The Best American Mystery Stories 2018

Andrew Bourelle Y IS FOR YANGCHUAN LIZARD ^{from D Is for Dinosaur}

“What’s the Y stand for?”

We were staring at the package on Fender’s glass coffee table, a quart-sized zip-lock bag full of gray-white powder. It looked like cocaine cut with fireplace ashes. There was a red sticker on the package with a black Y scrawled with a Sharpie.

“I’m not sure,” Fender said. “That’s just the street name.”

Fender said it was the newest thing in Asia, some kind of opiate mixed with cocaine alkaloid and crushed dinosaur bones. Not just any dinosaur—one specific skeleton that was stolen from a Hong Kong museum. Fender couldn’t remember the name of it. He said it was supposed to be like China’s version of the Allosaurus, but I didn’t know what the fuck that was either.

Because Y came from only one skeleton, that meant it was just short of impossible to get. Which is what made it attractive to Fender—who was a collector as much as he was a dealer.

“Have you tried it yet?” I said, but I could tell from the package that he hadn’t touched it.

“Nope,” he said. “I’m a businessman. Each snort is probably worth ten grand. But I am curious,” he added.

Fender and I were sitting in the living room of his spacious penthouse apartment. He had a nice view of Lake Erie out his window. The sky was overcast, the water gray.

Collector guitars decorated the walls of Fender’s apartment. An acoustic guitar reputedly owned by Johnny Cash. An electric from Eddie Van Halen. One with burn marks on it that was supposedly from that Great White concert where the pyrotechnics got out of control and killed a bunch of people.

Fender once joked that it was hard to know what was more valuable in this apartment, the guitars or the drugs. But I was as skeptical of the stories about the guitars as I was about the origins of Y.

We shared a joint and each had a bottle of beer, and talked about whether we thought the dinosaur-bone story had any truth to it. Fender said he believed there were real dinosaur bones in there—that much was probably true—but he doubted they contributed to the high.

“It’s like a rhinoceros horn,” he said. “People think it contains magical qualities, but that’s all bullshit. The real rush is that you’re snorting something rare. Exotic. We’re talking about a supply so finite that it’s practically nonexistent.”

Fender was wearing a silk robe with silly leather slippers, and his shoulder-length hair was pulled back into a ponytail. He had a soul patch and hoop earrings and looked quite a bit different from the kid I shared a room with when we were freshmen in college.

I told him I didn’t think the drug was going to go over well here. This was America. People here didn’t believe in that crap about rhinoceros horns, and they wouldn’t buy any mumbo-jumbo about mystical dinosaur-bone dust.

“I already got a buyer lined up,” he said. “We’re just haggling over price.”

“Speaking of buying things, I need to get a move on.”

He took me back to his study and unlocked the safe. I turned away so I wouldn’t see the combination. It made me uncomfortable how leisurely he was about opening it in front of me. Did that mean he was like that with other people? I hoped not.

The safe was the size of a small refrigerator. A series of shelves lined the left side, some stacked with cash, others with every kind of drug you could think of. On the right side were guns: a shotgun, some kind of military rifle, a handgun. There was also a pearl-handled switchblade, which I’d seen Fender open lots of bags of drugs with.

Fender reached in and brought out a brick of marijuana.

I handed him a stack of bills.

I shoved the marijuana into my knapsack, and we headed back to the living room.

I excused myself to his restroom before I left. When I came back, Fender and my backpack were sitting on the couch, but the bag of Y was gone.

“Why isn’t there a Chinese symbol on the package instead of a Y?” I said.

At the bar I managed, I used rat poison that was from China—poison that I’m sure was illegal as hell here in the U.S.—and there were Chinese symbols all over the packaging. I would think that whether Y was the real thing or someone was just pretending it was an exotic Chinese drug, either way it would make sense to use a Chinese character instead of an English letter.

“Beats me, man. Maybe they’re trying to Americanize it.”

I smirked at Fender and shook my head.

“I think you’ve been had,” I said. “Someone cremated a fucking dog and put it in a bag and you just paid God knows what for it.”

“Ye of little faith,” Fender said, clapping me on the back.

He opened the six deadbolts on his door, led me into the foyer, and opened the six deadbolts on the exterior door.

“See you,” he said.

“Wouldn’t want to be you,” I said.

“Bullshit,” he said, just like every time we said goodbye. “You wish like hell you were me.”

I went directly to the bar to open up. It was important that I get there before Theresa because I had to clean up the dead rats before she arrived. She’d come in once before me and was gagging her whole shift.

Each night before I left, I’d set out the poison in the storage room. Each day when I came in to open, I’d find three or four dead rats. Today there were only two, which meant maybe I was finally making a dent in the population.

They were lying on the concrete, their bodies twisted into stiff, strangely contorted poses, like they’d been convulsing until their muscles finally locked up. Their tongues hung out of their mouths, clamped between their teeth, and a strange bloody foam spilled from their clenched jaws like dyed beer froth.

I always wondered if the rats ate the poison at the same time, or if they were so fucking stupid that they went ahead and ate it even after they could see that one of their brethren had died. I’d considered hooking up some kind of camera to watch, but that was too much effort. I didn’t care that much.

I put the two dead rats in a plastic bag and was outside tossing it into the dumpster when Theresa came walking up.

“Hey, handsome,” she said, and gave me a smile that was better than any drug.

“Hey,” I said.

I wanted to call her beautiful or good-looking or something like that, but I couldn’t bring myself to do it. I wasn’t sure what Fender would think about me flirting with his kid sister, but I didn’t figure he’d be too happy about it.

I was a decade older than her, for one thing. And I wasn’t exactly what you’d call a good catch. My name was on the bar’s deed, but it was really owned by Ramzen Akhmadov, the head of the Chechen mafia in Cleveland.

That’s what happens when you borrow money from the mob for your drug problem. The vig is too steep. You get in over your head. Instead of getting your legs broken, you make a deal.

And then you’re stuck. You can’t walk away. Ever.

“Did you go see my brother today?” Theresa asked as she started taking chairs off the tables.

“Yep.”

She grinned. If I saw Fender, that meant I had dope.

“You want to smoke a jay before we open?” she asked.

Theresa was a cute girl—how could I say no?

I didn’t tap into the new brick of marijuana. I left that in my backpack behind the bar and went to the stash I kept in the freezer. I rolled a joint while Theresa finished setting up the chairs.

We sat at a table like a couple of regular customers and passed the joint back and forth. The funny thing about pot is that the best stuff in the country comes from Colorado, where it is legal. I figured it was just a matter of time before it was legal everywhere and my little side business would be defunct. I was trying to figure out a plan to get out from under Ramzen by then, but I hadn’t come up with any ideas yet.

I’d been smoking so long now that smoking a joint was kind of like smoking a cigarette to me. I didn’t get much of a buzz. Theresa had done some hard drugs in her day, but she didn’t have as many years of smoking weed on her résumé as I did. Her eyes quickly turned glassy and she couldn’t stop smiling.

Theresa had dirty-blond hair that wasn’t nearly as well cared for as her brother’s mane. She wore low-slung jeans, a tight T-shirt, and no bra underneath. Her breasts were small, but I liked looking at her nipples poking against the fabric.

I was sure she noticed.

I was sure she liked me looking.

It was just a matter of time before we hooked up. That would probably mess things up with Fender. And if I didn’t have him supplying me anymore, then that would mess things up with Ramzen, who expected the cut I gave him every week and wouldn’t like it if I went back to just being a bar manager.

In other words, hooking up with Theresa wouldn’t just risk my oldest friendship. It might risk my life.

But I had a tendency to not think with my head. A younger version of me would have made my move already. Theresa and I would be fucking in the back room instead of sharing a joint up front.

But I was trying to be smarter these days.

Trying.

Two unusual things happened that night at the bar.

We were doing moderate business for a Tuesday night, enough that Theresa and I were busy but we could handle it ourselves. I worked behind the bar and she spent most of her time on the floor.

When customers came to the bar and ordered the special, I’d take them into the storage room and sell them however much pot they were looking for. I was always careful. I knew everyone I did business with.

The first surprise was that Ramzan Akhmadov and his henchman Zakir came in.

Ramzen never came himself. He always sent Zakir, or someone even lower on the food chain. So when Ramzen showed up, I got a knot in my stomach and started to sweat.

“Hello, Charlie,” Ramzen said, sitting on a barstool across from me. “How’s things?”

He and Zakir both had thick accents, like a couple of Russian terrorists in a bad action movie.

“Good,” I said, wiping the bar off as if I was a character in such a movie.

Ramzen was in his fifties, with a face like a boxer who retired well past his prime, with lumpy, ruddy patches of skin and a mouth full of crooked teeth. He had a head full of silver hair and eyes that looked black in the bar’s dim lighting. Zakir was in his thirties, maybe a few years older than me, and he was handsome, with slicked-back hair and a mouth full of straight white teeth. While Ramzen looked like a dock worker trying on a nice suit, Zakir looked the part of a gangster.

I made myself put the towel down and just stand and talk with the men. Stop pretending nothing was weird.

I asked Ramzen if he wanted anything, and he declined.

“You?” I said to Zakir.

Zakir always took single-barrel bourbon, and I would normally pour without asking, but with Ramzen here, he might not want to be seen drinking on the job, so I figured I better ask.

He shook his head no and came around the bar like he always did and went into the back to the cooler. There was a case of Budweiser that was always in the same place. There were twenty-three bottles of beer inside. In the one empty space was an envelope of cash that I kept up to date for these visits.

“Did you catch the game?” Ramzen asked, making small talk.

“No,” I said. “I missed it.”

I had no idea what he was talking about, not even what sport. It was summer, so that meant either the Indians or, if they were still in the playoffs, the Cavaliers. I didn’t give a shit about professional sports, and I’m sure Ramzen didn’t either, except for the betting that went along with it.

I figured the game, whatever game it was, had something to do with why he was here. Maybe he wanted me to start taking bets like a bookie.

I didn’t want to do that. I didn’t want to get any more involved with him than I already was.

“Have you seen your friend Fender lately?” he said.

“I saw him today,” I said.

Honesty seemed the best policy here. I didn’t want him to find out later that I was lying.

“And how was he?” Ramzen asked.

I shrugged. “Fine.”

I was doing my best not to look over Ramzen’s shoulder at Theresa out on the floor. As far as I knew, Ramzen didn’t know that Fender’s sister worked for me. She was just another cute waitress. I had a few of them. Call me sexist, but good-looking girls help with business.

“Did Fender tell you about a new drug he has?” Ramzen asked. “I think it is called Y.”

Zakir came out from the back and sat next to Ramzen. Both of them stared at me.

“He mentioned something about it,” I said, again choosing honesty. “Some new thing from China.”

“Did you try it?”

“No,” I said. “You know me. I stick with naturals—no pills, no powder.”

Their eyebrows raised in unison, and that made me qualify my statement.

“No powder anymore,” I said.

“This is from the bones of a prehistoric animal,” Ramzen said. “What is more natural than that?”

I forced a laugh.

Zakir spoke up for the first time. “Did you see it?” he said. “The Y?”

Now I chose to lie.

“No,” I said. “He knew I wouldn’t be interested in something like that.”

Now things were starting to make sense. Fender said he had a buyer lined up. They were just haggling about price.

Ramzen was his buyer.

Fender paid his cut to Ramzen just like everyone else. But he didn’t work for Ramzen. He was never in debt, never needed Ramzen’s money (unlike me), so he was able to operate more or less without any oversight.

Still, Fender needed to be careful.

Ramzen Akhmadov wasn’t someone I would haggle with over a price. Fender had bigger balls than I did.

Ramzen and Zakir were boring into me with their stares. I could feel Theresa doing the same from across the room.

“If you find out anything you want to tell us,” Ramzen said finally, “call this number.”

He set a card on the counter. It was blank except for a handwritten number.

I frowned, hoping my expression would say, I don’t know what you’re talking about.

But I did, and they knew I did.

After they left, Theresa came over, her face full of worry.

“What was that all about?” she said.

“Do me a favor,” I said. “Call your brother and see if he’s okay.”

That’s when the second surprise of the night came: a police detective walked into the bar.

He was in street clothes, but I could tell he was a cop. For one, he had the air of scumbag smugness that cops have.

For another, he had a pistol strapped to his hip.

He came up to the bar, his eyes focused on Theresa, not me. He introduced himself as Detective Sean Williams.

“Are you Theresa Matthews?” he said.

She nodded, her eyes confused.

“And your brother is Glen Matthews?”

She nodded again, her eyes changing from confused to scared.

“I regret to inform you that your brother has been murdered.”

I closed the bar, told all the remaining customers that their tabs were on the house tonight, and then Theresa sat down with Williams at the same table where she and I shared the joint a few hours ago. She was in shock. She hadn’t cried yet. She had a dazed look on her face, a little like she was stoned but without the pretty smile that usually accompanied her highs.

Theresa asked if I could sit with them, and when I explained that Fender—i.e., Glen—was my college roommate and a longtime friend, Williams agreed.

He asked her questions about when she’d last seen Fender, if she was aware that he was a drug dealer. I knew which answers were lies and which were the truth.

When he came to me, I told him that I’d seen Fender earlier that day, that we’d each had a beer. I figured my fingerprints would be all over the place: the bottle, the bathroom faucet.

“What was the nature of your visit?” Williams asked.

“Just visiting,” I said. “We’re friends.”

“And were you aware that your friend was one of the biggest drug dealers in the city?” he said.

“We didn’t talk about that stuff,” I said.

“What kind of stuff did you talk about?” he said.

“The girls we slept with in college,” I said. “The time we stole a ceramic cow head from a fraternity party. Classes we failed. Stuff we did when we were eighteen and drunk and stupid.”

This was all true. Fender and I had very little in common these days. I sold dope, and he sold it to me—and I gave his kid sister a job when she needed one—but that was pretty much it. Otherwise, we lived worlds apart. We talked about old times—remember that one time?—and that was usually it. Discussing his latest boutique drug purchase was out of the ordinary for us.

“Did he mention a drug called Y?” Williams asked.

“Look,” I said, “Theresa and I don’t know anything about what Fender did. We don’t know what the hell is going on. What can you tell us?”

“The investigation is ongoing,” he said bureaucratically.

“Cut the shit,” I said. “Either you tell us what happened or we won’t say another word until we get a lawyer.”

Williams took a deep breath. He turned to Theresa.

“Your brother’s throat was slashed,” he said.

She gasped, bringing her hands to her face.

“But he was tortured first.”

She started sobbing. Then she rose from the table and ran into the back room.

Williams turned his stare to me.

“His apartment was ransacked. His safe was emptied. His guitars smashed.”

For some reason, that last bit hurt me the most. Fender loved those fucking guitars.

After the cop gave me his card and left, I found Theresa sitting in the cooler, her arms wrapped around her, covered in goose bumps. Her cheeks were streaked with tears, which had started to crystallize in the cold.

“I came in here because I wanted to feel some kind of pain besides what’s inside of me,” she said, her lips quivering, her teeth beginning to chatter.

“Come on,” I said. “I’ll walk you home.”

I didn’t bother to put out rat poison that night. Didn’t balance the books. Didn’t even take the tips out of the tip jar. I just grabbed my knapsack and locked the door.

On our walk, the warm summer air erased the goose bumps on Theresa’s arms.

“What’s this Y he was talking about?” Theresa asked.

“Some new drug,” I said. “Your brother said it was super-rare.”

“Do you think they killed him for it?”

“I don’t know,” I said, and I didn’t ask her who she meant by “they.”

She lived in a small one-bedroom. There wasn’t much to it. A thrift-store futon that she used for a bed and a couch. An old box TV. She had some movie posters on her walls from back when she used to work at a theater.

Back in her heavy drug days.

Fender had introduced her to the hard stuff when she was a teenager, then paid for rehab when she was out of control. He asked me to hire her when she was out, told me to keep her away from anything stronger than pot. Since I didn’t deal in chemicals—and because I’d been through something similar to her, back in my own dark days—he thought I was the right person for the job.

She sat down on her futon and pulled her legs up underneath her. She hugged herself like she had in the cooler even though her apartment was stuffy.

“Do you have anything stronger than pot?” she asked.

“No.”

“Let’s smoke a bowl then.”

I opened up my backpack to get the new brick that Fender had sold me.

The bag of Y was inside.

I didn’t tell Theresa the Y was there. I pretended like everything was normal. I pulled out a pinch of dope, packed her pipe, and passed it to her.

I took a couple hits, but that was just to give her the impression she wasn’t smoking alone. My mind was reeling, reliving my last conversation with Fender.

Had he acted unusual in any way? Had he seemed scared?

No, he seemed perfectly normal. Yet when I went to take a piss, he slipped the Y into my backpack. It must have been an impulse move. He wouldn’t have known I was going to pee before I left.

Still, he must have feared that someone would come looking for the stuff. I wondered if they’d tortured him for the combination to the safe, then killed him, only to find out that the safe didn’t have what they were looking for. Or did they know the combination and torture him afterward when they didn’t find what they were looking for?

They probably smashed every guitar looking for a secret hiding spot.

Theresa lay out on the futon and put her feet in my lap. I rubbed them. She had delicate feet, perfectly smooth, her nails painted an ugly purple color.

She groaned, “God, that feels good.”

“I need to get going,” I told her.

“No,” she said. “Stay. I’m afraid of what I might do if I’m alone.”

I was afraid of what I might do if I stayed. But I told her I would.

She sat up onto her knees and put one hand on my shoulder.

“This dope isn’t strong enough,” she said. “I need something else.”

I stared at her, knowing what she was going to ask for.

“Make love to me, Charlie. I know you want to. The only thing stopping you was my brother.”

“It doesn’t feel right,” I said.

She put her hand to my crotch, where my cock was hardening like quick-drying concrete.

“It feels right to me,” she said.

We never bothered to fold the futon out. We spent the night curled together, cramped on the couch cushion. No sheets or blankets. Just our skin, clammy in the humid air. We talked for a long time. I knew she needed to be distracted, so I filled the silence with talk about my life and how I didn’t know how I’d ended up where I was.

I should have been thankful, I guessed, that I kicked the coke that once brought me so close to ruin. But the cost was a partnership with the Chechen mob—a lifetime contract unless I could think of a way out.

“Why didn’t you ask my brother for the money?” Theresa asked.

“Pride,” I said. “Fender and I were friends back when we were nobodies. He was a somebody and I was back on track to becoming a bigger nobody than ever. Besides, Fender touched more drugs in one day than most people do in a lifetime, but he’s never really been hooked on anything. The willpower that son of a bitch had. I was embarrassed to admit I needed help.”

“I know the feeling,” she said. “But I always hated him for introducing me to the stuff. What kind of brother does that?”

She was right: Fender was no saint. He was a narcissistic drug dealer.

But he was my friend.

When Theresa drifted off to sleep, I lay awake, staring at the water spots on the ceiling, listening to the sounds of the city coming in through the open window. Voices. Music. Sirens.

I felt antsy, unable to lie still. Finally I untangled myself from her and started to dress. Streetlights through the window illuminated her milk-white skin, her pink nipples, her lovely face, which looked incredibly young while she slept.

“Sorry, Fender,” I whispered aloud.

Theresa’s eyes opened a crack and she muttered in a dreamy voice, “Where are you going?”

“I’ve got a few things I need to do today,” I said. “Go back to sleep. I’ll call you later.”

“I don’t want you to go,” she said, but she was already closing her eyes and drifting away.

“Theresa,” I said. “Don’t go anywhere. Don’t trust anyone. Don’t answer your door. Not until I call you.”

“Okay,” she said, but she seemed asleep already.

When I left, I locked the door handle but had no way of locking the deadbolt unless I woke her up to do it. I thought about it, and decided to let her sleep.

My apartment lived somewhere in the world between Fender’s and Theresa’s: not as shitty as hers, not nearly as nice as his. It was a modest two-bedroom with a nice TV and decent furniture.

I opened my backpack and put both bags of drugs on my wooden coffee table.

I stared at the Y.

Did Ramzen kill Fender?

Probably.

That meant the smart thing to do—smart for me but also smart for Theresa—was to hand the stuff over to him. That was the easiest way to stay safe, and to keep Theresa safe.

But Fender was my oldest friend, which pretty much made him my best friend. We didn’t have much in common anymore, but I liked him more than most people.

And I was in love with his sister.

I admitted that to myself at that moment, with the dull dawn light coming in through the window making the powder in the Y bag look even more gray and ashen.

I told you before I often did stupid things, impulsive things. You could say sleeping with Theresa hours after her brother was killed might be one of them.

But there was an even dumber thing I felt like doing.

I wanted to try the Y.

I kept telling myself that I would be able to think better if I knew what I was dealing with. Was this some great revolutionary new drug? Or just ordinary coke with a made-up story to go with it?

I wasn’t sure how knowing the answer would help me, but I felt like it would.

Or maybe I was just rationalizing. I wanted to try the Y, and so I convinced myself it was a good idea.

I got a drinking straw from the kitchen, cut off an inch section of it, and went back to the living room. When I opened the bag, there was a peculiar smell. Like a dusty book sitting on a shelf for a couple decades, with another underlying scent barely hidden—a rotten smell, like roadkill.

I stuck the straw into the bag, put the other end to my nose, and snorted a good, hard pull.

The effect was instantaneous.

It felt like I’d inhaled fire, and the flames spread through my skull and down into my limbs. I thought I was going to die, and then the pain turned into a soothing warmth. I sank back into the couch like I was falling into an ocean of pillows. I just kept sinking and sinking, my fingers and toes numb, the rest of my body nonexistent. I closed my eyes and began to dream.

I wasn’t human. My heart was pounding, my breathing coming out in raspy, ragged bursts. I had big powerful legs and tiny little arms, and a long tail that balanced the weight of an enormous skull. I had a massive snout and teeth the size of kitchen knives. It felt natural to have this body, to have this balance.

I was running through a jungle of exotic plants. My sense of smell was stronger than any human’s, and I inhaled rich, wild scents that I’d never experienced before.

It was intense, this dream, so lucid that I didn’t want to open my eyes and risk dissolving it.

I don’t know if it was the power of suggestion making me see what I was seeing and feel what I was feeling. Just knowing the story behind Y could have been enough to tell my brain what dream to have. Opiates can work that way.

But it didn’t feel that way at the time. I felt like whatever was in the Y had transported me back—mentally, telepathically, supernaturally—to a time millions of years ago. When the world was embryonic and the animals were primal, instinctual, murderous. I could feel the stardust in my bones, the atoms that were once plants or animals or water. I was the world and the world was me.

In the dream I killed some smaller creature, a feathered, four-legged little dinosaur. I ripped it apart with my sharp teeth, and I woke up with the coppery taste of blood in my mouth.

I staggered to the bathroom, unsure how to walk without a tail. I slurped water from the sink and looked at myself in the mirror.

There was a little splotch of dried blood around my nostril.

I checked the time. Six hours had passed.

I rushed out the door and headed for the bar. Theresa and I were both scheduled to work tonight, and I needed to find people to cover for us. The employees’ numbers were tacked up behind the bar. I didn’t have them with me.

There was no way I was working, and I wasn’t leaving Theresa alone either.

I didn’t feel any closer to having a plan about what to do, and I wasn’t sure if it was a good idea to tell Theresa how powerful the stuff was, given her drug history. But I felt like I should tell her. Her brother had died for this stuff. She had a right to have a say in what happened. And if I’m honest, I pictured us snorting the stuff together. It was that good.

I called her, but there was no answer.

When I walked into the alley behind the bar, Zakir’s black BMW was sitting there idling.

His arm was sticking out the open window, holding a cigarette.

“Hey,” I said, acting as if nothing out of the ordinary was happening.

“Where’ve you been?” he said. “You need to open soon.”

“Having a rough morning,” I said. “You heard about Fender?”

“Yeah,” he said. “Tragic.”

He said the words as unemotionally as if he was reporting on some crime on the other side of the planet.

He pitched his cigarette into the alley and followed me inside.

I poured him his single-barrel bourbon on the rocks, like always—when he wasn’t accompanied by Ramzen, that is.

He threw it back and slurped it all down.

“Another?”

“No.”

He reached into his sports jacket. I thought he was going to pull out a pistol, but instead he pulled out a switchblade.

The same pearl-handled one from Fender’s safe.

He poked around in the ice of his glass. There was blood on the blade, and tendrils of red spread into the liquid remnants at the bottom of the glass.

He fished out a piece of ice and popped it into his mouth. He crunched on it like candy. Then he folded the knife and stuck it back in his coat. His hand came out with a plain white envelope.

“Open this after I leave,” he said.

“What is it?”

“I’ll be back when you close tonight,” he said. “You give me what I want. I give you what you want.”

I scrunched my nose to pretend that I didn’t know what he was talking about.

As he walked toward the door, he called over his shoulder, “Don’t get any smart ideas. Don’t call the cops. Don’t call Ramzen.”

I said nothing. But I understood. He was going behind Ramzen’s back.

When he was gone, I tore open the envelope. Inside was a small plastic sandwich bag, and inside that was a tiny severed toe.

With ugly purple paint on the nail.

I called in a waitress and a bartender, and I made them do most of the labor while I sat in my office. I let them each go an hour early, and then I told the few remaining customers that I needed to close early.

When Zakir came in with Theresa, I was sitting at the table she and I had used the day before, first to share a joint, then to talk to the cop.

Theresa was limping. She had on black Nike running shoes, and it looked like the toe area on one foot was wet.

Zakir shoved her roughly into a chair and sat down across from me.

His bourbon was already poured, sitting next to the bag of white powder.

“It looks like you opened it,” Zakir said as he took his seat.

I nodded.

“And?”

“It gave me a bloody nose,” I said. “It burned like a son of a bitch. But it was the best high I’ve ever had.”

No need to lie about that.

He grinned widely. He picked up his bourbon and twirled it around, spiraling the ice cubes, which had started to melt while I waited.

“You didn’t think of poisoning me, did you?”

“I thought about it,” I said.

He laughed. Then he threw back the glass and slurped out the bourbon. Like before, he pulled out the switchblade and dug around in the glass. He fished out a piece of ice and crunched it in his teeth.

He left the switchblade sticking out of the glass, the tip bleeding into the puddle of bourbon at the bottom.

“So what happens now?” I said.

“What do you mean?” he said. “You get the girl. I get the Y.”

“I mean with you and Ramzen. You trying to take over? Coup d’état?”

“Just a little side business,” Zakir said. “You can keep your mouth shut, no?”

“Yes,” I said.

“And you?” He looked at Theresa, his eyebrows arched.

“She can,” I said.

“Good.”

He grabbed the bag of powder and headed for the door.

“What do all these Chinese letters mean?” he said.

“I think it’s supposed to be the name of the dinosaur whose bones are all busted up in there,” I said.

He gave me a hard stare, and I wondered if he could see my pounding heart shaking my chest from where he was. His eyes drifted over to Theresa.

“You coming?” he said.

She looked at me, and in a second her demeanor changed from fear to a look of guilty pleasure. She gave me a smile that was part apology, part delight.

She stood and kissed me on the cheek.

“I did have fun,” she whispered, and walked toward Zakir with no limp.

Zakir was grinning, his mouth full of white teeth, so pleased with himself that he couldn’t contain his elation.

I glowered at Theresa. “You should have just taken it from me this morning after you fucked me.”

She shrugged. “I was going to check to see if you had it with you. But you wouldn’t fall asleep.”

She turned to go and I didn’t know what to say, so I blurted, “Your brother loved you.”

She huffed and said, “My brother loved his stupid guitars.”

They left and I sat alone in the bar for a long time. Then I collected the switchblade and my backpack and walked home. On the way I took a detour down to the lake’s edge and tossed the baggie with the toe—whoever it belonged to—into the gray water.

I locked the door and spent the day with the switchblade in my hand, nodding in and out of sleep.

When evening came and no one had broken down my door, I went over to Theresa’s apartment. The door was unlocked. She and Zakir were both there, Zakir doubled over on the futon, Theresa lying on the floor. The bodies were contorted, frozen in positions of agony. Their noses had hemorrhaged a pink foamy blood. Their eyes were bloodshot and bulging from their sockets, their faces locked in a rictus of pain. Theresa had bitten her tongue between her clenched teeth.

I had hoped that Zakir would go first and that Theresa would be smarter than the rats. But they must have done their lines together.

I took off Theresa’s shoes just to be sure. She had all ten toes.

There was a framed photograph on the counter of Fender and Theresa. They were a few years younger, both smiling enthusiastically. I wondered if they were actually happy or just acting. I’d never really known Theresa at all.

“See you,” I said to their smiling faces, my voice a hoarse, haunted whisper that I didn’t recognize. “Wouldn’t want to be you.”

I called Detective Williams and spent the rest of the night at the police station answering questions.

“Turns out this drug called Y is nothing more than Chinese rat poison,” he said.

He looked at me skeptically, wondering what I knew and wasn’t telling him, but he seemed to be satisfied that the case was closed. He never searched my backpack.

I walked toward home, a zombie, in the early morning hours. I had hardly slept in three days. I’d lost my oldest friend and a girl I loved, even if only briefly, even if she never really existed. A fog rolled in and I stood at the edge of the lake, looking out into the smoky gray air, imagining a world on the other side with dinosaurs running around with eternity pulsing through their veins.

I called Ramzen.

“Zakir tried to blackmail me for the Y,” I said. “He was going behind your back.”

“You had the Y?”

“I gave him rat poison,” I said. “He’s dead.”

Ramzen was quiet for a long moment, then he said, “Someone else will be making the collection next week.”

“I figured.”

“And what of the Y?” he asked. “Where is it?”

I knew the Y would buy my freedom. I had been looking for a way out for years, and this was it.

“I don’t know,” I said, and hung up.

In my apartment, I pulled out the bag of Y, opened it, breathed in its primordial scent.

I wanted to escape.

To disappear.

To go back in time to a prehistoric world where Fender hadn’t died yet and Theresa hadn’t revealed her true self.

I poked the knife, sticky with dried blood, into the Y and came out with a heap of bone dust on the blade. I lowered my nose to the tip and inhaled as quickly and deeply as I could.