Orange County Noir (Akashic Noir)

by Gary Phillips

  He flew the blade across Judge Knott's neck, opening a river of blood that the judge covered with both hands seconds before his legs gave out. He dropped to the floor, knees first, then over into a fetal position.

  "And that's that," Lomax said. "We're outta here, Artie."

  "Not exactly," Six said. He had pulled his .22 automatic from somewhere and was aiming it at Lomax. "Fair's fair, Quentin. The judge ultimately honored the arrangement he and I had, so I would feel less of a man, truly guilty, if I were to ignore my responsibility toward him. It would be a sin I'd carry into the confessional, and with me for the rest of my life."

  "Jesus, Artie, you wouldn't, would you?"

  "What do you think?" Arthur Six said.

  he day had started out with me shitting blood. A little later, I was shivering in Doc's passenger seat under the warm July California sun, asking Doc about the blood while we were on the way to Tustin to see this friend of his who was supposed to help its get some morphine.

  Doc and I called each other friends, but we both knew without saying that we were drug buddies. That if I didn't have the five hundred bucks in my pocket to pry this hospicecare friend of his from her ethics long enough to give us some terminal cancer patient's painkillers, Doc would be in this car alone, or with some other human ATM machine. He had the connection, I had the money-and this made us, however temporarily, partners in the world.

  I was worried the blood could be an ulcer, maybe something more serious. Lately, I hadn't been able to get much more than Vicodin for my habit, and it had been corroding away at my stomach, a million tiny pickaxes mining the walls of my guts, so I figured it had caused an ulcer, caused me to rip and bleed into myself and leak slowly away from the inside out. But, too, my mind slid easily to thoughts of cancer and that I could be dying, at least dying faster or in a different way than from addiction. I'd asked my girlfriend Amber and she figured it was nothing. So I asked Doc, "Is blood out of your ass always bad news?"

  "It's never good news," he said.

  "I didn't ask if it was ever good."

  "It's not ever good," he said.

  I took a deep breath. I had the start of what would be fullblown dope sickness in a few hours. The metallic taste at the back of my mouth, the chills. Soon there'd be sweats. Then puke and diarrhea and my body making a tortured fist of itself. I needed exactly what we were going to get. While, of course, realizing it was what we were going to get that caused this. Every day becomes the same cycle of desperate need met with desperate opposition and sickness. I couldn't tell today from tomorrow anymore than you can tell the sea from the horizon in a marine-layer fog. It all just blurs together.

  "But is it always bad?"

  "Not always," he said. "But it's never good, so disavow yourself of that silliness right now."

  I looked at him.

  He said, "This is your ass and your blood, I'm guessing?"

  Sometimes things are simple. Doc was called Doc because he used to be a doctor. Maybe he still was-I wasn't sure, but I knew he wasn't allowed to practice medicine, at least not in California. He wrote some bad scripts, and he ended up losing his license. I think it may only have been suspended. But if anyone official was checking on him, he wasn't living too cleanly. He'd been able to hook me up until the day before with a pretty steady flow of Vicodin, but that only kept me going and didn't really make me high anymore. Without it, I was sick-a shivering noxious presence to all who had the bad luck or bad sense to enter the debris field I'd made of my life. With it, I could function, more or less, get to another day of clawing myself through the hours, wishing the next day would be better, but not seeing any reason it would be. I looked out the window at the towns under the 22 freeway. We'd left Long Beach maybe twenty minutes before and now we were passing the cluster of suburban sprawl of north Orange County, flashing by under an army of tall palms, blown by the offshore winds. It was a beautiful place, even from the freeway. Rooftops of homes glided under us to the right-to the left, a series of car dealerships in Garden Grove, and just east of them, out of sight from the freeway, a series of Vietnamese pho joints and body-piercing parlors in strip malls.

  I met Doc when he was still able to get OxyContin, eighty milligrams for a while and then forties, but eventually his source dried up. Oxy was a dream for a newly off-the-wagon user like me-a time-released chemical equivalent of heroin, without the messy, sloppy, desperate need to fix with needles. Crush a couple of eighty milligrams to start your high right off, and then top them off with a couple of unbroken eighties for the timerelease, and you could live your life in comfort and at something resembling peace. But as they always do, the drugs had stopped working and then, worse, they dried up and the mirage of beauty and ease they gave, they took away with them.

  Right now, though, Doc had talked about an old friend he used to work with who could hook us up with some morphine and maybe more in Tustin and was I in? I heard morphine and said yes and committed my last five hundred bucks from a poker win a few nights before. Normally I need a lot more info, but most of Doc's friends, even the addicts, were very white collar. They were all liars and cheats, but generally not as dangerous as street dope fiends. Plus, we were talking about morphine. The risk-reward was too good and I just jumped without a second thought, quick as a seismograph at ground zero.

  Doc said, "You and Amber been, you know, doing anything?"

  "What?"

  "From what I hear, strippers like to strap one on now and again."

  Amber did, in fact, like to strap one on now and again. And that had caused some blood, but only a little, and only right after. Not for days at a time afterward. "Dude, that's a stereotype," I said.

  "I'm your doctor."

  "You're not my doctor."

  "Well, I'm a doctor," he said.

  "Are you?"

  "Nevertheless," he said, "I have been an internist. I have a certain amount of experience with insertables. I've seen an astounding amount of things up guy's assholes. And women's assholes. You can tell me. Plus, I need to know the facts to know if this blood is an issue. "

  "Okay, fine," I said. "Yes, she has fucked me with a strap-on. Happy?"

  "Don't get so defensive, man. I'm your doctor."

  I let it slip that time.

  Doc said, "When was the last time?"

  "For the blood?"

  "No," he said, smiling. "When you let your pervert girlfriend sodomize you." I looked at him and he smiled and laughed. "You need to lighten up." He was driving and not looking at the road much as he hunted for his smokes in the backseat. I gripped the door handle and flashed visions of car wrecks and blood. Being a passenger scared the shit out of me-if I had any, I would have taken a few Valium before getting in the car. He said, "Everybody loves something up their ass during sex."

  "Really?"

  "It can sure as hell seem that way when you work the ER."

  "I can't talk to you at all, man."

  "C'mon," he said, "I'm trying to help. When was the last ... penetration?"

  "Weeks ago."

  "Okay," he said. "And this blood?"

  "The last few days."

  "Today?"

  I nodded.

  "Well, it's not that," he said. "Are you shitting blood? Or is there blood in your stool?"

  "What's the difference?"

  "Color."

  "What?"

  "It's an issue. What color is the blood?"

  "Red," I replied. "Blood colored."

  Doc nodded. He put in a CD-Jonathan Richman and the Modern Lovers' Rockin' and Romance. He cracked the window and lit an American Spirit, then offered me one.

  I shook my head. I had quit smoking almost ten years before. One of the hardest things I ever did. Doc had quit for years and only recently started again since his divorce. I really would have liked one then, but I held out. "Shit causes cancer, dude."

  "Media hype," Doc said. "And red isn't the only color blood can be. Especially on the inside."

  "So is red good
?"

  "Nothing is good," Doc said. "No blood in your shit is good. That's our goal. Our vision. An America with no blood in our shit. That's the ticket I'm running on. The noblood-in-your-ass ticket."

  "Red is less bad?"

  "That is true," he said. "Red is much less bad. If the blood in your stool is a greasy-looking dark red, almost black, that is a major and immediate concern."

  ,,And this?"

  He shrugged. "Probably nothing. How many Vicodin a day are you taking?"

  I was, until a week ago, taking about thirty, but I was stealing, when I could, from Doc's stash, when he had a stash, so I went with a low estimate. Our supply had run out five days ago and I'd halved my intake from twenty, to ten, to five, to only three the day before. My eyes felt like sandpaper and the suffocating heat in my head made every pump of my heart throb painfully all over my body. Like every nerve ending burned with Fourth of July sparklers. "Ten to twenty if I can. Less, lately."

  "That's probably it right there," he said.

  Jonathan was singing about his jeans and how they were a-fraying as I looked out the window at the blur of objects racing by.

  I knew I couldn't continue on the way I was going. My short-range plan involved the morphine and, after that, a meeting with this guy Leroy Marcus about some pot he wanted me to sell. The morphine was supposed to be my last for a while-the plan was to use it and slowly wean myself off, taking Vicodin when I had to, in order to detox as painlessly as possible and start clean. Go back to meetings. Be humble and start over. I'd done it before. I could do it again.

  I had, at that point, quit various opiates somewhere between thirty and fifty times in my life. Which meant thirty to fifty intentional detoxes. Withdrawals that made you sorry for ever being born-which sometimes seemed the point of the whole thing. The self-loathing burning hot enough to make the sorrows you suffered from withdrawal seem something like justice for the liar and cheat you'd allowed yourself to become. The twisted core of wrongness at your center everywhere you went was something that made suffering seem valid and just, in some way.

  "I can't drop all five hundred on the morphine," I said.

  "You have to."

  "I can't. I need at least a couple hundred for tonight."

  Doc said, "You got a game?"

  I shook my head. "You know Leroy Marcus?"

  "That'roid rage guy?"

  Leroy had an earned reputation as a guy you didn't want to fuck with. He'd been a boxer and had ended up recently with an ultimate fighting obsession. Leroy liked violence-seemed to like getting hurt as much as he liked hurting people, which made dealing with him an uneasy proposition at best. Someone who's not afraid of getting hurt, someone who actually welcomes the pain and raw savagery of the fight, is not someone you want to face off with. My dad told me when I was a kid, you never throw a punch unless you're willing to kill the guy-because he might be willing to kill you. Leroy probably got the same lesson somewhere along the line. But he threw punches and I didn't.

  "That's him," I said.

  "What the fuck do you have going with that beast?"

  "A pot deal," I said. "I need at least two hundred to sell some medical-quality shit he has."

  "You smoking pot?"

  I shook my head. "Pot's dollar signs to me. I'm trying to make some money."

  "Pot's legal now, dude."

  "Not legal," I said.

  "More or less. Any fuck off the street can get a script for it. How you going to make money?"

  "Buying a couple hundred off him and selling it to a buddy in Long Beach for about double. Quick cash. No risk."

  "You can't trust Leroy. There's plenty of risk just walking in his door."

  That was true enough. "I need money," I said.

  Doc smoked the end of his cigarette and rubbed it out on the outside of his door-the side of his car was streaked with the ends of his butts. He'd pinch out the tobacco and let the filters pile up at his feet.

  "We're scoring morphine-a real fucking drug-in Tustin," he said.

  "Are we?"

  "We are."

  I felt the sickness overcoming me. "We better be."

  "My point is," Doc said, "we'll get enough to make some money off it, if you want."

  I had tried over the years to make money with heroin, with Dilaudid, with OxyContin, and a variety of other opiates. All I ever did was end up doing them all, either fast or slowly. But they never made it, for me, from intent to deal to ever actually dealing.

  Doc said, "What if we spend your whole five hundred bucks on the painkillers?"

  "Then I'll do them."

  He looked hard at me.

  I said, "I'll do half of them."

  "Right, but what if you let me tuck a couple hundred aside and deal that."

  "For both of us?"

  "Of course for both of us, man," he said. "Who you going to trust to make a buck? Me, or Leroy Marcus?"

  Neither of you, I thought. Leroy's a brutal beast of a businessman and you're a dope fiend. But given the choice, I answered honestly. "I'd rather be in business with you."

  Doc merged off 22 onto 55 South, where it splits going to Riverside one way and Orange County the other, and we were headed toward Tustin, just a few miles away. We seemed to have reached some tacit agreement about the extra two hundred and the profit on the deal.

  "So, tell me about your connection," I said.

  "She's a hospice worker with a terminal case."

  "And?"

  "She's a diverter. She's helping us out."

  Diverter is the medical term, and the narc term, for a medical professional who diverts pain meds from the people who need them. The language of distance and euphemism. They're thieves, and people like me and Doc pay them to steal from people in pain. I try not to have any more illusions about what I do. I used to be able to lie about it-to others, to myself. But after seven years clean, it's hard to see this as anything but a hideous failure for me as a human being. My next drug possession case puts me at what's known at the SAP pits, SAP being short for Substance Abuse Program. I can't do this much longer-one way or the other.

  "How terminal?" I asked him.

  "What?"

  "How terminal a case?"

  "There aren't degrees of terminal," Doc said. "Trust me, I'm a doctor."

  "I mean how close to dead is this person?" I don't know why it mattered to me, but it did. As if the closer to dead they were, the less I'd be ripping them off, somehow.

  "Close enough to be designated terminal and have 24/7 hospice care," Doc said. "That's usually pretty late in the game."

  I nodded.

  Doc said, "And it usually means a lot of pain meds."

  The drug talk, along with my system being weaned off meds the last few days, started to make me feel cravings that hurt. But they were cravings with hope-that tingle when you're close to the drugs, in both time and distance. "Any chance for Dilaudids?"

  Doc shrugged as we reached the two Santa Ana/Tustin exits for 17th Street. The second exit heads south toward Tustin, and we took that one. "Hard to say," Doc said, lighting another cigarette. "Pain-management theory these days shies away from Dilaudids. But we should get plenty of morphine."

  When I still shot up, which I hadn't done in this last slip from sobriety, so it had been over seven years before, Dilaudids were like gold. Generally, they're about five to eight times more powerful than morphine, and you don't need to cook them-you can do what's known as a cold shake. Which is pretty much what it sounds like. You put a pill in some distilled water and shake it until it dissolves, and you're ready to put it in the cotton and up the syringe and go.

  "Listen," Doc said, "there's something difficult we might have to do."

  "Difficult how?"

  "It's a relatively new procedure. I haven't asked Sandra if he's on it or not, but this guy may have a permanent morphine vial implanted near the base of his spine."

  "Lucky bastard," I said, and I sort of meant it.

  "It's the wave
of the future. Going to hurt people like you and me. Pills and shit like that are going the way of the horseless carriage."

  "I don't follow."

  "All drugs are going to be time-released," Doc said. "Soon, they're won't be any pills to steal."

  "You said there'd be morphine at this place, right?"

  "Right," Doc said. "But, worst case scenario, you are going to have to cut the vial out of this guy."

  "I thought cancer patients had IV drips and patches and stuff."

  "They do, but in addition to that, depending on how far gone he is, he might have this semipermanent vial."

  "Why do I have to cut it out?"

  "Well, no one's saying for sure it's there."

  "If it's there, why the fuck am I doing the cutting?"

  Doc shrugged. "Because I don't want to."

  And that was that-his connection, his call. "But he may not have one of these, right?"

  "He may, he may not. But you might want to wish he does-concentrated morphine drip."

  "I'm not cutting open some poor fuck who's about to die," I said.

  "Well, let's hope it doesn't come to that. I was just warning you about some of the potential difficulties."

  I shook my head and looked at the faces of the other people driving out on the freeway. I wondered what they were talking about. What they were thinking they might have to do in the next half hour and how sick they made themselves.

  As we got off the freeway, I realized how tense I was, realized I hadn't been taking regular breaths, realized I'd actually been holding my breath. I tried to take in a few deep breaths while Doc swung across four lanes of 17th Street.

  "Be careful," I warned.

  "It's important to blend in," Doc said. "Cops pull over people like you and me when they're doing the speed limit. People drive like maniacs here. So should we, if we want to be left alone." Someone honked and Doc gave them the finger.

  I turned around and looked at the WELCOME TO TUSTIN sign behind us ... This side was for the people just leaving Tustin and it read: Work Where You Must But Live and Shop in Tustin!

  "Ah, yes," Doc said. "Rustln' in Tustin."

  "You from here?"

  "That I am. And a more dull town, you'd be hard pressed to find."