'You gonna be all right, honey girl? 'Cause me and my boy, we got to make a trip into the city.'
'You'll leave me somethin', Earl?'
'Course I will. You know I wouldn't let you have any pain.'
Ray finished dressing. He heard that godawful music Edna was playing in Ray's bedroom down the hall. He hated that new stuff sung by those pretty boys with the department store-bought hats and the tight jeans, wondered why anyone would want to listen to that shit when they could be listenin' to Cash, Jones, Haggard, or Hank. Just when he thought he couldn't stand to listen to it any longer, the music ended. He figured his boy was getting himself ready for their last run.
Ray took a small wax packet of brown heroin from his coat pocket and dropped it on the dresser.
'Be back in a few hours,' he said.
Sondra Wilson watched him leave, closing the bedroom door behind him. She tried not to look at the packet on the dresser. She didn't want to do it up now; she wanted it to last. But then she began to shake a little, thinking of it sitting up there all alone. She thought of her mother and her brother, and began to cry. She wasn't sure why she was so sad. Everything she wanted was here, ten feet away from where she was lying now.
She wiped the tears off her face and got out of the bed. She walked naked across the room.
From the bedroom window, Edna Loomis watched Ray and Earl out in the yard, arguing over something, Earl pointing to a row of stumps at the edge of the woods, where Ray had set up empty beer cans. Ray had his gun in his hand, and Edna figured he was getting ready to shoot the cans off the stumps. Ray liked to do that before their runs, said it got him 'mentally prepared' to deal with those coloreds down in D.C. Earl didn't like Ray shooting off that pistol; he didn't care for all that noise.
He must have talked Ray out of it, because Ray left, then came out of the barn with his gym bag and loaded the heroin into the space behind the bumper of the car. Edna drained her third Jack and Coke of the afternoon, watching him complete his task.
She felt kind of funny, clammylike, and her heart was racing really fast.
You can always be higher, though. Ain't no question about that.
She rattled ice in the glass and sucked out the last few drips of mash as Ray and Earl got in the Taurus and drove away.
Edna got dressed, slipped the barn key into her jeans, and went down the hall, knocking on the door to Earl's room, where that half-colored junkie, Sondra, spent all her time. She opened the door and went through it when the girl didn't respond.
Sondra was naked, sitting on the edge of the bed, using a razor blade to cut out lines of heroin on a glass paperweight. Edna didn't think she'd ever seen a girl that skinny, not even those New York models she'd seen on TV. She didn't know what Earl saw in her, but it wasn't any of her business, and anyway she didn't care.
'I'm goin' for a walk,' said Edna.
'Okay,' said Sondra, not even raising her head.
'I feel like takin' a long one in the woods.'
'Okay.'
'Fine.'
Edna didn't know why she bothered covering her tracks with this one. She left the room.
Sondra bent forward and snorted up a thick line of heroin. She snorted the one beside it at once.
The warmth came almost immediately to the back of her neck. It spread behind her eyes and to the top of her skull. Then it was in her legs and buttocks and traveling like hot, beautiful liquid up her spine and racing through her veins. The edges of the room bled off, and Sondra lay back on the warm bed.
Sondra remembered that she had been crying moments earlier, but she couldn't remember why.
Edna patted her pockets as she walked into the barn and strode briskly through the saloon area toward the back room. She had her little brass pipe in one front pocket, the key in the other. She had wedged her leather pouch holding her pack of Slims and Bic lighter in the ass pocket of her jeans.
Edna used her key in the lock of the steel-fortified door, opened the door, and flicked on the lights. She closed the door behind her. She went quickly to the shelf mounted over Ray's homemade lab. She snatched a vial off the shelf and opened its lid. The vial was filled to the top with crystal rocks.
Edna shoved the entire vial into the pocket of her jeans. Ray wouldn't be back for some time. She was going to mix a tall drink and take a walk out in those woods for real. Smoke up those rocks and have a party her own self. She deserved a little treat, the way Ray always left her hangin' like that, when she was doing her best to service him good.
Edna heard a door open from the front of the barn. She turned her head and stumbled back, her own reflection in the weight-lifting mirror giving her an awful startle. Looking down at the floor, she saw the carpet remnant beside the weight bench, not completely covering the trapdoor.
Edna heard boot steps clomping on the barroom floor. She had always been a quick thinker, her friend Johanna told her that all the time. She thought fast and decided. There wasn't but one thing to do.
Ray and Earl had only gotten a mile down the interstate when Ray told Earl they had to turn around and go back to the property.
'I forgot somethin',' said Ray.
'What, that speckled powder?' said Earl.
'It gives me an edge when I'm dealin' with those rugheads.'
'Go on back if you need it,' said Earl, lifting a Busch from the six-pack cooler at his feet. 'Me, everything I need, it comes from a bottle or a can.'
Ray U-turned the Taurus and headed back for the property.
Earl cracked his window, then rolled it down halfway. 'Weather turned yesterday.'
'It'll get cold again.'
'It stays like this, them greasers are gonna get ripe. You best put 'em deep, first chance you get.'
'Ground's still too hard, Daddy.'
'You better get to it, Critter.'
'I'll take care of it, Daddy.'
Ray took a deep breath, wondering if his father would ever stop tellin' him what to do.
Ray walked hard across the saloon floor, his fists balled tight. He needed to calm down, but how could he, havin' to take care of all these people, and his business, and on top of it all having to take a boatload of shit from his old man. He pulled his keys off his belt loop and fitted one to the lock on the back door.
The lock had already been turned. He reached for the knob. God damn, the door was already open.
'Edna,' said Ray, shaking his head, because he knew it had to be her had been back here; somehow she'd gotten hold of his key. There wasn't anyone else stupid enough to test him like that.
Ray went to the shelf and took down the spansules of crystal meth. He shoved the vial into a pocket of his jeans. He scanned the shelf: that other vial, the one held the ice, was gone. Edna was probably out in the woods, smokin' it all up at once, greedy bitch that she was. He knew she hadn't driven anywhere, as the F-150 was still parked in the yard.
Ray turned at the sound of the car horn. That would be his daddy, just landin' on it, tellin' him it was time to go.
Ray looked around the room. Somethin' wasn't right… Damn, there it was, too, the carpet remnant had been moved off the trapdoor. Must have been moved with all that activity they'd had back here with the Colombians, what with them all floppin' around and shit. Even so, thought Ray, as he moved the carpet aside and lifted the trapdoor, holding his breath against a familiar smell, it doesn't hurt to check.
He looked down the wooden ladder that led into the tunnel. The lights were on down there, but that didn't mean nothin', they worked off the master switch.
Earl landed on that horn again.
'All right!' yelled Ray, though he knew his daddy couldn't hear him.
Ray closed the trapdoor, placed the carpet remnant over it, and dragged the weight bench over a few feet. Now the weight bench sat atop the trapdoor.