by Rob Hart
There’s a small glassine envelope sitting next to the works. Stamped on it in red ink is a slice of pizza.
Dealers like to mark their product. Corporate logos and movie titles and funny little images. Could help lead me to a batch or a dealer.
Other than that, I’ve got nothing but a thought, that someone may or may not have dosed him.
I do know some people who like to do that kind of thing.
Back downstairs, Bombay is shoving the freezer bags deep into the garbage. When he’s done he looks up at me and holds the USB. “I made a virtual copy of his browser. We can check his e-mail and his browsing history. That’s about it. Didn’t seem to be much else helpful.”
“Did you see his phone?”
“Not down here. If his account password was autosaved I can probably access his records.”
I take out my phone, call Timmy’s cell. Straight to voicemail. Could be gone, or it could be dead, lost in a couch cushion or up in his pocket.
No sense in waiting any longer. I dial 911 and when the operator answers I tell them my friend OD’d and the address and that I’ll wait. I’m only a little surprised by the use of the word “friend.”
It’s quite a show. The first to arrive is a fire truck, and I let the firefighters in and explain to them there’s not much to be done, so they mill around on the block outside until some cops arrive. By this point there are people standing at their windows, some coming outside to ask what happened. When the cops take my name I tell them immediately that I was in for questioning and then let go. Figure it’s best to be honest. They give me some vicious side-eye but otherwise seem satisfied with my reason for being here: checking on my friend, was worried about him, back door was unlocked, found him dead.
The last to show up is the white medical examiner van. A few people come in and start poking around, taking pictures. A tall, skinny Asian woman, her hair shaped into careful curls, leads me and Bombay into the kitchen. She takes all our information. After she’s got it she takes a deep breath. An ID badge hangs from the lanyard around her neck. Emily Chan.
“How did you know him?” she asks. Her voice is weary, and for a moment I wonder if it’s rooted in disinterest, but there’s something a little heavier under that. Sadness. Like she’s gone on a lot of calls like this lately.
“We went to high school together. I ran into him recently and we reconnected.”
“Any next of kin that you know of?”
“Parents are dead. He made some reference to not having anyone.”
“Did you notice anything weird or off when you came into the house?”
“No. He invited us over. When he didn’t answer we checked the back door. I didn’t notice anything until I got upstairs.”
“Did you touch anything?”
“No,” I tell her, throwing a quick glance to Bombay. His lips are pressed hard together but it doesn’t look like he’s going to crack.
Emily nods, jots down some notes.
“What’s going to happen to him?” I ask.
She sighs again, her shoulders sagging. “We’ll do the best we can to find next of kin. Could be an aunt or uncle floating around somewhere. But if what you say is true, even if we do, I doubt anyone’s going to want to take possession of the body or take on the funeral expenses. Chances are he’s going to end up on Hart Island.”
“What’s that?”
She creases an eyebrow, like she’s surprised I don’t know. “Up between the Bronx and Long Island. The potter’s field for New York City. That’s where people go when there’s no one to claim them.” She looks around the house, frowns. “At this rate, we’re going to fill that place up pretty soon.”
Hearing that is a fist to the chest.
It makes me think of my dad. The dirt that might hold him, or not. Standing in a field and wondering where he went. I know how I feel about it. I hate the idea of that happening to anyone else.
“What if I claimed him?” I ask.
Emily stares at me for a second, maybe to see whether I’m kidding. I don’t think I am. I’m not a big believer in the afterlife. I’m not a fan of wakes or funerals. It’s not like you’re doing it for the deceased. They don’t know it’s happening. But there’s something so repellant about the idea of leaving him in a fucking field.
“Are you serious?” she asks.
“Yes.”
“If you’re not, I’m on the hook.”
“I want to do this.”
She nods, fishes out a business card, and hands it to me. “You got eight hundred bucks?”
“I do.”
“I know a cremation service. Couple of days, you’ll have the cremains. Does that sound amenable to you?”
“It does.”
She asks for my number, scribbles it on the clipboard. “You can pick it up in a few days,” she says. Her face shifts and she realizes the way that sounded, and she apologizes. I accept even though I don’t know that she needed to apologize.
Once she’s done, we leave, to find more snow on the ground and a bitter wind. I take it slow on the way back to Bombay’s. We don’t say a word, and by the time I pull into a spot down the block from the apartment building I realize the radio isn’t on, either.
I’m not hungry anymore but it feels like a sin to leave one uneaten slice of pizza. When Lunette and Bombay both decline, I fold it up and go to town. Wash it down with a beer and sit back on the couch as we continue with our marathon of home renovation shows.
A young couple laments that their fixer-upper has knob-and-tube wiring in the walls, which is apparently not up to code. Their renovation budget got kicked in the teeth for an additional ten grand. The husband complains that they’re spending so much money on renovations they can’t even see, and that they might have to surrender their marble countertops to make budget.
“You know what I hate?” Lunette asks. “These assholes are like ‘ooh wah, we have to spend extra money to make sure our house doesn’t burn down’. You know what would be nice? Making enough money to live in a house.”
“Fucking yuppies,” I say.
“Fucking yuppies,” she agrees.
I turn to Bombay. “Any headway?”
He nods without taking his eyes off the screen. “Couple of things. I’ve got a list of all the numbers he called, and he had his text messages synced to the cloud so I was able to review everything. Nothing of real interest in that, or in his e-mail. Different story with his geotagging. I was able to lift location data through one of the apps on his phone. Which is something I’m going to look into because that app isn’t supposed to do that. He went to a couple of places on the south shore. I can’t get addresses but I can get pretty rough locations. Last thing is, he looked at a bunch of websites that were about fentanyl.”
“Huh,” Lunette says, sipping her beer.
“Huh what?”
“That’s some nasty shit.”
“It is,” Bombay says, hitting pause on the TV. “Heroin comes from a plant. Fentanyl comes from a lab. It’s a synthetic. It’s supposed to be an alternative to morphine. So like after surgery for people who are opioid-tolerant. But it’s also, like, fifty to a hundred times stronger than morphine.”
“Real nasty,” Lunette says. “Easy to OD. Still, lots of folks like to mix it into their stash.”
“So a lot of people are going to die, and maybe that’s related to fentanyl.” I turn to Lunette. “What do you think? We know there’s a new guy on the block and he wants to make a name for himself. But if he’s using fentanyl, what, he kills a bunch of his customers? That doesn’t make a lot of sense.”
Lunette takes a long swig of beer. Finds that the bottle is empty. Puts it down on top of the coffee table. It makes a clacking sound. She sits back, folds her arms over her chest. Almost folding into herself. Shame and guilt sock me in the stomach.
“I’m sorry,” I tell her. “I wouldn’t if it wasn’t important.”
“Dealers cut their shit,” she says. “Powdered milk. Flour. Chalk. I’ve he
ard of guys using laundry detergent. Anything to stretch it out. But sometimes dealers will put out pure doses. That can be too much, even for veteran users. Because the more you use it, the more you can tolerate, right? A regular user needs higher and higher doses to get to the same high.”
“Okay, but fentanyl is so much stronger.”
Lunette’s face stretches into a grimace. “That’s the point. The point is to make a lot of people OD. Because then everyone’s going to want your shit.”
“Really?”
Lunette looks away from me. “You have to understand the psychology of this. If someone ODs, that doesn’t make you afraid of it, that makes you want it. Because that means it’s got to be good. Most of the time you’re dealing with stuff that’s been stepped on until there’s nothing left. The promise of a better high than the one you’ve got…”
She trails off. Gets up and goes to the window. Turns on the box fan Bombay set up for her and lights a cigarette. The gray wisps of smoke are sucked away from her, into the night air.
“If this is true, that there’s some guy out there trying to make some noise, that’s a way to do it,” she says. “I mean, it’s pretty fucked up, but that doesn’t make it not true. A dealer can build himself a dedicated customer base by killing off the first wave of users.”
“That is… not good,” I tell her.
Bombay looks up from his laptop. “She’s right. I’m checking Google now. Found a couple of stories already about dealers cutting with fentanyl for exactly that reason.”
Lunette sucks on her cigarette, staring over the glowing tip at me.
Bombay is staring at me too.
They’re waiting for me to say something.
“We can go to the cops,” I tell them.
“And say what?” Lunette asks. “Some drug dealer with a dumb name may or may not be planning to kill a bunch of people? You think the cops give a fuck about users? We’re vermin to them. No one’s going to give a fuck about us.”
“I don’t think that’s true,” I tell her. “The detective who questioned me and the PI I’ve been talking too both seem pretty passionate about ending this.”
“Right, but we don’t have much in the way of evidence,” Bombay says.
I run the scenario through my head. Showing up with a theory and nothing in hand is probably not going to do much, and there’s suddenly a ticking clock element. If I were to suss out some more information—something concrete, like more details of Kid Vicious, or when exactly this is supposed to go down, it would give us a little more weight.
Plus, it would look good to Reese. Like I can actually do this kind of work.
Not to be so cavalier as to say this is a great opportunity to advance my career. But it’s a great opportunity to advance my career. With the added bonus of stopping a bad guy, saving some lives, and finding some people who’ve gone missing.
Because this is my home. I know that now. This is where I belong. And I will not tolerate this in my home. Lunette’s not wrong—to call them junkies is to pass a judgment we don’t have the right to make. Yes, they made their choice. But they weren’t helped by dishonest pharmaceutical companies, and politicians who don’t care to fund treatment, and police officers who seem them like roaches.
It raises the questions of next steps. Knowing what Timmy found out is only a small part of a larger battle. I need to find out who the fuck Kid Vicious is, and where to find him.
“Those locations you pulled up,” I ask Bombay. “Is there any way to find out exactly where Timmy went?”
“Not specifically. I could do streets. Maybe a few homes or businesses. But phone GPS isn’t as precise as you would think. What are you thinking?”
“That Timmy went somewhere yesterday, got the information, and then he died,” I tell him. “Whether he was killed or what, I don’t know. But we have to retrace his steps.”
“I can tell you generally where he went, and I can tell you roughly how long he was in each place, but we’re getting into inexact science territory here, bro,” Bombay says. “There’s a lot of ground to cover. Would help if we could narrow it down.”
I get up, cross over to the fridge. Take out a beer. Consider it. Put it back. Think about asking Lunette for a cigarette. Don’t do that either.
Focus on the job.
“Can you put together a list?” I ask Bombay. “As much detail as you can.”
“Sure,” he says, looking back down at the laptop.
I take out my phone and call up Reese’s office. It’s well past eleven and I know she won’t be in but I’m hoping she stays on top of her messages. When the greeting ends and the recording starts I say, “This is Ash. I think I’ve got something but I need your help. Can you meet me tomorrow morning? Let’s say 10 a.m.”
And I give her an address.
By 10:08 I’m wondering if Reese didn’t get my message, or worse, if she doesn’t care. But then I see her car pulling into an empty space down the block from Project Sanctuary.
I had been keeping my car running for the warmth, so I kill the engine and walk over to hers and wave her down. She flicks the switch for the locks and I climb into the passenger seat.
“Usually I don’t even come into the office until eleven,” she says.
“It’s good that you checked your messages.”
“What I mean is, this better be good.”
“I think it is.”
I explain everything: Timmy being dead, finding out about the fentanyl, the theory of what Kid Vicious might be doing, that I’m worried it’s not enough to take to the cops. She listens quietly, nodding along the way.
“Well, it’s definitely not enough,” she says. “But it’s enough for me to shake some branches. So why are we here?”
“Because we know Timmy was rolling around on the south shore. And I’ve got some rough ideas about the locations, but I don’t have time to knock on twenty doors. I’d like to narrow it down.” I nod toward Project Sanctuary. “The woman who runs this place might be able to help. Maybe put us in touch with someone who will know if there’s anything worth pursuing. I tried to talk to her about Spencer. She wasn’t too forthcoming, because who am I? I figure she might be more inclined to talk to you.”
Reese laughs a little under her breath. “You really want that job, don’t you?”
“Right now I want to stop a bad guy from doing a bad thing.”
“All right, all right,” she says, turning the engine off. “Let’s go inside and see what we can get.”
As we come up on the building we walk past a group of hard-ass motherfuckers leaning against the wall, smoking cigarettes, shooting the shit. The kind of guys that, if they were walking toward you, even though you might feel bad, you’d cross the street anyway, just in case.
Reese doesn’t pay them any attention, but one of them mutters something under his breath at her and she stops dead. Turns. He’s two heads taller and maybe a hundred pounds heavier. He’s the kind of person I wouldn’t want to fuck with and I usually don’t feel that way about people. But she marches right over and looks up at him.
“You want to repeat that?”
“I didn’t say nothing.”
“Don’t be a coward on top of being a little shit,” she says. As she says it, it’s like she’s getting taller and he’s getting shorter. He looks around to his friends, who all take a step back. He has to deal with the consequences of his actions, they’re telling him.
He looks back at Reese. “Didn’t mean nothing.”
“Yes you did,” she says. “You were showing off for your friends. But you don’t talk to women like that. That’s not how a man is supposed to act. You understand?”
With his manhood called into question his face twists. He’s ready to say something back to her when Reese puts her hand up.
“Before you say it, shut the fuck up,” she says. “Answer the question. Do you understand?”
They hold each other’s eyes for a second.
The guy deflat
es. Reese wins.
“Yeah,” he says, looking down and away.
“Yes, ma’am,” Reese says. “Respect your elders. Jesus, you’re a fucking mess all over, aren’t you?”
The guy starts to roll his eyes, catches himself, says, “Yes, ma’am.”
Reese smiles. “Good.” She looks around, making eye contact with each of the men in turn, and walks away. Some of them look at me. I put my hands up and do a big exaggerated shrug. Slightly more afraid of Reese, but also glad she’s on my side.
As we move away, the men taunt their newly-cowed friend. I ask Reese, “What did he say?”
“Not worth repeating,” she says. “But when a man thinks he can say something like that to a woman, whether he knows her or not, you shut it right down.”
“I knew I liked you,” I tell her.
She gives me a little side-eye and a smirk.
The lobby of Project Sanctuary is quiet. No one in the waiting area. No one even behind the desk. But a few seconds after the door closes, a young kid with blue hair and a nose piercing comes out from the back. Reese flashes her ID and asks, “Is Kathryn Petersen-Wichnovitz around?”
He nods, disappears. A few minutes later Kathy appears. She looks like she hasn’t slept in a week. She glances at Reese with confusion, then me with recognition. She tries to hide the fact that she rolls her eyes. That does not bode well.
“You’re back,” she says, her voice sharp and impatient. “Did you find your friend?”
“Not yet.”
Reese clears her throat. “Ma’am, I’m a private investigator, and I’ve been hired to find the kid he’s looking for. We have something we need to run by you.”
Kathy looks back, and what no doubt is a mountain of work on her desk, but gestures to the chairs. We sit and I run through the spiel I gave to Reese in the car.
Her face sinks but she doesn’t seem surprised. “What can I do?”
“If there’s someone you can point us to who might know a little more about the scene on the south shore, that’d be a big help,” I tell her.
Kathy puts her hand to her temple. Presses hard and closes her eyes.
