by Dawson, Mark
Her daughter looked at her as if she were mad. “Not without you!”
“Well, alright. How about we do it together after breakfast tomorrow?”
“Can we look around the city?”
Could they afford to tarry? Probably. A morning wouldn’t hurt. Maybe even a day. And she wanted to spend as much time with Isabella as she could. The time was coming when that wouldn’t be possible any longer.
Beatrix kissed her on the cheek, grabbed her jacket and keycard, and left the room.
Chapter Eight
It was a hot night. Beatrix remembered New York summers and the humidity that squeezed the city like a warm, damp fist, forcing locals to dash between the air-conditioned oases of apartments, cars, shops and restaurants. She remembered one night in particular, the end to a long pursuit across the length and breadth of the continental United States, chasing down a double agent who had performed a midnight flit from under the noses of the FBI and the CIA. The man had stolen nuclear secrets from British and French companies and was rumoured to be offering them to Tehran.
She had followed him to the Bronx. The pathologist suggested that he had overdosed on a speedball that had practically burst his heart. That, at least, was true, although the lack of evidence of any predilection for narcotics had been puzzling.
Beatrix walked north, leaving the park and picking up a cab on Lenox Avenue. The driver was a surly Italian with rosary beads looped around the rearview mirror.
“Where you want to go?”
“Hunts Point,” she said.
The man angled the mirror so that he could look at her more clearly. “You want to go to Hunts Point?”
“That’s right. Is that a problem?”
“You pay me first, it ain’t no problem. Twenty bucks.”
She took the money and passed it over the back of the seat to him.
“Hunts Point,” he muttered under his breath as he put the car into gear and set off.
He followed Lenox Avenue, turned onto East 125th Street and crossed the Harlem River on the Willis Avenue Bridge. Beatrix closed her eyes and focused on the aches and pains, quantifying them, cataloguing, trying to gauge how quickly it was getting worse. She felt tired and washed out all the time now. Sometimes it hurt to close her fist around objects. She knew that it was getting to the point when she would be unable to defend herself if things took a turn for the worse.
She just needed to keep going for a little bit longer.
The driver took them along the Bruckner Expressway, exiting onto Longwood Avenue. She looked around. Hunts Point was one of New York’s main red light districts. The cheap rents and open warehouses meant that it had attracted an arts scene since the last time Beatrix had passed through it, but it hadn’t been gentrified yet. It was the proximity to the truckers at the terminal markets and the quiet, isolated streets that made it perfect for hookers and dealers to do their business.
“I don’t go no further than this,” the driver said, pulling over at the junction of Spofford Avenue and Edgewater Road. They were opposite the entrance to the New York City Terminal Produce Market and its large parking lot, filled with trucks. A railroad for goods and produce passed between the lot and the road.
The cab pulled away, and she walked south until she was on streets that she vaguely remembered. The atmosphere became more aggressive, a pervasive threat of violence just beneath the surface of things. Cars rolled by slowly, middle-aged men with nervous eyes glancing out at the women touting for trade. Other drivers were hidden behind tinted windows that muffled the heavy bass that leaked out into the street. Clutches of young black boys loitered outside the entrances to lock-ups and small warehouses, the bricks covered with colourful murals. The remains of stolen cars were abandoned outside chop shops. A white panel van advertised “Ca$h 4 Gold & Diamonds,” its paintwork disfigured with gang tags. The trees were thin and weedy, as if breathing this polluted air was stunting their growth, slowly poisoning them. Hookers worked the corners, and junkies lolled in doorways, begging for change.
She walked on to Halleck Street.
She remembered an old bar, barely more than a shack. It had been a clearing house for assignations and merchandise, the kind of place where you could get information about whatever it was you needed. It wasn’t there anymore. It wasn’t a case of a simple change of use, or even that the business had been cleared out and the building left empty, as had happened with many of the other derelict shells that lined the street. There was simply no building there any more. The block had been razed to the ground by what must have been a large fire, the blackened timbers that remained the only evidence of what had been there before.
That was annoying.
She kept going.
A man was slouched against the wall of a garage advertised as “Vallejo Auto Repair.”
She stopped before him. He was scrawny, covered in dirt, and he looked diseased.
“Whatchoo looking for, lady?” he slurred. “I got crack, smack, dope. Whatever your heart desires, I got it. I send you to the moon and back, and product’s cheap too. I ain’t kiddin’.”
She crouched down and took a ten-dollar bill from her pocket.
“So? Whatchoo want?”
“Just information,” she said.
He reached for the note, but she folded it back into her hand.
“Information first.”
“What information?”
“I’m looking for something,” she said. “I want you to tell me if I’m in the right place.”
“Shoot.”
“You know where I can get a piece?”
The man raised his chin and nodded in the direction of the bodega on the corner.
“Yeah, baby. That’ll go. Whatever you want, you can get it in there. What you want? A nine? They got nines, no problem, whatever you want. Pacho’s the dude you need. You tell him Sidney sent you, aight?”
He held out his hand, the fingers extended to show the dirty skin on his palm, and she lowered the note so he could snatch it.
She stepped around him, but he reached out and snagged the hem of her jeans.
“You sure I can’t help you? You look like you could use a fix.”
“Yeah,” she said. “I’m sure.”
She shook her leg away, breaking his weak grip, and went inside the bodega.
The bodega was stocked with tins of food and bottles of cheap wine and not much else in between. It was obvious that it was a front, and when Beatrix went up to the clerk and said she wanted to speak to Pacho, the man disappeared for only thirty seconds before returning, pointing to the door behind the counter that he had left ajar and telling her to go on through.
She did. The room beyond was big and noisy. Beatrix guessed that it was the same square footage as the bodega outside, and she would have been willing to bet that it made at least a thousand times the profit. There was a table and a lamp with an ornamental shade that was suspended on a long cord so that it hung down low right over it. A sawed-off shotgun rested on the table. There were three old ratty sofas and an old fashioned boom box that was playing a Jay-Z record. The paint was peeling off the walls, and the carpet, which looked like it might once have been beige, was the deep, almost black of blood that had been allowed to dry and stain. The sounds of the city outside came in through the open window, angry and close: car horns, gunshots and angry voices.
Beatrix assessed. There were a dozen people in the room: a big and mean-looking man behind the door, dressed in a velour tracksuit, his pendulous belly hanging over the top of his pants; a group of gang-bangers playing NBA on a PlayStation hooked up to a big LCD screen; two girls, maybe with the gang-bangers, smoking from a crack pipe on a sofa in the corner of the room. There were other girls, barely dressed, zoned out on crack so bad they looked like the living dead, dancing somnambulantly to the music, watching a gonzo porno on another scre
en. Finally, there was a thin white guy, unwashed dreads leaking out of a dirty bandana. He was wearing a LeBron jersey, a pair of loose slacks and nothing on his feet.
He was eating noodles from a takeout box. He looked up. “Well, looky here. Who’s this, Trevor?”
“Clipper says she interested in buyin’ some gear, boss,” the big guy, Trevor, said.
“That right?” He raised a piece of sweet-and-sour pork from the takeout box with his chopsticks, put it into his mouth and denoted the flavour with an exaggerated smack of his lips. He switched his gaze onto her. “That right, sweetness? What you want, white girl?”
He was white himself, but you wouldn’t have guessed to listen to him. His eyes wandered up and down her body, and she felt a moment of revulsion. She fought it back and said, “I want a gun.”
The man lounged back against the sofa and pointed at her, mimicking a gun with his thumb and forefinger. “She needs a gun,” he said to the big guy, suddenly laughing with uproarious gusto. “You hear that, big man? She said she needs a gun.”
“Heard that, Pacho.”
“Shit! You smoke enough hydro, and you end up thinkin’ you hear things there ain’t no way you could ever rightly have heard.”
Beatrix looked at him more carefully. His skin was pocked with old acne scars, and there were tracks on his arms that said he was a user. He had two big, chunky gold rings on his fingers and a heavy gold chain around his neck. He was older than he looked, maybe forty-five playing at being twenty-five, and there was a cruel light that shone in his eyes that said he was mean and worthy of her caution. He was the top dog here.
She looked at him coolly. “Do you have one?”
He nodded down at the sawed-off shotgun on the table. “Sure, I got one.”
“One that I could buy from you.”
“Shit, sure I do. What you want, a little Saturday night special? Somethin’ that’ll fit in your purse, but still big enough to make a mess out of someone who gets fresh with you when you don’t want them to get fresh—somethin’ like that?”
“A nine millimetre. Not too big. A Kel-Tec PF-9 or a Taurus PT709. Something like that.”
He stabbed the chopsticks back into the noodles and stood the box on the table. “Somethin’ like that,” he repeated with heavy sarcasm as he reached down into the pocket of his pants and pulled out a small pistol. He laid it on the table and spun it, the gun rotating until it came to a stop, the barrel pointing straight at her. Beatrix recognised the new Beretta 9mm Nano.
“That’ll do,” she said. “How much?”
“What you prepared to do for it, sweetness?”
“How much?”
He ignored that. “See, I like to think I’m a pretty good judge of a person’s character. What you say, Trevor? Am I a good judge of character?”
“The best I ever seen.”
“That’s right, the best. And I took one look at you as you came in that door, and I’m thinkin’ that girl, man, Pacho, that girl who used to be fine not so very long ago, now she’s just all the way desperate. I mean, look at you, all emaciated and shit. You been on the rock too long, baby. It ain’t a gun you here for, is it? You here because you heard that the produce I put on the market is primo, grade A, number one top shit. That’s right, ain’t it?” He grinned at her.
Beatrix felt her anger rising. She spoke coolly and calmly, but it was difficult. “I want the gun,” she said. “That’s all I want. Is it for sale or isn’t it?”
He toyed with her some more. “What you want a piece for? Boyfriend been hittin’ you around? You and me, we work somethin’ out. I’ll send Big Trevor over there to pay his sorry ass a visit. He won’t be a problem no more, and I’ll show you what a real man looks like.”
“I’ll give you five hundred dollars for it.”
He went wide-eyed, theatrically over the top. “You carryin’ that much cash into a place like this? A white girl like you, little like you are, all skinny and shit, all alone?”
She took out her money and, with no nerves, counted out five hundred-dollar bills. She dropped the notes on the table next to the gun and then peeled off another and dropped that, too. “For ammunition,” she said.
“Shit, girl, you got stones!” Pacho laughed. “You see this bitch, Trevor? You see the stones on her?”
“I see it, boss.”
Pacho looked up at her with a predatory gleam in his eyes. She looked back at him, daring him to look away first. He baulked, hiding it behind a laugh, and swept the gun across the table to her. He picked up the box of noodles, extracted the chopsticks and pointed with them to the empty chair opposite him. “Take a seat, baby,” Pacho said. “Let me get you a drink.”
“No thanks,” she said.
“You don’t want nothin’ else?”
“Just the ammunition and then I’m gone.”
He leaned back and laced his fingers in front of him. “Like I say,’ he drawled, “when it comes to reading people, there ain’t no one I’ve ever met can hold a candle to me. So let me tell you something else I seen in you as soon as you come through the door. I seen hunger. The kind of hunger that tells me that this ain’t your first dance with the devil, you know what I’m talkin’ about? You ain’t here for a gun, least not just for a gun. You had a taste of the good stuff before, right? And you be wonderin’ right now whether you might like another taste.”
The shame of it was this: he was right.
She thought about it, and the more she ran it through her mind, the more she realised it had always been about more than the gun. She could have found a piece anywhere. She could have contacted Pope and had the local quartermaster meet her with practically anything she wanted. Getting it like this was crazy, unnecessarily risky, and she would never normally have taken an unnecessary risk.
She had known that there would be drugs here.
Heroin.
Her appetite had waited quietly at the back of her thoughts, just detectable but always there, and it had brought her here under a false pretence. Now, after it had put her in front of the junkies and their paraphernalia and their little packets of oblivion, it told her, whispering into her ear over and over and over again, that here was the answer to all of her pain.
All she had to do was ask.
“You like this?” the man said, holding up one of the little baggies. He flicked a finger against it. “I see you do. You want some?”
She fought the urge to say yes.
“Primo-fucking-grade-A horse, baby. Uncut. Practically untouched by human hands since it left Afghanistan.”
She looked at the bag and felt the old rush of weakness that she had never completely been able to ignore. The morphine she had been taking had sated her appetite, at least at the start, but recently all it had been doing was just whetting the edge of her weakness. She knew, looking at the little plastic baggie that Pacho was holding between his thumb and forefinger, that it was the solution. That, right there, was the answer to the pain and the sleeplessness and the fear that she looked upon every time she closed her eyes.
“What you say, sweetness?”
“How much for a hit?”
“Gratis. Compliments of the house.”
Before she could say anything, he took a brass spoon and dropped a chunk of the fibrous heroin into it, taking a syringe and squirting in a little water. He took out a lighter and heated the bottom of the spoon. Beatrix watched it bubble and spit as it started to heat, and the hunger that she had kept locked up deep inside her crept back up to the surface, avid, ready. Pacho dropped a cotton wool ball into the mixture and then slid the needle into the middle of it, using it to filter half of the solution as he drew it up into the barrel.
He placed the spoon down carefully on the table and handed her the needle.
“Enjoy.”
She took it. She had only injected occasionally, now an
d again, preferring to chase the dragon, but she knew that this would be more intense and her need was greater. This would work.
She held the syringe between her fingers, gently rolling it one way and then rolling it back the other.
“Come on then, baby. What you waiting for?”
No.
Isabella.
She had made a mistake. She had always known it. She just needed to bring herself to the edge to know that it was true. This was the coward’s way out. The pain was bad, awfully bad, and she knew that she could find peace by pushing the needle into her vein and sliding down the plunger. That was the void, and it had served her well enough when she had sunk into the squalor of the Chungking Mansions, when she had nothing to live for and when the possibility of overdosing was a promise, not a threat.
But not now.
Isabella.
She did have something to live for now. There could only be a little time left, and every moment was precious. She couldn’t squander a second of it in a stupor. The pain was her reminder that, despite everything, she was still alive.
She was alive.
She laid the syringe down and rolled it over to Pacho’s side of the table.
“What?”
“I don’t want it.”
Pacho flicked the syringe back across the table at her.
“No,” she said. “I don’t want it.”
“What you mean, girl? After I went to all that trouble?”
“I’m sorry.”
He leered at her, a wide grin that exposed his discoloured teeth and then, as he parted his lips, the damp red tip of his tongue. “You fine, darlin’. You sure there ain’t nothin’ here you want?”
Beatrix closed her fists and hoped, prayed, that he wasn’t going to do something stupid that would get him and everyone else in the room killed, but he spread his legs and nodded down at his crotch, and she knew that it was all about to get real.
“No,” she said, scoping out the room with fresh eyes. “I’m sure. Thanks.”
“Come on, don’t be like that.” He looked over at the big black guy at the door. “Trevor,” he called out, “lock the door and get over here, aight? She don’t think she want to partake of everything we got to offer, but I know she does.”
