For approximately 24 hours, I was in possession of enough heroin to be be sent to prison for life.
Or was I?
OK, let’s start from the beginning. Friday March 9, 2001, was a nice day in lovely Seattle… so nice, in fact, that we decided to take the dog for a walk around Green Lake in the late afternoon. It was unseasonably warm and sunny that day, which of course should have been an omen for the sordid world of drug trafficking that we were unwittingly about to enter. But who would have thunk it? Let’s just call this burst of nice weather Random Chance Occurrence #1 (or better yet, RCO#1).
The lake is nearly three miles around, and we had covered about two and a half miles of it when we decided to cut up on a dirt path that travels between the main foot path and the street. Why did we take this path? Unknown, but it qualifies as RCO#2. We were on the path approaching a stand of trees when we noticed two squirrels having a very festive time off to the side. This is the type of thing that most people wouldn’t even notice, but we always watch out for anything that might get the dog’s attention and make him lunge ahead. So just in case you were wondering why we were looking at the squirrels, now you know. (Since we had a reason to be watching the squirrels, this is disqualified from being RCO#3.)
As we got closer, the squirrels took off and raced up the closest tree. One squirrel — the one I like to call Rocco — was carrying something in his mouth and it looked… well, strange. It was large and flapping about as he ran. Definitely not a nut or any other similar squirrel-type food. We stepped in for a closer look.
Rocco made his way up to a branch about 10 feet off the ground and started tearing into his mystery package. Damn, he was going at that thing with gusto! At about this time, we realized that what he had was a black latex balloon and that he was in the process of chewing off and possibly swallowing bits and pieces of it. Yuck! You don’t have to be a Stage Seven Vegan Treehugger to wince at the site of a squirrel eating pieces of intestine-blocking latex. We started to talk about how to get the balloon away from him, when, without warning, we were bestowed with RCO#3.
Rocco dropped the balloon.
I quickly took a step over and picked up Rocco’s fallen treasure. He came racing down the tree, hellbent on retrieving what he figured was rightfully his. I looked down at the balloon and noticed the small hole that Rocco had chewed in it. Then I noticed that the balloon was partially filled with something, and it was spilling out of the hole. Interesting… why on earth is this balloon filed with a white powder?
Uh-oh.
(Just in case you haven’t watched enough television in the last 10 or 20 years, I’ll fill you in on the significance of this. Drugs are often transported by pouring them into balloons, which are then swallowed by people known as mules. I’ll leave it up to you to figure out how the balloons are later retrieved.)
Not 60 seconds earlier, we had simply been on a walk through the park, and now, thanks to three Random Chance Occurrences, I was now holding what may or may not be a sizeable amount of drugs, as well as a balloon that may or may not have passed through someone’s digestive tract. Oh, and one more thing: Rocco was coming after me.
  |
Really. By this time, Rocco had scampered down the tree and was heading straight for me. I know that in some parks, squirrels get very used to humans and will often approach them for peanuts and other snacks. But that’s not the case at Green Lake; the squirrels prefer to do their own foraging and thus tend to keep their distance from people. Apparently, however, Rocco had already become an addict and he was jonesing for his next fix.
Have you ever seen a squirrel with a monkey on his back? It’s not a pretty sight.
Anyway, Rocco stops short of actually attacking me and instead gives me a wild eyed squirrel look, accompanied by several feverous squirrel yells. Meanwhile, we decide that we can’t just leave our discovery sitting on the ground, so we take it on home. I should mention that I manage to do this without setting one additional square millimeter of finger skin on the balloon. Rocco chooses not to pursue.
Once we arrive home with our illicit goods, we place the balloon in an official evidence pouch, better known as a Ziploc Snack Bag. We weigh it. Fifteen grams. Is that a lot? Maybe it is, maybe it isn’t. Hey, we’re new at this, so I’m sorry if we a bit ignorant on some of the particulars.
Now we have to decide what to do with this mountain of China White, this spread of smack, this… uh, stable of horse. A good citizen would of course immediately notify the local police department so they could send over a biohazardous waste disposal van and dispense with the nasty stuff. But what if the cop who came to our door had just attended a Zero Tolerance training course? What if all they cared about was that we were in possession of the drugs and how we got them was irrelevant. What if they didn’t believe that we took the drugs from a squirrel!
Well, we may not be perfect citizens, but we certainly aren’t stupid citizens. In the end, we did the only logical thing: we took some pictures then flushed everything. How much is 15 grams of heroin worth? I have no idea, but I’m sure there are some who would have cried at the site of it swirling round and round then down and out. Besides, there’s a good chance it wasn’t heroin at all. Maybe some kids were just joking around and they put some flour in a balloon and left it in the park. I guess we’ll never know, but it makes for a much better story if we just go on the assumption that it was heroin.
And what of Rocco? Since we’re going ahead and making assumptions and embellishments, we’ve decided that Rocco was part of a team of highly trained drug-running squirrels who ferry their goods all over the city. Every now and then, their own personal addictions get the better of them, and, like Rocco, they decide to dip into the inventory. Hey, no one is going to miss just a little bit, right? But Rocco had to go back to his boss (who we can only assume is a raccoon) and explain just what happened to his cargo. Poor little guy.