“You guys ever try ‘Blast’?” I asked.
“No man, shit came and went fast. I heard it was fuckin’ crazy shit-like meth and acid and dust times ten all at once,” Chipper said. “I’m a down head. I ain’t lookin’ for no fuckin’ Ferris wheel ride,” Carlisle said.
We kicked around some small talk and I let them know how they could get a hold of me if they needed me. With guys like this you didn’t come on too strong about getting help, but I always wanted them to know where they could find me if they had to.
I thanked the guys, gave them a ten, and headed back to the Eldorado. On the way back to the Moody Blue, I threw in the On Stage eight-track and listened to Elvis do “Walk a Mile in My Shoes.” I was thinking about Howard’s shoes and how his whole life he’d been stepping in shit with those shoes, and probably how the one time he fought back against it in his life it was the biggest mistake he ever made. I also wondered why he wasn’t getting high in prison. I knew if I ever had to live that life I would have done anything and everything to alter my consciousness away from the reality.
It felt to me like the “Blast” overdoses had something to do with something, but that just might have been my mind’s way of making something fit. It could just as easily have been one of the many fucked-up events that had occurred during Howard’s thirty-year stint in our culture’s hellhole. Elvis had moved on to “Sweet Caroline” as I was pulling up to the Blue when I saw Billy chucking his throwing stars into my oak tree. He sprang to attention as I pulled in.
“Sir!” he said.
“Hey, Bill,” I said, returning his bow with just a slight nod.
“Sir-I am anxious to resume training, sir.”
“Yeah, well Billy, uh, I haven’t felt like going to the gym much.”
“Sir, I will train anywhere.”
“Okay, Billy, but I’ve been a little fucked up lately, so I’m not sure how good I’ll be as a teacher.”
“Sir?”
“Uh… it’s just… well… never mind.”
Billy looked at me with his eyes wide open and his head tilted. It’s the same look Al gives me when I take away a shoe he’s been chewing on. I figured it would be easier to just give Billy a half-hour workout than to try to explain it to him.
“All right, Billy. C’mere,” I said. He sprang up, ran over to me, came to attention, and bowed.
“WASABIIII!” Billy screamed, snapping his fist down into a ready position.
For the next half hour I worked him on throwing good punches and pretended it was a special karate technique when in reality it was fundamental boxing. I’m not entirely sure why, but I made him drill his recoil every time he threw a punch, and I did it so much I could tell that even Billy was getting bored with it. To me, it was like some sadomasochistic medieval mantra I was doing to punish myself because I had misplaced my hair suit. I kept with it though, like it was an infected itch that I should’ve stopped scratching a long time ago.
After I dismissed Billy, Al greeted me at the door with a jump toward the nuts that I was able to dodge. He did two 360s and then lay down on the floor and farted. I wasn’t sure how to take that as a greeting, but with the way things had been going I didn’t feel like interpreting it.
I hit the machine and there was a message from Marcia.
“Hi Duff, it’s me.” She sounded full of energy, which wasn’t like her at all. “I’ve been doing a lot of work with my therapist, and she says that I need to have some closure. So I wanted to let you know we won’t be getting back together. I just needed to say that.”
Well, I’m glad she’s making progress.
You know you’re getting to a fairly low point in your life when even the women you don’t really like much are breaking up with you. Actually, Marcia had already dumped me and this call was to make sure I really got it. If nothing else, therapy was teaching her to be thorough.
Something told me to turn on the TV, and when I did I wasn’t surprised to see that all the local stations were in special-report mode. There were shots of crime-scene tape, what looked like forensic teams, and guys in windbreakers that said “FBI” on the back. In the middle of the camera shot was a large gray bag, what I guessed was a body bag. The reporter was having a very official conversation with the anchors back in the studio.
“Liz, do the authorities have any idea of the whereabouts of Howard Rheinhart?” Lance Justin of Channel 10 asked his live, local, late-breaking correspondent.
“Lance, they do not, but I have an unconfirmed source that Rheinhart’s blood was found at the scene,” Liz Priest said.
“There have been suggestions that this murder was more gruesome than the others. Can you tell us anything about that?”
“Yes, Lance, though I’d like to warn our viewers that some of the details I’m about to share are quite disturbing. This victim, a still-unidentified teenage female, had several fingers removed and inserted in other parts of her body. There were also strange puncture wounds up and down her sides as if she was being drained of blood, Lance.”
They continued the banter back and forth, saying essentially the same things over and over. This was getting crazy weird, and to have it so close to me gave me a queasy feeling like I had woken up in an alternate universe.
I actually felt sick.
21
With the latest murder I had this feeling that I needed to pick up my pace and stop spinning my wheels. It seemed like every day I didn’t find Howard put some high-school kid at risk. This whole thing felt like a puzzle, and the only thing that seemed to make sense to me was to pick one of the pieces and start seeing where it might fit.
I’d never heard of this Blast and I’ve been working with street addicts for a long time. Sometimes drugs come and go but more often drugs get new names, or slightly different versions of them appear mixed with something new that alters the high. I met some guys once who combined Benadryl with some prescription narcotic, and they said it was their best high ever.
With not a whole lot clogging up my day planner, I dropped by Rudy’s office at the hospital. His office was buried back in the corner of the second floor, and it was filled with stack after stack of papers, textbooks, and interoffice envelopes. I walked in without knocking.
“Excuse me, Doctor, I have this hemorrhoid I’d like you to look at,” I said.
“Geez, you are a hemorrhoid,” Rudy said without looking up from his desk.
“What do you know about prison medicine?”
“What are you, making a documentary? Look, kid, I’m really freakin’ busy-why aren’t you at work?”
“There was an incident.”
“There always is with you-it didn’t have anything to do with my new tenant Sanchez, does it? I can’t believe you had me lie to social services.”
“No, it’s not that. Rheinhart was on my caseload and I’m trying to find out about what his prison time was like. A bunch of his tiermates OD’ed back then on something they called ‘Blast.’ You ever hear of it?” I asked.
“Yeah, as a matter of fact I have. A guy in my practice did some rounds at the prison during that period. It was a synthetic hallucinogenic with some narcotic characteristics. The high was supposed to be like a combination of acid, heroin, and crank,” Rudy said.
“Wow, now there’s a trip for ya. Where’d it come from?”
“That’s the thing, no one could ever figure it out. The other thing was that once it built up in the system it was very quickly fatal. Turns out that it metabolized into something very similar to strychnine. The inmates who died had only done it three or four times.”
“Could they’ve made it themselves?”
“Unlikely. This wasn’t a bathtub crank, it was more like graduate-chemistry shit. Some of it broke down with different half-lives and that prolonged the high while something else broke down more rapidly to accentuate something else. It was pretty complicated shit.”