Gladly the Cross-Eyed Bear

4

“Aside from Etta Toland’s,” I said, “do you recognize any of the other names on that list?”

We were sitting in the garden behind Lainie’s house. It was ten o’clock on Saturday morning, and I had just handed her the witness list that Pete Folger had hand-delivered to my office at nine. I had not slept well the night before. Neither had Patricia. Folger was all smiles when he suggested that I ask my client to plead to Murder Two and thirty years, rather than risking the electric chair on the Murder One indictment. He wanted to move this along fast, he said. I wondered why.

Lainie wasn’t wearing glasses this morning.

Her hair sleep-tousled, no makeup on her face, wearing a red and black, floral-print, knee-length kimono sashed at the waist, she sat sipping black coffee under the shade of a pepper tree, squinting at the document I’d just handed her. She was wearing the heart-shaped ring on her pinky; I wondered if she slept with it on. Her legs were crossed. A short baby-doll nightgown in the same floral print showed where the kimono ended high on her thigh. She kept jiggling her foot.

“I don’t know any of these people,” she said. “Who are these people?”

“The witnesses who testified to the grand jury.”

“What’d they say?”

“Well, we don’t know yet. Enough to get an indictment, that’s for sure.”

“Does he have other witnesses, too?”

“If not now, then he certainly will by the time we go to trial. But he’ll supply their names when I make demand for discovery.”

“When will that be?”

“Within two to three months.”

“When will you talk to the people on this list?”

“I’ll start making phone calls today. If I’m lucky, I can begin seeing them on Monday.”

“To take depositions?”

“No. Just informally. If they’re willing to talk to me. Otherwise, yes, I’ll have to subpoena them and question them under oath. You see...”

Lainie glanced up from the typewritten list. A spot of sunlight escaped the snare of leaves above her head, shifted uncertainly in her golden hair. She looked at me expectantly. The wandering eye gave her the forlorn appearance of an abandoned child.

“You see, Folger’s still hoping we’ll plead.”

“Why would we?”

“He’s hoping that after I talk to these people, whoever they are...”

“Well, who are they, that’s what I’d like to know, too.”

“I have no idea. But he’s hoping we’ll recognize the strength of his case and accept his offer.”

“Second-degree murder.”

“Yes. Second degree means without any premeditated design.”

“I just shot Brett on the spur of the moment, right?”

“Well, yes. For second-degree murder, that’s what it would have to be.”

“Heat of passion, right?”

“Well, no. That’s a term used in the section on excusable homicide. That wouldn’t apply here.”

“Especially since I didn’t kill him.”

“I know that.”

“So why would I settle for thirty years in jail?”

“Well, not to exceed thirty.”

“For something I didn’t do.”

“I’m not recommending it.”

“More coffee?” she asked.

“Please.”

She leaned over to pour. I watched her.

“Was your girlfriend angry?”

“What?” I said.

“Last night. She seemed angry.”

“Well... no. Angry about what?”

“You and I talking together,” she said, and shrugged. The kimono slid slightly off her shoulder, revealing the narrow strap of her nightgown. She adjusted it at once, put down the coffeepot, and looked across the table at me. “Was she?” she asked. “Angry?”

“No.”

“Someone told me she’s a state attorney.”

“That’s right. A very good one.”

“Do you talk to her about me?”

“Absolutely not.”

“I hope not. Milk?”

“Please.”

She poured. I kept watching her.

“Sugar?”

“One.”

She slid the bowl across the table to me.

“Why was she angry?”

“It had nothing to do with you.”

“Then who?”

“I’d rather not discuss it.”

“Then she was angry, right?”

“As I said...”

“You’d rather not discuss it.”

“Right.”

She was jiggling her foot again. Smiling. Jiggling the foot.

“I’d hate to go to the electric chair, you see. Just because...”

“Well, I’ll try to make sure...”

“Just because my attorney’s sleeping with someone,” she said, overriding my voice. “Giving away my secrets to some woman in bed,” she said. Single eyebrow raised over the crooked right eye. Faint smile still on her mouth.

“I don’t know any of your secrets,” I said.

“If you knew them,” she said.

“I don’t care to know them.”

“But you are sleeping with her.”

“Lainie...”

“Aren’t you?”

“Lainie, if my personal relationship with Patricia Demming intrudes in any way upon my performance as your attorney, I’ll immediately withdraw from the case.”

“Your performance as my attorney,” she repeated.

Still smiling.

“Yes. In fact, if you think I’m not representing you properly...”

“But I think you are,” she said.

“Good. I’m happy to hear that.”

“Besides,” she said, “anything between us is privileged, isn’t that right?”

“Yes,” I said.

What secrets? I wondered.

“Isn’t it?”

“Yes,” I said.

The security guard’s name was Bartholomew Harrod.

If a jury had been present, anything old Bart said would have been instantly and automatically believed. That’s because anyone named after one of the Twelve Apostles could not possibly be lying. Well, Judas Iscariot, maybe. Nowadays, there are women on juries, but back when you and I were young, Maggie, a jury consisted of men only. Put on that jury an Andrew, Bartholomew, James (two of them, no less), John, Thaddeus, Matthias, Philip, Peter, Simon, Thomas, or — well yes, he said modestly — even Matthew, and what you had, folks, was a jury of “twelve good men and true.” Not to mention Paul, who said he’d seen Christ after the resurrection, and was therefore elevated to Apostlehood and later to sainthood.

There was no jury listening to what Bartholomew Harrod was saying at two o’clock on what was still a bright sunny Saturday, the sixteenth day of September. Sitting outdoors around a circular coffee table with a plastic top and wrought-iron legs painted green were Harrod, and me, and Andrew Holmes, the man in my office who would most likely be trying the Commins case if I myself declined that singular ordeal. That made three good men and true, but who was counting Apostles’ names?

I had called Harrod immediately after leaving Lainie’s house. I’d told him I was defending Ms. Commins and had been offered his name by the state attorney, Peter Folger, whom I was sure he knew and who had suggested that I might want to talk to him as soon as possible. I told Harrod that if he agreed to come to my office, or to meet with me wherever he preferred, we could talk informally about what he’d said to the grand jury, and this might save the trouble of my having to cross-examine him later, a blatant lie, but one that sometimes swayed a reluctant witness.

What worked best, however, was the “America the Beautiful” approach, which basically sketched in the premise that everyone in the United States was entitled to a fair trial. In the interests of justice, then — which certainly Mr. Harrod would want for himself if ever, God forbid, he found himself in a similar situation — in the interests of freedom and justice for all, then, I felt certain he would want the defense to know how the grand jury had arrived at its finding, toward which end a knowledge of his testimony would be enormously helpful, in the spirit of justice and fairness.

I told him that he wouldn’t be under oath while we talked, it would all be very informal, although I would appreciate being able to record what he said, just for reference later on. This was another lie, though a smaller one, but neither was anyone under oath while we were talking on the phone. I needed the recording for backup in case we asked him, on the stand and under oath, to repeat anything he might say in our informal discussion. That was why I’d asked Andrew Holmes, no relation, the new partner in the firm of Summerville and Hope, to join me when I spoke to Harrod.

I would have preferred sending either of my two investigators, Warren Chambers or Toots Kiley, to interview and record Harrod. But calls to Warren’s office and home garnered identical messages saying he’d be out of town for the next week or so, and Toots’s machine said only that she was “away from the phone just now” and asked that a message be left at the beep. Which meant that I could not send them independently to do the donkey work and then later testify to the authenticity and genesis of the tape. Which further meant I needed a witness to the taping.

“You may well ask why.

Because if I myself tried Lainie’s case and called the Apostle Bartholomew to the stand and started questioning him about what he’d said on the tape, he might very well answer, “I never said that.” In which case, I would play the tape to refresh his memory. But suppose he then said, “That’s not my voice on that there tape” — who would be able to testify to the contrary? Under the Disciplinary Rules — what we refer to in the trade as DR 5-101 — an advocate cannot be called as a witness. So Folger would need no prompting to ask, as the Constable of France had once asked a lowly messenger, “Who hath measured the ground?”

Hence the presence of Andrew Holmes.

Whichever one of us ended up actually trying the case, the other could be called as a witness to the whys, whens, hows and wherefores of the taping.

The tape recorder sat in the center of the coffee table.

The three of us sat around the table in uncomfortable director’s chairs with faded green canvas backs and seats. We were in the backyard, such as it was, of Harrod’s mobile home in a park thronged with similar homes just off Timucuan Point Road.

In the state of Florida, people who own so-called mobile homes pay no state, city, county, or school taxes. All they have to do is buy a license under Article VII — titled “Finance and Taxation” — of the Constitution of the State of Florida, wherein “Motor vehicles, boats, airplanes, trailers, trailer coaches and mobile homes, as defined by law, shall be subject to a license tax for their operation in the amounts and for the purposes prescribed by law, but shall not be subject to ad valorem taxes.”

The license, under Chapter 320.08 of the Motor Vehicle Licenses section, costs twenty dollars flat for a mobile home not exceeding thirty-five feet in length, twenty-five dollars flat for a mobile home over thirty-five feet in length but not exceeding forty feet, and escalating on up to fifty dollars flat for a mobile home over sixty-five feet in length. Even if the tires have been removed from the vehicles, even if the vehicles are sitting on concrete pads, even if water and electricity have been connected to the vehicles, they are still considered “mobile” homes so long as they are not “permanently affixed” to the land.

What annoys many residents of Calusa is that people who own mobile homes are permitted to vote, even though they pay no taxes. To many residents of Calusa, these frankly ugly aluminum monsters are a blight on the land, especially when the land happens to be choice river-front property purchased long before anyone knew it would one day become valuable.

Harrod clearly appreciated his protected status as a mobile home owner. He clearly appreciated his tiny fenced backyard and the distant glimpses it afforded of the Cottonmouth River, which meandered through the metallic maze like the snake after which it had been named, sunlight glinting off its scaly waters. He seemed to appreciate as well all the attention being lavished on him this afternoon, two lawyers in suits and ties, tape recorder ready to preserve his precious words for posterity.

He was a blue-eyed, white-haired, somewhat grizzled man in his late sixties, who — like so many other senior citizens down here on the white sand shores of the Gulf — had retired some ten years ago, only to realize that doing nothing was the equivalent of being dead. I had read somewhere that George Burns’s nephew had once told him he was thinking of retiring, and Burns had said, “What will you do with yourself?” His nephew had responded, “I’ll play golf all the time.” Burns thought about this for a moment, and then said, “Lou, playing golf is good only if you’ve got something else to do.”

Harrod had taken a job as a security guard.

Which is how he happened to be there this past Tuesday night when Lainie Commins drove into the parking lot of the Silver Creek Yacht Club at a little before ten P.M.

“How did you know the time?” I asked.

“Just let me see if we’re getting this,” Andrew said, and pressed the STOP button and then the REW button, and played back Harrod’s opening words. Andrew’s suit was the color of wheat. His tie was a green that matched the faded backs and seats of the director’s chairs upon which we were sitting. He was twenty-nine years old, and he had dark curly hair and brown eyes and an aquiline nose, which meant it was curving like an eagle’s beak, and an androgynous mouth, which meant it had both male and female characteristics, with a thin upper lip and a pouting lower one. Black-rimmed eyeglasses gave him a scholarly look, which was entirely appropriate in that he’d been editor of the Law Review at U Mich, and had graduated third in his class.

“...little before ten,” Harrod’s voice said.

“How did you know the time?” my voice asked.

“Okay,” Andrew said, and simultaneously pressed the PLAY and REC buttons.

“I looked at my watch,” Harrod said.

“How come?”

“Dining room quits serving at eleven-thirty. I wondered who might be coming in so late.”

“Tell me where you were,” I said.

“Little booth at the entrance to the club. I sit in there checking the cars as they come in. People on foot, too, some of the time.”

“Is there a barrier?”

“No, I just stop them and either wave them on or tell them to back on up and turn around.”

“Is there a light in the booth?”

“There is.”

“Was the light on this past Tuesday night?”

“It was.”

“Tell me what you saw at a little before ten that night, Mr. Harrod.”

“White Geo driving up to the booth, woman behind the wheel.”

“Can you describe this woman?”

“She was Lainie Commins.”

“Did you know Lainie Commins at the time?”

“No, I didn’t.”

“Then how...?”

“I asked her what her name was and she told me it was Lainie Commins and said she was there to see Mr. Toland. Brett Toland, that is. Who was killed that night.”

“She gave you her name and also Mr. Toland’s name?”

“Yes. That’s what they usually do. If they’re here to join somebody for dinner, or to go on one of the boats. The boats sometimes give cocktail parties, fifty, sixty people invited to them, it gets hard keeping track. I’ll tell you the truth, there’s no way I can really double-check with the person who’s the member. I just keep my eye on a guest, make sure they’re going where they said they were going, the dining room, or one of the boats.”

“What did this woman who said she was Lainie Commins...?”

“Oh, she was Lainie Commins, all right. I seen her since, identified her picture at the hearing, in fact. She was Lainie Commins, no question.”

“What’d she look like?”

“Blond hair, eyeglasses, wearing a white shirt with a blue scarf had some kind of anchor design on it.”

“What color?”

“I told you. Blue.”

“The anchors, I mean.”

“Oh. Red.”

“Was she wearing slacks or a skirt?”

“Couldn’t see. She was inside the car.”

“Where’d she park the car?”

“Near the lamppost at the far end of the lot.”

“Did you see her when she got out of the car?”

“Yes, but I don’t remember whether she had on slacks or a skirt.”

“But you were watching her.”

“Yes. Wanted to make sure she was going to the Toland boat, like she said.”

“How was she wearing her hair?”

“What do you mean?”

“Loose? Up? Tied back?”

“Oh. Loose.”

“But you didn’t notice whether she was wearing slacks or a skirt.”

“No, I didn’t.”

“Watched her as she got out of the car...”

“Yes.”

“What’d she do then?”

“Went to the walkway along the dock, started looking for the Toland boat. Toy Boat, she’s called.”

“You were watching Ms. Commins all this time?”

“Watching her.”

“Did she find the boat?”

“She found it. Stopped at the gangway, looked up at the boat, then yelled out ‘Hello?’ Like a question, you know. Hello? When she didn’t see anybody on deck.”

“You could see all this from the booth?”

“I could.”

“How far away from the boat were you?”

“Fifty, sixty feet?”

“Light on in the booth, dark outside, but you could see...”

“There were lights along the dockside walk. And in the saloon. I could see her plain as day.”

“But you didn’t notice whether she was wearing slacks or a skirt.”

“Didn’t notice that, no. Not a leg man, myself,” he said, and smiled. I smiled, too. So did Andrew.

“What happened then?”

“She yelled out his name. Mr. Toland’s. Like a question again. Brett? And he came up out of the saloon and she went aboard.”

“Then what?”

“Don’t know. Soon as I saw she was expected, I went back to my own business.”

“Which was what?”

“Watching television. I have a little Sony in the booth, I watch television when it’s slow.”

“What were you watching?”

“Dateline.”

“This was now what time?”

“Oh, ten after ten. A quarter past?”

“Did you see Ms. Commins when she left the boat?”

“No, I did not.”

“You wouldn’t know whether Dateline was still on when she left the boat, would you?”

“Goes off at eleven, it’s an hour-long show. Dining room closes at eleven-thirty, which is when I go home. Night watchman comes on then.”

“Does he sit in the booth, too?”

“No, he patrols the docks, the dining room, the whole area. There’s no traffic after the dining room closes.”

“You didn’t happen to see Ms. Commins coming off the boat at about ten-thirty?”

“No, I did not.”

“Didn’t happen to see her driving out of the parking lot a few minutes after that?”

“No, I did not.”

“How come? You were sitting right there in the booth...”

“I didn’t see nobody come off that boat at ten-thirty,” Harrod said. “And I didn’t see the white Geo leaving the lot at that time, neither.”

You were on the boat?

Yes.

Last night?

Yes. But only for a little while.

How short a while?

Half an hour? No more than that.

“Thank you, Mr. Harrod,” I said. “We appreciate your time.”

“Hello, you’ve reached Warren Chambers Investigations. I’ll be out of town for the next week or so, but if you leave a message I’ll get back to you as soon as I return.”

No clue as to when Warren had recorded the message.

Same message on the machine at his home number.

I tried Toots again.

“Hello, I’m away from the phone just now, but if you’ll leave a message at the beep I’ll get back to you as soon as I can. Thanks. Bye.”

Which meant that Andrew and I had to keep our four o’clock appointment with a tape recorder and a man named Charles Werner.

When you’re a member of the police force, you see all kinds of things, people doing all kinds of things. You answer a Family Dispute call, you go in, find a man in his undershorts, woman wearing nothing but panties, man yelling she threw hot grits on his head, woman yelling he’s full of shit, you see all kinds of things. It’s like a police officer isn’t a human being anymore the minute he puts on the uniform. He becomes just the uniform, nothing inside it. Woman ain’t ashamed to be seen wearing only her panties, big fat woman with breasts hanging down to her navel, you aren’t human to her, you’re just the Man come to see to this little dispute here, you’re just an anonymous part of the system, not a human being at all, just the Man.

You see a dead person laying in his own blood in the street, people screaming and crying all around him, you tell them to back off, go home, ain’t nothing to see here, let’s go, let’s break it up now, you’re not a human being same as the ones screaming and yelling, you’re just the Man. And you’re not supposed to be affected by the blood underfoot swarming with flies, or the brain matter spattered all over the fender of the car, or the fact that the kid laying there with his skull open is only fourteen years old, you’re the Man come to set it all straight.

On Amberjack’s boat here in the middle of the Gulf, Warren Chambers was the Man again. The Man come to see about this little matter of Toots Kiley’s addiction, the Man come to set it all straight. So it didn’t matter he had to take the handcuffs off and lead her to the head and stand outside the door where he could hear her peeing behind it. There was no more embarrassment here than there’d been with the fat lady in her panties, he was just the Man here to settle this thing, the Man here to get her sober again. Wasn’t anybody behind that door pissing, wasn’t anybody outside here listening. The lady in there was invisible, and the Man outside here was anonymous.

“I still don’t know how to flush this fucking thing,” Toots said from behind the door.

“You finished in there?”

“I’m finished.”

“I’ll show you again. Unlock the door.”

She unlocked the door. Stood by the sink in the small compartment, washing her hands while he demonstrated the use of the flush yet another time, not that she seemed too interested in learning about it. The thing wasn’t working properly, anyway, he’d never been on a goddamn boat that had a toilet worth a damn. He had to run the pump over and over again till he finally got water in the bowl. Toots dried her hands on a paper towel, and was about to toss it in the toilet when he gave her a look would kill a charging rhino. She wadded the towel and dropped it in the sink. He picked it up, opened the door under the sink, tossed the towel into a metal basket fastened to the inside of the door, closed the door again, and took the handcuffs from the pocket of his windbreaker.

“Come on,” she said, “we don’t need those.”

“I don’t want you hitting me upside the head,” he said.

“What good would that do? I don’t know how to run a boat.”

“Even so.”

“Come on, Warr. I’m not a desperado.”

“Not yet.”

“I’m not hooked. You’re making a mistake. You see me clawing at the walls?”

“Bulkheads.”

“You see me?”

“That’s not what happens, Toots.”

“That crack you found, somebody was trying to make me look bad, that’s all.”

“Sure.”

“Come on, let me go upstairs, get some air. You keep me chained to the wall like an animal I’m liable to go crazy.”

“I don’t want you jumping overboard.”

“Why would I do that?”

“You’ve kicked it before, Toots. You know exactly what you’re liable to do.”

“I can’t swim. Why would I jump overboard?”

“Gets too bad.”

“It’s not going to get bad. How many times do I have to tell you I’m...”

“How do you feel now?”

“Terrific. How do I look?”

She put her hands on her hips, lifted her chin like a model, turned to him in profile, took in a deep breath. She was wearing the same short black skirt she’d had on when he’d snatched her from the condo on Thursday night, wrinkled now, that and the thin yellow blouse, also wrinkled, her legs bare, the high-heeled black shoes up forward where she was handcuffed to the wall when she wasn’t complaining about the toilet facilities.

“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...

“Let’s go,” he said.

“What?”

“Time to go back down.”

She wanted to hit him.

Instead, she smiled dazzlingly and said, “Sure, whatever you say,” and held out her right hand for the cuff.