The Cocaine Chronicles (3 page)
“Yes?” the Martinez brothers asked together. They always used the speakerphone. They were too afraid of each other’s betrayal to allow private calls.
“This is Octavian,” I said. “I’m through here. I got the money back and I took care of the guy.”
“Already?”
“I got lucky,” I said. “It fell in my lap.”
“What about the ten keys?”
“In the wind,” I said. “Long gone.”
Jim Burger
LAURA LIPPMAN
is a Baltimore writer best known for her series about Baltimore-based P.I. Tess Monaghan. She also has written two stand-alone novels,
Every Secret Thing
and
To
the Power of Three.
A
Baltimore Sun
reporter for twelve years, she also has written for the
New York Times
, the
Washington Post,
and
Slate.com
. Her work has won virtually all the major prizes given to U.S. crime writers, including the Edgar, Anthony, Agatha, Shamus, and Nero Wolfe.
(or: how to lose a lot of weight and
change your life in just one weekend)
by laura lippman
I
had just broken up with Brandon and Molly had just broken up with Keith, so we needed new dresses to go to this party where we knew they were going to be. But before we could buy the dresses, we needed to lose weight because we had to look fabulous, kiss-my-ass-fuck-you fabulous. Kiss-my-ass-fuck-you-and-your-dick-is-really-tiny fabulous. Because, after all, Brandon and Keith were going to be at this party, and if we couldn’t get new boyfriends in less than eight days, we could at least go down a dress size and look so good that Brandon and Keith and everybody else in the immediate vicinity would wonder how they ever let us go. I mean, yes, technically,
they
broke up with
us
, but we had been thinking about it, weighing the pros and cons. (Pro: They spent money on us. Con: They were childish. Pro: We had them. Con: Tiny dicks, see above.) See, we were being methodical and they were just all impulsive, the way guys are. That would be another con—poor impulse control. Me, I never do anything without thinking it through very carefully. Anyway, I’m not sure what went down with Molly and Keith, but Brandon said if he wanted to be nagged all the time, he’d move back in with his mother, and I said, “Well, given that she still does your laundry and makes you food, it’s not as if you really moved out,” and that was that. No big loss.
Still, we had to look so great that other guys would be punching our exes in the arms and saying, “What, are you crazy?” Everything is about spin, even dating. It’s always better to be the dumper instead of the dumpee, and if you have to be the loser, then you need to find a way to be superior. And that was going to take about seven pounds for me, as many as ten for Molly, who doesn’t have my discipline and had been doing some serious break-up eating for the past three weeks. She went face down in the Ding Dongs, danced with the Devil Dogs, became a Ho Ho ho. As for myself, I’m a salty girl, and I admit I had the Pringles Light can upended in my mouth for a couple of days.
So anyway, Molly said Atkins and I said not fast enough, and then I said a fast-fast and Molly said she saw little lights in front of her eyes the last time she tried to go no food, and she said cabbage soup and I said it gives me gas, and then she said pills and I said all the doctors we knew were too tight with their ’scrips, even her dentist boss since she stopped blowing him. Finally, Molly had a good idea and said: “Cocaine!”
This merited consideration. Molly and I had never done more than a little recreational coke, always provided by boyfriends who were trying to impress us, but even my short-term experience indicated it would probably do the trick. The tiniest bit revved you up for hours and you raced around and around, and it wasn’t that you weren’t hungry, more like you had never even heard of food; it was just some quaint custom from the olden days, like square dancing.
“Okay,” I said. “Only, where do we get it?” After all, we’re girls,
girly
girls. I had been drinking and smoking pot since I was sixteen, but I certainly didn’t buy it. That’s what boyfriends were for. Pro: Brandon bought my drinks, and if you don’t have to lay out cash for alcohol, you can buy a lot more shoes.
Molly thought hard, and Molly thinking was like a fat guy running—there was a lot of visible effort.
“Well, like, the city.”
“On, like, a corner.”
“Right, Molly. I watch HBO, too. But I mean, what corner? It’s not like they list them in that crap Weekender Guide in the paper—movies, music, clubs, where to buy drugs.”
So Molly asked a guy who asked a guy who talked to a guy, and it turned out there was a place just inside the city line, not too far from the interstate. Easy on, easy off, then easy off again. Get it? After a quick consultation on what to wear—jeans and T-shirts and sandals, although I changed into running shoes after I saw the condition of my pedicure—we were off. Very hush-hush because, as I explained to Molly, that was part of the adventure. I phoned my mom and said I was going for a run. Molly told her mom she was going into the city to shop for a dress.
The friend of Molly’s friend’s friend had given us directions to what turned out to be an apartment complex, which was kind of disappointing. I mean, we were expecting row houses, slumping picturesquely next to each other, but this was just a dirtier, more run-down version of where we lived—little clusters of two-story town houses built around an interior courtyard. We drove around and around and around, trying to seem very savvy and willing, and it looked like any apartment complex on a hot July afternoon. Finally, on our third turn around the complex, a guy ambled over to the car.
“What you want?”
“What you got?” I asked, which I thought was pretty good. I mean, I sounded casual but kind of hip, and if he turned out to be a cop, I hadn’t implicated myself. See,
I
was always thinking, unlike some people I could name.
“Got American Idol and Survivor. The first one will make you sing so pretty that Simon will be speechless. The second one will make you feel as if you’ve got immunity for life.”
“O-
kay
.” Molly reached over me with a fistful of bills, but the guy backed away from the car.
“Pay the guy up there. Then someone will bring you your package.”
“Shouldn’t you give us the, um, stuff first and then get paid?”
The guy gave Molly the kind of look that a schoolteacher gives you when you say something exceptionally stupid. We drove up to the next guy, gave him forty dollars, then drove to a spot he pointed out to wait.
“It’s like McDonald’s!” Molly said. “Drive-through!”
“Shit, don’t say McDonald’s. I haven’t eaten all day. I would kill for a Big Mac.”
“Have you ever had the Big N’ Tasty? It totally rocks.”
“What is it?”
“It’s a cheeseburger, but with, like, a special sauce.”
“Like a Big Mac.”
“Only the sauce is different.”
“I liked the fries better when they made them in beef fat.”
A third boy—it’s okay to say boy, because he was, like, thirteen, so I’m not being racist or anything—handed us a package, and we drove away. But Molly immediately pulled into a convenience store parking lot. It wasn’t a real convenience store, though, not a 7-Eleven or a Royal Farm.
“What are you doing?”
“Pre-diet binge,” Molly said. “If I’m not going to eat for the next week, I want to enjoy myself now.”
I had planned to be pure starting that morning, but it sounded like a good idea. I did a little math. An ounce of Pringles has, like, 120 calories, so I could eat an entire can and not gain even half a pound, and a half pound doesn’t even register on a scale, so it wouldn’t count. Molly bought a pound of Peanut M&Ms, and let me tell you, the girl was not overachieving. I’d seen her eat that much on many an occasion. Molly has big appetites. We had a picnic right there in the parking lot, washing down our food with diet cream soda. Then Molly began to open our “package.”
“Not here!” I warned her, looking around.
“What if it’s no good? What if they cut it with, like, something, so it’s weak?”
Molly was beginning to piss me off a little, but maybe it was just all the salt, which was making my fingers swell and my head pound a little. “How are you going to know if it’s any good?”
“You put it on your gums.” She opened the package. It didn’t look quite right. It was more off-white than I remembered, not as finely cut. But Molly dove right in, licking her finger, sticking it in, and then spreading it around her gum line.
“Shit,” she said. “I don’t feel a thing.”
“Well, you don’t feel it right away.”
“No, they, like, totally robbed us. It’s bullshit. I’m going back.”
“Molly, I don’t think they do exchanges. It’s not like Nordstrom, where you can con them into taking the shoes back even after you wore them once. You stuck your wet finger in it.”
“We were ripped off. They think just because we’re white suburban girls they can sell us this weak-ass shit.” She was beginning to sound more and more like someone on HBO, although I’d have to say the effect was closer to
Ali G
than
Sopranos
. “I’m going to demand a refund.”
This was my first inkling that things might go a little wrong.
So Molly went storming back to the parking lot and found our guy, and she began bitching and moaning, but he didn’t seem that upset. He seemed kind of, I don’t know, amused by her. He let her rant and rave, just nodding his head, and when she finally ran out of steam, he said, “Honey, darling, you bought heroin. Not cocaine. That’s why you didn’t get a jolt. It’s not supposed to jolt you. It’s supposed to slow you down, not that it seems to be doing that, either.”
Molly had worked up so much outrage that she still saw herself as the wronged party. “Well, how was I supposed to know that?”
“Because we sell cocaine by vial color. Red tops, blue tops, yellow tops. I just had you girls figured for heroin girls. You looked like you knew your way around, got tired of OxyContin, wanted the real thing.”
Molly preened a little, as if she had been complimented. It’s interesting about Molly. Objectively, I’m prettier, but she has always done better with guys. I think it’s because she has this kind of sexy vibe, by which I mean she manages to communicate that she’ll pretty much do anyone.
“Two pretty girls like you, just this once, I’ll make an exception. You go hand that package back to my man Gordy, and he’ll give you some nice blue tops.”
We did, and he did, but this time Molly made a big show of driving only a few feet away and inspecting our purchase, holding the blue-capped vial up to the light.
“It’s, like, rock candy.”
It did look like a piece of rock candy, which made me think of the divinity my grandmother used to make, which made me think of all the other treats from childhood that I couldn’t imagine eating now—Pixy Stix and Now and Laters and Mary Janes and Dots and Black Crows and Necco Wafers and those pastel buttons that came on sheets of wax paper. Chocolate never did it for me, but I loved sugary treats when I was young.
And now Molly was out of the car and on her feet, steaming toward our guy, who looked around, very nervous, as if this five-foot-five, size-ten dental hygienist—size-eight when she’s being good—could do some serious damage. And I wanted to say, “Dude, don’t worry! All she can do is scrape your gums until they bleed.” (I go to Molly’s dentist and Molly cleans my teeth, and she is seriously rough. I think she gets a little kick out of it, truthfully.)
“What the fuck is this?” she yelled, getting all gangster on his ass—I think I’m saying that right—holding the vial up to the guy’s face, while he looked around nervously. Finally, he grabbed her wrist and said: “Look, just shut up or you’re going to bring some serious trouble to bear. You smoke it. I’ll show you how…Don’t you know anything? Trust me, you’ll like it.”
Molly motioned to me and I got out of the car, although a little reluctantly. It was, like, you know, that scene in
Star Wars
where the little red eyes are watching from the caves and suddenly those weird sand people just up and attack. I’m not being racist, just saying we were outsiders and I definitely had a feeling all sorts of eyes were on us, taking note.
“We’ll go to my place,” the guy said, all super suave, like he was some international man of mystery inviting us to see his etchings.
“A shooting gallery?” Molly squealed, all excited. “Ohmigod!”
He seemed a little offended. “I don’t let dope fiends in my house.”
He led us to one of the town houses, and I don’t know what I expected, but certainly not some place with doilies and old overstuffed furniture and pictures of Jesus and some black guy on the wall. (Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr., I figured out later, but I was really distracted at the time, and thought it was the guy’s dad or something.) But the most surprising thing was this little old lady sitting in the middle of the sofa, hands folded in her lap. She had a short, all-white Afro, and wore a pink T-shirt and flowery ski pants, which bagged on her stick-thin legs. Ski pants. I hadn’t seen them in, like, forever.
“Antone?” she said. “Did you come to fix my lunch?”
“In a minute, Grandma. I have guests.”
“Are they nice people, Antone?”
“Very nice people,” he said, winking at us, and it was only then that I realized the old lady was blind. You see, her eyes weren’t milky or odd in any way, they were brown and clear, as if she was staring right at us. You had to look closely to realize that she couldn’t really see, that the gaze, steady as it was, didn’t focus on anything.
Antone went to the kitchen, an alcove off the dining room, and fixed a tray with a sandwich, some potato chips, a glass of soda, and an array of medications. How could you not like a guy like that? So sweet, with broad shoulders and close-cropped hair like his granny’s, only dark. Then, very quietly, with another wink, he showed us how to smoke.
“Antone, are you smoking in here? You know I don’t approve of tobacco.”
“Just clove cigarettes, Grandma. Clove never hurt anybody.”
He helped each of us with the pipe, getting closer than was strictly necessary. He smelled like clove, like clove and ginger and cinnamon. Antone the spice cookie. When he took the pipe from Molly’s mouth, he replaced it with his lips. I didn’t really want him to kiss me, but I’m so much prettier than Molly. Not to mention thinner. But then, I hear black guys like girls with big behinds, and Molly certainly qualified. You could put a can of beer on her ass and have her walk around the room and it wouldn’t fall off. Not being catty, just telling the literal truth. I did it once, at a party, when I was bored, and then Molly swished around with a can of Bud Light on her ass, showing off, like she was proud to have so much baggage.
Weird, but I was hungrier than ever after smoking, which was so not the point. I mean, I wasn’t hungry in my stomach, I was hungry in my mouth. And what I wanted, more than anything in the world, were those potato chips on the blind lady’s tray. They were Utz Salt ’n Vinegar; I had seen Antone take them out of the green-and-yellow bag. I loooooooooooooooooooooooooooooove Utz Salt ’n Vinegar, but they don’t come in a light version, so I almost never let myself have any. So I snagged one, just one, quiet as a cat. But, like they say, you can’t eat just one. Okay, so they say that about Lays, but it’s even more true about Utz, in my personal opinion. I kept stealing them, one at a time.