Shards

by Allison Moore

The next morning there were lots of calls from him on my cell phone. I sent them to voice mail, wanting to get rid of this guy as quickly as I could. Then the home phone rang and Carol told me it was for me.

  I accepted the phone nervously, worried that it might be Bryant or my sergeant.

  “Hi, Alli.”

  The dealer.

  Shit, how had he gotten this number?

  I was panicking but tried to play it cool.

  “I just wanted to make sure you got what I left you,” he said.

  “Oh, what was that?” I asked.

  Just then, my brother-in-law came in with flowers and a card.

  “This was on the front steps. It’s addressed to you, Alli,” Tim said uncertainly.

  “Yeah,” I said on the phone. “It just arrived. I’ll call you later.”

  “Who knows you’re living here?” Tim asked.

  “Well,” I said, opening the card slowly. It was a homemade card, some sort of insane bullshit booklet about how much he loved me. How much he was going to miss me. How he would love me unconditionally. How he would love me forever. How—

  I tried to shield it from Tim’s eyes.

  “It’s this cop I’ve been working with in Everett,” I said hurriedly. “That was him on the phone too. I knew he was a wack job, but apparently he’s fallen in love with me.” I tried to laugh it off as I continued manufacturing the lie—he was on the rebound, his girlfriend had jilted him unexpectedly, I’d helped him get over it by talking to him, and now he’d fallen in love with me, ha ha.

  “It’s kind of weird that he knows where we live,” Tim said.

  No shit. I had no idea how the dealer knew my sister’s address. And phone number. I hadn’t even told him I was staying with her. Had he followed me? Watched me? Was he doing surveillance on the house?

  Fuck.

  In a panic, I sent the dealer an email. I told him I was in law enforcement and that I couldn’t see him anymore because of what I did for a living. I figured that would scare the shit out of him and he would never contact me again.

  I was so wrong.

  16

  As soon as my flight landed in Maui, I turned on my phone. Four voice messages from the dealer, full of love and threat in equal measure.

  When was I coming back, he wanted to know. He loved me more than anything on earth and needed me in his bed. We were soul mates and destined to be together. Every minute apart was torture.

  Then: he knew I worked for MPD. He’d known since the beginning.

  And by the way: he had a video of me smoking meth and having sex with him and he would send the video to MPD and Keawe if I didn’t come back to Washington and see him that weekend.

  How had he found out where I worked? How on earth did he know about Keawe?

  Clearly, he had hacked into my email. I didn’t believe him when he said he had a video, but that wasn’t really important. How was I going to explain some drug dealer from Washington calling Keawe or MPD?

  I was terrified. For the first time I saw that the career that I loved might not hold up against my using. Until now all I cared about was dope. Getting it, using it, doing whatever I had to to make sure I wasn’t found out. Now I saw what I had done to my life.

  Things were out of control. I was going to have to tell Keawe. MPD. Someone. I was going to have to get out of this web of lies.

  Keawe called just as I walked in the door of my apartment. Part of me—a large part—wanted to break down and tell him everything. Instead, I sent his call to voice mail. I went into the bathroom, curled myself in a ball on the floor, and started to cry.

  I lay there for a long, long time, aware that I was beginning to break down. The drug that had kept me going for so long, that had made me able to work harder and faster, was now working against me. The quantity I was consuming now, plus the potency of the dealer’s meth, was too much for me. My brain was beginning to fail.

  I recognized this.

  And then.

  And then, after finally understanding the gravity of the situation, after accepting for the first time what the drug had turned me into, I picked up a packet of meth instead of my phone. I ate the meth because you get higher faster that way. The taste is unbearable, but what addict cares about taste?

  I decided to play along with the dealer. I would turn around and manipulate him just as much as he manipulated me. He was the only human being I knew who could give me what I wanted in the quantities I needed, and I was going to have to find a way to work around his craziness.

  I sent him an email to tell him I would be there to see him on Friday, and I went in to work.

  “Jesus, Alli,” Wilkes said. “What are you doing back here? You need to take care of yourself.”

  “I am,” I said. “I’m doing a lot better.”

  Wilkes looked unconvinced.

  I didn’t want to fuck up my cases, but I couldn’t do the work.

  All I could do in Maui was smoke. I kept thinking if I could just take one more hit I could sit down and finish the case.

  I couldn’t.

  I lasted two weeks in Maui before I returned to Seattle. I was in such terrible shape when I left that I worried Wilkes or Roger Bryant would call my sister to see how I was doing, so when I got to her house, I set her phone to forward all incoming calls to my cell phone, knowing she wouldn’t figure it out for a while.

  I spent most of my time in Seattle with the dealer. He didn’t mention MPD or the sex tape, just talked about how much in love with me he was. He was weird, but I settled into playing boyfriend and girlfriend with him. There were rules. I had to tell him how much I loved him all the time. I had to make him a drink exactly how he wanted it—a vodka with exactly five ice cubes. I couldn’t wear a ponytail because he didn’t like me in a ponytail.

  There were rules all over the house, rules I was always learning. No shoes. Don’t go in that bathroom, only this one. Don’t go in the computer room unless I invite you. Don’t go into the shop, ever. The spare room? Absolutely not.

  It wasn’t hard to follow the rules. I knew that was how I would keep getting my dope.

  One day his friend Joe came over and sat at the table with the dealer. I was wandering around, starting little tweaker projects in the kitchen, ignoring the men until I saw Joe pull out a gun.

  “Nice piece, huh, Alli?” he asked, laughing and waving it around, trying to intimidate me. I wasn’t intimidated, but I was worried. I assumed Joe had no skills, and it was always the people who aren’t trained that will shoot first.

  The dealer had a gun too. He kept it in his shop for protection and took it out every now and again to clean it. I kept that in mind in case he ever got too crazy.

  After another ten days in Seattle, I got ready to head back to Maui.

  “I’d like that sex tape,” I told the dealer casually, when I left. “So I can watch it while I’m away from you.” It was the first time I had mentioned it.

  “Sure,” he said evenly. “I burned a DVD for you. As a gift. You can watch it and think about us.”

  “Oh thank you,” I said. “It’s so thoughtful of you to do that.”

  I knew he wasn’t stupid enough to give me his only copy of the tape, but I thought if I acted like it didn’t matter that he had made it, he wouldn’t do anything as stupid as calling MPD.

  When I got back to Maui, I watched the DVD. It was pretty damning. I didn’t care about the sex part, but anyone who watched it would see me smoking meth and I would be busted.

  I hid the tape in my apartment, in an old purse on my closet shelf.

  I stayed in Maui for a week trying to work, but no matter how long I stayed at the station, no matter how much dope I smoked, I couldn’t concentrate enough to finish a report everyone was waiting for. When Wilkes took a look at what I was doing, he frowned and said, “Jesus, Alli. Maybe you’re too sick to work.”

  “I’m not,” I said, but started taking more days off. As soon as I realized I couldn’t get anything done, I headed
back to Seattle.

  This became my pattern: stay in Maui until I couldn’t stand it, then go back to Seattle and see the dealer for more drugs. It went on like this for a long time—weeks turning into a month and then two. I told the department I was returning to the mainland for treatment, and they believed me, even though I looked sicker and sicker. My meth use was massive, and after a while we started adding heroin to the mix.

  When I was in Seattle, I had to be on the phone a lot with MPD, and that never made the dealer happy. One time the dealer found me talking to Keawe and got really pissed. When I got off the phone, I asked him for some dope, and he said, “Why don’t you get dope from Keawe if he loves you so much?”

  “Come on,” I said, ignoring his comment about Keawe. “I need a hit.”

  “I don’t have any for you right now,” he said. “You have to wait.” He turned and walked away from me, and I followed him into the kitchen.

  “Don’t be a dick,” I said. “I haven’t had any all day and you gave me that heroin last night. I need meth to come down from that.”

  Suddenly he turned and said, “Don’t tell me what you need, you bitch.”

  “Don’t be such an asshole.” I pushed him with two hands, and suddenly we were in a pushing and shoving fight that only ended when he slammed my hip into the kitchen counter.

  “Quit it!” I said, rubbing my hip.

  He turned and walked away. That shove gave me a nasty bruise on my right hip bone, but I didn’t think any more about it. I brushed it off as the heroin and us getting too high.

  He brought me a bowl of dope a few minutes later, and he started giving me more heroin that night as well. Soon everything was back to normal.

  • • •

  When I got back to Maui a few days later, I found Keawe waiting for me at my apartment. I was happy to see him. Fucked up as I was, he always made me feel things were going to be okay.

  “What are you doing here?” I asked.

  “Listen, Alli,” he said, “while you were away Erin and I moved some of your stuff to her house.”

  “What stuff?” I asked suspiciously.

  “Your clothes, your uniform, your toiletries and such.”

  I felt confused. I had counted on having a hit as soon as I walked in the door, and I was so focused on it that I couldn’t really understand what he was saying.

  “You went through my things?” I asked. This was it, I thought. He’d found a pipe—he was going to tell me he knew about the ice. Or he’d found the sex tape, or the dealer’s name and address, or—

  But I had been so careful about hiding things. Maybe he hadn’t found anything.

  “We just want to help,” Keawe said. “Erin can look after you at her house.”

  “I’m not going,” I said. I was pissed that they’d done this without asking, as if I were a child. “Bring my stuff back,” I demanded.

  “Look at you,” he said gently. “You look like shit, you weigh about eighty pounds—”

  “A hundred and sixteen,” I said, then, “Excuse me,” and ran for the bathroom. I just about made it before I started throwing up.

  Keawe was right behind me. He placed his warm hand on the small of my back and gathered my matted hair away from the sides of the toilet. “See?” he said. “There’s no way you can stay by yourself. You need someone to take care of you, and I can’t be there all the time.”

  “It’s just, it’s just—” was all I got out before I started heaving again.

  “I know,” he said. “It’s the chemo.”

  No, I thought, it’s the heroin withdrawal.

  And then, Oh shit, what am I going to do now?

  17

  My friendship with Erin had continued to be mostly one-sided. She would call me and I wouldn’t call her. She would invite me places and I wouldn’t go. She would buy me gifts and I would get her nothing.

  Erin wanted to be girlfriends, and I wanted to operate solo, but she had been persistent and eventually I had come around. Even though I hid all my secrets from her, she was probably my closest female friend on Maui. Now she wanted to take care of me.

  Because I had stopped using heroin so abruptly, I went straight into withdrawal. I was throwing up six or eight times a day at Erin’s, and I had the fevers, shakes, and diarrhea, all of which only helped my cancer story.

  As soon as I moved into Erin’s house, Keawe said, “Let me get you some weed to help with the nausea.” So I would go in the bathroom, pretending to smoke marijuana for my chemo and smoke the meth instead. Neither Keawe nor Erin had any idea what was going on. Erin was an easy friend for me to have because like many cops she drank too much, and most nights, she would fall soundly asleep on the couch and not even realize I was up.

  So much for taking care of me.

  I was fine with that.

  Erin lived in a new subdivision nicknamed Coptown because so much of MPD lived there. It was easy for my colleagues from work to come by her house to see me, and they did—all the time. “We love you, Alli,” they would say. “You’re going to make it through, you’re going to be okay.” Some of them brought flowers.

  When Wilkes came, he had news for me. He said, “Alli, you know we want you to get better, and we need you to take as much time as you need. But your sick leave’s run out.”

  “Am I being placed on suspension?” I asked. “Because I understand—”

  “No, we’re not going to suspend you. One of the officers has donated his sick leave.”

  “No,” I said. “I don’t want anyone to do that. Who was it?”

  “I can’t tell you that, but I will tell you that once everyone heard, they did the same thing. Eventually I sent out a memo, and you wouldn’t believe the response.”

  “Oh God,” I said. “No.” I continued protesting, but Wilkes held up his hand like a stop sign.

  “You can always count on your brothers in blue,” he said.

  I turned my face away, so ashamed at what my lies had led to. Jesus, I had to put an end to this. I needed to say, Stop, call it all off, I don’t really have cancer.

  But I couldn’t.

  These wonderful friends, these wonderful colleagues—they just wanted to help in a helpless situation. Even though I couldn’t eat, they kept bringing me food. They would have done anything to help.

  The next afternoon, the chief of police came by with a casserole his wife had made. I just wanted to die.

  People were so shocked when they saw me. Because I was on ice I had no idea how bad I looked. I was down to 115 pounds, hadn’t brushed my hair in six or seven days, and was vomiting all the time. I thought I looked amazing.

  After the heroin withdrawals, my body was so tired that it didn’t matter how much meth I smoked. I slept. I slept for forty-eight hours and that made Erin think I was even sicker.

  “I have a plan,” she told me one day. “My mom and I are organizing a fund-raiser.”

  “A fund-raiser?” I asked.

  “Yeah. To help you pay for your treatment. I know everyone’s been donating their sick leave and that helps, but you still have all those bills to pay.”

  “Erin, I don’t want you to do that,” I said. “I have insurance. I don’t need—”

  “It’s already in the works,” she said. “We’re going to have a dinner and a silent auction at one of the Kaanapali hotels. You know everyone will come. We’re going to . . .” As she told me about the plans, my heart sank even further.

  A fund-raiser? A fucking silent auction for a lying, law-breaking, whore drug addict?

  Like so many times before, I wanted to die. Looking the people I loved in the eye and lying to them remains the most painful part of my story.

  It took ten or eleven days for me to get through the withdrawal and the crash, and after that I couldn’t handle people coming by the house anymore. I couldn’t handle the lies. By that point, more than eighty fellow cops had donated their sick leave to me.

  I had to go. I had to get out of there. The dealer
in Washington was expecting me, but I couldn’t face him. I told Keawe and Erin I needed to go to Los Angeles to see a new doctor, try a new cancer treatment. Keawe didn’t want to let me go, but I insisted this was the best doctor in the country. If he could have, Keawe would have come with me, and then I would have been screwed. It was one of the few times in our relationship that I was glad he was a married man.

  I flew to Los Angeles just as I said I was going to—and then, with my last remaining cash, I bought a one-way ticket to New Mexico to see my mom. I suppose I thought there was some way she would be able to fix everything for me.

  My mom had no idea I was coming. I called her from the airport and she had to leave work early to come pick me up.

  As soon as she saw me, she knew I was sick. “Alli, what’s happened?” she asked me. Hugging me, she made me feel protected, okay. She took me home, and it was so good to be safe in my own house, with my family, that I crashed for twenty-four hours straight.

  When I woke up, she said, “I’m taking you to the emergency room.”

  “No,” I said. “I’m fine now. I just needed to get some sleep.”

  I knew I couldn’t go to the ER. Any doctor would take one look at me and say, This girl’s not sick, she’s high.

  “You’re sick, Alli. Look at you.”

  “Why do you always tell me how horrible I look?” I yelled at her. “I’m tired. I’m working too hard. Just let me rest. Isn’t that what you’re supposed to do when you come home?”

  My mom winced. She could see in my eyes that I was going to run, and she was trying to find a way to contain me.

  “Okay,” she relented. “We don’t need to go to the ER, but I’ll make an appointment with Dr. Warren. She’s known you your whole life.”

  “Fine,” I said, knowing I would leave before going to any appointment.

  I spent a week with my mom, sleeping and getting high. She had a new dog, a mastiff named Bella that she had rescued from a shelter. She had gotten Bella with me in mind and had started the paperwork to send her to Maui to be with me. Mo had been a special dog, but so was Bella, and I liked her immediately. I spent a lot of time cuddling her that week.