by Callie Hart
Has he ever met Garrett? I find it hard to believe that he has. No one in their right mind would be going around accusing him of being a stand-up dude if they had actually spent more than three seconds in his company. I shake my head slowly.
“No dice. Garrett has a strict policy about taking product up-front before payment. Doesn’t fucking happen.” I don’t know why I’m giving the guy a hard time. Garrett didn’t give me a specific figure to take from his mark. He said I could keep whatever he brought along to the deal, and the contents of the rucksack is worth about five dollars, max, so twenty-three grand is a win for sure. Now that I’ve decided I’m not going to kill him, I don’t feel bad about being a dick to him, though. It’s like he owes me and he doesn’t even know it. I make him sweat it out for a moment before I look away, sighing. “All right. Fine. But Garrett’s not gonna be a happy man. He’s gonna come looking for you.” Damn straight he is. He’s gonna be raging that I didn’t finish the job. He’ll probably send Raj or Colby out to finish up after me, and then he’s going to hunt me down and have me explain why I sacked out on something he told me very specially he wanted me to take care of.
Lucas, the shitty actor with the shitty dreads, just gives me a loose smile, like he’s not in total control of his facial features. I know the look. Too much coke and your face feels numb as fuck. Too much heroin, and who knows what your goddamn face feels like. Who knows what goddamn planet you’re on. It’s a miracle this guy is even standing.
He has a ratty, torn duffel bag hanging from his shoulder. “Hand it over,” I tell him, pointing.
Lucas sways like a drunken stalk of corn. He allows the strap to fall from his shoulder, catching the bag before it can fall. “I need to get something out of here first,” he says slowly. “Can you hold this?” He holds out a handful of stuff—keys, his cell phone, a pair of tangled up headphones. What the fuck is wrong with this guy? And what am I, his motherfucking manservant? I stare him down, waiting for him to get the picture and start taking this whole thing a little more seriously. This is the problem with living in Los Angeles: there are too many soft-headed idiots here that think the world adores them and wants to bend over backwards to make their charmed lives easier.
Lucas clears his throat. “You are a very unhappy individual, my man. You need therapy.”
Fucking therapy. If one more person asks me who my therapist is, I’m legit going to pop them in the fucking throat. “I need you to get the fuck on with this so I can go home.” The intensity in my voice must finally break through the drugged haze inside his head, because Lucas swallows.
“Sure, man. Sure. Just trying to look out for you.” He unzips the bag slowly, and something about the way his hand is shaking makes me suddenly suspicious. He was easy-breezy a second ago, but now he’s anxious, his lips white, his shoulders inching slowly higher and higher up toward his ears. A realization hits me: he doesn’t have twenty-three thousand dollars in that busted-up bag of his. He has something far more unpleasant. I reach out, stilling his hand on the zip.
“You have got to be fucking kidding me, Lucas. Do you want to die?”
“What? What the fuck are you talking about?”
Lucas drops his cell phone, his earphones clattering to the ground after it, and he nearly jumps out of his skin. He stares down at his belongings on the ground, a spider-webbed crack running across the screen of his oversized smart phone, and I can see his pulse hammering in his neck like a runaway freight train.
“Aren’t you going to pick that up?” I ask. Lucas doesn’t know what to do; fear and indecision are warring each other in his bloodshot eyes, plain as day. Slowly, I stoop down, collecting his things, careful not to take my eyes off him, ready in case he finally manages to grow a pair and opens that bag of his. I stand, and the guy hasn’t moved a muscle. Confident he won’t try anything stupid, I glance down at his phone. There’s a message on the lit up, fractured screen, which reads:
G Money: Is it done?
G Money. Why am I not surprised that this dude has a contact in his phone called fucking G Money? Probably some rich Hollywood exec waiting on his high. Or maybe the dude in the busted-up vehicle that dropped him off here ten minutes ago. Either way, I don’t like the sound of the message. Is it done? People don’t generally use a term like that to describe a drug deal. Not in my experience anyway. You got the stuff? You met up with Molly yet? Are you done?
“Is it done?” implies something else altogether.
I narrow my eyes at Lucas holding out his phone to him. He looks like he’s just shit his expensive, torn-up jeans. “Want to tell me why you’re here right now?” I ask calmly. Inside, I am anything but calm, though. My blood is lighter fluid, and I’m just waiting for a match. I’m about to go up in flames.
“Look, man, I’m just doing what I’m told, okay. I owed him a lot of money, and he said this was the only way to wipe the slate clean. He said if I—”
I punch him square in the jaw, lightning fast and hard as fuck. He doesn’t see it coming. No one ever does. Back when I used to fight for money, I could always count on my right hook to hit a guy’s off switch if I had a clean shot at him. I don’t hit Lucas that hard. I don’t want him out cold. I hit him hard enough to let him know he’s walked into a situation he should have run from, but soft enough that he’ll still be able to talk once he catches his breath. He hits the ground hard, ass first. I know how bad the spiraling pain shooting up his coccyx and into his spine is right now, ringing alarm bells inside his head. Grabbing hold of him by the shirt, I lift him up a little and I slam my fist into his face one more time, just to reinforce the fact that I mean fucking business.
“Garrett?” I say calmly. “Garrett told you to kill me?”
Lucas blinks, nodding frantically.
Well isn’t that just the most ironic news of the entire fucking evening? I shove him back down to the ground, snatching the duffel bag away from him. Inside: a sawed-off shotgun, and a “Tickle Me Elmo” stuffed toy, grinning manically up at me. No money whatsoever.
I stare at Elmo. Elmo stares at me.
“Have you ever fired a sawed-off?” I ask, my tone mild.
“What? No. No, man. I haven’t.” Lucas is jittery, crashing from his high. Adrenaline has a nasty way of bringing the mind sharply back into focus. I remove the shotgun from the bag and break it, checking down the barrels.
Buckshot.
I snap the thing closed again. “D’you know how close you’d have to be standing to me in order to kill me with this shit?” I don’t look at him. I stare at a peeling poster on the alley wall. “DJ Customize, Foam & Fuck party, Tuesday May 2nd. $20 entry. Doors at 6:30 p.m.” I have no idea what a foam and fuck party is, but 6:30 in the evening seems a little early for anything even remotely related.
“I don’t know. I have no idea, man. I told him I didn’t have a gun, and he told me to find one and fast. It’s all I could get my hands on.”
“Well. You sawed it off behind the choke. You know what that means?” I show him the gun. He shakes his head wildly. He’s sweating badly, beads of perspiration rolling down his face. “The longer the barrel, the better accuracy you have with a weapon like this. If you saw the barrel off behind the choke, you can forget about accuracy altogether though. The blast pattern of your ordinance is gonna go wide. And buckshot is already designed to do that anyway, so… I’m gonna say you would have had to be real close to kill me with this thing. You’d have seriously fucked me up, but I wouldn’t have been dead. And you know what that means?”
Silence.
“It means I would have had plenty of time to take out my knife and cut you open from stem to sternum.” I remove the knife from my pocket as I say the words, and Lucas’s eyes round out, the size of polished silver dollars.
“Please, man. Please. I just needed to clear my debt. I didn’t want to kill you.”
I didn’t want to kill him either. He and I are one and the same. We were both sent here to accomplish a goal, though, and
it seems as though shaky, incompetent Lucas was actually going to follow through. I crouch down, turning the blade over and over in my hands.
“I don’t really know what to do with you now, Lucas. I was going to let you go, but…”
“Please. Please, man. If you’re going to kill me, don’t fuck me up with that thing. My mom will have nightmares for the rest of her life. Let me go out high. Let me go out so fucking high I don’t even realize it’s over.”
I cock my head to one side, thinking about this. I’m not really fond of blood. It’s messy, and the copper tang of the iron makes my stomach uneasy. If Lucas dies with a hypodermic hanging out of his arm on the other hand, things will be nice and clean. No mess. No intestines gathered around him like coiled, slick, wet snakes on the filthy concrete. No bile or shit from punctured internal organs.
“Okay. That sounds fair to me,” I agree. “Where is it?”
Lucas cries as he removes a slim, flat glasses case from his pocket and hands it over to me. I almost feel bad for the guy. Almost. Inside the case: a spoon, a length of rubber tubing, a lighter, and a small baggie containing about a hundred bucks worth of heroin, which is to say not very much heroin at all. “Is this it?”
Lucas nods miserably.
“I guess it’s your lucky day, then, huh?” There’s a chance he might not overdose on this amount of H. A small chance, but still. Could be someone finds him and calls an ambulance.
I methodically cook up for him while he sits in a strange, accepting kind of silence. I take his arm, ready to tie off around his bicep, but then I notice his veins are all black and collapsed underneath his skin, and I swear under my breath. “Where?” I demand.
Lucas reluctantly toes off his right shoe, then removes his sock, holding onto the balled-up material tightly in his hand as he watches me. The veins in his foot aren’t much better than the ones in his arm, but I manage to find one that still has flow to it. Lucas begins to sob. Somewhere, distantly, I’m aware that most people would feel something in this situation. They might feel…I don’t know. Remorse? Guilt? Fear of being caught? My emotions are running on an even keel as I slide the needle into Lucas’s foot and I slowly press the plunger down. I do it really slowly. He sighs, the panic and fear melting away as the drugs instantly take hold, crashing over him, and then a strange thing happens. I stop. A thought has occurred to me. What a weird gift it would be to this fucking idiot to not kill him right now. He’s not expecting to wake up from this ride. What would he do if he did? Would the surprising gift of life be the wake up call he needs to stop using? Would he hurry straight home, pack up his shit, and leave town immediately? Check himself into rehab?
I doubt it. Once heroin has a hold on you, it rarely ever lets go. It takes a strong will and an iron determination to wrestle yourself free from the grasps of the kind of addiction Lucas is saddled with, and I don’t think he has either.
Still…
I feel strangely benevolent as I withdraw the needle from his foot and place it on the ground beside his unconscious body. Lucas is lost in his dreams, riding motherfucking unicorns and swimming in rainbows, having the time of his life right now, but there’s a very, very good chance he’s going to wake up at some point and want to die.
Let’s see what he does with that.
I slide the sawed-off shotgun back into his duffel bag, and I loop the strap over my head. The rucksack I brought here, filled with chalk and baby powder, gets dumped in the trash as I make my way out of the alleyway.
I walk away. As I do so, I begin to plan the many entertaining ways in which I could murder Garrett Jonas. Not tonight, though. It turns out I really don’t have the energy for murder tonight, and besides…when I arrive home, letting myself into my apartment, I find I have a visitor. In the darkness, someone is waiting for me, sitting in my favorite chair by the window, moonlight spilling across their chest as they sleep.
David.
For some reason, I’m not as shocked as I should be. I never told him where I was going when I left New Orleans. I didn’t even tell him which state I was headed toward. For all my older brother knew, I could have been in Mexico, and yet somehow here he is, crashed out in my apartment, waiting for me to come home.
He wakes up, blinking blearily into the darkness. It takes him a second to locate me in the shadows, then he looks up at me and smiles grimly. “Hey, Tommy. Long time no see.”
“What are you doing here?” I dump the duffel bag unceremoniously on the floor.
“It’s Genevieve.” He pauses a moment, allowing that to hang between us, and then he says, “You know I wouldn’t have come otherwise. You know I would never have risked your safety. This is bad, though. Really fucking bad.” He takes a cigarette pack out of his pocket, removes a cigarette and lights it. He holds the smoke inside his lungs for a beat, then exhales heavily, sending twin jets of smoke pluming from his nostrils. His eyes meet mine properly for the first time. “It’s time for you to come back to the Quarter, Tommy. It’s time for you to come home.”
CHAPTER TWO
NIKITA
“Don’t fucking look at me, slut. Don’t blink. Don’t move. Don’t even fucking breathe.” Cruise Martin, convict, 43, serving year eight of his twenty-four-year sentence for murder, grinds the heel of his boot into the side of my head. I lie still on the polished linoleum, fingers spread wide, stomach flush with the cool surface of the floor. I’m calm. I don’t say anything. My heart’s beating slowly, despite the threat of extreme physical harm that hovers over me right now. Cruise is a big guy, one of the biggest in the Orleans Parish Prison. Not only is he huge, but he’s also extraordinarily violent. I know it’s crazy, but I’m fairly sure he can smell fear, so I just…turn it off.
“Don’t worry, Dr. Kelly. He’s not going to hurt you. He’s not stupid enough to add the years onto his sentence.” Mitch Davis peers through the tiny glass window in the door to my office that Cruise has barricaded with my desk. Mitch is one tough son of a bitch; if he wanted to, he could kick the door in with one swift, hard boot kick, but he’s not stupid. There are men inside the walls of this prison who do not react well to feeling cornered. If they feel like they’re backed into an indefensible position, they act rashly, wildly, without thinking. Given the box cutter Cruise is holding tightly in his hand, Mitch obviously wants to wait and see how Cruise is going to let the situation play out before he starts kicking anything.
“How long have I been treating you for, Cruise?” I ask evenly.
Cruise doesn’t say anything, He snarls under his breath, pressing his foot down harder against the side of my head.
“Four years. Every week for four years. That’s four hundred and eight sessions we’ve shared. Four hundred and eight hours we’ve spent in each other’s company, discussing very personal matters. Is there anyone else in the prison you feel comfortable discussing your most personal matters with, Cruise?” He’s told me in a round about way about the abuse he suffered as a child. He’s told me about his alcoholic mother, and the time when he was seven years old and his older brother was shot and died right in front of him. He’s told me how the smell of blood gives him an erection, and he doesn’t know why. I am the only person he would ever tell these things to in here. It took a full eighteen months before he opened up to me. I know he’s not going to kill me. I know, deep down inside that traumatized, dark, fucked-up mind of his, that he thinks of me as an ally.
A box cutter is still a box cutter, though. And the fact that he punched me in the face and threw me down to the floor when we came in here for his session today is what it is, too. He’s officially in the shit. No two ways about it.
“Why don’t you just shut your mouth, Doc? You’re not taking this situation seriously right now. You think I won’t kill you? You think I won’t slit your throat from ear to ear if I don’t get what I want?” His thin-soled plimsolls fill my view for a second. There’s blood marking the white band that runs around them, and it’s fresh. Must be mine.
“
What exactly is it that you want, Cruise?” I ask. “You haven’t even told us yet. How can we give you something if we don’t know what it is?” My office is small—just enough room for a filing cabinet, a desk and two chairs. Cruise groans, tapping the base of the box cutter against the side of his head. He removes his foot from my head and begins to pace the length of the narrow space, muttering under his breath.
Technically I could get up now. I don’t. That would not be a smart move on my part, unless I want to get thrown to the floor again. Safer to stay put for a second and wait out this madness. Mitch makes eye contact with me through the glass window in the door and I can see how mad he is. As assistant warden in the prison, it’s his responsibility to make sure the staff are safe at all times. He’s told me repeatedly over the years that I need to have a guard in my office whenever I’m treating a patient, and I’ve always refused point blank.
Cruise’s groaning ascends in pitch, until he’s practically vibrating with anxiety. “I just need… I just need them to change it back,” he says, as if this should be obvious.
“Change what back?”
“The light bulb in my cell. It went out, and they replaced it. The new one’s darker, though. Dimmer. I should be able to read properly at night before lights out, but the light’s too faint. They did it to fuck with me. They did it to screw with me. Now I can’t read the letters my daughter sends.”
“The light bulbs are all sixty watts, Cruise,” Mitch says through the door. “Come on, man. You know that. We talked about it yesterday.”
Oh, great. So Mitch knew Cruise was hypersensitive about the light in his cell? That’s just fucking perfect. The guards are supposed to pass on information like that to me before a session, so I can monitor the inmate’s behavior. It probably seemed stupid to Mitch. An administrative complaint that didn’t make any sense whatsoever. To Cruise, however, who has such a small area of space to call his own inside this terrible machine, something like climate control or a change in lighting is major. It’s outside of his control and therefore something he’s certainly going to notice, if not become agitated about.
