A nod by skinny-gold-tooth-guy will get you a pass to the shooting gallery in the next room, where you can order up any combination of goodies at cartel retail. Credit is a very bad idea, unless you want to leave some fingers behind.
I didn’t start out a junkie. Most of them start out as kids partying on booze and weed. Then they get bored and experiment with more exotic stuff. Acid, Ecstasy, DMT, you name it. Then coke and speed, which means downers for the end of the ride: Xanax and Oxy. When the balancing act gets too tricky, the first snort of heroin solves the whole riddle of how to get right. It’s no longer a question of how to get high, it’s a matter of simply trying to feel human again. Heroin can do that. Until you run out.
I came at it from another angle. I was a straight arrow in school. I drank a little in college, smoked some pot, so what. It didn’t really ring my bell. But after I broke my back in a diving accident and the pain never went away, I discovered Vicodin. And when ten of them a day couldn’t dull the knife jabbing in my spine and I was juggling three doctors to keep my prescriptions going, who just happened to show up at my physical therapy session? Jimmy Ortiz.
¤ ¤ ¤
My phone is barking at me. It’s actually Vincent, the Lab from the TV show Lost. The display says my ex is calling.
What the hell. I’ve got a long drive ahead of me.
“Hello Allison.” On my right, the lovely sight of the Long Beach refinery.
“Charlie . . .” She’s crying. This is the sweet, remorseful Allison. She’s going to try to reel me in. “I’m not your enemy.”
“I know that, Allison. We’ve got to be on the same side . . .”
“And do what’s best for Mindy,” she sobs.
“Right. What’s best for Mindy.”
“I worry about her all the time.” Her voice is low and husky. My guess is that she passed out in the late afternoon and is now on her third drink after waking up. She’s in the sweet spot—the eight minutes where it’s working for her. The rest is all about chasing the eight minutes.
“Have you heard from her yet?”
“No, I was hoping you had.”
“She texted me a while back. I think she has a new boyfriend.” I’m improvising, but the seeds that get planted now will surely bloom when Allison gets to crazyville.
“Really, have you met him?” I can hear the tinkle of ice on glass. She likes flavored vodka on the rocks.
“As a matter of fact, I have.” This could get tricky.
“Really? What’s he like?”
“Well, he seems to really like her.”
“Why that little bitch.” But this is purred, not hissed. “Tell her to call her mother, would you?” Her eight minutes are nearly over, and I have a chance to duck out before I have to duck for cover.
“I’ll definitely do that, Alli. Listen, I’m driving and don’t want to get a ticket. I’ll have her call you soon.”
“You do that, Charlie. Hey, are you anywhere nearby?” Oh boy. I’ve actually fallen for this one before. Lots of times. It’s at least as dangerous as hooking up with Tanya.
“No, Alli, I’m actually down near Palos Verdes right now. I’m on a case.” Finally, a true statement.
“Okay, that’s too baa-ad,” she says in a singsong voice. Accompanied by more tinkling of ice. Time to go.
“Bye Alli.” I toss the phone on the seat next to me.
¤ ¤ ¤
A new vision unfolds. The memory doors seem to pop open at random. This is fifteen years ago and Mindy’s a baby. Allison and I are on the couch in the living room of our starter condo in Culver City. Mindy’s asleep and we’re exhausted. Alli’s leaning against me; I’ve got my arm around her, and all is right in a peaceful, quiet world. Then, like scene selections on a DVD, I’m getting images. No random selection, but a greatest-hits collection of every petty argument and cop-out and bullshit story that led to the war that our marriage became. And always the attempts to put it back together.
We hit rock bottom when Mindy was twelve. A marriage counselor suggested we take a trip. We left Mindy with Allison’s sister in Sherman Oaks and found a bed-and-breakfast in La Jolla. The place was charming and the wine at dinner just right, and somehow Alli was able to let go enough to let me back in. We talked over dessert like we were on our third date. We reminisced and flirted and held hands and her toes crawled up my leg under the table. We made love that night and again in the morning.
That next day we planned a beach trip. We found an upscale market and bought French bread, soft cheese, smoked ham, black olives, and two bottles of wine, then drove to the beach. We ate and drank and baked in the sand. We held hands when we waded into the warm Pacific, then splashed each other and laughed till we fell down in the shallow surf. When we got back to our towels, we opened the second bottle of wine.
Somehow we wound up in the car, sandy and itchy from dried salt, our bathing suits still wet. We were arguing about something—how to get back to the bed-and-breakfast, I think—when we got to the cliffs. We were both more than half in the bag, but Allison seemed to have more tolerance for it than I did. The next thing I remember is standing with a bunch of teenagers and looking thirty feet down at the ocean. The kids jumped. Allison said, “Don’t,” and I dove, flying toward crystal clear blue-green water.
And that was the beginning of the nightmare. Ambulance, hospital, neck brace, doctor visits, pain meds, physical therapy, and, finally, Jimmy Ortiz and heroin.
¤ ¤ ¤
Time passes and I don’t know where it goes. I check my phone and it tells me that I talked to Allison at 8:42. It’s 10:15 now; I’m driving past the San Onofre power plant and have no recollection of the last hour and a half. I remember remembering something—diving off a cliff and hurting my neck—but something about it doesn’t feel right. I call Allison. I know the timing is bad, but I’ve got to check on something.
“Taking me up on my offer? You’re too late and a dollar short, you bastard . . .” Slurring and sloppy, spoiling for a fight, and I’m dumb enough to make myself a target.
“Alli, listen, I’ve got a question.”
“Yeah, well the answer is fuck you. Ha! Yeah, fuck you, you sad little junkie loser.”
It seems hopeless to expect her vodka-soaked brain to dredge up what I need, but I press on. “You’re right,” I tell her, “I’m a pathetic strung-out loser. You’ve always been right. About everything. Now, what happened when we went to La Jolla?”
“What happened? You mean how did you fuck up a perfectly nice holiday?”
“Sure, how did I fuck up our perfectly nice holiday?”
“You got drunk and jumped off a goddamn cliff. That’s how you fucked up our holiday.”
“Then what happened?”
“Jesus, you are pathetic. You got a two-hundred-and-fifty-dollar fine for ignoring the sign that said no diving. All those kids that dove in scattered, but the lifeguards caught you. Then we got a sixty-dollar parking ticket and you puked in the car. Any other questions?” She laughs into the phone and something falls with a loud thump in the background.
“Yeah, my back. How did I hurt it?”
“Boy, you really are an idiot. You flew headfirst over the handlebars of your bike. Do you remember your own name? Do you remember how much money you owe me?” Her voice is rising in volume and pitch now. “DO YOU REMEMBER WHAT YOU PUT ME THROUGH?”
I click the phone shut. My suspicion was correct and I’m in trouble. If I can’t trust my memory, what can I trust?
At least I got the flying part right.
¤ ¤ ¤
I fly through Oceanside, Carlsbad, Encinitas, Del Mar. If my brain’s a computer, it’s in crash mode and needs to boot up from a new disk. Trouble is, I don’t have a new disk. I’m stuck in a loop: morgue, Daniel, Jimmy’s, Tanya, Ratboy, Mindy, jail, Jason. A gold mine and a silver Mustang. Did I make any of them up? And how do they all tie together?
I’m waiting in line at the border and my phone barks. Tanya asks me if I saw Ja
son. I tell her, “Yeah, we had a nice long talk.”
“Well, did he tell you where my money is?”
“Yeah, he told me it’s in the ground.” He was about to tell me more, but I was desperate to find Mindy, and Jason was dying. For some reason, I withhold this information.
Tanya says, “That’s just geo-speak for unmined gold—money in the ground. It’s bullshit, as you know by now if you’ve read the report.”
I’ve read two reports and they say opposite things, and I have no idea which one is correct, but why mention it?
“So where are you now, Charlie? Why don’t you come back to the Oceana and we’ll figure out what to do next?” It’s the nice Tanya that’s come out to play, which is about as reliable as the nice Allison.
“I don’t think so, Tanya. I’m more concerned about finding my daughter than I am about your money.” I click off just as a border guard waves me through. A chime tells me I have a new text message. It’s from Allison, saying she still loves me.
20
I’ve got the Z doing eighty down the toll road, past Ensenada. I should be coming up to San Vicente, the last town on the map before I go off the grid and onto dirt roads, into the mountains, flying blind. I want to crank it up to a hundred, climb on the roof, and howl at the moon, but there is no moon and the Z coughs and stutters in the darkness. It loses speed, and flooring the pedal doesn’t help. The gas gauge says I have half a tank, so something is seriously wrong. Now we’re chugging along at about twenty miles an hour. There’s smoke billowing out behind me. The Z is a perfect metaphor for my life, lurching forward into barely illuminated gloom, the rear view a murky nothingness. A metallic bang signals the end, and I’m coasting, the sudden silence as big as the pitch-black sky.
The Z rolls to a stop on the side of the toll road. I turn the key off and kill the lights. Ensenada is far behind me. I haven’t seen a car or an electric light in almost half an hour.
On a hunch, I pull out Jason Hamel’s phone. It’s down to one bar, but it’s got GPS and I am thirty-eight miles south of Ensenada, with eight miles to go before I get to San Vicente. If I had a plan, it’s changed, but it never included sitting in a dead car until something happened.
I grab Mo’s gun from under my seat, along with DeShaun’s. It’s a Ruger .380 semi-auto, actually a pretty handy backup piece, if I need one. I step out of the Z and tuck the Ruger under my belt, up against the small of my back. Mo’s 9 goes in front, enough to the side that my jacket covers it. I pocket all three cell phones and say goodbye to the Z. No way will it be there in the morning.
¤ ¤ ¤
The Z was my divorce present to myself. Actually, it was all I could afford after turning in the Lexus I could no longer make payments on. It was a red 1978 Datsun 280Z, the last of its kind, and it’s been my friend for the past three years. Now it’s road kill, carrion for scavengers who at best will leave a wheel-less frame on the side of the road.
I start walking in the dark.
My mind wanders.
There’s something wrong with the whole picture from the start. Tanya used me as an intermediary in a blackmail scheme. She wanted to recover her husband’s investment and keep it for herself. Jason Hamel wanted to destroy a report that would demolish his dream of a huge gold discovery and the Christian ministry that it would finance. The Caffeys were just about to publish their drilling results and were “very excited,” according to James Caffey’s widow. So why did they produce a report saying the mine has no value? And how did Tanya get both reports?
A memory.
¤ ¤ ¤
My first experience with heroin. I was at my physical therapy session. Two Hydrocodone tabs usually made PT tolerable, but this time they were useless. I sat in the waiting room with my head in my hands; I knew I couldn’t go through with the session. I must have groaned or something, because this huge guy in the seat across from me said, “That bad, huh?”
I shook my head and said, “It gets like this once in a while.”
He said, “Yeah, I know what you mean. I was eating Vicodin like candy.”
And we were off and running, swapping stories about how we got hurt, how bad it was, how you can’t crap on Vicodin and how not crapping gives you killer headaches. Finally, Jimmy said, “Yeah, it got to where I couldn’t stand it anymore.”
His use of the past tense got my attention. I asked him what he meant and he nodded toward the door. We got up and went out to the hallway to the men’s room.
At this point, my new friend Jimmy Ortiz changed my life. I would get pain management at the cost of being tethered to heroin maintenance like a dog on a choke-chain: try to pull away, feel the pain.
Jimmy reached in his coat pocket and pulled out an amber vial with a black screw-on cap. From his jeans pocket he produced a mini Swiss Army knife. I watched, mesmerized, as he unscrewed the cap, dipped the tip of his blade into the vial, pulled out a tiny mound of white powder, and brought it to his nostril. A discreet whiff and the white powder disappeared.
Then it was my turn.
¤ ¤ ¤
I wonder what would happen if I left the body and just roamed into the night, as far from here as possible. What limit is there? Is it like there’s an elastic cord that stretches thinner and thinner until it snaps? And then what? Didn’t Daniel tell me not to leave my body for too long? What’s too long? I think I’ve pushed the limit a couple of times, and I didn’t like the feeling.
A sound from behind. I keep walking. Now I’m casting a shadow, and the highway becomes visible as I trudge toward nowhere. A dirty, rusted pickup pulls up next to me.
“Hey, that your 280 back there?” It’s a guy with long dirty hair, American. There’s a blonde in the car with him. I show some teeth to signal that I’m friendly.
“Yeah. So far, anyway.” I don’t know how long I’ve been walking. The only reason the car is still there is that no one has seen it yet. Until now.
“Where’ya headed?” The blonde’s teeth aren’t so great, but she shows them all anyway. Signaling that she’s friendly too, I suppose.
“San Vicente.”
“Reservations at the Hilton?” They both start cackling. I don’t like it.
I shrug.
“Well hey,” the guy says. “You’re fucked out here, so hop in.” The blonde opens the door and slides toward the driver. I slide in and shut the door.
“Your car’ll be gone in the morning.” The guy’s chewing gum like his life depends on it. The index finger of his left hand is wrapped in gauze and duct tape. He has a beer between his legs, and now he takes a swig from it and offers it to the blonde.
“Not much I can do about it.”
“I don’t know what your plans are in San Vicente, but you might be better off staying with us for the night. The town’s shut down for the evening and there’s nothin’ there anyway. We got a place right up here a ways . . .” He gestures off into the darkness.
The blonde is tapping Heavy Metal rhythms with her fingers on her knee and bobbing her head like a pigeon. I consider my options, a speedy operation, like dividing a number by zero on a calculator: the answer is always “error.”
“I’d appreciate that,” I hear myself saying. But I know crazy when I see it.
The driver says, “Right on,” and fishes a joint out of his pocket. He fires it up and passes it to me, sputtering, “Name’s Herbie. This is Melinda. We got a place not far from here. It’s your lucky night, pardner.”
I take a hit off the joint just to be friendly, and say, “Charlie Miner.”
Herbie and Melinda laugh their cackling laugh and Herbie stomps on the accelerator. The pickup lurches forward with astonishing power and veers left onto a dirt road that I didn’t even see coming. Herbie turns off his headlights and we hurtle into oblivion with a roar, shaking and bouncing and kicking up rocks that hammer the undercarriage like a hailstorm.
Melinda takes the joint from me and hits on it like it’s going to save her life. We hit something soft and
bump over it, then a rise that sends us airborne. Herbie yells, “That’s what I’m talkin’ ’bout, motherfucker!” He finally slows down and turns the headlights back on. We turn left again, this time onto a narrow track between clusters of bushes that scrape the side of the truck. The path snakes around and uphill for a few minutes and we come to a stop at a gate. It’s a crude contraption of two-by-fours and chickenwire, with barbed wire on top. In the glare of the headlights, I can see a level clearing butting up to the side of a cliff. There’s a wooden shack on the left and, maybe twenty yards away, an RV on the right. In between, there’s a recent-model Saturn with California plates.
Herbie gets out of the truck, saying, “Home sweet home,” and opens the gate. He reaches in the back of the truck and pulls out a backpack, which he slings over his shoulder. Melinda scoots over and drives the truck in. She parks and gets out, taking a big flashlight from the glove box.
Herbie catches up with us and, guided by the beam of the flashlight, we go to the back of the shack. Herbie opens the door to a shed and starts the generator inside; it’s a new, expensive-looking one that purrs as the lights go on in the shack. He goes back to the truck and gets a plastic cooler out of the back.
We go into home-sweet-home. Two lamps with ridiculous dried spiny blowfish shades show me a room about twenty feet square. It’s got a concrete floor, but there’s a sofa and a table with three chairs. To the left, there’s a doorway to a dark hall. Straight ahead, there’s a work bench with a laptop and a printer. An ice chest, a hot plate, and a microwave define the kitchen area to the right. Next to the ice chest, there’s a rusted U-bolt sticking out of the concrete.
I’m standing looking at the room when suddenly there’s an arm around my neck. I arch my back so Herbie won’t feel the Ruger. Melinda pats me down and finds Mo’s 9.
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