by Greg Iles
“I kill you,” Cyrus says, “there’d be consequences.”
This is a nice idea, but probably untrue. My father would likely commit the rest of his life to finding out who had murdered me, but no nationwide quest for vengeance by a cabal of powerful cops would result. There’s an ex–Delta Force operator who might get upset about my demise, but he has a living to make. Although now that I think about it, Daniel Kelly might just take it into his head to get some payback if I were murdered. And anybody with Kelly on his ass truly has a problem.
“Did Jaderious set me up?” I ask.
Cyrus stands and walks over to the counter where the TV and microwave stand. “We got Lean Cuisine and Dr Pepper. Got some Dannon in that fridge over there. You take what you need. But don’t be getting up in my Pringles. Got it?”
“Leave your Pringles alone.”
Cyrus looks at Blue and says, “He’s smart, ain’t he?”
Blue’s big belly rolls with laughter.
“You just bide your time,” says Cyrus. “Enjoy the ride. When the trial’s over, if you’ve been a good boy, you can leave here the way you come.”
“Good as new?”
“A little rehab, maybe. Or you can become a customer. I wouldn’t blame you. Not many people can chase the dragon and walk away. It’s too good. Like classy white pussy gone bad.”
“Why do you want to keep me high?” I ask, genuinely puzzled. “Why not just lock me in here?”
“’Cause this is where I’m staying part of the time. And I don’t need you bugging me, trying head games and shit. You on the nod, it’s less stress on you and me both. For me it’ll be like you ain’t even here. You’ll be like a pet dog or something. You okay with that?”
“Fine.” If I’m still alive, I’m okay with just about anything.
“I thought so. But you listen, right?” Cyrus points at me “I don’t want to kill you. But I will. Understand? You cause me any kind of shit, you become even a minor inconvenience, and I’ll send you right back to the void. Clear?”
“Clear.”
“And don’t even think about not taking the dust. ’Cause I know how to hurt a motherfucker. So does my crew.”
I don’t reply.
Cyrus takes a cup of yogurt from the fridge and rips off the foil top. “After two or three days, you gonna be begging for the shit anyway. Wait and see. You won’t want to live without it.”
“How do you come and go from here?” I ask. “Don’t they have security?”
Cyrus spoons yogurt into his mouth. “Triton’s got an old nigger manning the guardhouse at night. He works for me, though, not those motherfuckers.”
How much more perfect could it get? Cyrus can live in relative luxury two miles from town, and keep tabs on his drug business without any fear of discovery by the police.
“Me and Blue gotta make a couple runs tonight,” he says, setting down his yogurt. “So it’s time to hit you up again. Don’t make us hold you down. You do that, you gonna pay a price.”
I tell myself not to resist the injection, but when Cyrus starts cooking the heroin, my adrenaline begins to pump. When he picks up a loose syringe off the counter, I can’t help but back away.
“Fuck!” Cyrus mutters. “Blue?”
Blue pulls a small revolver from his pocket and points it at me. He forces me into the nearest corner, then cracks the gun against my left shoulder with deceptive speed. My arm goes numb from shoulder to wrist.
“Lay down, now,” he says in a surprisingly mild voice. “Ain’t no use fighting. Just gon’ make it worse on you self.”
“Has anybody else used that needle?”
Cyrus shakes his head. “It’s the same one I used on you in the van. Come on. We’re running late. Don’t make me hurt you.”
Fighting all my natural instincts, I lie on the sleeping bag and let Blue squeeze my biceps to pump up my antecubital vein. Cyrus slips in the needle again, no pain whatever. As a test, I begin counting softly. When I hit seven, the rush begins. Again it starts in my belly, then spreads outward through my limbs. A heat like the warmth of plunging into a woman envelops my entire body.
“Is it good?” asks Blue. “How you feel?”
“Like a jellyfish,” I murmur. “But I’m part of the water.”
“Most people say it’s like their mama’s womb.”
I nod in vague agreement. “Could be…don’t remember.”
Blue giggles like a little boy.
“I get back to the womb another way,” Cyrus says. “Right, Blue?”
“Oh, yeah. Best way there is.”
“Maybe I can remember,” I think aloud. “Go back in time, you know?”
“No,” Cyrus intones. “Don’t work that way.” He kneels beside the sleeping bag and lifts my sagging chin until I’m looking into his deep black eyes. “Let me tell you ’bout time, brother. I done some reading on that shit. People say time be like a river. That’s bullshit. You can swim upstream and downstream in a river. Can you do that with time? Hell, no. Time ain’t no river. Time is a big fucking razor blade scraping across the universe. And the edge of that razor is now. See? That’s all there is, man. No upstream or down, no past or future—just now. And all the stuff we feel, like hoping and feeling sorry for shit, that’s nothing. Useless. Nothing matters in this world but now.”
“I…understand your metaphor,” I manage to slur. “But things we do in this now can change our reality in the later now. See? That’s why…why what we do matters.”
Cyrus stares at me, working out my logic. Then he shakes his head. “You missing the point, dog. It’s ’cause you’re on the dust. That’s the only thing that can take away the now. Dust blurs it, like. Stretches it out into this big warm blanket. That’s why people kill to get it.”
“No,” I whisper, but my grip on reason is fading fast. “This stuff is the now. It takes away the past and future. It’s the only thing that can.”
Cyrus laughs. “Oh, yeah. You way up in the good now.”
“Am I?” I ask, wondering if I’m speaking at all.
Cyrus stands. “Sleep tight, brother. Enjoy the ride.”
He walks toward the door, but before he opens it, my eyelids fall, and I snuggle under the warm blanket that heroin has thrown over my soul.
Cyrus was right about the passage of time. Soon I had no idea whether it was day or night, whether five minutes had passed or five hours. The heroin came and went like a warm tide, and my consciousness waxed and waned with it. People came and went, too, but I paid scant attention. An elderly black man in a uniform. A white girl. Jaderious Huntley. A teenager. And always Blue, who administered my heroin as lovingly as a gifted nurse. If Cyrus looked like an NFL cornerback, Blue was a nose tackle. Blue was Refrigerator Perry with a kind face. Blue was my nurturing angel.
Heroin was something else.
Heroin was an epiphany.
Suddenly all the disjointed images I’d never understood made sense: the generations of Englishmen who gave up everything to lie in opium dens in India; the ragged junkies in the Houston court system; the Scottish fuckups in Trainspotting; Tuesday Weld in Dog Soldiers; even Frank Sinatra shooting up in The Man With the Golden Arm, back in my father’s day. This was why those people did what they did. This was what they were after. You go your whole life without understanding something. You know people who do it—who are even obsessed with it—but you feel no pull yourself. And then you experience it.
And the earth shifts on its axis.
I think the fact that I’d tried other drugs in college created my misconception of heroin. Marijuana took away anxiety, made my head thick and mellow. Powdered cocaine—the three times I tried it—sent me into a euphorically controlled high, during which I felt capable of anything. But heroin short-circuits pain right at its source. It bathed me in a primitive bliss that must indeed be the closest thing to the womb. Hour after hour, I lay half comatose on the floor of the lab, trying to get my conscious mind around what was happening in the base of
my brain.
I couldn’t do it.
Eventually I realized that time was indeed passing. Drew’s trial had begun. Cyrus showed me copies of the Examiner. The changing front pages showed photos of Shad, Drew, Quentin, even me. But it was all so far away, like something happening on the other side of the world. I knew I should fight what was happening to me, but how could I? Blue outweighed me by a hundred pounds, and Cyrus wore his pistol all the time. He even wore it while watching DVDs in his recliner.
He watched them on the little thirteen-inch Sony on the counter against the wall. Even when he wasn’t watching movies, he played them. His taste surprised me. He watched a lot of science fiction: the original versions of The Thing and The Planet of the Apes; Kubrick’s 2001: A Space Odyssey. He watched conspiracy films from the seventies: The Conversation, The Parallax View. War films: The Bridge on the River Kwai and The Great Escape. Perhaps most surprising of all, Cyrus watched westerns. He seemed to choose his westerns by their stars: Steve McQueen, Robert Mitchum, Henry Fonda. And he watched The Godfather—over and over again. I figured his cinematic tastes might have developed during his service in the Gulf War.
Most of the time Cyrus ignored me, but he would talk to me about movies. He was stunned and pleased to learn that The Bridge on the River Kwai and The Planet of the Apes had been written by the same man. I remarked that he seemed young to be a fan of such old movies, and he laughed. “Mama had a boyfriend,” he said. “All that guy did was watch HBO and TNT Classics. He never worked, man. He had a job as a bag man for a guy who ran numbers, but that was it. He’d just watch movies and drink. I’d sit there with him all day long, eating fish sticks and watching movies. I got to liking them. Like meditation, you know? That’s why I run them all the time, the way most people listen to music. Movies are my drug, man.”
He showed me a newspaper article with a picture of my father above it. He said Dad had hired private experts to mount a search for me. I asked if I could read the article, but Cyrus refused.
“You just keep cool,” he said. “Pretty soon the jury’s gonna convict the doc, and you can go home to your little girl.”
I peered into his eyes, searching for deception. “Why wouldn’t I be a fool to believe that?”
Cyrus grinned. “Good question. But you got people on your side you don’t even know about.”
“What do you mean?”
“Let’s just say the word’s out in the community that I might have you. And I’m hearing things about making sure you don’t get hurt. Del Payton’s widow’s making some noise, for one.”
Althea Payton is the widow of the factory worker whose murder I solved five years ago. In the matrix of Natchez society, she’s the equivalent of Coretta Scott King.
“Then there’s the preacher of Mandamus Baptist,” Cyrus goes on, “where your maid went to church. Quentin Avery’s put in his two cents’ worth. And then there’s your daddy’s patients, which seems to be about half the black people in this town.”
This gave me some real hope. “What about Shad Johnson?”
Cyrus laughed hard at that. “I think he’d be fine if you didn’t make it.”
I laughed with him, trying to foster some sense of comradeship. Cyrus might be a monster when it came to his business, but he seemed sincere about letting me go. If he wasn’t, why hadn’t he killed me the first day? My best strategy was to wait out Drew’s trial and do nothing to upset my captor. Drew and Quentin would have to make it on their own.
As always, when the effects of the heroin began to fade, manic anxiety began building in my mind. But Blue returned and injected me again, and again I felt content to wait out my term in the wilderness.
Soon, Cyrus and Blue left to “make a run somewhere,” as they often did when I was on the nod, so I decided to make a trip to the restroom. I threw off the top half of my sleeping bag and forced myself to get up. I told my feet to walk, but they refused. They were asleep. I stood there for a while, waiting for my circulation to normalize. Then I tried to walk again. No progress. I looked down at my feet. They looked strange. They were the wrong color. Almost blue, really—especially the toes. I reached out for the wall to stabilize myself, then slowly rose up and down on my toes. After about a minute of this, the feeling slowly returned to my feet. As my toes woke up, the blue faded away.
I figured it was no big deal.
Chapter
36
I’m going to die here.
I’m going to die because Cyrus White has no real knowledge about the human body, and because in the end—as he told me in the beginning—he doesn’t really care if I survive or not.
Three days ago, as best I can remember, my feet began to burn. Around the same time, my hands and face began to tingle. I wrote this off to the heroin, but the symptoms didn’t abate between fixes. They got steadily worse. Two days ago, when I sat on the commode, the underside of my thighs began to burn. I tried to ignore the stinging pain, but after thirty seconds I had to stand up. A half hour later, I tried again. Same result. My skin couldn’t tolerate the pressure of the toilet seat without intense pain. That’s when the paradox hit me: I was mainlining a powerful painkiller, yet I was feeling pain.
That night, my chin went numb and stayed that way. Then the hair on my head began standing up in different places, like a fear reaction—only I wasn’t afraid. This erection of small groups of hairs coincided with the onset of shooting sensations in my face, much like electrical shocks. They weren’t acutely painful, but they were icy cold and they left numbness in their wake. By morning I had to sit on the commode to urinate, because I got dizzy trying to stand. I couldn’t stay seated long enough to finish, so I squatted over the bowl like a girl in a nasty bathroom.
What the hell was happening to me?
If I stood erect for any length of time, my hands would grow painfully heavy, as though overfilling with blood. When I held them up to my face, I was shocked to see that my palms were dark red with a bluish cast. Only by holding my hands above my head could I get the blood to drain out of them.
Cyrus and Blue thought I was crazy to be afraid, that I was freaking out over normal drug effects. I prayed they were right, but the next time I sat on the john, the tip of my penis began to sting so badly that I had to roll onto the floor. It took several minutes for the pain to ease. When I examined myself, I saw that the tip of my penis was blue. Though the skin eventually pinked again, two tiny black pinpoints remained.
Dead tissue.
My extremities weren’t getting enough blood. As the symptoms worsened, I began to experiment. Every time I stood erect, blood gathered in my feet and hands until they ached and pounded. The veins around my ankles bulged with pressure. Sitting on the john caused the blood in my torso to collect in my abdomen, and also in the only extremity attached to my abdomen. After a few hours of experimenting, I realized what was happening. My extremities were getting adequate arterial flow; the problem was my veins. They weren’t carrying away the deoxygenated blood fast enough.
Something was interfering with my venous circulation.
Cyrus quickly tired of hearing me catalog my symptoms. When I showed him my red hands and bulging veins, he shrugged and returned his attention to Das Boot. He muttered that he’d never seen heroin cause problems like that, or at least not so quickly. Plus, he assured me, the batch he was using on me was exceptionally pure.
I told him I was probably having an allergic reaction of some kind. An immune reaction, possibly. Something in the heroin was causing inflammation in my blood vessels—probably an adulterant used to cut the drug. Cyrus told me to shut up and let him watch his movie. It was usually best to let him alone, but panic had begun gnawing at my brain. When your skin starts to die before your eyes, your common sense gets a little out of whack.
My plea to be spared further doses of heroin produced exactly the opposite result. When the sound of Cyrus’s little blowtorch filled the room, I scrambled into the corner and put up my fists. Cyrus called in Blue and
another guy and ordered them to hold me down, then began prepping the dose. I marshaled my fear and tried to channel it into strength. Something in the heroin was killing me, and one more dose might finish the job. But I was no match for Blue and his companion. Cyrus was still laughing when he popped the needle into my vein.
I screamed in rage and terror, but within ten seconds the Jesus Dust performed its magic. A rush of warmth bathed my soul, and my health concerns suddenly seemed rather academic in nature. The shooting pains in my face became interesting events, like lightning bolts across a summer sky. The black pinpoints of flesh on my penis became decorative tattoos, aboriginal art that some unknown artist had added to my manhood during my sleep. But hours later, as I began to come down, I knew I’d been right about having a reaction to something in the powder.
Whenever I changed position, I felt tidal shifts of blood in my body. When I laid down, my stomach would pound for two or three minutes—not my heart, but my abdominal aorta. When I tried to stand, consciousness flickered, my face went numb, and the inside of my left thigh would throb. My femoral artery was trying desperately to shunt adequate blood through a system crippled by clogged veins. Cyrus laughed as I wavered on my feet, assuming I was still stoned.
I knew then that if I didn’t get out of the factory, I would die in it. I had to find a way out. That, or a way to kill Cyrus and Blue.
I curled into my sleeping bag and waited for them to leave.
Hours later, after Cyrus and Blue disappeared on a run, I struggled to my feet and began to inventory the lab. Despite my pain and fear, I quickly discovered a reason for hope. I didn’t know much about battery production, but I knew a lot more than Cyrus and his crew. The lab contained quite a few leftover parts and other materials—materials that knowledgeable men would not have left lying around. There were boxes of lead plates stacked against one wall, and also rolls of electrical wire. The cart I’d seen when I first awakened in the lab had a trickle-type battery charger sitting on it.
