Free Green Ice: A Deadly High by Christian Fletcher

into the seat and drove away within a few seconds.
    Mancini waited until the Nissan turned back onto the highway and was out of sight before he began to walk out from the side street. He glanced left and right but nobody watched him from the shadows or shaded doorways. So far so good. Now came the difficult part.
    Trey was playing some kind of game on his phone when Mancini returned to the Thunderbird.
    “Open the trunk,” Mancini hissed.
    Trey glanced around with an expression of shock on his face. “Hey, yo. There you are. I thought you’d run out on me, you were so damn long, man.” He reached down in front of him and engaged the trunk release lever.
    Mancini placed the bag inside the compartment, alongside his own rucksack. “Okay, let’s go. Head towards Miramar. It’s a street about a mile behind us. I’ll check it out on the map.”
    Trey started the car and pulled out onto the highway. Mancini found Miramar Street on the map and realized they’d have to loop around at the intersection. Miramar stretched from the main route by the harbor, through the center of the city and beyond.
    “It’s a long street,” he muttered to himself , pointing out the route on the map to Trey. “We’ll take a drive by the house we want, for a look-see first and park up someplace nearby.”
    “Won’t they be expecting somebody to show up?” Trey asked.
    “Yeah, probably but I don’t know how much they’ve let their guard down. The jungle drums have said they’ve been on one long party since they took off with that big bag of cash they stole from Oreilles.”
    “What’s this new wave riding rush they’re talking about?”
    “What?”
    “This new shit that’s supposed to trip you right out and get you so fucked up, you don’t even know what your own name is type stuff,” Trey said. “Isn’t that what this is all about?”
    Mancini glanced at Trey. “I knew they stole a large batch of Oreilles’s dope but I don’t know what the hell kind of nasty shit it is.” He’d never taken any sort of narcotic in his life.
    Trey negotiated the traffic and kept glancing at the map on Mancini’s lap. Mancini hoped the three guys weren’t totally spaced out on whatever the new, wonder drug was. He’d seen guys high on PCP, crack cocaine and crystal meth, who thought they were invincible and had absorbed several bullets or whacks with baseball bats before finally going down.
    They turned back, heading west along the main highway until they saw Miramar Street to their right. Trey took the turn into the road, which was a one lane route, nestled between a disco bar and a hotel. The street opened up into a two-way lane after the first intersection and the sidewalks on both sides were flanked with small hotels and bars.
    “Looks like the bad guys wanted to be close to the action,” Trey said, eyeing a young girl walking in the opposite direction on the sidewalk.
    Mancini glanced around the street. He was thinking more about exit routes and possible hazards than admiring the local women. The house number written on the piece of paper was in the high seven hundreds. Luckily, Trey drove slowly, still ogling the chicas, which allowed Mancini to study the building’s address numbers. He guessed the guys wouldn’t be holed up too far out of town. They’d want to be close to the bars and the hubbub of the city. The number of people on the sidewalk started to dwindle the further they drove from the main focal point of Ensenada, which seemed to be around the harbor area. Bars, hotels and restaurants became less frequent, instead replaced with small stores and one storey dwellings. Mancini noticed the number on one house was 796. They’d driven by the address they were looking for.
    “Pull over and park up anyplace you can,” he instructed Trey.
    “Are we at the place?” Trey slowed to a crawl, looking out for a free parking slot. 
    “We’re near the house but we need to check it out before we go in. This damn car stands