Cracked

by Barbra Leslie

  And in eight or ten hours I would be crashing like a derailed freight train. But who cared, because right now was all that mattered.

  This was the hotel where my sister had been murdered. There were two or three other motels within walking distance, but this was where I had to be.

  “I would like your finest room, please, sir,” I said to the man behind the counter. He was obese in a way that you usually only saw on American reality television. Like soon he wouldn’t be able to move and he would become fused to his couch.

  “Wow,” he said. He grabbed a key from behind him, not taking his eyes off me. Or standing up either. That would have been a lot to expect. “You look like somebody.”

  My heart beat faster. “How much? Somebody who?” My hands were sweating as I rifled through my purse.

  “Seventy a night, laundry facilities on the second floor, two dollars a wash, two dollars a dry,” he replied. “Somebody dead.”

  “What?” I was counting out the cash, hands shaking. I shoved eighty at him. I wanted to get out of there, but fast.

  “You look like somebody who’s dead,” he repeated.

  “Thanks,” I said, snatching the key from the counter. “You know how to flatter a girl.” I knew what he meant – I looked like Ginger, especially if she was trying to look like me. But had he seen her body? Did he know her?

  Dom and I walked quickly to Room Four, and it was only my need for the pipe that stopped me from going back to talk to the desk clerk again.

  Later, I told myself. When I wasn’t feeling any pain.

  Once inside the room, Dom and I didn’t waste any time lighting up. All conversation was gone now. It was all about getting high as quickly as possible.

  I took the first hit and held it in, closing my eyes. Thank you, thank you. The smoke filled my head, my limbs, and my heart, making everything easier to bear. Dom turned the TV on. I let myself be high. I sat and looked at SpongeBob SquarePants and thought about what I would say to Dom, how I would ask what I wanted to know. I had to be careful, doubly so because of being high. Even I knew that.

  About an hour later we’d gone through half the eightball. I didn’t feel quite as chatty as I usually did on crack. Either we were smoking a huge amount, or Dom was pocketing some. I found I didn’t really care. I lit another hit and closed my eyes again, savoring the rush, thinking about sending Dom out for more. It was only, what? Six-thirty or so? Maybe seven? Surely that dealer chick would still be at the bar.

  When I opened my eyes, Dom was standing over me, his fists clenched.

  “Who the fuck are you,” he said. He didn’t look so friendly anymore. I coughed. Crack lung. “Your name isn’t Danny.”

  “Yes, it is,” I said. “I swear.” I really hoped he wasn’t going to hit me. I tensed my thighs, ready to tackle him and avoid a punch. I didn’t know if my body would work or not, but I had already been hit once in the head today.

  He threw the plastic wallet into my lap. When had he gone into my purse?

  “That,” he said, pointing to it, “is not a picture of you on there. That’s a picture of Danielle.” He cocked his arm back as though to land a good blow at the middle of my face.

  “Wait, wait,” I said, as calmly as I could. The crack had slowed down time. I was sweating, and my heart seemed to be going too slowly. Way too slowly for being high. “That’s my sister.” Dom didn’t put his arm down, but he looked unsure.

  “What do you mean,” he said. “She’s dead.”

  I started to cry for real. “Did you kill her?” So much for staying cool and collecting information.

  “What?” Dom was yelling now, but he’d put his arm down. “Fuck are you talking about? Danny was my friend.”

  “Your friend,” I repeated. I wasn’t crying anymore. Crack brain. I couldn’t process what was going on. Sometimes I felt more coherent on crack, able to make great mental leaps. This was not one of those times. My brain felt slow and foggy. Too slow and foggy, in fact. Something was wrong.

  “Wait a minute,” Dom said. He moved away and sat on the other bed looking at me. “When you first come into the bar, Dave and I, for a minute we both thought that you was Danielle. That you were Danielle,” he corrected himself. Was it just me, or was he speaking in slow motion? “But then we saw that you weren’t as pretty. No offense,” he added.

  “None taken,” I said. None was. I wasn’t as pretty as Ginger. “Her name is really Ginger.”

  Dom shook his head. “Nope. Her name was Danielle.” I didn’t wonder why Ginger had used my name. It made sense. I was her twin, and I was an addict. For whatever reason, Ginger was becoming me.

  “My name is Danielle. Well, Danny. Remember?”

  We continued with this Who’s-On-First routine for a bit. I knew Ginger. She didn’t do anything by half measures. If she was going to live like me, she was going to become me, ID and all. And as much as she loved me, I thought that loving her boys as much as she did meant that she wouldn’t, couldn’t, do the things she had done as Ginger Lindquist. She had had to leave Ginger altogether to be in a place like Lucky’s, or the Sunny Jim. If, indeed, she had even gone there under her own steam.

  “Did my sister used to go into that bar?” I asked Dom. “Is that how you know her?”

  “Lucky’s? Yeah. She come in about six or eight months or so, I guess. Maybe more. She took a shine to us. She was like one of us.”

  I was lying down on one bed by now, and Dom on the other. We were both on our sides facing each other, trying to talk. I couldn’t figure out what was wrong. My tongue was getting thicker.

  “Dom,” I said carefully. “Did that dealer know Ginger? I mean, Danielle?”

  “Yeah,” he said. His eyes were closed now. “They were sorta friendly, I guess you could say. Not a lot of women come in, you know?”

  “Dom. Dom,” I repeated, as loudly as I could. He seemed to be sleeping. “That taste like crack to you?” Crack has a particular taste when you inhale the smoke. Sometimes it has a faint baking soda taste to it, if it has been cooked with too much. But usually not. And this tasted like something else, but I couldn’t remember my words. And the effect had been the same.

  Dom didn’t answer. “Dom,” I repeated. I closed my eyes, too. “I think we might be in trouble.”

  8

  I woke up and it was pitch black outside, but a lamp was on in the room. I started violently throwing up on the spot, my head turned to the side. All over the polyester bedspread, the floor, myself. I was a puker from way back, long before drugs. A puker, as well as a fainter. Anything could set it off. First day of my period, certain smells and tastes. Cilantro, for example.

  I kept my eyes shut as my body emptied itself.

  When I opened them, I started shaking.

  Dom was on the other bed, soaked in blood. It seemed to have come from his mouth, but there was so much of it, I couldn’t be sure. His eyes were bulging open. He was so white he looked blue.

  There was no doubt he was dead. I didn’t have to check.

  He was the first dead body I would ever see.

  Something caught my eye in the mirror. “Hi, Danny!” was written there, in large friendly script. With blood, or red lipstick.

  I didn’t own a red lipstick.

  I looked down at myself. I was covered in vomit, and there was a hypodermic needle in my arm, taped there to keep it in place. The plunger was down. I ripped off the tape and took the needle out and applied pressure to my arm in case it bled. Throwing the needle across the room, I moved quickly to the phone. I was wide awake and more alert than I’d ever felt in my life. I stepped on Dom’s blood on the carpet, and it squished under my bare feet. I retched again as I picked up the phone. No dial tone. Nothing.

  “No!” I was shouting. I slammed the receiver into the phone over and over. “No, no, no.” I ran past Dom and crossed myself. Jack had been Catholic, and I had picked some of it up by osmosis.

  Wrenching open the door, I ran outside, barefoot, covered in pu
ke and some of Dom’s blood, I could see now, splashed onto my bare legs and feet. Had I killed him? No, no, no.

  “Help,” I was yelling, running toward the office. I cut my foot on something in the parking lot and kept running. “Someone call the fucking cops!”

  A couple of girls on the street moved forward to get a look at what was going on, and a man who looked like he could be dealing walked quickly in the other direction. Toward Lucky’s.

  Before I reached the office, a police car and ambulance careened into the parking lot, sirens blazing. Fuck, I thought. That was fast.

  Detective Miller got out of the car, Detective French right behind him. I pointed at the room. “He’s dead! He’s dead in there!” They rushed past me and into the room, guns drawn. A paramedic approached me with a silver foil blanket.

  “Ma’am?” he said cautiously. “Where are you hurt?” He looked like he was scared I was going to spray HIV-tainted bodily fluids all over him. I didn’t blame him.

  “I’m fine, I’m fine, go get him, get him!” I yelled, pointing at the room. A crowd was starting to form. The paramedic wrapped the blanket over me. It seemed important that someone went in to take care of Dom. I knew he was dead, but I didn’t want him in there alone. Someone in a uniform should be in there. All the uniforms in the world should be in there.

  Poor Dom. Oh, God.

  “We have to wait until the officers indicate it’s okay to enter,” he said calmly. “Please come and sit down so I can check you out.” He led me over to the back of the ambulance. I sat there as he flashed a light into my eyes and asked me a few questions to determine if I was of sound mind. What was my name? What year was it? Who was the president? Another EMT was taking my blood pressure. Second time in one day. He frowned at the reading, got me to lie back, and did it again.

  “Do you suffer from hypertension?” the second EMT said.

  “High blood pressure? No. I mean, I don’t think so.”

  Where were Miller and French? They hadn’t come out of the room yet. I started shaking again. Then my body seemed to take over, and the shaking turned into convulsions. I was aware of everything, but I just couldn’t stop my body from moving. The paramedics snapped into action, strapped me onto the gurney, and one of them slipped something into my arm.

  “Stay with us, Danny,” one of them was yelling into my face. He was too close, and it made me panic more. My body wrenched back and forth, up and down. The paramedic was talking on a walkie-talkie or something as he ran around to the front of the vehicle and started it up, sirens on again. I closed my eyes and gave in to my body. “Danny! Danny! What did you take?”

  I could hear him, but I couldn’t talk. But the shaking was slowing down.

  “She’s responding to the drip,” the EMT yelled to the one in the front. “Danny. You’re an IV drug user. Is that right?”

  I shook my head. I’d never put anything into my arm. Just up my nose and into my lungs.

  “Danny, there’s a bruise and a track mark on your arm,” the paramedic said, more gently. “We’re here to help. You don’t have to lie. We’ve seen worse.”

  “Somebody drugged me,” I managed to say. “I woke up with a needle taped to my arm.” EMT guy relayed this info to the front, and I could hear that guy radioing ahead for the hospital to inform the police. “It was just supposed to be crack, and it was crack, but I think there was something else in it.”

  “Don’t worry, Danny,” the paramedic said to me. He was cleaning the vomit off my face. “We’ll be at the hospital soon. You’re going to be just fine.”

  “I don’t think so,” I said. “But thanks for saying so.”

  * * *

  I was admitted to the hospital, poked for blood, given an EKG, six stitches on the bottom of my foot, cleaned up, fed some clear broth and given something to relax me.

  “Ativan?” I said, swallowing the pills the nurse handed me.

  “You know your pharmaceuticals,” the nurse said, no expression on her pretty face.

  “Everybody has to have a hobby.” I was just closing my eyes when Miller and French walked in.

  “I’m in a private room. I can never afford this,” I said. I was pleasantly sleepy.

  “You’re under police protection here, Danny,” Miller said. “There’s an officer outside this room.” He indicated the bed. “Mind if I sit?”

  “What about Dom,” I said, nodding for Miller to sit. “I don’t suppose…”

  “He’s dead,” Detective French said. She was standing at the foot of my bed with her arms crossed. Miller shot her a look.

  “That note on the mirror,” I began, but French cut me off.

  “Written in your friend’s blood,” she finished crisply.

  “The twins?” Oh God. Please tell me they’re safe. Please, God, let them be safe. I was out getting high. No matter what I had told myself, I was doing drugs while the boys were still missing. What would Ginger say?

  “You tell us,” French said. “You sure you have no idea, Ms. Cleary?”

  I sat up straighter. “Lady, what is your fucking problem,” I said slowly. “I didn’t kill him, you know. You might want to brush up on your people skills. In the space of the last several days, my twin sister has been murdered, my nephews have been kidnapped, I was attacked in a bathroom, and then drugged, while someone two feet away from me died from whatever knocked me out. It’s a good thing I didn’t choke on my own vomit.”

  French looked out the window. Miller spoke up.

  “Danny,” he said gently. “That man did not die from an overdose, or a tainted dose. Someone held him down, while someone else cut off his tongue.”

  “And left him there, unable to move, while he bled to death,” French finished quietly. “They gave him a blood thinner, first, to speed up the process.” She was still looking out the window.

  “Oh my God, oh my God.” I grabbed Miller’s hand and held it tight. “Why didn’t they kill me too?” I wished they had. But maybe not like they’d killed Dom. “Oh God, poor Dom, poor Dom; he was a nice guy, too. He knew my sister.”

  Miller looked over at French, who took a notebook out of her back pocket and started writing. “How do you know that, Danny?”

  The drug was working its magic, and there was nothing in the world, nothing I wanted more than sleep. “Please,” I said. “Can we do this tomorrow?”

  Miller started to say no, but I was already drifting out. Just before I went under, I heard Detective French’s voice. “She’s two steps ahead of us,” she said, and then I slid into oblivion. Finally.

  9

  Ginger was patting at the back of my head with something, gently.

  “You did a real number on yourself this time,” she said. She very softly punched me in the shoulder. “Good thing you can handle it.”

  “I didn’t do it to myself,” I was trying to protest. But she was busy writing something down in a notebook. There was a tube down my throat. Why was there a tube down my throat?

  Ginger was singing something as she wrote in her notebook. I was listening to it as hard as I could. It was “King of the Road.” We’d always sung this when I was growing up. The whole family.

  Ginger looked at me as I tried to sing along. “Don’t you remember the lyrics?”

  I was trying to nod, but she cut me off. “Get some rest, ma cherie amour,” she said. I tried to laugh. We used to sing the Stevie Wonder song together.

  I couldn’t do anything through the tube in my mouth. It was so frustrating, and I tried to pull it out and I kept pulling and pulling, but more and more tube kept coming up, until I realized that I was pulling out my own intestines. It vaguely bothered me.

  “Danny,” Ginger was saying, gurgling through the blood that was seeping down her face. “Find it.”

  * * *

  “Hey, fuckface. Beanpole,” Darren was saying. My eyes were open. My head hurt as though I’d been hit on the head by a two-by-four swung by David Ortiz, aka Big Papi.

  Hey. I’m a ba
seball fan. So sue me.

  “Hi,” I whispered, looking around.

  “It was horse tranquilizer,” Darren said. “Cooked into the crack.”

  Ketamine. Nearly anything could be mixed together to get the effect addicts wanted. So many addicts, so many amateur chemists. “Get right to the point, why don’t you,” I replied. My voice cracked a bit. I was very thirsty. I looked around, and Darren grabbed a glass of water sitting next to my bed and put it up to my lips. I drank, and it tasted like springtime in the Alps.

  “Thank you,” I said, leaning my head back and wincing. Oh yeah. The knock on the back of my head.

  “The doctor who let you walk out of here yesterday is going to be in big trouble,” Darren said conversationally. “You were supposed to be held here.”

  “They ain’t built a jail that can hold me, homes,” I said. Darren laughed. He got up and kissed my forehead.

  “Do you have any fucking idea how worried I was yesterday? How worried everybody was?”

  Everybody. Oh Christ. This meant he had told Skipper and Laurence.

  “The twins?” I said. Darren shook his head. He didn’t look like he’d slept. I closed my eyes.

  “Did you see Ginger?” I asked. My voice was hoarse. Darren passed me more water.

  “I did,” he said. When I was finished with the straw, Darren filled the glass again with the pitcher on my bedside table and took a big swig. “I saw her.”

  “It wasn’t Ginger,” I stated. “Somebody who looked like her?”

  “Danny,” Darren said gently. “It was definitely Ginger. Okay? It was Ginger.”