Bad Moon On The Rise (3 page)

“
I’m gonna quit,” she said
automatically.

“
Where’s their father?
Does he know?”

She spit near my feet. The wad of
saliva landed near the toe of my boot and quivered in the red clay.
I stared at it for a moment, then looked back up at her. It had
missed me by inches. Her eyes darted away from mine. She could not
hold my gaze.

“
What father?” she finally
said sullenly. “Even if he knew the kids were here, he wouldn’t
give a damn.”

“
Get out of here,” I told
her, tired of being a witness to the wreck this stranger had made
of her life. I slammed the door and slapped it with my palm.
“Go.”

“
What about —” she bit
back her words as her eyes tracked the baggie I held.

“
Forget about it,” I said.
“Next time spend the money feeding your kids.”

She tried to spit in my face again,
but this time I ducked. I heard the grind of the gears being jammed
into place and jumped up onto the front stoop just as she gunned
the motor and backed the truck rapidly across the yard. She peeled
out onto the winding blacktop and headed toward town, weaving back
and forth across the center line in her drug-tinged
anger.

I hated to let those kids go. But I
had learned it was a bad idea to interfere in other people’s lives
if you were just passing through.

I stepped back into the shadows,
hiding by a corner of the house, waiting for more druggies to come.
They came all right. A pair of cars pulled up and a party of
college-age kids hurried inside, as if afraid someone might see
them out in the middle of nowhere. After that, a steady stream of
broken-down wrecks stopped by, disgorging passengers. Inside, a
drug party was in full swing. This wasn’t a loud music, cut-the-rug
party, I saw, as I peered through a hole in the dirty sheet that
had been draped over the living room window. People sat on the
floor, leaning against the walls or lounging on ratty lumps of
furniture, passing a pipe from hand to hand, breathing out tiny
plumes of white smoke after holding it in for as long as they
could, staring at the ceiling, staring into space, staring at each
other. No one spoke. The college-age boys sipped at beers
methodically, as if that small, familiar action somehow made them
normal. One woman lay listlessly on her back in the middle of the
room, a human coffee table, unnoticed by the others. Whatever she
was doing, she damn sure wasn’t tweaking. My guess was that she’d
mainlined a ghetto’s worth of the cheap ass black tar heroin that
had recently infiltrated the state from Mexico. There had to be a
good reason for the smile on her face. No one in their right mind
could have managed a smile surrounded by the disintegrating human
beings that ringed her.

By six o’clock, I was cold, I really
had to pee and I was sick of staring at stoned-out losers. But
there were too many people for me to approach any one person. I
didn’t want to start a stampede. I needed information, not a bunch
of tweaked out, panic-stricken drug addicts trampling me in their
fear.

It was close to seven o’clock before
the crowd broke up, stumbling out to their trucks and cars or, in
the case of the college kids, Jeeps bought by clueless parents.
They were ready for the long drive home to their apartments,
schools and, worst of all, assembly lines. With my luck, I’d be the
one to buy the computer made later that day by one of these
sleepless stoners coming down from a three-day high.

It was as if a parade of zombies had
risen from the grave to march out into the world. They had a gray
pallor in the morning light and moved stiffly, as if their joints
ached. Their faces were blank, their eyes already dead. I hid in
the shadows and thanked God I was not one of them. I had touched
the madness that was drug addiction many years ago and I never
again wanted to feel the unfillable hunger, never again desired to
fight the pull or spend the night’s darkest hours battling between
craving and sleeping.

The baggie I’d confiscated was still
in my back pocket. I took it out. It held a collection of dirty
yellow crystals that looked like someone had both pissed and puked
all over them. Very appetizing. It was crystal meth and it scared
the shit out of me. I had never touched that particular drug in my
life. Thank god it had come along after I had sworn off the hard
stuff. But the power of it seemed overwhelming in its potential to
enslave. What if I was unable to resist just a taste? Would I be
hooked? Would my life unfold before me in one long, downward spiral
before I even had time to catch my breath?

I emptied the crystals out onto the
gravel and ground them to dust beneath my boots. I didn’t ever want
to find out. But I kept the pills after examining the big, white
ones carefully. What the hell could they be? As for the Valium and
Vicodin, well, I’m no fool. I kept them for my PMS stash. They
could make that time of the month downright fun. It’s hypocritical
of me, I know, but I’m a big fan of better living through
pharmaceuticals, so long as you don’t mix your stash with bullets
or booze or chase your pills down with the hard
stuff. 

The last of the cars finally pulled
away from the house, leaving only a yellow Chevy that had seen
better decades. I peered in the living room window for a final
check. The comatose woman still lay sprawled in the middle of the
rug and I could see the pants legs of someone sitting against the
wall near my window. That was okay. I’m a big girl. I was tipping
the scales at close to one hundred and eighty pounds at the moment.
I could handle one conscious and one unconscious person easily,
even if it came down to simply sitting on them. It was time to see
if anyone left behind had spotted Tonya Blackburn or her son
recently.

The door was unlocked. I pushed my way
inside. The house smelled like cat piss and chemicals. Just another
romantic detail of life in the fast lane. The pasteboard walls had
head-sized dents in them and plastic picture frames dangled from
nails hammered into the walls, the contents long-since hocked or
burned for heat. I turned a corner and came nose-to-nose with a
fake oil painting of a crying clown. Jesus. How could anyone stare
something like that in the face while they were high? I picked my
way over a stained beige carpet to the living room, expecting a
crack-crazed pit bull to emerge from a closet and chomp its jaws
down on my ass at any moment. Instead, a tiny calico kitten
wandered out of a reeking bathroom to nudge my feet. It was
red-eyed and underfed, no doubt having already inhaled enough meth
to fell a 300-pound lumberjack. I’m sure some college kid found it
entertaining to exhale up its little pink nose. People can be real
sick when they put their minds to it.

The zoned-out woman lay in the middle
of the living room floor, eyes closed, a Mona Lisa smile curling
her lips. I checked her pulse, just to be sure. She had taken a
lickin’ but she was still tickin’ so I moved on by.

A skinny black man sat hunched on a
ratty sofa pushed against the far wall. A forgotten cigarette
dangled from his fingertips, dribbling ashes on the carpet at his
feet. He was a poster boy for fire safety. He was also staring at
the television as if watching a program, but the set had long ago
been smashed in—otherwise it would have been pawned—and only a
jagged black hole met his gaze. Perhaps he was waiting for Star
Trek to start.

“
You’re going to set the
house on fire,” I said, removing the cigarette from his hand. His
eyes rolled up at me. They were rimmed in yellow and a red crust
glued the right one halfway shut. Spittle flecked his lips and a
dried line of snot snaked from a nostril across one cheek. I’d seen
healthier-looking people on a slab at the morgue. Better-smelling
ones, too.

He mumbled something along the lines
of “Why you?” 

“
Wake up,” I said more
sharply, shoving him back against the couch. This caused a wooden
leg to snap beneath the sofa and the whole left end of it fell to
the floor with a clunk. The junkie sitting on it simply listed to
one side like a drunken mariner going down with his ship. I had
disturbed someone’s home, however: a mouse darted out from under
the sofa, scurried across the rug, reached the passed-out woman,
then ran up her hips, across her torso and down the other side
before disappearing through a far door. The kitten was sitting in
the doorway but did not appear to care as the mouse ran right past
it.

Et tu, Brutus?
I thought.

“
Hey, watch
it.”

Well, what do you know? After thirty
seconds of moving his lips, the man on the couch had achieved
sound.

I stared at him and he stared blankly
back, having already forgotten he’d started the conversation. I
wasn’t going to get anywhere unless I took drastic action. I
checked him out more closely. He was dressed in clothes that had
not been washed for at least three weeks, but his pockets were
smooth. I checked the folds and cushions of the couch, wary of
hypodermic needles. When I found no weapons, or paraphernalia that
night hurt me, I left him and wandered off in search of the
kitchen, where I filled an old orange juice carton with water from
the tap.

He was still sitting on the couch,
staring at the broken television set and listing to one side when I
returned. 

“
Hey—look!” I said. “Isn’t
that Shelly Winters in The Poseidon Adventure?” His head jerked up
and I threw the water in his face. He sputtered in indignant anger.
But at least he perked up.

“
No call for that,” he
mumbled, clawing at the air like there were bats flying around his
head.

“
Sober up, handsome,” I
said. “I need to talk to you.”

“
You the law?”

“
No. And be glad I’m not.
This place is full of enough drugs to put you away for life. Hell,
you’re full of enough drugs to put you away for life.”

“
Ain’t none left,” he said
sullenly, brushing water off his filthy shirt. “Why else you think
everyone left?”

“
What’s she on?” I asked,
nodding at the woman on the floor.

“
What’s it to you?” He
looked around for his cigarettes and I pushed a pack on the floor
toward him with the toe of my boot. “What you want from
me?”

“
Information.” I stood as
far away as possible and held up the photo of Tonya Blackburn. “Do
you know this woman?”

He squinted at the photo and I held it
closer. He stared at it for so long that I thought he had fallen
asleep. “Do you know her?” I asked in a louder voice, doing my best
to sound like I was seconds away from kicking his ass.

“
Yeah, I know her,” he
said, taking a drag off his cigarette. He released the smoke in a
long plume and watched it rise to the ceiling. “She’s just some
crack whore. What you want with her?”

I kicked his feet so hard that his
legs flew up in the air like he was a scarecrow being tossed over a
fence. I don’t know why I did it. It just made me feel
better.

“
What you do that for?” he
complained, rubbing his ankles.

“
Watch your language
around me,” I said. “I’m a lady.”

“
Yeah,” he said sullenly.
“I can tell.”

At least he was coherent enough to be
sarcastic.

“
How do you know her?” I
demanded.

“
She used to hang out
here,” he said. “'Til she ran out one night acting
crazy.”

“
What are you talking
about?” I moved closer, although I was still unwilling to touch him
or his furniture.

“
It’s nothing,” he said.
“No business of yours.”

That was when I lost it. The cat
stench, the starving kitten, the drugged-out woman at my feet, the
waste of human protoplasm snarling in front of me: I just had to
get away from it all. And the only way to get away was to move
things along.

I pulled my Colt out of my jacket
pocket and stuck it in his face. He wet his pants, which was
satisfying. I had his attention at last and the smell didn’t make
much difference.

“
What you want?” he said
in a tiny voice. “I got no money.”

“
Tell me about her,” I
ordered. “Everything you know.”

“
Everyone knows her,” he
said. “Her name’s Scout. That’s what we call her.”

“
I don’t give a shit about
her stupid drug nickname.” The single most annoying thing about
addicts was how they gave each other nicknames, like they were kids
in a clubhouse and it made them cool. “What do you know about
her?  Where is she now?”

He was staring at the photo again,
more alert as the effect of the drugs wore off. He noticed Tonya’s
son Trey in the photo. “That her son?” he said. “Guess she wasn’t
shitting us after all.”

“
Yeah, that’s her son. I’m
trying to find him.”

“
We thought she was
lying.” He peered at the boy some more, puzzling out what was off
about the photo. “That boy’s white,” he said
indignantly.

“
Congratulations,
Sherlock. Now where is she?”

He shook his head. “She been gone for
two, three weeks now. Like I say, she run out of here one night all
freaked out.”

“
Start at the beginning,”
I ordered him. “And don’t leave anything out.” I nudged him with
the tip of my gun just to make sure he got my point. It wasn’t
loaded, but he didn’t know that.