Rob said he’d been watching all the good work she’d been doing since she sobered up, he was really very proud of her, working with Warren Chambers, good man, they were the ones cracked the case got Hope shot, weren’t they?
“Well, Morrie Bloom was on it, too,” Toots said, not wanting to take all the credit. “And, anyway, it was Matthew’s legwork led us in the right direction. It was almost as if he was supervising the case from his hospital bed.”
For some reason, Rob looked very attractive to her. Maybe it was because he’d lost ten, fifteen pounds and was down to what he called “fighting trim” or maybe it was because he’d been putting in a lot of time on his boat most weekends and had a great tan...
“You like boats?” he asked. “We could maybe go out on my boat one weekend, you like boats.”
“Yeah, I do,” she said, lying.
The way she felt about boats was that they looked terrific from the shore, but they weren’t particularly great to be on. Even so, the notion of going out on a boat with Rob one weekend was somewhat appealing, although she couldn’t have said quite why at that moment. Also, he was wearing his hair differently. Back when they were sitting that whorehouse together, he wore his brown hair in a very short crew cut that really made him look like a redneck cop, but now it was longer in back and hanging on his forehead in front, which gave him a sort of boyish look with those clear blue eyes of his, she had never noticed how startlingly blue his eyes were.
It didn’t occur to her that the reason Rob might have seemed so attractive to her on this day last May when she was feeling particularly vulnerable and alone was that in the early days of her getting to know cocaine Rob was the man who’d supplied her with the stuff. He was her source. He was the one who introduced her with a courtly bow to the white lady, and later — when the only thing that mattered in her life was scoring cocaine and snorting cocaine — he was the one who taught her how to go out and get it on her own, introduced her to men who would help her earn the money to pay for the stuff she so desperately needed, became her mentor and her guide, her savior and her salvation. It never occurred to her that in her mind Rob Higgins would forever be equated with snow or C or blow or toot or Peruvian lady or white girl or leaf or flake or happy dust or nose candy or freeze or any of the other darling little euphemistic pet names he’d taught her for a drug that could fry your brain whether you sniffed it up your nose or smoked it in a pipe. It never occurred to her that proximity to Rob meant proximity to the white powder that had dominated her life for more than two years. It never occurred to her that Rob would forever be equated with the soaring ecstasy she’d known when she was a user.
“So do you think you’d like to see the boat sometime?” he asked.
“Yeah, maybe,” she said.
She had worn to the hospital a short khaki-colored cotton dress with panels that tied in front to create a sarong look, and she could tell from the way he was looking at her that he liked the way it showed off her legs and her breasts. It never occurred to her that she might be in danger. It never occurred to her that Rob Higgins was cocaine.
Looking up at her as if the idea has just occurred to him, he said, “How about now?”
On the way over to the marina, he started talking about how many crack users they’d been busting lately right here in little old Calusa — “The fuckin thing’s an epidemic,” he said, “well, not only here, all over America.” That was because you didn’t have to snort crack the way you did cocaine powder, what you did was smoke it, which made it appealing to people, especially teenagers, who thought smoking was sophisticated and glamorous, anyway. But smoking it meant you got your high in ten seconds or less instead of the two minutes or so it took with the dust, because the drug went straight from the lungs to the brain.
“Although there are people who say it isn’t addictive because of the sodium bicarbonate they use when they’re processing the drug.”
“What’s the sodium bicarbonate got to do with it?”
“You’re asking me? It’s what makes the crackling sound when you smoke it. The sodium bicarbonate. That’s why it’s called crack.”
“Yeah, but what’s sodium bicarbonate got to do with whether or not it’s addictive.”
“They say it makes it nonaddictive,” Rob said.
“Who says?”
“Addicts,” Rob said, and laughed.
“That’s bullshit,” Toots said. “Crack is freebase cocaine, and cocaine’s addictive, period.”
“Well, not physically addictive.”
“No, not physically. But...”
“As well we both know,” he said.
“As well we both know,” she repeated, nodding in acknowledgment, smiling in appreciation of the fact that they’d both been there and back.
“You hear all kinds of crazy stories from these jerks doing crack,” Rob said. “We picked up this guy last Tuesday in a bust we made, he told us Sigmund Freud was a famous coke user, the shrink, you know?”
“Yeah?”
“Yeah. And that he’d written some kind of medical paper, Freud, about how coke cured indigestion and morphine addiction, and how it also helped cure asthma, and how it could be used to arouse sexual desire. Anyway, here we are,” he said.
He was all over her the minute they got on the boat.
His hands went up under the short cotton dress, and she felt him hard against her as he pulled her close, and she thought Hey, I thought you were going to show me your boat, but she did nothing to stop him, pressed tighter into him instead, tilting her groin into him, arms going up around his neck, lips responding when his mouth claimed hers. They half fell, half slid onto one of the berths up forward, in a narrow little space as tight as a cave, and he slid her panties down over her thighs and her ankles, and spread her wide to him, and she wondered how long it had been since anyone had touched her down there, sober and celibate went hand in hand. His hands on her buttocks now, lifting her to him, inside her now, clutching her tight against him, enclosing him, rising to meet him, Jesus.
He showed her the crack pipe while she was still lying naked on the bed. Stood before her naked himself, tanned everywhere but on his ass and his still faintly tumescent cock, poor baby. It took a moment for her eyes to move reluctantly to the glass pipe in his hands. Naked, he sat on the bed beside her.
“Want to see how it works?” he asked.
“I know how it works,” she said, meaning she didn’t want a demonstration, for Christ’s sake, they were both clean. But maybe he meant the principle of the thing, a demonstration of how it would work if somebody actually put crack in it, because she didn’t think he actually had any crack here on this nice boat where he’d just fucked her brains out. What she figured was the pipe was something he’d picked up busting a crack house someplace in New-town, little war souvenir, so to speak. She never expected him to open one of the lockers and lift out a little plastic Baggie full of plastic vials that really did look like the vials perfume samples came in. But there were rock crystals in these vials. There was crack in these vials.
“Where’d you get that?” she asked.
“You pick up things here and there. Let me show you.”
“Rob...” she started to say, but he said, “Biggest high you ever had, Toots,” and suddenly her heart was pounding fiercely, and suddenly she was wet again below, as if anticipating sex, when all she anticipated was cocaine.