by Barry, Mike
“Crazy,” she said, but not in a hostile way, rather as if she were humoring him. “I just can’t take that. I can’t believe it.”
“You ever see an OD?” Wulff said.
“OD? What’s that?”
“OD. Overdose,” he said, easing the accelerator all the way back so that now they were staggering along at forty-five, little lights from the industrial plants glinting across the hood like apparitions, maintaining control of the vehicle at all costs because it was not worth throwing himself off the road to make a point. A junkie would not think that way, of course. “They’ve overloaded the system, you see. Usually by the time you find them they’re already in deep coma, sometimes dead, and what comes off them is the smell of acetone, because there’s been a complete breakdown of the liver; you see, the system hasn’t been able to metabolize the stuff out, so it’s all in the system, half-oxidized, just about the way it went in except that the chemistry has had a chance to work it over and mortification has started to set in. So you get this terrific smell coming from them, pure acetone if you catch them early on, but if it’s more than twelve hours, you get the stench of corrupted flesh. Most of the time the needle is half in their arms. Most of your OD’s of course happen on a mainline injection, although it’s not unheard of for a skin-popper to get one too, particularly if he misses the right spot in his ass and instead of the gluteal maximus works it into the rectal area….”
“I don’t think I want to hear any more of this,” the girl said fuzzily. “I don’t want to—”
“Of course you do,” Wulff said, slowing the truck even more, tapping the brake down about thirty now but still holding the road well. It was a sweet vehicle, no question about it, a good transporter, smooth and fluent in all gears at all speeds. “You believe in the permissive society; you think it’s just a groove that people should be allowed to do whatever they want to do, different strokes for different folks and we’re all children of the same God, right? Take your own trip, do your own thing, am I right? So let me tell you what it’s like when a junkie takes the trip he’s suited for, his final trip. The needle is generally half hanging in the arm, and the mouth of course is open; you see, one of the features of poisoned junk or an overload of the system is to induce a series of small strokes, capillaries popping, arteries starting to sever right in the weakest areas of the body, which with almost anybody under forty is in the brain. They’ve gone into hemorrhage, you see, they’ve got a nice hematoma swelling against the cranial walls, pressing on the dura mater, the sheath between the brain and the skull, the same thing that gets inflamed when you get spinal meningitis, except that this time it isn’t inflamed, it’s just destroyed—the hemorrhage ruptures it. It’s a real groove to have a ruptured dura mater and a massive cerebral hemorrhage, and of course the OD’s like it quite a bit; they get a terrific flash, I understand, just before they realize that they’ve had it and they collapse. Of course,” Wulff said, “of course, this is just a suggestion, I mean, there isn’t too much hard evidence for this. It’s not too easy to get a firsthand report; the kind of people who have had the flash are a little difficult to interview. And then of course you get a rupture down below too, you get a complete loss of bowel and urinary function, so that they crap in their pants, void down their legs. That happens almost as quickly as the hemorrhage, a chain reaction, you see. It breaks down the whole system; it’s really a great thing to see. And I haven’t even given you half the fun of an OD; there’s the business of carting them down, getting the meat wagon, you understand, scraping the body off the floor—they leave that to the cops, there’s not a morgue attendant in the city who wants to handle a befouled body, and you can take your civil-service crap and throw it right out of the window, that’s one dirty, sweaty, fucking job that they leave to the cops or it doesn’t get done at all. And then, riding down to the morgue in the wagon, just you and the corpse, maybe your partner if he isn’t puking his guts out somewhere, but usually you’re handling this all alone; it’s not the kind of detail, you see, where they won’t mind tying up a couple of men. They’ll tie up a couple of hundred men to guard the mayor when he’s in the St. Patrick’s Day parade, and of course when the President comes into the Waldorf to make a speech you’ve got the block ringed with a few thousand, all working overtime, but OD’s don’t generally turn up on the front pages of your own family newspaper, so it isn’t too necessary to worry about the cosmetics.” He was sweating lightly, ran a hand across his brow, felt it sealed in there with moisture and took it away, flinging away the droplets. It all came back. It was true; just like infantry training the army or combat or playing the guitar or sex, it was always with you. You could never leave it behind; unbidden, it rode with you, that passenger, forever, and in the nights or at times like these when the walls came down, it was always there, biting. “Forget it,” he said. He could hear the girl sobbing beside him. “Forget the whole damned thing. I’m sorry,” he said. “I went too far. Forget it.” He slowed the truck to ten miles, drifted off the road, bounced along the gravel in the intimation of sunlight coming behind them. “Are you all right?” he said.
She shook her head violently, her hands over her cheeks, and slowly, one by one, he brought them down, to see her face gleaming like a doorknob. “All right,” he said, “I’m sorry. I said I was sorry.” Her face seemed riven. She shook her head again, tried to say something, couldn’t.
“I’ll drop you off anywhere,” Wulff said. “We’ll be pulling off the road in a few miles. I’ll drop you at a diner or wherever you want to go. I’ll even try to find you another ride. You want some money?” He felt atrociously guilty, and that was wrong; there was no reason for him to feel guilty, he had merely shown her the actual implications of what she saw only in the abstract. If everyone could see it, if people could actually see where their morals or ethics or world view or simple indifference led them, there would be no such thing as heroin addiction in the world; there probably wouldn’t be any wars, either, or at least only faraway wars, where people were dismembered only at a great distance and filtered through encouraging kill ratios. But that was another issue. He could not even get into the whole matter of Vietnam or what it had meant to America; he had been in Vietnam, in combat, for years, years ago, and the moment he had gotten out, he had simply cut it out of his consciousness like a piece of meat. He would not think of it. He simply would not think of it anymore. “All right,” he said, looking at her face, drying out, now merely a collection of panels tacked together in the dawn. “Okay now? I’m going to drive.”
And she fell against him, and her arms were around him then; he felt her clutching at him, felt her hands moving around his body and then gathering him in; and whimpering, her mouth was at his ear. “I’m sorry,” she said, “I’m so terribly sorry, I’m sorry that you had to see something like that; it shouldn’t have happened, it shouldn’t be that way,” and she was scrabbling away at him. “Forgive me,” she said, “forgive me, I didn’t know, I didn’t know about the pain,” and her body was like a weight coming upon his, not an unpleasant weight, but a burden nevertheless. “Let’s go into the back,” she said. “I want you, I want you right now,” and it was not perversity which had excited her, he saw, but merely the need to give comfort, and he moved slowly from the seat, he had to make Detroit, he moved into the back with her, he had to keep on going, he gathered her against him, and it was with the feeling that it was not going to be so easy, it was not going to be so damned easy at all to separate himself from her, but what did he care, what did he care? He had not talked about this for a long time, and he would never talk about it again, but it had been purged for the moment; at least for a while he was free of it, and maybe that was all that he had sought from the beginning—simple purgation, simple loss, the absolution from a culpability that he knew he would always have to carry, because if he did not, dear God, who would? Who ever, ever would?
XIII
The shit came from somewhere to the south, maybe Mexico, although Coat
es had never been sure. Important not to ask too many questions, he had known from the beginning. From the south it came already arranged in neat little bricks stashed in a locker at the bus terminal, the same locker or the open one nearest to it on the same day of every week, rain or shine, except for two weeks in the summer. Everybody has to take a vacation. The key came in the mail, and Coates used it to open up the locker, pick up the stuff, and transfer it to Hamilton. In return Hamilton would give him one thousand dollars in a plain white envelope, with sometimes an extra hundred or two just for the hell of it.
Coates had suspected that Hamilton was getting more than a thousand dollars a week worth of services out of him, but not to question. Fifty-two thousand dollars a year with bonuses tax free was certainly heavy enough for him, although on a patrolman’s salary it was difficult to use it without raising publicity. Mostly he had had to settle for taking a small edge in small ways, better bourbon, a better car than he really could afford, while most of it was stashed deep in a safe-deposit box of a bank of which he was very fond. In a few years he could make a production of having to get the hell out of the department, get out of Detroit before it burned, get to the Canadian wilds or something and go fishing, and after he had hung around home for a while letting that bullshit story take, he would lay twenty thousand dollars on his wife and kids, more than they were worth, the three bitches, and he would take the other two hundred thousand and run. He’d stay in the country, of course; that was where most men made their mistake in abandonments, getting caught in customs or by Scotland Yard or something, but he was not stupid enough to get into anything like that. Screw Scotland Yard and exotic Mediterranean landscapes. He would hit for California with two hundred thousand and fuck his way blind through every quarter of it. It ought to last him seven or eight years anyway, conservatively invested and well handled. Beyond that, Coates did not care to think. He had his life planned out until he was thirty-nine or forty that way, and a man thirty-nine or forty he figured was half dead anyway … or at least after fucking his way blind through California for eight years he ought to be dead. He would give it a try.
It was a nice tight life scheme. He hadn’t done badly for a guy who got out of high school with a lousy academic diploma that was good for nothing and another two years’ voluntary draft in the army, which had taught him how to be a target emplacer for training fire. That was certainly a great opportunity for civilian employment that they were making for him, just as all the ads had promised. But the PD was hiring when he came out, and they were very sympathetic to veterans, and ninety-six hundred a year to start in those days just before the riots began looked pretty good to a twenty-year-old with the most indifferent of prospects. He had grabbed it. After that the wife and kids had come into the scene just the way that luggage might come to an airport traveler. He had never exercised conscious choice, not even during the riots when he was in the middle of the fire and figured that he would get his ass busted like everyone else, until Hamilton had made the approach to him out of nowhere, saying that he had heard that Coates was a promising man and he had an offer for him. That had been the first moment of choice. He had been twenty-five years old then. Now he was twenty-eight. He had a hundred and twenty-one thousand dollars in his safe-deposit box, and in another couple of years it would be two hundred and twenty-five thousand, less five thousand dollars for better bourbon and twenty for the wife and the two bitches. He had had a nice clean organized life.
And now Hamilton was dead.
He had no choice, Coates figured. Not after what Hamilton had done. Not after the murder of Shields, the business in the factory, the very sudden pressures which had come upon him within the department. For some reason people were screaming about the murder of Shields, and Coates knew damned well, almost as if he had been there, exactly who had killed him and probably why. Panic.
He had had to kill Hamilton. Hamilton had panicked. A panicky man, Coates remembered from the days of the riots, was capable of doing almost anything. One day he would kill Shields and the next day he would kill Coates, all for the same reason, to save his own ass, to cut off the lines of communication both ways. How could he not have done it? But now, of course, Coates was scared shitless.
It was not fear of detection. That would blow right over; Hamilton, union steward or no, was just another body in an empty lot in a city where, unfortunately, this was pretty common and incited little comment. Executives were found in empty lots. Also, Hamilton had had his share of enemies; the last place they were going to look (Coates was sure) was in the PD itself. The PD would in any event protect its own.
No, it was not that. He knew that he could sweat that one through; everything would be all right, he was positive. It was the whole matter of his income, of his life plan. Everything had been set up neat as a pin and tick, ticking along toward the deadline of age thirty, when he would make his split and start screwing, and now, thanks to Hamilton and no one else, the deal was screwed the hell up. He wasn’t going to be getting the cool fifty grand a year anymore, the fifty grand that probably multiplied into a halfmillion for Hamilton. But what the hell, he was going to get twelve-eight, plus credit toward pension plan, salary protection, increments, and full medical coverage through the PD, and that was all. If he tended bar, maybe he could work that up another three or four grand if he was very efficient and was in a tipping district. In any event, it was all shot. Sixteen grand a year wasn’t sixty. And the hundred and twenty-one in the safe-deposit box simply was not enough, it was not nearly enough for the way he had had his lifetime mapped out. And at twenty-eight he was too old to deviate, to pick up another life plan. If a man was lucky he might stumble into one; it was impossible for a high-school graduate to have two.
There was only one solution, Coates figured. One way to handle the situation, to continue to have his shot and to keep things going.
He would have to run the stuff through himself.
It wasn’t so hard. The people who were placing it in the lockers might not even know that it went to Hamilton or what he did with it; all that they were interested in was their own cut. As long as they got paid, it was no sweat, they would keep it coming. In the meantime, at least until a couple of payments had been made, they would keep on dropping the stuff in and Coates could continue to pick it up.
Of course, he didn’t know where payment went to or how much it would be, but he was willing to take this step by step, not try to look too far in the future. First you did one thing, and then the next came along. If you moved step by step, all would be yours, whereas if you tried to see the big picture in a flash, you wound up Lyndon Johnson. That was all.
So Coates the first week did what he could. The key was mailed to him, he went to the terminal, the stuff was in the locker, he picked it up and took it home this time instead of passing it on to Hamilton. Taking it there, he realized for the first time why Hamilton had done this through Coates and not direct, why he had thought it worth a grand a week to have a runner. Of course. That way, whoever was mailing it in to those lockers had no idea of who was picking it up, and Coates double-protected by keeping it one level separated still. You had to admire the son-of-a-bitch, Coates thought. Even dead he had shown a lot of class, a good deal of free-form operating. Who would have thought that Hamilton, a mere union steward, a working stiff like Coates, would have had it in him?
Live and learn.
At home he went straight to the bedroom, threw his wife out, locked the door, and spread the stuff out on the bed. Shit, it looked good. He didn’t really know horse from coke, coke from Coca-Cola, but he had seen some kilos run through the PD or on suspects a couple of times, like any cop would, and he had a rough idea of quality. This was unusual, tender, closely packed, fine white powder. In all the movies he had seen you were supposed to lick your fingertip, put it delicately in the crystals, and taste one, and so Coates did it too, finding it oddly sweetish to the taste, but otherwise he had no idea in hell of what it was supposed to mean. What did ta
sting it have to do with quality, and how would good shit taste as opposed to bad shit? But it wasn’t worth worrying about; the important thing was that he had it.
The next thing to do was to figure out how in hell he was going to run it, and where. He could hardly put advertisements in the newspapers, and it seemed inadvisable to go up to the North Side and start peddling it by hand, although he was sure that that would have given him a brief but very profitable career. No, you had to think of some way to pass it through channels, to put it in the pipeline so that you could derive the profits but none of the penalty, so that you could work it through the existing channels of supply, which were always hungry for stuff like this, high-quality goods, but which would pay cash on the line and would enable him, who was to say, to take maybe not one but two or three thousand dollars a week out of the operation. What that cheapskate, liar, fool, murderer Hamilton was paying him had to be the least of it, just a drop in the bucket, just a shadow of the real money that was in this kind of operation. That figured. That would have to figure. If Hamilton was paying him a thousand dollars a week, there was probably ten times as much in it for him. The son-of-a-bitch.
But then, sitting on the bed, the bricks of shit looking up at him, glowing in the light, Hamilton’s cheapness still making him burn, Coates had to laugh. Really, he had to laugh, sitting there, thinking of himself, thinking of the situation. How was he going to move these bricks? What was he supposed to do, go down to the PD and throw them on the table, ask for suggestions? Peddle his ass and the bricks on the North Side? Put an ad in the newspaper giving a mail drop for inquiries? No, it was crazy, all crazy, bullshit, and even if he were to do something as nutsy or more so than this, he would not know who to pass the money on to, he would not know how much money he was supposed to pass, and surely after one or two more shipments, that would come to one hell of a halt.
