by Stephen King
This idea had actually occurred to me once or twice. James Conklin, Detective of the Dead. Or maybe to the Dead. I’d never figured out which sounded better.
“Not the NYPD, though,” she continued. “Fuck those ass-holes. Go private. I could see your name on the door.” She briefly raised both hands from the wheel, as if framing it.
Another honk.
“Drive the fucking car,” I said, trying not to sound alarmed. It probably didn’t work, because I was alarmed.
“Don’t worry about me, Champ. I’ve forgotten more about driving than you’ll ever learn.”
“Your nose is bleeding again,” I said.
She wiped it with the heel of her palm, then wiped it on her sweatshirt. Not for the first time, by the look of it. “Septum’s gone,” she said. “I’m going to fix it. Once I’m clean.”
After that we were quiet for awhile.
56
After we got on the Thruway, Liz helped herself to another bump of her special blend. I’d say she was starting to scare me, but we were well past that point.
“Do you want to know how we got here? Me and you, Holmes and Watson off on another adventure?”
Adventure wasn’t the word I would have picked, but I didn’t say so.
“I can see by your face that you don’t. That’s okay. Long story, not very interesting, but I’ll tell you this much—no kid ever said they wanted to grow up to be a bum, a college dean, or a dirty cop. Or to pick up garbage in Westchester county, which is what my brother-in-law does these days.”
She laughed, although I didn’t know then what was funny about being a garbageman.
“Here’s something that might interest you. I’ve moved a lot of dope from Point A to Point B and got paid for it, but the blow your mother found in my coat pocket that time was a freebie for a friend. Ironic, when you think about it. By then IAD already had their eye on me. They weren’t sure, but they were getting there. I was scared to death that Tee would spill the beans. That would have been the time to get out, but by then I couldn’t.” She paused, considering this. “Or wouldn’t. Looking back it’s hard to tell which. But it makes me think of something Chet Atkins said once. You ever heard of Chet Atkins?”
I shook my head.
“How soon the great are forgotten. Google him when you get back. Excellent guitarist, up there with Clapton and Knopfler. He was talking about how shitty he was at tuning his instrument. ‘By the time I realized I was no good at this part of the job, I was too rich to quit.’ Same with me and my career as a transporter. Tell you one other thing, since we’re just passing the time on the good old New York Thruway. You think your mother was the only one who got hurt when the economy went tits-up in ’08? Not true. I had a stock portfolio—teeny-weenie, but it was mine—and that went poof.”
She passed another double box, being careful to use her blinker before swinging out and then tucking back in. Considering how much dope she’d ingested, I was amazed. Also grateful. I didn’t want to be with her, but even more than that I didn’t want to die with her.
“But the main thing was my sister Bess. She married this guy who worked for one of the big investment companies. Probably haven’t heard of Bear Stearns any more than you’ve heard of Chet Atkins, right?”
I didn’t know whether to nod my head or shake it, so I just sat there.
“Danny—my brother-in-law, now majoring in waste management—was just entry-level at Bear when Bess married him, but he had a clear path forward. Future was so bright he had to wear shades, if I may borrow from an old song. They bought a house in Tuckahoe Village. Hefty mortgage, but everyone assured them—me included, damn my eyes—that property values out that way had nowhere to go but up. Like the stock market. They got an au pair for their kid. They got a junior membership in the country club. Were they overextended? Fuck, yes. Was Bessie able to look down on my paltry seventy grand a year? Ten-four. But you know what my father used to say?”
How would I? I thought.
“He used to say that if you try to outrun your own shadow, you’re bound to fall on your face. Danny and Bess were talking about putting in a swimming pool when the bottom fell out. Bear Stearns specialized in mortgage securities, and all at once the paper they were holding was just paper.”
She brooded on this as we passed a sign that said NEW PALTZ 59 POUGHKEEPSIE 70 and RENFIELD 78. We were a little over an hour away from our final destination, and just thinking that gave me the creeps, Final Destination being a particularly gory horror movie me and my friends had watched. Not up there with the Saw flicks, but still pretty fucking grim.
“Bear Stearns? What a joke. One week their shares were selling for over a hundred and seventy dollars a pop, the next they were going for ten bucks. JP Morgan Chase picked up the pieces. Other companies took the same long walk off the same short dock. The guys at the top made it through okay, they always do. The little guys and gals, not so much. Go on YouTube, Jamie, and you can find clips of people coming out of their fancy midtown office buildings with their whole careers in cardboard boxes. Danny Miller was one of those guys. Six months after joining the Green Hills Country club, he was riding on a Greenwise garbage truck. And he was one of the lucky ones. As for their house, underwater. Know what that means?”
It so happened that I did. “They owed more on it than it was worth.”
“A-plus work, Cham…Jamie. Go to the head of the class. But it was the only asset they had, not to mention a place where Bess, Danny, and my niece Francine could lay down their heads at night without getting rained on. Bess said she had friends who were sleeping in their camper. Who do you think kicked in enough so they could keep up with the payments on that four-bedroom white elephant?”
“I’m guessing you did.”
“Right. Bess stopped looking down on my seventy grand a year, I can tell you that. But was I able to do it on just my salary, plus all the overtime I could glom? No way. Because I got part-time work as security in a couple of clubs? More no way. But I met people there, made connections, got offers. Certain lines of work are recession-proof. Funeral parlors always make out. Repo companies and bail bondsmen. Liquor stores. And the dope biz. Because, good times or bad, people are going to want to get high. And okay, I like nice things. Won’t apologize for it. I find nice things a comfort, and felt like I deserved them. I was keeping a roof over my sister’s family’s head, after all the years Bess high-hatted me because she was prettier, smarter, went to a real college instead of a community deal. And, of course, she was hetero.” Liz almost snarled this last.
“What happened?” I asked. “How did you lose your job?”
“IAD blindsided me with a piss test I wasn’t ready for. Not that they didn’t know all along, they just couldn’t get rid of me right away after I pitched in with Therriault. Wouldn’t have looked good. So they waited, which I suppose was smart, and then when they had me in a box—at least they thought they did—they tried to turn me. Get me to wear a wire and all that good Serpico shit. But here’s another saying, one I didn’t learn from my father: snitches wind up in ditches. And they didn’t know I had an ace up my sleeve.”
“What ace?” You can think I was stupid if you want, but that was actually an honest question.
“You, Jamie. You’re my ace. And ever since Therriault, I knew the time would come when I’d have to play it.”
57
We drove through downtown Renfield, which must have had a big population of college kids, judging from all the bars, bookstores, and fast food restaurants on its single main street. On the other side, the road turned west and began to rise into the Catskills. After three miles or so, we came to a picnic area overlooking the Wallkill River. Liz turned in and killed the engine. We were the only ones there. She took out her little bottle of special blend, seemed about to unscrew the cap, then put it away. Her duffle coat pulled open and I saw more smears of dried blood on her sweatshirt. I thought about her saying her septum was gone. Thinking about how the powder she was
snorting was eating into her flesh was worse than any Final Destination or Saw movie, because it was real.
“Time to tell you why I brought you here, kiddo. You need to know what to expect, and what I expect of you. I don’t think we’ll part friends, but maybe we can part on relatively good terms.”
I doubt that was another thing I didn’t say.
“If you want to know how the dope biz works, watch The Wire. It’s set in Baltimore instead of New York, but the dope biz doesn’t change much from place to place. It’s a pyramid, like any other big-money organization. You’ve got your junior street dealers at the bottom, and most of them are juniors, so when they get popped they get tried as juveniles. In family court one day, back on the street corner the next. Then you’ve got your senior dealers, who service the clubs—where I got recruited—and the fat cats who save money by buying in bulk.”
She laughed, and I didn’t get why that was funny, either.
“Go up a little and you’ve got your suppliers, your junior executives to keep things running smoothly, your accountants, your lawyers, and then the top boys. It’s all compartmentalized, or at least it’s supposed to be. The people at the bottom know who’s directly above them, but that’s all they know. The people in the middle know everyone below them, but still only one layer above them. I was different. Outside the pyramid. Outside the, um, hierarchy.”
“Because you were a transporter. Like in that Jason Statham movie.”
“Pretty much. Transporters are supposed to know only two people, the ones we receive from at Point A and the ones we turn the load over to at Point B. Those at Point B are the senior distributors who start the dope flowing down the pyramid to its final destination, the users.”
Final destination. There it was again.
“Only as a cop—dirty, but still a cop—I pay attention, okay? I don’t ask many questions, doing that is dangerous, but I listen. Also, I have—had, anyway—access to NYPD and DEA databases. It wasn’t hard to trace the pyramid all the way to the tippy-top. There are maybe a dozen people importing three major kinds of dope into the New York and New England territories, but the one I was working for lives right here in Renfield. Lived, I should say. His name is Donald Marsden, and when he filed his taxes, he listed developer as his former occupation and retired as his current one. He’s retired, all right.”
Lived, I should say. Retired.
It was Kenneth Therriault all over again.
“The kid gets the picture,” Liz said. “Fantastic. Mind if I smoke? I shouldn’t have another bump until this is over. Then I’ll treat myself to a double. Really redline the old blood pressure.”
She didn’t wait for me to give permission, just lit up. But at least she rolled down her window to let the smoke out. Most of it, anyway.
“Donnie Marsden was known to his colleagues—his crew— as Donnie Bigs, for good reason. He was one fat fuck, pardon my political incorrectness. Three hundred ain’t in it, dear—try four and a quarter. He was asking for it, and he got it yesterday. Cerebral hemorrhage. Blew his brains out and didn’t even need a gun.”
She dragged deep and shot smoke out her window. The daylight was still strong but the shadows were getting long. Soon the light would start to fade.
“A week before he stroked out, I got word through two of my old contacts—this would be Point B guys I stayed friendly with—that Donnie received a shipment from China. Huge shipment, they said. Not powder, pills. Knockoff OxyContin, a lot of it for Donnie Bigs’s personal sale. Maybe as a kind of bonus. That’d be my guess, anyway, because there really is no top of the pyramid, Jamie. Even the boss has bosses.”
This made me think of something Mom and Uncle Harry used to chant sometimes. They had learned it as kids, I guess, and Uncle Harry remembered it even when all of the important stuff had blown away. Big fleas have little fleas upon their backs to bite em, and little fleas have lesser fleas, and so on ad infinitum. I supposed I might chant that to my own kids. If I ever had the chance to have them, that was.
“Pills, Jamie! Pills!” She sounded enraptured, which was mondo creepy. “Easy to transport and easier to sell! Huge could mean two or three thousand, maybe ten thousand. And Rico—one of my Point B guys—says they’re forties. You know what forties go for on the street? Never mind, I know you don’t. Eighty a pill. And never mind sweating out a run with heroin in plastic garbage bags, I could carry these in a fucking suitcase.”
Smoke slithered out between her lips and she watched it drift away toward the guardrails with their sign reading STAY BACK FROM THE EDGE.
“We’re going to get those pills, Jamie. You’re going to find out where he put them. My guys asked me to cut them in if I got a line on the stuff, and of course I said yes, but this is my deal. Besides, there might not be ten thousand tabs. There might only be eight thousand. Or eight hundred.”
She cocked her head, then shook it. As if arguing with herself.
“There’ll be a couple thousand. A couple thousand at least, got to be. Probably more. Donnie’s executive bonus for doing a good job of supplying his New York clientele. But if you start splitting that, pretty soon you’re stuck with chump change, and I’m no chump. Got a little bit of a drug problem, but that doesn’t make me a chump. You know what I’ll do, Jamie?”
I shook my head.
“Make it out to the west coast. Disappear from this part of the world forever. New clothes, new hair color, new me. I’ll find someone out there who can broker a deal for the Oxy. I may not get eighty a pill, but I’ll get a lot, because Oxy is still the gold standard, and the Chinese shit is as good as the real stuff. Then I’m going to get myself a nice new identity to go with my new hair and clothes. I’ll check into a rehab and get clean. Find a job, maybe the kind where I can start making up for the past. Atonement is what the Catholics call it. How does that sound to you?”
Like a pipe dream, I thought.
It must have showed on my face, because the happy smile she’d been wearing froze. “You don’t think so? Fine. Just watch me.”
“I don’t want to watch you,” I said. “I want to get the hell away from you.”
She raised a hand and I cringed back in my seat, thinking she meant to give me a swat, but she only sighed and wiped her nose with it again. “How can I blame you for that? So let’s make it happen. We’re going to drive up to his house—last one on Renfield Road, all by its lonesome—and you’re going to ask him where those pills are currently residing. My guess would be in his personal safe. If so, you’ll ask him for the combination. He’ll have to tell you, because dead people can’t lie.”
“I can’t be sure of that,” I said, a lie which proved I was still alive. “It’s not like I’ve questioned hundreds of them. Mostly I don’t talk to them at all. Why would I? They’re dead.”
“But Therriault told you where the bomb was, even though he didn’t want to.”
I couldn’t argue with that, but there was another possibility. “What if the guy’s not there? What if he’s wherever his body went? Or, I don’t know, maybe he’s visiting his mom and dad in Florida. Maybe once they’re dead they can tele-port anywhere.”
I thought that might shake her, but she didn’t look upset at all. “Thomas was at his place, wasn’t he?”
“That doesn’t mean they all are, Liz!”
“I’m pretty sure Marsden will be.” She sounded very sure of herself. She didn’t understand that dead people can be unpredictable. “Let’s do this. Then I’ll grant you your fondest wish. You’ll never have to see me again.”
She said this in a sad way, like I was supposed to feel sorry for her, but I didn’t. The only thing I felt about her was scared.
58
The road ran upward in a series of lazy S-turns. At first there were some houses with mailboxes beside the road, but they were farther and farther apart. The trees began to crowd in, their shadows meeting and making it seem later than it was.
“How many do you think there are?” Liz asked.
>
“Huh?”
“People like you. Ones who can see the dead.”
“How should I know?”
“Did you ever run into another one?”
“No, but it isn’t exactly the kind of thing you talk about. Like starting a conversation with ‘Hey, do you see dead people?’ ”
“I suppose not. But you sure didn’t get it from your mother.” Like she was talking about the color of my eyes or my curly hair. “What about your father?”
“I don’t know who he is. Or was. Or whatever.” Talking about my father made me uneasy, probably because my mother refused to.
“You never asked?”
“Sure I asked. She doesn’t answer.” I turned in my seat to look at her. “She never said anything about it…about him…to you?”
“I asked and got what you got. Brick wall. Not like Tee at all.”
More curves, tighter now. The Wallkill was far below us, glittering in the late afternoon sunshine. Or maybe it was early evening. I’d left my watch at home on my nightstand, and the dashboard clock said 8:15, which was totally fucked up. Meanwhile the quality of the road was deteriorating. Liz’s car rumbled over crumbling patches and thudded into potholes.
“Maybe she was so drunk she doesn’t remember. Or maybe she got raped.” Neither idea had ever crossed my mind, and I recoiled. “Don’t look so shocked. I’m only guessing. And you’re old enough to at least consider what your mom might have gone through.”
I didn’t contradict her out loud, but in my mind I did. In fact, I thought she was full of shit. Are you ever old enough to wonder if your life is the result of blackout sex in the backseat of some stranger’s car, or that your mom was hauled into an alley and raped? I really don’t think so. That Liz did probably said all I needed to know about what she’d become. Maybe what she was all along.
“Maybe the talent came from your dear old Daddy-O. Too bad you can’t ask him.”
