The Jungle Kids

by Ed McBain

  “Let me in,” I said. “The Law’s on the scene.”

  She stepped back without another word, and then slammed the door and locked it when I was inside.

  “You swingin’, sister?” I asked.

  She looked at me with that glazed look in her eyes, and she was almost beginning to nod just standing there. She didn’t need to answer me because it was written all over her face. “The swingin’est, man,” she said.

  “You were hungry last night,” I said. “Where’d you score?”

  “I scored,” she told me sleepily. “What do I have to do, report everything to you?”

  “You don’t have to report nothin’ to me,” I said. “Nothin’ at all.”

  “You ain’t kidding, mister.”

  She stretched out on the bed, her legs widespread, the wrapper under her like a silken sheet. She began to nod, so I shook her and said, “Which one of these windows opens on the courtyard?”

  “Why?”

  “I got a deck. Come on, Annie, look alive.”

  “Window near the dresser,” she said. “What do you mean, you got a deck? Out there in the courtyard, you mean?”

  I was already over to the window. I opened it and then looked down into the courtyard, spotting the syringe over near the wall. It was about a ten-foot drop to the concrete below, and a barred sewer grating was just under the window. I’d have to jump clear of the grating, and I’d probably need Annie’s help to get back up again.

  “You give me a hand on the way back,” I said, “and we’ll divvy the junk. Okay?”

  I looked over to where Annie lay on the bed. She was really beginning to nod now, so I yelled, “Hey, hophead!” and her eyes popped open. She looked at me and I said, “Okay?”

  “Yeah,” she said drowsily. “Sure, okay,” and then she fell back on the pillows and I got ready to jump. I should have hung from the window ledge, but I didn’t think of that. I just dropped down, and I guess maybe I was too anxious to get at that deck and syringe. Anyway, I didn’t miss the grating.

  My foot hit it flat, right between two of the bars, and my ankle hit the concrete wall of the sewer, and I dropped clear down to my crotch, almost tearing myself in two.

  At first, the pain was so great that I couldn’t move. I just crouched there with my mouth open and the fires dancing in my groin. I couldn’t have yelled if I wanted to. And then after a while the pain in my groin went away, and there was another pain, in my leg this time. I tried to get out of the grating, but my leg felt like it was ready to fall off every time I moved.

  I looked down into the sewer, and I almost puked when I saw my leg. It was twisted at a funny angle, and the bone had pushed through my pants leg, and a lot of blood was already staining the wool.

  “Annie!” I yelled. “Hey, Annie!”

  I waited for a few minutes, and then I yelled, “Annie!” again. She didn’t answer. I remembered that she’d just shot up, and that she was nodding, and I wondered how much of a shot she’d taken and how long she’d be out.

  “Annie!” I yelled once more, and then I shut up because I didn’t want to bring anyone else to the windows. I could see the syringe off in the corner against the brick wall, and a couple of feet away from it, the package of heroin. Annie was on the stuff, but the rest of the people in this dump were from nowhere. If they spotted me with my leg all bass-ackwards, they’d call the cops. And if the cops came, they’d find the syringe and the H, and good-by Joey.

  There was nothing to do but wait until Annie came around.

  It wouldn’t have been so bad if the leg didn’t start hurting so much. That, and the syringe just a few feet away against the wall. I tried to reach over for the syringe, but the leg protested whenever I moved. I couldn’t get the leg out of the grating without snagging the broken bone on the bars, and I couldn’t get up enough energy to move it anyway.

  I needed a pain killer, and there was a deck of the stuff just about three feet from where I was caught. There was a hypo with a needle about a foot beyond that, and I couldn’t get to either of them.

  It was a good thing I wasn’t hooked on the stuff. I’d been on H for six months now, and that was all. A little mootah before that, but everyone knows mootah ain’t habit forming. I know guys who smoke marijuana down to roaches every night before supper, just like taking a cocktail. The Law makes it a menace, but what the Law don’t know ain’t funny, believe me. I popped off on H because I liked the stuff, and that was it. I mean, man, you can take an addict or you can take a guy who just does it for kicks, and there’s yards of difference. Now Annie was hooked, clear through the bag and back again. She’d been on the stuff so long, she had it for breakfast, dinner, supper, and between-meal snacks. Annie was different. She was what you call a fiend, man, and that was not me. Annie was the kind, you got her in bed she didn’t know what the hell was going on. All she thought about was the needle, but not me. Me, it was kicks, pure and simple. I could have dropped H any time you said, dropped it like a diseased deck—but I didn’t want to. Not when it was so much fun.

  So that part didn’t bother me too much, the H being so close, I mean. If I was an addict, it would have been different, it being so close, I mean. I just wanted it now to kill the pain in my leg because the pain was a godawful sonofabitch and Christ knew when Annie would see the light of day again.

  The bleeding stopped after I reached down through the bars and tied a tourniquet with my handkerchief. It was cool down in the courtyard, and that was one thing to be grateful for. That sun up on the roof had been terrific, what I mean, hot!

  I began to curse the cops for ganging up on me, forcing me to beat it up to the roof and dump the junk. If it hadn’t been for them, I wouldn’t have been forced to jump from Annie’s window to get the stuff. It was a good deck too, and I’d got it from Harry the Horse, and Harry knew heroin like he knew his own backside. He’d done three stints at Lexington, and each time they told him he was cured, he’d come out and hop on the merry-go-round the very next day. You could always score with Harry. He was a real fiend, an addict you know, and he knew what a guy was going through when he was sick. So all you had to do was hold your stomach and maybe vomit a little in front of Harry, and he’d lay a deck on you gratis. Which was nice, and you could always depend on Harry’s junk being good.

  The deck laying there on the concrete was good for at least two pops, and I really needed the junk now because of the leg. I sat there cursing the leg and watching the glint of the syringe in the corner. I wasn’t sick for the stuff, you understand, but I’d planned on shooting up, and then the goddamned cops had come along. And now my leg was busted, and all because of the cops.

  I don’t know how long the kid was sitting at the window, but I noticed him just then, and he gave me a scare sitting there like that just staring at me. The window was across the courtyard from Annie’s, and the kid was no more than five years old, with stringy blond hair and big blue eyes. He kept eyeballing me through the closed window, and I smiled at him and said, “Open the window, kid.”

  He couldn’t hear me. He kept looking at me as if I was some goddamn animal in the zoo. I made a lifting motion with my hands, and he finally caught on, and pulled up the window, and kept looking at me.

  “Your mother home, kid?” I asked.

  He shook his head, but he didn’t say anything.

  “Your daddy?”

  Again he shook his head.

  “You all alone, kid?”

  “Yes,” he said. “They went t’the store.”

  “Good, good. Look, kid, you want some candy?”

  “No,” he said.

  “What do you want, kid? Ice cream? A ball? A kite? What do you want?”

  “Nothin’,” he said.

  “Look, kid, you see that thing in the corner there? That thing with the needle on it.”

  “Yeah,” the kid said.

  “You see that door there in the wall, kid? That must lead to the basement. You want to go down to the basement and brin
g that needle to me?”

  “No,” he said.

  I bit my lip and said, “What’s your name, sonny?”

  “Mike.”

  “Well look, Mike, you bring me that needle and that little package there, and I’ll buy you a big bag of candy. How’s that, Mike?”

  “I don’t want no candy.”

  “What do you want? I’ll buy whatever you want.”

  “’Lectric trains,” he said.

  “Fine, I’ll get you those. Just go down to the basement and come get me that needle and …”

  “I can’t,” the kid said.

  “Why not? For Christ’s sake, I’ll buy you the goddamned trains, I told you. Come on, kid.” I cursed myself for not having realized there was a basement door leading to the courtyard. If I’d known that, I wouldn’t have had to jump from Annie’s window. Now this stupid sonofabitch kid was playing hard to get. “What do you say, Mike?”

  “My mother told me to stay here,” he said.

  “I’ll explain to her when she gets back. Come on, kid. Just go outside and look for the basement door, and then go down there and open the door that leads to the courtyard. Okay, Mike?”

  “No,” Mike said.

  “Why not, you little bastard? Why the hell …”

  “That’s cursing,” Mike said. “My mother says that’s cursing.”

  I shut up for a minute and thought. “Look, Mike, I got another idea. You don’t have to go down to the basement. You’re afraid to go down to the basement, is that it?”

  “No,” Mike said.

  “Look, just go around and knock on apartment 11. That’s on the other end of the hall, Mike. Just knock there and ask for Annie, and tell her I’m down here, will you, Mike? How about it, Mike? Then I’ll buy you the trains.”

  “My mother told me to stay here,” he said.

  “Why? What harm will it do …”

  “I got a cold,” Mike said. “I ain’t allowed out of the house ’til I’m better.”

  “You don’t have to leave the building, Mike. You just go around the hallway, all inside the building, and knock on apartment 11. You won’t be disobeying your mother.”

  “I can’t,” Mike said. “I got to stay here.”

  “You little sonofabitch. If I get out of this …”

  I heard a door slam, and I shut up quick. Then a woman’s voice shouted, “Mike! What are you doing near that window?”

  I tried to flatten myself against the wall, and then I saw a hand grab Mike’s arm and yank him away from the window. The woman slammed the window shut without looking out into the courtyard, and I wondered if Mike would tell her about me. I hoped he wouldn’t because that was the next step to cops on the scene, and I didn’t yearn for a possession charge.

  I wished I hadn’t hocked my watch two months ago because I wanted to know what time it was. Two months ago, though, I’d needed a fix bad, and Harry the Horse was in Lex, and I couldn’t depend on a score with him. I’d tried a purse snatch, but the old lady began screaming, so I finally had to hock the watch, and it was a damned nice watch, too.

  I figured it for pretty late because the cops had clamped onto me about three, and then by the time they fooled around up on the roof, another half hour was shot. Figure another half hour down in this goddamned courtyard. Maybe four o’clock, by now. It was still September, so maybe I could count on light for another three hours at the most.

  But how long would Annie stay in fogland?

  That was the big question.

  And how long could I take the pain in my leg?

  I looked over at the syringe again, and I got that funny feeling in my stomach, the feeling I always got just before shooting up. I could imagine how it must have been with addicts. I just did it for kicks, and even I got that feeling just before I rammed the needle into my arm. I thought of sinking that needle into flesh now, sinking it right into that popping blue vein, and then booting the H, pulling it into the syringe with blood mixed, and then shooting it back into the vein, booting it again and again and again.

  I began to sweat a little. My leg was pretty swollen now, and the dried blood had made my pants leg stiff. I couldn’t feel anything at all below the knee on that leg, except the goddamned pain. I began to think I was lucky not having hurt myself worse, falling up to my crotch the way I did. I tried reaching over for the deck of H, but the movement made my leg hurt like hell, and I couldn’t reach it anyway, even if I could have crawled halfway out of the grating.

  I thought about how simple it would have been if the cops hadn’t screwed up the works. I’d have looked up Perry, and maybe shared the deck with him, or maybe even dropped in to Annie’s pad, and shared the junk and a few other things with her, even though she was dead from the neck down when it came to fish. Still, who said she had to enjoy it? There was one cat in this world who meant beans to Joey Angeli—and that was Joey Angeli. And even if she lay there like she was some goddamn corpse, she was still built like a plastic latrine and better than most who wiggled and shook. I began thinking of Annie and her body, and that slow, sleepy look in her eyes, and the way her lips parted when she took the needle.

  I began thinking of that, and after a while the pain in my leg stopped, and there was just a numbness below my knee, like as if I had no leg at all there. Just a numbness and a big throbbing that went clear up to my skull. The throbbing had a nice beat to it, a thrum-thrum, and I kept listening to the beat and watching the syringe with its sharp pointed needle off in the corner, and I guess I must have dozed.

  It was dark when I woke up. There were lights in the windows all around the courtyard, like candles in a church. I looked up to Annie’s window, and it was dark. And then I noticed that it was closed.

  Closed!

  Somebody had closed the goddamn window while I was asleep. Annie had probably come out of it, and left the apartment to try to score again. I cursed myself for a stupid bastard, falling asleep like that when I should have kept watching and listening for Annie. Now she was gone, and I was alone in this damned courtyard, with the darkness all around me, and a leg that felt like it was cut off at the knee. I looked down at the leg to make sure it was still there.

  With Annie’s light out, the sewer grating was in darkness, and I was grateful for that, at least, because then no one could see me from upstairs. A big shaft of light fell on the syringe in the corner, and I looked at the syringe and wet my lips. The leg didn’t hurt at all now, except for the throbbing and the numbness, but there was another hurt inside me, and I realized it had been a hell of a long time since I’d had my last fix. Too long a time. I’d shot up at about noon, but only with a single cap, and stuff that hadn’t been too good anyway, which is the trouble when you get it from a guy you don’t know. I’d been hungry, though, and Sam had told me The Man was on the scene, so I’d looked him up. I’d had to hock my portable radio to get the cap in the first place, and when it didn’t really stone me, I was ready to strangle the greasy bastard who’d hung it on me. Later, when I’d hit Harry the Horse for a free ride, I forgot all about the dragass pusher, and I was ready to really snap my cork when the goddamn cops pulled up.

  So it had been since twelve o’clock, and Christ alone knew what time it was now. By the sweat on my forehead, it was pretty damned late. By the trembling of my hands, and the tight knot in my stomach, and the tic-ing that was beginning on the side of my mouth, and the itchy feeling on my back, it was pretty damned late. The monkey was beginning to scratch, all right, the monkey was. Twenty-five pounds he weighed, and he was on my shoulder and clawing away, and the only way to shake that monkey was with that deck of H right there on the concrete, that deck and the spike off there in the corner, its sharp end glinting in the beam of light.

  If I was an addict, I’d have gone crazy watching that sweet stuff so close and not able to get at it. I began to feel a little sick to my stomach, and then I started to sweat more freely, with the hot sticky perspiration trickling down over my jaw and my neck and down my bac
k. I couldn’t sit still, but I couldn’t move too much because my leg felt like lead down there in the sewer. I began to scratch my back, and my face, and I felt itchy all over, and the thing in my stomach began to twist and roll, and finally I couldn’t take it any more, and the sickness bubbled foully out of my mouth, all over the sewer grating and all over my pants leg, and the stench of it made me sick all over again, only this time there was nothing left in my stomach and I heaved dryly while the shivers and the sweat mingled and made me feel like a joker with malaria.

  It passed after a while, the way it always passed. I knew it wasn’t gone forever, though, because that monkey was still on my shoulder and scratching away, and my teeth were clacking together. I tried to hold my jaw steady but I couldn’t control the sonofabitch, and I thought the noise of my teeth would bring everybody in the building to the windows, and all the while I thanked God I wasn’t an addict because then it would really have been bad.

  I tried to gather some strength. I leaned back against the wall, with my leg so swollen now it couldn’t have fit through the bars of the grating. I lay back against the wall and I looked up at the lighted windows, with the shades all drawn now, and I could see shadows dancing on the shades, like images in some hophead’s dream, like the shadows I’d seen once when that fruit uptown had treated me to a blow at opium. That had been the craziest, man, that opium, only the fruit had owned yellowed teeth, and a skin like parchment, and I figured I’d stick to good old H, after that. Still, it had been the craziest, with sounds I’d never heard before, like Stan Kenton and Dizzy all wrapped up together blasting their horns and pounding their bongo drums, like that only better because all the sounds were clear and sharp, and I could make out the delicate tonguing of the trumpets and the low wailing of the trombones. And there’d been colors, as if they were dancing in time to the beat, fierce reds that splashed against my eyeballs and violent purples and jagged yellows. That opium had been the wildest, man, better than the sniff of cocaine I’d had once, and even better than the morph Harry the Horse had laid on me a long time ago.