“So we have a situation,” he said.
“Well, Chief,” Dodd said, “you’ve worked undercover, you know how it can get.”
I edged the drapes back. Some kids were playing touch football on the lawn across the street. Nettle undercover. Busting a Black guy for a matchbox of marijuana. Fifteen years in the joint. Hell of a deal.
“How bad is it?” Nettle asked.
I let the drapes drop back into place and looked over at Jim.
“Since that overdose I guess I’ve had a rough time,” he said. His voice was shaking. He glanced over at me. I have betrayed my partner, betrayed my lover.
“Exactly how bad is it?” Nettle asked.
Jim sucked in a breath, leaned forward in his chair, rolled his sleeve up and extended his arm toward Nettle. It was worse than when I last saw it. There on his arm was a four-inch track, bright red and swollen, like some nightcrawler had slithered under his bruised, scab-dotted skin.
Nettle leaned to look at it, shook his head slowly, and then sat back in his chair. He raised a hand to his face and rubbed his cheek.
“I think,” he finally said, “that you could use a few days off. Go to Houston, get some rest. And then get back here and make the goddamn case on Gaines.”
Jim cocked his head back and glared at me. See there, bitch, I can handle it. He nodded at Nettle.
A few days off. I couldn’t seem to get my breath.
“Right away,” Jim said. “Thanks for your confidence.”
“It’s not confidence, Raynor. I want Gaines. That’s why you were hired and that’s what I expect you to deliver.”
Jim flashed a look at Nettle, but caught himself.
“Clear as can be,” he said quietly, standing to leave.
“Sergeant Dodd,” Nettle said, “why don’t you give Jim a lift to his place. I’d like to talk to Kristen for a few more minutes.” He turned to me. “Just follow me down the road a ways. We can talk in my car and then you can head back.”
He drove slowly down a blacktop two-lane road heading south from Dodd’s house. The pine trees came right up to the road shoulder, spiking black against the night-blue sky. There were hundreds of stars, thousands and millions of them, stars you couldn’t see when you looked at the night sky in town. I could see a glow above the tree line a mile or so down the road. Nettle drove carefully, as though feeling his way along the road.
I rounded a curve in the road and saw a church, solid white, spotlessly, brilliantly white. Set on black asphalt in a large clearing among the pines, surrounded by floodlights, glowing in the night. The asphalt lay clean and level and black, with hard-edged white lines marking the parking spaces on its surface. The steeple, tall and traditional and shining, was a stark white point jutting into the night air before the jagged blackness of the tall pines that cut the night sky behind it.
Nettle pulled onto the road shoulder just before reaching the church. I eased over behind him, killed my engine, and walked across the gravel to his Chevy.
I got in and clicked the door shut. Surrounded by the smell of new car, of vinyl and plastic and ultra clean carpeting, I sat staring at the church, wondered if I was about to be fired. He turned toward me, draped his arm across the seatback.
“I just wanted to tell you that I know how hard it was for you to come forward,” he said. “It took a lot of trust, and I want you to rest assured that you can talk to me whenever there’s a problem.”
“Three days off isn’t going to do the trick, Chief. You know that.”
He turned in the seat and leaned toward me. Such even white teeth he had, so polished, so spotless, so perfect. I despised his teeth.
“I can’t tell you how important it is to me that I know there are officers in the department who are willing to be straight with me, to tell me what’s happening. I’ll remember come promotion time.”
Then he lunged, grabbed my face and pulled me toward him. I don’t know exactly what happened next, I felt an arm around my waist, pulling, and another, his forearm across my neck, trying to push me down on the front seat. I scrambled, twisting away from him, something ripped, his lips mashed wet against my cheek. And then somehow I was outside, slamming the door against his reaching hand, hearing him yell something as I ran toward my car.
I cranked the engine, turned the wheel hard to the left and slammed the accelerator to the floorboard, screeching onto the roadway, slinging gravel against his car. I heard the metallic pinging as the stones hit his trunk, and in my rearview there was Nettle, stomping in circles next to his car. Bastard.
I held the pedal down until my speedometer was pegged and fought the car around the curves. Damn him. Got a woman in his car on the side of the road at night and holy Jesus, she has to want it. Has to. Worthless fucking East Texas egg-sucking playboy.
I didn’t slow until I reached the edge of town, and then I sat most of the way through a green light, wiping his dried spit from the place on my cheek. I made it through the intersection on yellow, wiping my hand on my jeans until I felt friction heat on my thigh.
Jim was in the apartment when I got there. Sitting at the kitchen table, drinking a beer. I went to the kitchen sink and washed my face, scrubbing hard, then to the bedroom to change my clothes.
“Hell of a deal,” he said when I sat down. “I’ve never copped to anything. Nothing. No matter what the accusation was. Now that bastard has a rope tied right around my neck. All he has to do is tighten the fucking noose. Hell of a deal.”
Something rushed up inside me, and I looked at the floor, tried to shake my head clear, couldn’t, falling, drowning, couldn’t stop it. I stood up and slammed him in the chest, nearly knocking him from his chair.
“Who the fuck are you,” I screamed, “to tell me one hell of a deal? Hell of a deal? Yeah, bastard, it’s a hell of a deal! Come on down, you said, come on down and marry me, be my wife, love me. And I do it, and I get down here and you’ve turned into a worthless sack of shit that can’t do anything but stick needles in your sorry-ass arm. Curl up and die! Fucking shrivel up and blow west!”
He stood up, his mouth half open, eyes wide with alarm, and reached for me. I pushed past him, slammed at the wall, feeling the soft plasterboard give beneath my fist.
“Just fuck you!” I screamed. “You and your self-righteous lawman bullshit, you’re a fucking junkie, that’s all, a strung-out, punk boy needle freak!” I slumped against the wall and closed my eyes. “You aren’t even worth pitying.”
He put a hand on my shoulder, wrapped himself around me. I felt the wet warmth of his tears on my neck, his body pressed tight against my back.
“I’m sorry,” he said. “I’m so fucking sorry.”
13
We didn’t go to Houston. We didn’t go anywhere. Both of us knew that three days wouldn’t make any difference. We stayed right there in the apartment, and after a night without dope, Jim took to his bed.
When I walked into the bedroom with a cup of beef broth, he was under three blankets, sweating heavily.
“Just take a little,” I said. He turned his head away.
“I can’t.” His voice was weak with fever, his jaw trembled spasmodically.
“All this from speed?” I asked.
“Not speed. Brown.”
It was as though he’d just confessed to having a secret lover, a woman on the side. I felt like someone had finally ripped a blindfold from my eyes after leading me around sightless for weeks. I’d thought he was strong enough to recover from the overdose, believed all this time that he was doing okay. I’d been so busy making cases that I hadn’t noticed how badly it had shaken him.
“I thought you knew,” he said.
I had no answer. I was relieved when someone knocked on the door.
“Tell them I’m sick,” he said. “Tell them I have the flu or something.” He clenched his mouth shut and I closed the bedroom door behind me.
It was Jammer, a scooter nasty, an ex-heroin addict who’d switched to speed because, he sai
d, he got more done that way. He was thin and tiny, with greasy brown hair that hung in uncombed strands to the middle of his back, and a scraggly goatee of the same drab shade. The only real color left in his Levi’s came from gray-black oil stains streaked across the thighs. His irises were fierce blue, glaring out of Mongol eyes, but he was one of the gentlest of our defendants.
“Flo,” he stammered, “I don’t want to be a bother, but, could I maybe use your scales for a few minutes?”
I waved him in and brought the scales to the dining table. He sat down and began pulling things from his boots.
“Got any baggies?” he asked.
I brought the Ziplocs from the kitchen, and the other things he would need: the mirror, the grinder, the razor blades, a pack of matches.
“I’m so broke,” he said. “Got no place to crash even, gotta get some cash. I been sleeping in the rail yards.”
He smelled like it, the odor of poverty clinging to his clothes, scented of layered dirt and sweat.
“You want something to eat? Jim’s kind of sick and I was going to try to get some eggs down him.”
“That’d be good,” he said. “I ain’t really had much to eat for a week or so. What’s he got?”
I could tell him and he would understand, it would be real, not the way it was with Nettle. In the narcotics course, they’d told us always to choose a cover that was close to our real lives, that there was less chance of slipping up that way. That last bit of advice was N/A to Jim and me now. We couldn’t slip up. We were no longer playing roles.
“He’s been chipping some,” I said. “He’s trying to pull up.”
“Oh, man,” Jammer said. “I been there. What a drag.”
I scrambled some eggs while Jammer cut the last of his stash and sealed the powder into tiny plastic triangles, which he would sell for ten bucks a piece. He stopped long enough to wolf down the plate of eggs I put in front of him and then he went back to work, his hands shaking so badly that I was amazed he didn’t spill crystal meth all over the table. He didn’t drop so much as a single grain.
When he finished, he asked if I wanted any and I said of course. Of course I wanted some. What I didn’t say was: Yeah Jammer I want some, but not because I’m going to put it in my arm, I want some so I can have another case on you, so the D.A. can prosecute you and the State can lock you up. I need another number, Nettle wants lots of cases, yeah, sell me some more dope.
I bought three dime bags from him and he pocketed the thirty bucks like it was a real stake, enough to put him on the road to success.
“Think I could use your shower?” he asked.
“I’ll get you a towel.” It felt good to be kind to him. Maybe he would remember.
I put the scale away and made more eggs while Jammer was in the bathroom. Jim was sitting up when I brought them in. He hadn’t touched the broth.
“At least try,” I said.
“At the moment,” he said, “I feel not unlike trampled dog shit. Who’s in the bathroom?”
“Jammer. I bought speed from him.”
“What for? We’ve got two cases on him.”
“Because he needs the cash. Besides, just because Nettle says get Gaines we’re suddenly supposed to stop buying from everyone else? That’ll raise some eyebrows for sure.”
“He wants that case.”
“I was there. I heard.”
“I’m getting too old to do this shit. Keep it up, I’ll wind up sitting out on the highway next to a truck full of vegetables, quoting the price of okra.”
“Hey Jim you’re barely thirty. It’s not exactly time for the home yet. Now eat this.”
He opened his mouth and I put a forkful of eggs in. He closed his eyes and struggled to swallow.
“They’re pretty dry,” he said.
“The rate you’ve been going they won’t stay down long anyway.”
“I shouldn’t have brought you in on this, girl.”
Jammer tapped on the bedroom door and stepped into the room, standing awkwardly next to the dresser. His wet hair was pulled into a ponytail and draped over his shoulder, leaking water on the front of his still filthy shirt.
“How you feeling, man?” he asked, slipping this hands into his back pockets.
“Like I got run over by a truck,” Jim said.
“Yeah,” Jammer said. “Well, I was strung on heroin for a good four years. Switch to speed. It’s not so hard on you.”
“Whatever,” Jim said. “I’ll find you when I’m back on my feet, man.”
“Sure.” Jammer looked at me. “Thanks for the meal and all.”
When he was gone, Jim just looked at me.
“Why’d you tell him?” he asked finally.
“He gets around. Now everyone in town will believe you aren’t the heat. Including Gaines.”
He clutched suddenly at his stomach and pointed to the trash can next to the dresser.
“Quick,” he winced.
* * *
Defendant number seventy-eight, seventy-nine, eighty. While Jim slept it off I kept right on making buys: cocaine at five in the morning and Quays at eight-thirty; acid at two and Biphetamine at three-thirty. Day after night after day. My body was going in so many different directions that I stopped trying to keep track. But I thought all along that I had it under control. I was doing my job. Jim had lost it, he’d let it get the better of him, but I was showing him that I was street, I was strong, I was handling it. I would walk into the bedroom wired out of my mind and talk calmly to him, give him progress reports, tuck the blankets around him and tell him I loved him. I thought about moving him to my apartment so he could be away from all the activity, but the place was still empty and I did not feel like dragging furniture down the sidewalk.
I think a week or so passed before Jim got out of bed and put some clothes on. I didn’t really keep track. I bought dope and tried to get him to eat and bought more dope.
When the day came that he finally felt strong enough to move around, he walked in and sat down at the dining table and stared at me. I’d just bought some coke, still had the mirror and vials out on the table, and was sitting there sniffling, trying to catch the last of the drip, hating myself for loving the taste of snot.
“Maybe I’ll try a little lunch,” he said.
“Excellent,” I said. “I’ll make you a salad.”
“Just a little cereal.” He picked up a vial and rolled it between his fingers.
“Bought it off a guy named Seymour.”
“Walker set it up?”
“Yeah. We’ve got eighty defendants as of this buy.”
“But not the big one. How many Fuhnew Lahnews?” FNU LNU, First Name Unknown, Last Name Unknown. Transients, people without names, dealers who slipped into the parks or the clubs, sold their stash and split quickly, leaving nothing in their wake but a physical description.
“Dodd told me only the third buy you made,” I said, “at that Chicken Shack.” My hands shook as I poured milk over his cereal and carried it to the table. Wired to the point of misery. I brought the Sunday paper from the couch, set it on the table in front of him.
“Check it out,” I said. “The governor has declared a War on Drugs. Got a committee and everything.”
“Run it up the flagpole and see if anyone salutes,” he said weakly.
“They’re talking about bringing in the military. They’ll all get strung. Imagine the Marines on acid.”
“Forget acid,” he said. “Rob was telling me about some kind of shit called freebase. Mix a little coke with some heavy-duty chemicals, dry it out and smoke it. Said the first thing that comes to mind when you do the stuff is homicide.”
“Right. Like the first time you do LSD you’re gonna jump out a window.” I reached to touch his forehead. It was cool.
“I’m okay,” he said. “Really.” He tapped a finger against the newspaper. Says here the governor’s coming in May.”
“You can bet Nettle will time the bust-out for that.”
“You think that stuff about the Cowboy Mafia is real?” I asked. Nettle had said Gaines was hooked up with them, a group of ranchers who supplemented their income by selling tons of pot. They had the space, the trucks and strategic locations all over Texas, to say nothing of the ethic of the Old West: Don’t fence me in, I’ll kill any bastard who gets in my way.
“Who knows,” Jim said. “Now he says he wants us to make the buy out of one of Gaines’s cars. So he can seize it.”
“He think this is some kind of game show or something?”
“He wants the Cadillac. I told him we should go for one of the Mercedes.” He smiled. “We ought to set it up so we wind up with that dump truck he keeps parked behind Drillers. That’d piss Nettle off but good.”
“I’m glad you’re up and around,” I said. I reached for the mirror. Jim paused with his spoon halfway to his mouth.
“I’m just tired,” I said. “Last one.”
“Until when?”
“Until the next buy. Don’t worry. I’m cool with it.”
When Jim called Nettle that afternoon and said we were getting closer to Gaines, I wondered if he had simply gone over the edge, lost touch completely.
“What do you mean, getting closer,” I said when he hung up. “We haven’t even seen him for weeks.”
“I need some slack,” he said. “I don’t want Nettle getting antsy. We’re talking about a heavy motherfucker here.”
I’d never seen him so nervous about a case. In Pasadena, he’d always been the one to lead the charge. He was the one who kicked the doors, who walked cold into shooting galleries and came out with new cases. But he was no longer eager. He seemed almost desperate.
“Chief told Walker he would slide automatically if he delivered Gaines.”
“Sure,” I said. “Like Walker’s in the same league. He’s done a good job, and as far as I’m concerned he’s already off the hook.”
Jim stood up and began gathering the week’s worth of newspapers that were scattered around the living room.
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