The Neon Jungle

Chapter Seven

Vern Lockter stood in the third-floor bathroom with a bath towel around his shoulders to protect his thin gray shirt. It was a blue-gray shirt made of Egyptian cotton, as fine as silk, tailored in England. It was new, and to wear with it he had selected the pale flannel slacks, so pale a gray they were almost white — the slacks with the small pleats and the side seams stitched in black. He wore a narrow green fabric belt with a small gold slip buckle, and green matching canvas shoes with heavy crepe soles and gold eyelets.

He turned on the water and waited until it ran warm, and then, making small cups of his hands, he ducked his head over the bowl and lifted the water to his hair, worked it in vigorously, making his scalp tingle. He turned off the water and opened the mirrored medicine cabinet and took out the narrow bottle of hair lotion. He poured a bit into his palm, rubbed his hands slickly together, and then worked that into the jet hair. With his comb he combed all the hair straight forward first so that it hung shining before his eyes. And then he worked it back, bobbing his head with each stroke starting from the top and working down to the hair worn long over the ears, using the more delicate strokes for that. He wiped the comb on a corner of the towel, replaced it in the cabinet, hung the towel on his rack. He took a small tube from the medicine cabinet and, using the smallest bit of Vaseline on his fingertips, smoothed his eyebrows back. They had a thick gloss and almost met over the bridge of his nose. He took a cleansing tissue and wiped his fingertips dry. He examined his nails. They satisfied him. He inspected himself in the mirror. The fabric of the shirt was so thin that the weight of the fresh pack of cigarettes made the pocket sag. He transferred the cigarettes to the right pocket of the slacks, making a mental note to keep them there while wearing this particular shirt.

His body, under the clothing, felt sleek and hard and competent. Nothing, he thought, like running up- and downstairs with a few hundred pounds of groceries every day. He bunched his fist and flexed it and looked at the slide and change of the long muscles of the forearm. The black hair was curled thick on the top of his arm, running down the wrist to a thinner growth on the backs of his hands. There were small black tufts between the knuckles of his fingers. Once upon a time that had bothered him, offended him a bit. Then there was that college girl who had called it a “most intriguing and indicative secondary sex characteristic.” He had made her repeat it and explain it, and he had filed the phrase away in his vast storehouse of memory. Later, following it up, he had brought the four books back from the public library. Freud, Jung, Adler, Stockton. He had gone through them in a week. He had found them remarkably usable. And he found they repeated many things he had already half learned about people, and how to achieve from them the desired reaction.

His focus for twenty minutes had been upon himself. He stood and let his senses flow out. Bonny was closest, in her room down the hall. Since her coming the third-floor bathroom had held a faint effluvium of female. Cosmetics, racked toothbrush, a different brand of paste than he used. And, rarely, a long glossy dark red hair. He had picked one up, pulled it slowly between his thumb and fingernail, and seen it leap into a tiny coiled copper spring. Having her close had given him a constant awareness of her. She had filtered into his dreams. He had stalked her mentally, the way a man will play the market on paper, and estimated his chance of success. He could get no clear estimate. The factors involved seemed too variable. He suspected that it was because she was out of context. Misplaced. That blurred his vision. She was quite obviously knowing, aware, practiced, and disenchanted. Yet there seemed something hazy about her state of mind.

And so, with reluctance, he had restrained himself from making any trial advance. He sensed in her not only struggle and loneliness, but also that most dangerous thing, a disregard of consequence. It would be stupid to imperil profit for the sake of impulse. And stupidity was the only crime. He had paid for that particular crime once. He did not intend to pay again.

It had taken him a month of steady dedicated thought to discover something about this business that could be marketed. It had taken him a week to make the contact once the idea was clear. He presented it to Karshner as a service he was willing to sell. Karshner told him he was too hot for such games. Wait until he was clear of Paul Darmond, the Preacher. And Karshner said it was a bad base, being in Rowell’s backyard. But Karshner reluctantly took the proposition higher and came back with provisional approval, provided the butcher could be firmly hooked. Vern explained the plan for hooking him. Karshner said it was too complicated. Karshner suggested turning him into a user. Vern said he wouldn’t work with a user any more than he’d try junk himself. It just wasn’t safe. Karshner said he’d only suggested that to test Lockter’s intelligence. Lockter told him that a recorded intelligence quotient of 140 was a pretty good test in itself. Karshner said he was a one-time loser and how bright was that? Vern said it was due to an impulse and he’d given up impulses.

Karshner said he would approve if he liked the hook. Stussen had been almost too easy. The next portion of the agreement was payment for the services to be rendered. That took time. The final agreement, satisfactory to all parties, was a fee of thirty dollars per delivery, with a guaranteed minimum of three hundred a week. The money was not, of course, to be banked or spent freely. That attracted attention. There was to be a weekly payoff to the butcher to make the hook more firm in the jowl.

The most delicate part of it had been the arrangement of the Monday-morning transfer, when Vern turned over the last week’s cash, less his cut, for next week’s box. That was the hottest point, the trouble point. That was where a tail could be operating from either end, ready to close in. There had to be a safe place for transportation of the box back to the store, and a safe place for the cash collections, which in a good week could total ten thousand. The same hiding place could serve for both, and it seemed logical that it should be on the truck. Yet it must be a place that would not be discovered were anyone else to drive the truck, or even work on it at a garage.

They did not like Vern’s ideas, and he did not like theirs. In the end a false back was installed in the glove compartment of the panel delivery truck. It made the compartment shallower, but not noticeably so to anyone reaching in. It was pivoted off center and a firm push on the right end opened it. The transfer was made at a gas station where Vern had been refueling the truck prior to the arrangement. The men’s room was small and rancid, and the door was around at the side. The key, on a piece of wood nearly a foot long, hung by the station door. On the wall of the men’s room, placed high, was a rack for paper towels. It was battered, rusty, ancient. There was a newer rack below it, and that one was in use, taking a smaller-sized towel. It was highly unlikely that the old rack would be taken down. The upper edge was raised, so that on top of the rack was a depressed rectangle that could not be seen from the floor.

Each Monday Vern would remove the collection from the glove compartment while en route, a thick packet of bills from which he had already taken his end. He would shove it in his pocket, park the truck by the pumps, take the key, and go around to the men’s room. He would lock the door behind him, reach high and take the box and replace it with the bills. He would put the box in his pocket, flush the john, run water, and, as an added touch of artistry, come out fixing his belt. As soon as he was en route again he would put the box in the secret compartment. Back at the store after deliveries were over, he would find a chance to slip the box to Rick Stussen.

During the moments of transfer he would feel as though all his nerves were being pulled fine through his skin, and as though he could never again take a breath that was deep enough.

He had simplified the marketing setup when he spoke to Stussen about it, leaving out one link in the chain. They were operating close to the top, close to the main source, the only source in Johnston. The deliveries were to the peddlers, rather than to the pushers. The farther down the line you got toward the ultimate user, the more dangerous it was, and the more careless and dangerous the people were. It was the job of the peddlers to supply the pushers, and they each had their intricate methods of transfer to the pushers. The final exchange, from pusher to user, was a raw blundering business of objects passed from hand to hand in lobbies of cheap theaters, in schoolyards, in broken-down candy stores, at dingy wrestling matches, on city buses. It was dangerous because too many of the pushers were users, and had become pushers in order to guarantee their own supply. They were unpredictable. And having to deal with the pushers made the job of the peddlers unenviable. But such were the profits all the way up and down the line that it was a risk that seemed to the peddlers to be worth taking. Vern had contempt for them. The contempt was proven to be accurate during the two bad times when the Man came to town in force and coordinated with the locals, and turned the peddling organization upside down, making a sweep of most peddlers and a lot of pushers but, almost inevitably, coming to a dead end at the level of the peddlers. The peddlers were kept under constant surveillance by the organization. They knew that at the first sign of addiction they would be cut off at the pockets and a new peddler lined up. And they also knew that if they cracked and gave away source and method once they were taken in, they would sooner or later have a bad accident. In prison or out.

It was nice, and it had been nice, and it had gone smoothly, and there had been a few bonuses from time to time. There was a place in the cellar, in one end of the cellar, where the floor had not been concreted. There were three fruit jars buried there, the black dirt tamped hard over them. In them the money was rolled tight, and it was good to think about them. Stained moldy money could mean trouble. He had dripped the wax thick around each lid in addition to the rubber gasket and spring top. All used bills in smaller denominations. A fourth jar, hidden behind cellar trash that hadn’t been touched in years, was slowly filling. By the time it was full there would be close to forty thousand.

He went back over the new problem. That was what caught so many of them. They would sense a factor that could disrupt the whole thing. Yet the thought of the money coming in blinded them. Just a little more. Just a little bit more. Then I’ll quit. That was the blindness that spoiled everything. You had to be alert for the smallest cloud on the horizon. Then forget the money. Predicate the risk. Figure the odds. And if it looked bad, get out and get out fast.

It would be difficult to cut loose right now. The delivery system had made them too happy up there on topside. It had made them feel too safe. So any reason he could give would not be enough — particularly the reason that was in his mind. They would laugh at that one. The ideal situation would be to blow the whole arrangement sky high without imperiling himself. That couldn’t be done by a double cross. Their arms were too long. They could reach too far. And leaving Stussen behind would mean an almost automatic warrant.

The ideal solution would be to have Stussen drop out. Drop all the way out. Drop dead. Then there would be no possibility of carrying on. The time lag of setting it up in the same way again would be too great. The market had to be supplied. So they’d have to go back to the previous, more risky method of supplying the peddlers. And that would be an automatic out for one Vern Lockter.

But Stussen wasn’t going to oblige by dropping dead merely because it was convenient. And killing was a task performed by a fool. So, to eliminate one fool it was necessary to convince a second one that it was a job worth performing. That, in turn, brought the slow wheel back to Jana, where it stalled against the immutable fact of Stussen’s sexlessness.

It was a convoluted problem, and it made him tingle with awareness to consider the aspects of it, to consider potential solutions. He had confidence he would find one.

But first it would be necessary to examine the new problem a bit more closely, to see if perhaps he was exaggerating its importance. He knew that he had been guilty of a minor bit of stupidity. For a time his awareness of every detail of his environment had been faulty.

It was Friday evening, two days ago, that he had gone up the stairs and stopped at the second-floor landing, stopped very still, his nostrils widening as he detected, to his astonishment, the faint cloying odor of weed. He had stood there, and known in a matter of seconds. The kid. Teena. Much quieter lately. Out a lot. Thinner. Quite a change since the death of that Henry, Gus’s precious Henry, the oaf in uniform. On Friday he had told himself it was all right. If the kid was on tea, the word could be passed along, topside to peddler to pusher. Cut her off at the pockets. They roped them with tea and built them up to horse. Tea could be dropped without a cure. Horse couldn’t. And throw just enough of a scare into the kid to make it stick. If she got on horse and turned wild, that unfunny man with the unfunny face would lean hard. He might lean hard enough to tip something over.

So, on Saturday, he made a point of getting a good long look at Teena. And he found she was beyond tea, found that she had a habit. Perhaps it was a small one comparatively, but she was starving for it. The signs were there to read in the reddened eyes, the tight movements, the yawning, the rubbing of the nose. She’d been out Saturday night and he hadn’t seen her yet today, but he hoped she’d connected somehow. It would make her easier to talk to.

He walked down the hall from the bathroom to the stairway, and heard, in passing, the muted sound of the music Bonny was forever playing softly on that record player of hers. He had heard Rowell had leaned on her. That was fine. He could lean that way all he wanted. Vern saved the same look for Rowell that he used on Paul Darmond. Bright young man who has learned his lesson. Direct look and shy smile. Darmond bought it. It couldn’t be sold to Rowell.

When he thought of Rowell, he thought of seeing the clown face on the ground and stamping hard with his heel, turning it as he stamped. The thought made his shoulders come up and flattened his breathing. No. That was in the impulse department. That was glandular. Not out of the head. Discard everything that doesn’t come out of the head. Discard that thing that can come roaring up through you like black flame. That’s what happened the last time, when you smashed the stein and jabbed with the broken handle and felt the glass shards twist and tear the soft tissue of the face that had sneered, had annoyed you.

The flame died quickly away, and he went catfooted down the stairs, feeling the flex of his body, feeling taut, aware, all his senses standing open like doors, intensely aware of himself in space, in time, in precise moment of time. Bonny upstairs. Walter, Doris, Gus, Jana, and Anna all off at the afternoon movie. Rick Stussen down in his tiny room off the kitchen.

He went softly down the hall to her door and pressed his ear to the varnished panel as he slowly turned the knob. He heard her bed sigh as she moved, heard a soft cough. He opened the door quietly and stepped inside and shut it quickly enough to contain her gasp of shock and surprise.

“Don’t come in here!”

“I’m in. I want to talk to you.”

She was in pajamas and robe, her hair rumpled, her face wan. She sat up, tugging the belt of the robe tight, unconsciously combing her hair back off her forehead with her fingers, giving her head a quick feminine toss.

“Get out! You can’t come in my room. I’ll yell.”

“Wouldn’t you rather yell for a fix, Teena?” he asked.

Her shoulders came slowly forward and she looked crumpled, sitting there. “A fix? I don’t know what you mean.”

He took two quick steps, snatched at her left wrist, shoved her sleeve up roughly. “A fix. A cap. A jolt. A pop. What do they call it in your group, dear?”

She looked down at the floor. He released her wrist. Her arm dropped limply. The sleeve slid partway down.

“How long has it been?” he asked, sitting beside her on the bed.

“Five days.”

“Trying to break it cold?”

“God, no!” She still stared at the floor. He caught the faint stale flavor of her breath. “How did you find out?”

“Just like when I pick up a newspaper. I know what the news is because I can read the print.”

“It doesn’t show that much.”

“Not to those who don’t know what to look for. You had weed here in your room Friday. It stinks. I smelled it.”

“It was the only thing I could get hold of.”

“Couldn’t you make a connection last night?”

“I couldn’t find anybody. I’m sick. I’m awful sick, Vern. I had a connection Friday and walked out on it. I can’t stop thinking about it.”

“Walked out when you were three days hungry?”

“Stupid. I keep wishing I could set the calendar back to Friday.” She turned sharply toward him in sudden awareness, and her sharp fingernails bit his wrist. “You know the score, the way you talk. Vern, have you got any? Have you? Do you know where I can make a connection? Please, Vern. Please, I’m dying.”

“Just shut up and answer questions. What was the last fix?”

She turned a bit, her back half toward him. “Cap and a half.”

“Main-lined? Yes. I saw the new marks. Kid, do you want to kick the habit?”

“Right now, yes.”

“How do you mean, right now?”

“I do and I don’t. I can’t explain. Sometimes I think of what’s happening to me. I mean, the way it’s making me look. Then I want to kick it. But not cold. A taper. Then... Oh, hell, Vern. What’s left if I do? What’s left for me? I’ve already spoiled one kind of life, and there’s only the other kind. Nothing in the middle.”

“What were you thinking about when I came in?”

“Killing myself. I was thinking about different ways.”

“That would be a nice mess.”

“It would be easier than the way I feel. I spoiled my only connection Friday. I don’t know how to get another one.”

“Maybe I can do something.”

She turned quickly and he saw her immediate misinterpretation, written shrill across her eyes. “I’ll do anything you want me to do, Vern. Anything. Honest to God.”

“I don’t mean that. I’d like to see you kick it. You’ll feel different when you’re out from under. God, you’re seventeen and you look twenty-five.”

“I know.”

“I can’t get in touch with the right people until tomorrow. Then I might not hear for a couple of days.”

“I can’t stand it that long. I can’t stand it.”

“I don’t mean for a fix. I mean for a way to get you off it. If things work right, you can play sick and—”

“I won’t have to play hard.”

“Shut up and listen. Play sick and I can maybe get hold of the right doctor. One who won’t tell your old man the score. Just tell him you’re... well, on the verge of a nervous breakdown and ought to go into a rest home. You’ll get a cure.”

“No.”

“I tell you, you’ll get a cure. It’s not hard. They taper you off.

They use other drugs that cut down the shakes.”

“They all say it’s terrible.”

“I want your solemn promise that you’ll play ball with me on this.”

“I can’t stand it that long. I’ll go crazy. I’ll do something terrible.”

“Suppose, in return for your promise, I get you enough to tide you over.”

She grabbed his arm. “Can you? Right now? Can you?”

“What about your promise?”

“Oh, yes, Vern. I’ll do it. I told you I’ll do anything.”

“A junkie’s promise. You know what that’s worth.”

“Cross my heart, Vern.”

“You won’t leave the house until you leave with the doctor?”

“No, Vern. No. Get me a strong fix. A heavy one. I need it.”

“You got an outfit here?”

“No. I was wishing I had. I was going to put a bubble in my blood. They say that kills you easy.”

“Stop that kind of talk.”

“All right, Vern. Anything you say.”

“You understand I’m taking a hell of a risk. I’m doing it because your old man gave me a break. I don’t want you to break his heart.”

“Hurry, Vern. I promised. Go get it for me.”

He went out into the hall and shut the door quietly. He recognized all the dimensions of the risk he was taking. Yet, all in all, it seemed to be a lesser risk than letting her go off, fly apart, or remake her own connection until her habit got so big it ruined her, turned her into morgue bait or a face in a lineup. In either case, Rowell would be snuffing around. This way — and certainly topside would see the necessity for cooperation — no one should be the wiser, and the kid would get a cure that she would think was the result of human kindness.

He knew he might not have much time. Yet he had to pick the safest peddler in the book. He went silently through the kitchen and let himself into the store. The red neon around the wall clock burned all weekend, as a night light. He found the book under the counter and looked up the number.