If you want to find a junkie, go to a drug dealer.
He asked the woman, “Who runs this place?”
She tightened up, shut her eyes, hugged her elbows. “I don’t know. I don’t know anything.”
“You’re in a position of responsibility. I think you do know something.”
“No no. I just set up the dates. That’s all.”
“Open your eyes.”
“No no.”
“Open.” She squinted at him. “You report to someone. I would like to know who that someone is.”
“No, no report.”
“Yes, report. Get him on the phone.”
“No, no phone.”
”I’m really enjoying our talk,” he said. “But seriously, it’s time to get the show on the road, lady.” He cocked the .38 and held it up to her forehead. “Give me a name.”
The gun alone didn’t scare her, but she took a look into Grey’s face, saw that he’d come to the end of his road and played out his entire string, and that was enough. She whispered something.
“Again,” Grey prompted.
“Mr. Jericho.”
“Full name.”
“Benson Jericho.”
“And where is he at the moment?”
A silky voice came from behind Grey. “I’m right here.”
Grey turned.
He thought, Is this the end? Am I there yet? Is Ellie around the next corner?
He took two steps forward and stood practically toe to toe with Jericho. The man was younger than might be expected. He didn’t look like a whoremaster and drug dealer. At this level it was all big business, and he projected the cultivated persona and attitude of the wealthy and cosmopolitan businessman. Refined with expensive tastes. Silk suit to go with the voice.
Grey took a breath. Jericho’s cologne, face cream, exfoliates, and hair product all smelled like money.
He thought, This man has an enormous backstory. This is the kind of role a serious actor could set his teeth into. Jericho. You’d run the lines and think off the page, like Kendra had said. No matter what the dialogue was you had to figure out, Did he hate his father? Was he bullied as a child? Was he allergic to strawberries. Jericho. Grey looked and saw him flayed open, his whole life leaking out. When he was a kid his old man drilled holes in bowling balls. Looked like Jericho was going to wax lanes his entire life, but raised himself from some one stoplight town and managed to swing a serious scholarship to a prestigious school. Not Ivy League but close. Started off selling weed but quickly moved up to the harder stuff, had a whole network in place by the time he was nineteen. Had the charm to pimp a few of the cheerleaders at school, made money with Internet amateur porn. Made a bundle and moved to the city, put the girls up in a nice place and gave it a five-star name. Premium Friends. Didn’t really need to get his hands dirty except on a few occasions. At least one girl probably thought she was getting cheated and threatened to go to the cops. Jericho cuffed her to the bed and tortured her with pressure points, raped her, and promised to kill her parents if she ever said anything. She fell back in line and was probably one of the happiest whores in the place. The heroin came in from the Asian woman’s family somewhere in Thailand. If anything ever went wrong he was at least four connections away from customs. Nothing ever stuck to him. He thought of himself as a gentleman bandit, an entrepreneur of pleasure and desire.
Grey kept the gun pointed directly at Jericho’s belly.
“You don’t need that,” Jericho said. “Give it to me.”
“Eva Rains. Ellie. Where is my sister?”
“I’ve been waiting for you,” Jericho said. “I’ll take you to her.”
23
Maybe one of the bouncers doubled as a chauffeur because Jericho drove his own Mercedes over to a hospital on the Upper West Side. Grey had given him the gun and followed without another word and they’d both kept silent the entire ride uptown. As they pulled in to the medical center Grey swallowed down a groan.
Pax had been right. Grey had gone about this entire thing backward. He should’ve checked the morgue and the hospitals the day that Ellie sneaked from his bed. But he’d been so blinded with his need to find her that he’d gone out of his way not to discover the truth.
“Are you Pax or Grey?” Jericho asked.
“Grey.”
“She talked a lot about both of you. You’re the one she ran to.”
Grey said nothing. He thought, What could she have said? She hadn’t seen either of us in more than ten years. Would she just tell the same old stories of the abuse they’d suffered at the hands of the Wagners? He had questions to ask but couldn’t seem to quite form them.
They parked and walked into the building and Jericho nodded and said hello to a nurse working the front desk. He’d been here plenty of times before. They knew him on sight and gave him sweet smiles.
Grey followed, the lights of the corridor burning as brightly as the desert sun. He had to shade his eyes.
When they got to ICU, the antiseptic stink of the place made him gag. He had to stop for a moment.
“Are you all right?” Jericho asked.
“Yeah.”
“You don’t have to go on.”
“Of course I do.”
“You look sick. What do you use?”
“I don’t use, you prick.”
Jericho tilted his head. “This way.”
They proceeded up another hall, had to punch in a number on a keypad to get through. Jericho was a trusted visitor. They turned one corner and then another. They passed open rooms where head trauma cases lay in bed with their shattered skulls held in place by enormous iron braces. Grey huffed.
Finally they arrived at Ellie’s room.
It reminded Grey of Monty’s office. Glass walls and a huge sliding glass door. Another fish bowl where every passing stranger could look in on the dying.
Ellie was hooked up to fifty-thousand watts of machinery. A ventilator had been attached to a tube in her throat and every few seconds it would force air into her lungs and make her body jerk and sway. As if she were lying at the edge of a lake and wind-blown waves pushed and pulled at her body.
Grey sat in the visitor’s chair at the side of the bed and took her hand. It was cold and so pale that he could see the veins working beneath her skin. She’d lost a lot of weight in the last three months. He spoke her name or thought he did. Her eyes were half-open and empty. He put her palm to his mouth and spoke against her flesh. He wasn’t aware of his own words and he couldn’t stop himself. He didn’t recognize his own voice and was almost lulled by the rhythmic murmur of it, like a hymn or a prayer.
He thought about her hugging her dog in the corner of the Wagners’ kitchen while Pax beat the hell out of the old man. He thought of her telling the DA to get fucked. So many machines were attached to her that he could barely see her body beneath the tubes and wires. The ventilator breathed her breaths for her with hideous regularity. His breathing soon fell into the same mechanical cadence.
“What happened to her?” he asked. “Was it peritonitis?”
“What?” Jericho said. “Oh, you mean from the knife wound. No, not peritonitis.”
“Then what? Overdose?”
“Yes.”
“On your product.”
“Yes.”
No guilt. No oh my God I am heartily sorry. No I’ve devoted my life to saving children from the evils of drugs.
“Tell me what happened.”
Jericho took a deep breath, nearly a yawn, like he was already bored. “She and her manager started off as customers of mine. Good people. We spent a lot of time together. I own a small movie outfit. Erotic thrillers. Soft-core. I wanted her to star in our next feature. I fell in love with her.”
“Jesus Christ.”
“Why, you think it can’t happen?” Jericho seemed genuinely offended. “You think a man like me can’t fall in love?” Grey simply stared at him, realizing it was impossible to guess at the complexities and stupidities of a pimp in silk. “But her habit kept growing.”
“And you kept feeding it.”
“She and Raymond…he’s the manager…”