I have that, Arctor said. Sincere need.
Youve got to be bad off to be let in here.
I am, he said.
How strung out are you? Whats your habit up to?
Ounce a day, Arctor said.
Pure?
Yeah. He nodded. I keep a sugar bowl of it on the table.
Its going to be super rough. Youll gnaw your pillow into feathers all night; therell be feathers everywhere when you wake up. And youll have seizures and foam at the mouth. And dirty yourself the way sick animals do. Are you ready for that? You realize we dont give you anything here.
There isnt anything, he said. This was a drag, and he felt restless and irritable. My buddy, he said, the black guy. Did he make it here? I sure hope he didnt get picked up by the pigs on the wayhe was so out of it, man, he could hardly navigate. He thought
There are no one-to-one relationships at New-Path, the girl said. Youll learn that.
Yeah, but did he make it here? Arctor said. He could see he was wasting his time. Jesus, he thought: this is worse than we do downtown, this hassling. And she wont tell me jack shit. Policy, he realized. Like an iron wall. Once you go into one of these places youre dead to the world. Spade Weeks could be sitting beyond the partition, listening and laughing his ass off, or not be here at all, or anything in between. Even with a warrantthat never worked. The rehab outfits knew how to drag their feet, stall around until anyone living there sought by the police had zipped out a side door or bolted himself inside the furnace. After all, the staff here were all ex-addicts themselves. And no lawenforcement agency liked the idea of rousting a rehab place: the yells from the public never ceased.
Time to give up on Spade Weeks, he decided, and extricate myself. No wonder they never sent me around here before; these guys are not nice. And then he thought, So as far as Im concerned, Ive indefinitely lost my main assignment; Spade Weeks no longer exists.
Ill report back to Mr. F., he said to himself, and await reassignment. The hell with it. He rose to his feet stiffly and said, Im splitting. The two guys had now returned, one of them with a mug of coffee, the other with literature, apparently of an instructional kind.
Youre chickening out? the girl said, haughtily, with contempt. You dont have it at gut level to stick with a decision? To get off the filth? Youre going to crawl back out of here on your belly? All three of them glared at him with anger.
Later, Arctor said, and moved toward the front door, the way out.
Fucking doper, the girl said from behind him. No guts, brain fried, nothing. Creep out, creep; its your decision.
Ill be back, Arctor said, nettled. The mood here oppressed him, and it had intensified now that he was leaving.
We may not want you back, gutless, one of the guys said.
Youll have to plead, the other said. You may have to do a lot of heavy pleading. And even then we may not want you.
In fact, we dont want you now, the girl said.
At the door Arctor paused and turned to face his accusers. He wanted to say something, but for the life of him he couldnt think of anything. They had blanked out his mind.
His brain would not function. No thoughts, no response, no answer to them, even a lousy and feeble one, came to him at all.
Strange, he thought, and was perplexed.
And passed on out of the building to his parked car.
As far as Im concerned, he thought, Spade Weeks has disappeared forever. I aint going back inside one of those places.
Time, he decided queasily, to ask to be reassigned. To go after somebody else.
Theyre tougher than we are.
4
From within his scramble suit the nebulous blur who signed in as Fred faced another nebulous blur representing himself as Hank.
So much for Donna, for Charley Freck, andlets see Hanks metallic monotone clicked off for a second. All right, youve covered Jim Barris. Hank made an annotation on the pad before him. Doug Weeks, you think, is probably dead or out of this area.
Or hiding and inactive, Fred said.
Have you heard anyone mention this name: Earl or Art De Winter?
No.
How about a woman named Molly? Large woman.
No.
How about a pair of spades, brothers, about twenty, named something like Hatfield? Possibly dealing in pound bags of heroin.
Pounds? Pound bags of heroin?
Thats right.
No, Fred said. Id remember that.
A Swedish person, tall, Swedish name. Male. Served time, wry sense of humor. Big man but thin, carrying a great deal of cash, probably from the split of a shipment earlier this month.
Ill watch for him, Fred said. Pounds. He shook his head, or rather the nebulous blur wobbled.
Hank sorted among his holographic notes. Well, this one is in jail. He held up a picture briefly, then read the reverse. No, this ones dead; theyve got the body downstairs. He sorted on. Time passed. Do you think the Jora girl is turning tricks?
I doubt it. Jora Kajas was only fifteen. Strung out on injectable Substance D already, she lived in a slum room in Brea, upstairs, the only heat radiating from a water heater, her source of income a State of California tuition scholarship she had won. She had not attended classes, so far as he knew, in six months.
When she does, let me know. Then we can go after the parents.
Okay. Fred nodded.
Boy, the bubblegummers go downhill fast. We had one in here the other dayshe looked fifty. Wispy gray hair, missing teeth, eyes sunk in, arms like pipe cleaners We asked her what her age was and she said Nineteen. We double-checked. You know how old you look? this one matron said to her. Look in the mirror. So she looked in the mirror. She started to cry. I asked her how long shed been shooting up.
A year, Fred said.
Four months.
The street stuff is bad right now, Fred said, not trying to imagine the girl, nineteen, with her hair falling out. Cut with worse garbage than usual.
You know how she got strung out? Her brothers, both of them, who were dealing, went in her bedroom one night, held her down and shot her up, then balled her. Both of them. To break her in to her new life, I guess. Shed been on the corner several months when we hauled her in here.
Where are they now? He thought he might run into them.
Serving a six-month sentence for possession. The girls also got the clap, now, and didnt realize it. So its gone up deep inside her, the way it does. Her brothers thought that was funny.
Nice guys, Fred said.
Ill tell you one thatll get you for sure. Youre aware of the three babies over at Fairfield Hospital that they have to give hits of smack to every day, that are too young to withdraw yet? A nurse tried to
It gets me, Fred said in his mechanical monotone. I heard enough, thanks.
Hank continued, When you think of newborn babies being heroin addicts because
Thanks, the nebulous blur called Fred repeated.
What do you figure the bust should be for a mother that gives a newborn baby a joypop of heroin to pacify it, to keep it from crying? Overnight in the county farm?
Something like that, Fred said tonelessly. Maybe a weekend, like they do the drunks. Sometimes I wish I knew how to go crazy. I forget how.
Its a lost art, Hank said. Maybe theres an instruction manual on it.
There was this flick back around 1970, Fred said, called The French Connection, about a two-man team of heroin narks, and when they made their hit one of them went totally bananas and started shooting everyone in sight, including his superiors. It made no difference.
Its maybe better you dont know who I am, then, Hank said. You could only get me by accident.