Chaingang

26

NEAR WHITETAIL POND

They drove back the long way around, so as not to have to get near the Waterworks Road area, or the more-traveled Cotton Avenue. Royce went down the county gravel to Farm-to-Market, and cut through Bill Wise's place to Market Road, driving all the way out past Slabtown on North Market. He was fighting serious seizures of fear. They'd written him off.

He tried a dozen times to begin telling Mary, who was visibly confused and frightened.

“Are you gonna talk to me?” she finally asked.

“Yeah,” he said, forcing a smile. “I'm gonna talk to you.” They passed a pizza joint and he slowed down. “You hungry?"

“No."

He pulled up and stopped in front of a small packaged goods store. “I'll be right back.” She didn't say anything. He went in and bought some chilled wine and snack foods. He had to have something in there to help soak up the acid that was threatening to eat its way through the lining of his stomach.

“Okay,” he said with a sigh, getting back in the vehicle and starting the motor, putting the sack behind the seat and pulling out onto the blacktop. “I'll start at the beginning. It's a long story."

“I've got lots of time, Royce,” she said. It was all he could do not to say, I hope so."

“You know what it's like here. Not exactly your cosmopolitan big city. Two Jews and one black guy, and they don't like to admit it. Nothing to do but get high and gossip. I hated this place then. Remember?” He meant when they broke up. She remembered only too well.

“There wasn't an ounce of sophistication or excitement here. You were the only thing good about it, and you wanted to be married so desperately, it was your entire focus. You were in love with the idea of settling down. It was like a—” he edited himself and didn't say the words bear trap “—thing I couldn't come to terms with. I thought we'd get stuck in the marriage, like so many others had, and we'd both come to hate each other.” He looked over. She was listening, without any expression.

“Right or wrong, that's the way I felt. But all the marriage talk had me ripe for a relationship exactly like the one we had. You made me want constancy, a stable thing with a sexy lady, all the trappings of marriage without the reality.” Without the trap. “And the next girl I met hit me between the eyes.

“She was just like me. It's funny now. Actually a laugh riot. I really thought this beautiful dope fiend had chosen me to fall for because I was such a stone hunk, see. I really fucking loved myself back then.” Mary laughed. “I was a goddamn fool.

“We got onto the fastest lane there is—really heavy into junk. Then she let me find out who she was. She was an undercover narc. I just couldn't handle it. I went deeper over the dope edge. That was when I was given my option. I could do hard time—they had me on ‘possession with intent,’ which carried a stiff mandatory rap, real serious time in the can—or I could help her make this case."

“The case turned out to be a caseload. And they kept pulling me deeper and deeper into the jam. I stayed with this—I stayed with her. That's what's so impossible to understand now. Why I didn't just do the time, I'll never be able to explain even to myself. I did end up doing more time inside my skull. They trapped me. Of course, they had a lot of help. The thing about undercover work is—you got all that nice junk right there at your fingertips. You're not much different than a plain junkie—your life is centered around scoring—it's just that narcs are also trying to bust their fellow junkies. Other than that, we were the same as any other doper."

Mary watched him as he talked about it. His hands were moving all the time: rubbing his eye, scratching his arm, touching his face, tapping time on the steering wheel. She read the fear in his body language, and it made her even more afraid.

“Eventually you get pulled into things you couldn't imagine doing before. Hell, I was straight compared to what I'd become when she got through getting me into the scene. It's amazing how easy it is to slide from doing a little social blow to having a big-time jones. Or to slide from a couple of hits at a party to doing eight balls or slamming or basing. You just slide in. That's the problem. Your head keeps telling you how great it is."

“But you knew right from wrong, Royce. How did you ever—” She cut herself off. “I just don't see how you could believe that drugs wouldn't take you down. You're not that stupid."

“I still don't say all drugs are bad for all people. Hash ... weed ... there are some things that some individuals can handle, and they get a nice high and that's it. It's like boozers—some people can drink some things. Moderation. That's the thing. But if you've got an addictive personality, you shouldn't be doing these things. Cocaine, that's another matter altogether. Nobody handles it. Everybody thinks they can. It's so insidious. It's ‘not addictive.’ Everybody and his brother is blowin’ snow. Suddenly you've got a second mortgage on the house and you're talking kilos, dealing, and you just keep sliding."

He told her all the details of the operation against the punk Happy Ruiz, how they were going to use his vulnerability to get a big trafficker, one of the top executives for the Colombian cartel. The details of the setup:

“I was perfect for it, since this was my turf. I was a homeboy. I was a known stoner. I would start using, become this punk's good customer. Then I do some small-change dealing, supposedly. Keep buying more coke, and finally—set up a deal where I could contract for serious weight, getting our boy into as much of a bind as possible. Time it to coincide with a big shipment so they'd be anxious to move a large amount, play to their greed; only, when the punk set it up, I'd vanish into the woodwork. He'd have to use his emergency line of communication to contact the boss man."

He explained about the phone scam and how ELINT, the phonemen, could nail the otherwise invulnerable dope trafficker by the local pusher initiating an emergency contact. Everybody would fall, and Royce Hawthorne would be cut loose in the bargain.

They reached Whitetail and got out and went in the Perkins cabin. Royce built a big fire in the stone fireplace and they sat in front of it, sipping cheap wine and munching cheese.

“For whatever reason, they've decided to let me twist slowly in the wind. The thing about that is—you're in trouble, too. You're with me, and they know you're the one I—cared about. That we've been seen together a lot since Sam's been gone. They'll try to hurt you, too. I was an imbecile and a jerk to get you involved. I just didn't think.

“Now—I call ‘em at the regional office with a tip on the biggest drug lab in the history of the Western world and they like blow me off!"

“What do you mean?"

“They're not about to do anything. The head guy just goes—oh, yeah, that's very interesting. Three hundred acres of—uh-huh. Armed guards and dogs. Yeah. Okay. Cool. We'll get right on that."

“Maybe that's just his way."

“You don't get it. Look: If you're mounting a big-scale, expensive operation against an underground lab, you've got to coordinate your Clandestine Laboratory Enforcement Team; it's a major-league-type SWAT operation. You've got what they call a ‘hammer'; a HAMR is a Hazardous Materials Response, and it involves special vehicles, personnel, weapons, tactics. You don't just say, ‘Oh, yeah—what's that address again? Twenty-fourth and Plowed Ground? Okay—we'll see you next Tuesday. Take care.’ It doesn't work that way.” He took a large gulp of wine.

“What does all this mean?"

“It means that for whatever reason, they've written me off. And that means you're in great danger. Happy and his biker goons are still running around loose. For all I know, this so-called serial killer they keep talking about is part of this whole mess. I have nobody I can go to. The FBI doesn't appear to give a shit. It's as if this were a U.S. government operation of some kind. It's got like a security umbrella over it—almost as if a the bad guys had diplomatic immunity."

What he didn't say would have just frightened Mary more, and for no point. He rubbed his ankle where the sheath knife was itching. He didn't even have any weapons to protect them with. His shotgun was in the pawnshop, and didn't work too well to begin with. He'd had a Saturday night special he'd sold to buy coke one night. She had no idea what a bodyguard he was. He looked up at the fireplace, noticing the pegs in the stone, as if an old musket might have hung there once. Even it was gone.

“Did you have a gun up there once?” He hoped it was still around.

“Yeah,” she said, “it was broken—didn't shoot.” Her mind was on other things. She was thinking about that money he'd borrowed. About what Marty Kerns had told her. “Something was broken off it. It was an old antique. It'd been Sam's grandfather's. I think he decided it would get ripped off and he put it in our cold storage box. I haven't seen it for a long time.

“I want to ask you something. When you borrowed that five thousand dollars ... it was for cocaine, wasn't it?"

“It was for gambling. I was supposed to scurry about and act like a junkie dealer would act. Trying to get his investment money together. It was all planned. But I had to make it look real. You were convenient, and I knew there was no risk—I wasn't going to lose."

“How did you know that?"

“There was a dealer at this place—The Rockhouse—where all the stoners hung. This one dealer, she was one of us. She'd been put in place just to make sure I'd win my seed money."

“So I was just a—somebody to be used, to you."

“You have to understand, babe, when you think like that all the time, it becomes an unshakable habit. I'm a user. It's my nature. Did you ever see that movie with Charlie Chaplin—Modern Times? Remember the scene in the factory where Chaplin is caught between the gears? That's the way it is—the way it was—for me. You reach out for whoever or whatever is at hand, you know?"

“Yeah.” She knew.