Chapter 154

HIV Aimee deplaned at Pearson International Airport in North York, north of the city.
Her boyfriend was standing there by the doors, waiting to pick her up.
He hugged her tightly. He went to wait for her luggage to come out the conveyor belt, while she ducked quickly into a public washroom next to a Second Cup coffee kiosk.
She waited until a fat woman exited the third stall down on the left, the wheelchair accessible stall.
It stunk in there like coffee-smelling feces. Aimee took a breath and worked quickly. She stood on the toilet seat and pushed up the third puffy white acoustic tile from the back wall, and felt around up there. Her finger tips touched something hard. She grabbed the object and pulled it down to her. It was a small red-and-white cooler.
She sat back down on the toilet seat and opened the cooler. Inside were several blue ice packs surrounding a Starplex scientific sample container, not much bigger than a film container.
She unscrewed the orange lid and took her make-up case out of her own purse. She held a jar of cover-up make-up to the light. She unscrewed the black lid on the jar and scooped out the make-up with her finger. Pressed into the soft make-up was a tightly tied condom. She cleaned off as much of the goopy make-up as she could and then placed the tied condom carefully inside the Starplex container.
Ten grand.
She tightened the lid securely. There was a white sticker label on the side of the small bottle that said sterile.
She sealed it over the cap and took a black marker out of her purse and wrote on the sticker: “Rawle Powder, June 3, 2009.”
She placed the sample bottle back into the cooler and surrounded it with the ice packs, then stood on the toilet seat and put it back into the ceiling.
She exited the washroom, just as her boyfriend was coming down the esplanade with her luggage.
“Where are the kids?”
“In the car,” her boyfriend said.
“You left them alone, in the car?”
“What?” Her boyfriend shrugged and blushed, knowing he’d done something stupid.
Aimee fumbled in her purse for a stick of gum. She wondered who might be making the pickup.
There was a huge black man with craggy eyebrows sitting at one of the tables of the coffee kiosk, with a woman who looked like a stripper.
Gotta be him, she thought. His biceps are enormous.
The black man glared at Aimee as she walked by. He even gave her an almost imperceptible smile.
On the escalator, heading upstairs, Aimee looked back and saw the stripper get up from the table, turn on her heels and stride into the ladies room.


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