He applied the Page 69 Test to his latest novel, Everybody Knows This Is Nowhere, and reported the following:
In this scene, Richard Tremblay, the leader of the motorcycle gang The Saints of Hell, and a major player taking over the drug world in Toronto is talking on the phone to Sharon MacDonald. Richard and Sharon were a couple twenty years earlier when he was a small-time dealer who actually rode a motorcycle and she was a stripper in Montreal. Now she’s turned a whole floor of the apartment building she lives in into a grow op and sells a lot of marijuana, but she’s under house arrest for an assault and the cops have discovered the grow rooms (though they don’t yet know she operates them). She’s asked Richard to front her some dope until she can get a new operation up and running.Read an excerpt from Everybody Knows This Is Nowhere, and learn more about the author and his work at John McFetridge's website and his blog.
He said, “Your daughter, she met a guy a couple of times trying to sell a large supply.”
“Yeah, she mentioned something. A farmer maybe.”
“Right. So, I’d like to know who he is and where he’s getting it.”
Sharon thought, yeah, some poor punk-ass kid tired of watching his old man go broke growing tomatoes out in Leamington, just enough margin in tobacco to barely survive another year, plants himself a little crop and now Richard and his boys have to come down hard on him.
“Why don’t you just pick him up?”
Richard said, “You want me to front this for you or not?”
“Yeah, okay.”
“Look, Shar, I’m trying to do you a favour here, you don’t have to take it.”
“No, no, I’ll do it. Who he is and where he gets it.”
“Sounds easy when you say it. Let me know,” and before he could hang up, she had to say, what about my supply?
“Oh yeah, I guess you can’t very well come get it. I’ll send it over.”
“Okay.”
“Aren’t you going to thank me?”
Mostly she was pissed off at herself for getting into this situation. She said, “Thanks, Rickie, I’ll let you know.”
He laughed and hung up.
She lit another cigarette and sat on the couch with the phone in her lap. Now she was going to have to call Bobbi, get her to call Becca or one of the massage girls the farm kid approached, get a number on him and get him over. He’d have to spill, he was so naïve, walking into Toronto telling everyone who’d listen what a big supplier he could be.
Guy that dumb, she was almost surprised the cops hadn’t picked him up.
Then there was a knock on her door and it was the cops.
Check out the complete list of books in the Page 69 Test Series.
--Marshal Zeringue
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