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Chapter 10
WHAT GOES UP MUST COME DOWN
Dusk settled over Austin, and the Good Wagon Books warehouse was eerily quiet save for the
sound of Ross, who stood at his desk, typing ferociously on his keyboard as he tried to finish
up some coding on the Silk Road Web site so he could leave for the day.
He had never been so busy in his entire life.
Putting aside Julia (and the attention she required), he was working on his book business,
managing his part-time employees, and running his drug Web site simultaneously.
He wanted so badly to give up the Good Wagon Books part of the equation, but he didn’t want to
upset his friend who had given him the business, and, more important, Ross didn’t want to be seen by
those around him as abandoning yet another unsuccessful project.
Thankfully, the daily tasks were complementary.
Each morning when Ross arrived at the Good Wagon Books storage facility, he would fire up his
laptop in his tiny office, which sat off to the side of the warehouse. He checked the book orders,
followed by the drug orders, before shipping both off to customers around the country.
For the books he would wander the aisles of the stacks he had built by hand over several months;
dozens of rows of nine-foot-tall wooden shelves filled with old novels and nonfiction tomes that
were all painstakingly organized and alphabetized. Ross stuffed titles that had sold online into puffy
manila envelopes before printing the recipient’s name and address on a label maker.
He would break to eat his lunch—a peanut butter and jelly sandwich on mulchlike hippie bread
—before the real fun began.
It was time to package the drugs.
With a vacuum sealer normally used to keep food fresh, he encased the magic mushrooms he had
grown in plastic wrap. He then dropped them into one of the same padded envelopes he used for
paperbacks and hardcovers. Finally he used that same Good Wagon Books label maker to print the
recipient’s name and address. He took immense pride in the process.
In the weeks after the Silk Road opened for business, Ross had been shipping his shrooms off to
buyers only once or twice a week. Now, a couple of months after he officially launched the site,
orders were starting to come in daily. There had also been another new development on the site. An