“You look fine,” he said.
“So let me go upstairs, okay?”
He looked at her closely.
She didn’t seem any the worse for wear, considering she hadn’t had a hit since sometime Thursday. He didn’t know whether she’d beamed up at a crack house someplace before coming home with her new stash, the ten jumbo vials he’d found in her handbag, four big juicy rocks in each vial. But that would’ve made it late Thursday night, say ten, eleven o’clock, and this was now a little past three on Saturday afternoon, which made it — what? Forty hours or so since she’d been off the pipe? Eight hours to go for two full days, yet she wasn’t showing any of the signs he’d expected. Either she was a damn good actress or she was really telling the...
No, he thought, don’t fall for that shit.
She is Tootsie Pipehead, and I am the Man.
“Please, Warren,” she said. “Just for a few minutes. Smell a little fresh air.”
“Just for a few minutes,” he said.
Two reasons she wanted to go up on deck.
First was to keep on working him, make him believe she was sane and sound, just a dear old friend wanting a breath of fresh air, look at me, do I look like a person craving cocaine, for Christ’s sake? I am little Miss Goody Two-Shoes, and all I want is to go back to the Land of the Free and the Home of the Brave. One thing she didn’t want was to show him what she was really feeling this very fucking minute. Because if she could convince him she was really straight, that this was all some kind of bizarre mistake, why then she could get him to turn this fucking tub around and take her back to Crack City. If she could keep him thinking she was just the Nice Little Girl Next Door, breathing in all this clean fresh healthy air ten thousand miles from shore, here in the middle of fucking nowhere, keep him from knowing how much she was missing the shit right now, keep him from knowing how everything inside her was screaming for a hit right now, couldn’t sleep for dreaming of crack, couldn’t stop thinking of crack every minute she was awake, if she could only keep him from knowing what she was thinking and feeling here at the railing of the boat as she looked out at a clear blue afternoon sky over inky-blue water, trying to appear calm and cool and dignified though her skirt and her blouse were wrinkled and her mind was screaming crack.
Ten seconds was all it took.
Two glass stems stuck in the glass bowl of the pipe. You drop the crack pellet in the larger stem and heat the frog with a butane torch till it melts down to a cooked brown ooze. “You suck on the shorter stem like you’re pulling a lover’s tongue into your mouth, kissing that sweet mother crack, fine white cloud swirling up in the bowl of the pipe, swirling, sweet suicide flying to your brain in ten seconds flat, man, you got a piece of the mountain, man, you are beaming up, man, Scottie got the rock, man, you are in explosion mode!
And oh that first sweet flash, oh that incomparable rush, puffing at the mother lode, sucking on the source, warp speed now, oh how good, oh how fucking ec-static, oh come fuck me, crack, come be my lover, come be my man, come make me laugh out loud, come make me strong and powerful, come make me happy, happy, happy, make me come, make me giggly happy, crazy happy, I am so alive, so fucking married to this delicious fucking Rock of Gibraltar!
God, how she wanted it.
Now!
Right this fucking minute.
But no, just be Shirley Temple here at the boat’s rail, blond hair blowing in the wind, she once blew a Japanese man for the twenty dollars she needed for the rocks. He kept telling her he liked “bronze,” she thought he meant the metal, realized he was talking about girls with yellow hair, the things she’d done for crack, the twists she’d worked for crack. She’d blow a thousand fucking Japs right this minute if somebody would only return her pipe and the rocks she’d bought last Thursday night, a hundred and fifty bucks’ worth of the shit, he hadn’t thrown it overboard, had he? Only a crazy person would do that, he wasn’t a crazy person.
So first, let him think everything’s hunky-dory sweetie, here’s Peggy Sue Got Married, sniffing in the good salt air, not a thought of any controlled substance on her mind, oh dear no, cocaine, what is that? Crack, what is that? I never heard of such things, sir, I am just a little farm girl from the heartland of America, far from the shore, adrift on a sea of little-girl happiness, sniffing in the good clean ocean air. Me a druggie? Oh dear no. Me a crackhead? What does that mean, sir, crackhead?
Let him think I’m clean and sober, let him think he’s made a mistake, it was just somebody trying to set me up, frame me, putting evil substances in my trash basket and my purse, trying to make people think I’m using again when I wouldn’t even know where to go to score.
And then find where he stashed the rocks he took from my bag Thursday night.
Stuff had to be somewhere aboard this tub, he couldn’t have thrown it overboard, could he?
You son of a bitch, she thought, tell me you didn’t throw it overboard.
She was sure he’d kept it. Because some well-meaning jackasses, you know, they didn’t realize how desperate you could get when you were forced to kick it cold turkey. So they kept some of the stuff around thinking they could give you just a little bit of it if you started acting crazy, just a teensy-weensy little bit to take the edge off if you started bugging. Just till you straightened out a bit, you know? And then let you go without anything for a slightly longer time this time, before they gave you another hit of the pipe, acting as a sort offender, loving counselor, you know, helping you through this terrible ordeal of what was known in the trade as Drug Withdrawal, never once realizing that cold turkey is cold turkey, man, and cocaine plays no fucking part in rehabilitation.
But he’d been a cop once, he knew better than to try weaning a crack addict from the pipe, he’d worked sections in St. Louis could curl the hair on a dachshund. So why would he have kept any of it? Coast Guard out here stops the boat, finds ten jumbos and a pipe, there goes Warren Chambers and the cute little blonde he’s got handcuffed to the wall. Nice story, Sambo, you’re helping the cunt kick it cold turkey, then what are you doing with this shit, can you tell us that? No way he would’ve kept it.
But just in case...
Just on the off chance he had a soft heart for someone so severely afflicted, addicted, yearning for the rock, aching for the rock, dying for the rock, then maybe there was one chance in a hundred million that he had kept some of the stuff to ease her pain when push came to shove, and maybe, if only she could convince him to give her free rein of the boat...
Shit, she wasn’t going to jump over the side.
Or hit him on the head.
Or do anything else foolish.
So if only she could sort of roam around, you know, loose, you know, instead of chained to the wall, the fucking bulkhead, then maybe she could find the stuff and...