Bad to the Bone (16 page)

“Did he snitch on his friend?” Moodrow asked, mildly curious.

“Of course,” José interrupted. “They all snitch. What does it matter? The cops say these particular ones got long records, so they’ll do a few years. I told the cops, ‘Big deal, there’s always ten more takin’ their place.’ I don’t understand why the cops don’t stop the dope and the crack.”

“Just wave their arms and make it all disappear?” Moodrow snorted. “Like when your mama kissed the booboo and made it better?”

“Okay, wise guy,” José said seriously, “but I remember twenty years ago, when the heroin was coming into the
barrio
. My cousins turned into
maricón
fucking junkies. So bad they beat up my grandmother for money to buy dope. I thought I was in hell, then, but if you’re in hell, that’s supposed to be the end of it. So tell me how it could be that hell got worse? And what kind of hell is comin’ next? I got a fourteen-year-old boy and I’m afraid to send him to the corner for a loaf of bread. How’s he gonna become a man when he’s fourteen and too scared to go into the street?”

“Look here, José.” Moodrow, unruffled, stirred his coffee. He’d been living with the failure of law enforcement for a long time. “What’d you call me a minute ago? ‘The old man’? I’m retired, remember? The only thing I’m responsible for is my rocking chair. Make me a container. Light and sweet.”

“Hey, Moodrow,” Armando called, walking over close to the register, “wanna go double or nothin’ for the coffee?” He turned his face from side to side. “How long since the
maricóns
beat me down?”

Moodrow gently pressed the swelling on Armando’s face, examining the bruises carefully. “Four days. Maybe four and a half the most,” he said without hesitation. “Not less than four.”

Armando began to laugh. “You’re still
muy hombre
, Moodrow. You’re still the big fat king cop of Loisaida. Today, I buy the coffee. Tomorrow, we clean up the drugs.”

D
EENY WASHINGTON HAD NEVER
been happier in his life. He was even happier than before that fateful day, twelve years ago, when the pigs stuffed his butt into an impossibly crowded Baker’s Island bull pen and he got so sick he
had
to admit that he was a miserable piece of shit of a black dope addict and would never be anything else.

Of course, the fact of it was that dope
made
you happy, even
if a
junkie’s life was hell on earth. Even if a heroin addict with infected arms (like
his
infected arms) could expect nothing more than a short life and a common grave dug by prisoners from Riker’s Island. Prisoners who were, most likely, junkies themselves.

Unless, maybe, some piece of heaven reached itself down to lift you up. Unless you somehow teamed up with a bitch like Marcy Evans and she fucked your wasted black ass into oblivion. Unless she gave you a place to stay and turned you on to the
baddest motherfuckin’ shit ever to find a home on the Lower East Side
. Unless she made
you
the
only sole source
for the baddest shit ever to find a home on the Lower East Side.

PURE, baby! The one, the only, the greatest dope in the whole of New Jack City. The Big Rock Candy Mountain come to feed Deeny Washington’s
personal
monkey.

When he thought about it (and he seemed to think about it every moment of his waking life), he kept concluding that it couldn’t be happening to him. There he was, prowling the streets, an inch from being too sick to function, when she’d stepped in front of him with her palm outstretched. He’d expected to find a quarter (or, better yet, a motherfuckin’
dime
), which would be the ultimate confirmation of his slide into subhumanity, but her fingers held several small vials of white powder and when he looked back up at her, she said, “Your fucking dreams, nigger. That’s what’s in here. Your fucking dreams.”

Of course, he was
supposed
to beat her down because she called him a nigger, but he was so sick that he let her drag him, like a dog on a leash, to a small apartment on Broome Street. The dope was like nothing he’d ever used. It took away the sickness, but it didn’t leave him nodding out on the floor. There was something else in it, like cocaine, but it didn’t make him want to use more ten minutes after he got off, either. It made him want to get in the bed with the little white bitch. It made him want to hump the living shit out of her, which is exactly what he did.

Or exactly what
she
did to
him
. He was never really sure, because she was as eager as any woman he’d had in his life. Even if she
did
make him take a shower before they got started. Even if she
did
wash him down with a soft, soapy washcloth. Even if she
did
clean him up like a housewife preparing a chicken for dinner and make him wear a condom
every
time they did it. (Which he couldn’t really bitch about since the last time he tried to give blood, they told him he had the virus and it was only a matter of time.)

Deeny Washington giggled as he strutted along Delancey Street. The white bitch had set him up as the
sole
source for the heaven called PURE and now he had some decent bank in his pocket, as well as dope in his veins. He also hadn’t been sick in weeks and his weight was back up to a hundred and sixty pounds. No more rags from the back of the soup kitchen either. Deeny’s big black ass was squeezed into designer jeans, his broad back caressed by a safari jacket from Banana Republic.

But none of those particular accomplishments protected him from the sickness that hovered above him like some black vulture in a cowboy movie and he began to pick up the pace a little. He hadn’t gotten off for more than six hours and he could feel the vulture dropping down from the sky, smelling the sickness as it itched and scratched beneath his skin.

Not that he couldn’t put up with it. Deeny remembered days when the vulture was
this
close and he didn’t have an unlimited supply of shit waiting for him a few blocks away. Days when
he prayed
for death. But that was all in the long ago, gone away past and
no
junkie ever lives in the past. If a junkie lived in the past, he’d remember the sickness and he wouldn’t go back to junk after weeks of getting clean in a jail cell. After weeks
of absolute
,
motherfuckin’ hell
. Deeny had picked up his monkey in Vietnam after he’d been wounded. The scars on his belly ran in every direction and the pain had been incredible, but, of course, he would go through
that
bullshit again and again before he’d face the sickness of being without dope.

Marcy was calling to him before he got the door open. “That you, Deeny?”

“Who were you expectin’?” He might as well play it a little bit bad, because he was sure as shit gonna melt when she held out the PURE.

“How’d it go, today?” She was standing next to the bed, wearing a Mickey Mouse T-shirt without a bra and red gym shorts over black panties that were no more than wishful thinking.

“Sold out, like every day.” Deeny’s cock began to rise, despite the impending sickness. “They beggin’ for PURE. They cryin’ for it. We got as many crack addicts as dope junkies now. I swear for a fact, Marcy, if you give me enough PURE, we are definitely gonna
own
the Lower East Side.”

She only grinned at him, tossing her blonde hair back over her head, pulling her small perfect features into a baby-pout. “Didn’t I ever tell you ‘Pleasure before business’?”

Then she was handing him a brand-new spike and he was sitting on the edge of the bed, wrapping a piece of rubber tubing around his bicep, slapping at a vein on the outside of his arm. There were no abscesses, now that he was using a new .22 gauge needle each time he got off, and he found a vein without any trouble at all.

The vulture drifted off even before he pushed down on the plunger, even while the blood boiled up into the transparent syringe. It wasn’t much of a hit, just enough to push the sickness a few hundred feet into the air. But there was plenty of PURE for later on and Marcy was already pulling the T-shirt over her head. Her shorts were already sliding down over her thighs. Her panties…

She took her time with him, keeping him on the edge, but not letting him get off. She did things to him that she hadn’t done before, not even bothering with a rubber, and Deeny thought her abandon was due to the way his tongue moved over her swollen flesh. Not that he really cared. His body was on fire and when he finally exploded, he screamed a scream loud enough to scare away the most determined vulture in the desert sky.

“One more time, Deeny. Then a big reward.” She turned completely around, putting herself astride his hips, then pushing him up into her. They were both pouring sweat when she leaned forward, laying her small dark nipples against his lips. He could feel her reaching up for her orgasm. Her whole body shook violently, then seemed to melt. He was coming, too, screaming again, though he was too lost even to hear his own voice.

She got off the bed as soon as she caught her breath, going into the bathroom, as usual, while Deeny lay back against the pillow. She would come out with a spike in her hand, a spike filled with enough PURE to keep him happy until the morning. Maybe he’d watch the Mets game if it was on TV. Order in some Chinese food…

“Here you go, baby.” She was standing by the bed, a loaded spike in her hand. Two months ago, he’d been a terminal heroin addict waiting for the first infections that signal the onset of full-blown AIDS. Now he had dollars in his pocket and the taste of a sweet, clean woman on his lips. It was a miracle. The kind Jesus gave to His believers. Not to some miserable junkie who hadn’t done a good deed since the day his grandmother kicked him out of the house.

“Thanks, Marcy.” Once again, he found a vein without having to probe. Then he closed his eyes, pushed the plunger home and was dead before he could take the needle out of his arm.

Marcy sighed and began to pack her few things. She was going to miss Deeny even though she had to admit that he couldn’t be left alive when they ended their test marketing. Deeny was so eager, so grateful for the changes in his life. But, then, she concluded, Deeny didn’t get such a bad deal, after all. A quick, unexpected death was an improvement on the future that awaited him before he was selected to implement the program.

Fully dressed, now, she zipped the small suitcase closed, then fished the house keys out of her pocket. “Bye-bye, Deeny,” she said, gathering the small cardboard box that held the still-running video camera, flicking off the lights, locking the door behind her. “Bye-bye.”

Wendell Bogard watched the video tape four times. He watched in wonder, all the while thinking how the tape was evidence (but not against
him
, of course) and how only a crazy white man would be crazy enough to keep it. Two crazy white people really. The bitch was crazier than Craddock. The both of ’em cold enough to keep souvenirs. Like cowboys notching their six-shooters after the big gunfight.

At first, Wendell had supposed that his new partner was dangerous crazy. Burning with the kind of fire that sizzled until the pigs dipped it in the sewer of American justice. Only the truth was the pigs were miles from Davis Craddock’s door. But not from his own. The pigs were steady scratchin’ at Wendell Bogard’s door.

Davis Craddock rose abruptly and stopped the VCR. “I guess that’s the final proof, right?” he said, turning from blood to business with a suddenness that made Wendell want to applaud. “You heat PURE to the boiling point, it’s gonna kill you. That’s what happened to Flo.”

“Flo’s not dead,” Marcy said. “Flo’s still alive.”

It was a game they played. Him sayin’ his old girlfriend was dead and the new girlfriend sayin’ she was alive. Thing about it was that the old girlfriend and the new girlfriend used to do each other. Lovers, more or less. Marcy Evans also loved to put PURE in her veins. Maybe she was wondering when she’d be dead, too. And if ol’ Davis C. would give a shit.

Craddock pressed the rewind button and the machine began to hum. “I have to admit it was a mystery, at first. I’m talking about when Flo died.”

“Flo isn’t dead.”

But Craddock was ignoring her, speaking directly to Wendell. Knowing Wendell would eat it up.

“Seems like the mystery got solved when you injected the mice,” Wendell observed mildly.

Craddock shook his head. “C’mon, Wendell. Where’s your scientific spirit? It’s up to men like us to keep the spirit of honest inquiry alive. Sure, we did boil up a batch of PURE and inject fifty times the normal dose for a human into fifty little white mice. Sure, all fifty twisted themselves into pretzels before their tiny brains exploded. But to the scientific fucking mind, that is not proof that PURE, when heated, kills humans. It doesn’t, for instance, prove that PURE killed Flo.”

“Flo isn’t dead.” Marcy Evans was lying back against the sheets, her small hard breasts pointing straight up. To Wendell, her nipples looked like an extra set of pale, pale eyes. One time, Wendell, dreaming of chocolate brown skin against blue-white flesh, had tried to bring his own woman, Jo-Dee, into their little circle, but Jo-Dee had freaked. Jo-Dee didn’t like white people very much.

Of course, Wendell didn’t like white people, either, but the craziness changed it for him. Jo-Dee couldn’t see that. “The white man likes to use us for sex,” she’d said. “Nigger might sometime get so close to the white man, he think the white man finally love him. But in the end, the white man gonna take his white pussy and his white money and leave a nigger to face the mob. Check it out.”

“So, what I had was a mystery,” Craddock continued. “And a number of questions. Like, why hadn’t PURE killed Marcy? She’d been using it for months without any ill effects. Why didn’t PURE kill
all
of Deeny Washington’s customers? Was the process of decay continuous or was it due to some external factor? If the process was continuous, all the PURE would eventually become a neurological poison and the formula would have to be discarded. But, if the process was due to external factors, maybe the factors could be avoided. And maybe PURE had nothing to do with Flo’s death. The fact that Marcy found Flo with the needle still in her arm is only circumstantial. It does not represent proof to the scientific mind.”