Alice & Dorothy (20 page)

My jaw might be broken
. The ceiling of his Momma’s house came slowly into focus, and he lay there for a while staring at the cracks in the cheap paint. He frowned when the image of Alice coming at him with the lid off the back part of the toilet danced across his memory. He’d never seen that look on a woman before. Pure, chaotic rage.

She killed someone
. Like an idiot he’d nearly blurted it out when she had that gun on him. The freezer gun.
I
am
an idiot. I should have never left them alone out here. I should have kicked her in the face the moment she walked through the door
. He was actually lucky to be alive, if he thought about it.

That thing with the brown haired girl had been a mistake. He shouldn’t have tried to fuck her. Not when he didn’t know if Alice was awake or not. His stupid rage had gotten the best of him. She’d just looked so fucking useless.
Just wanted to make sure she knew I’m the boss
. He ran his fingers through his hair but it hurt and he stopped. And then he remembered the black bag he’d grabbed out of the toilet.

He sat up. Nausea and dizziness met him halfway. He closed his eyes until the wave passed. Slowly. He mustn’t rush it. He grabbed the table for support. He braced his other hand on his knee. He got up on one shaky leg. He was standing now. Good.
I can stand, at least
. He took a few steps on his rubber legs, found the hall, and braced himself against the wall. A picture of Dali’s melting clocks leapt free of the hook as he passed; it crashed to the ground behind him. Glass splintered and spilled across the floor.
Old Grammy would have liked that. She always hated that picture
.

He couldn’t see into the bathroom yet. He was blind with pain. It didn’t matter though. That blond whore and her skittish friend had taken the bag, he was sure of it. He’d used it for bait, to buy some time, and now it was gone. The blood and slivered candy coated bits of teeth weren’t enough to mask the sour tang of shit in his mouth. He owed a lot of money on that bag.
I am an idiot
, he thought again.

He reached the bathroom and a quick glance around confirmed what he knew was true. The lid off the back of the toilet was missing. There was water and blood on the floor from his fight with Alice.
I should have gone to the freezer first
. But he hadn’t gone for the gun because he’d never seen Alice as a threat before she pulled his own frozen gun on him.

The strange thing was that he actually thought he was doing her a favour when he dropped her at the hospital. She had to know he couldn’t stay there with her; he’d given her the drugs. But Alice hadn’t seen it that way. She’d seen another betrayal from another man in her life. There was a long list of them now, Rabbit had no doubt. He wondered if the little brunette was Alice’s lover now. If she’d given up on men forever.

Shit
.

Alice had been his friend, hadn’t she? He always thought so. As good of friends as they could be under the circumstances. Rabbit liked to think that he and Alice had crossed some kind of line that went past the usual dealer and user relationship. They’d been close. He’d showed her things. Like where he’d stashed his backup gun, just in case shit ever went down when she was in the house.

He walked back to the living room, being careful to avoid the glass from his poster. He grabbed his smokes off the table. He plunked down on the couch. He popped a smoke into his mouth, flicked his lighter and took a drag. In response, his teeth shrieked in pain, and Rabbit pulled the bloody stick from his lips.

“
FUCK!
” He mashed the smoke in the ashtray. He cupped the green glass in his hands and spit a bloody wad into the bed of ashes. When he breathed out the ashes caught the air and puffed out around him. His teeth glittered back at him like tiny bits of yellow pearl. He thought of the stripped meat look of a dog bone.

Twenty thousand dollars
. Those bitches had taken it all. Rabbit was a business man; he had people who depended on him on both sides of the ladder. He answered to his connections. He answered to the junkies who came to bang and pretend to be his friend. But he’d convinced those Mexican fucks to trust him with more this time, and now he was out a whole lot of money. And if Alice started selling it before he had a chance to cut it again, he’d be out twice as much. Forty thousand.
Fuck
.

Alice wasn’t a heavy user. She still had a brain. She wasn’t particularly bright when it came to Mr Brown though, and she might just as easily kill herself as kill someone else. She had high octane shit. Not pure, by any stretch of the imagination, but not some bullshit baby powder mix that you’d have to shoot a full grain of to get high. A grain would kill her. And she wouldn’t even know how much that was.

Rabbit touched his teeth with the tip of his tongue. The exposed nerves were like nine volt batteries in his mouth. They sent a charge up inside his face and made his nose twitch. He coughed and whimpered, rubbed his face with his hands and they came away bloody. He snorted blood and smoke. He looked over at the television and sighed. His head was killing him. It felt like his brain was about to burst out of his face. A wave of nausea passed. He had to get his fucking shit together. He had to find those cunts before the Mexicans came looking for their cash.

But first he had to get rid of the lightning show in his mouth.

Rabbit reached down under the couch and felt around until his fingers closed on a cool metal box. It was an old cigarette tin he’d picked up years ago during a promotion. Back when smoke companies were still allowed to advertise to Average Joes and before they’d lost all their ad money in class action lawsuits to dying smokers. It was bound in yellow and green rubber bands. The top of the box had a sticker of a skeleton smoking a long tipped cigarette and sporting an oversized top hat. Rabbit thought the skeleton might have been
Slash
from his Guns N’ Roses days, but he wasn’t sure.

He pulled the bands off the box and popped it open. There were bags of dope, a lighter, new unopened syringes, his baby spoon from when his momma fed him by hand (and wouldn’t she be proud of her son for using
that
particular heirloom to cook junk), and a tightly wound bundle of Q-tips. Everything a growing boy needed to blast his brains out.

He didn’t need the blast though. He just needed enough to turn the lightning spikes in his broken teeth into warm fuzzies. He needed to keep enough of his head so he could figure out how the fuck he was going to find Alice.

He scooped up a bag of dope and placed a chunk of heroin about half the size of his little fingernail in the baby spoon. The pale brown powder broke apart easily enough and he pushed it around on the spoon to even it out. There was a half a beer sitting on the coffee table, but he was afraid if he used it as mix he’d end up sleeping on the floor. Instead he pursed his lips, forming suction in his closed mouth and drawing blood out of the wounds left by his broken teeth. Then he pushed the blood to the front of his mouth with his tongue and very carefully spit into the spoon. He stirred it with his baby finger. The mixture of blood, spit, and drug turned black on the spoon. Sticking the finger in his mouth caused a small lightning bolt to hammer along his jaw and he winced accordingly. His finger tasted bitter and bloody.

Rabbit carefully put the spoon down on the table and gabbed a cotton swab out of his kit. Then he picked up his lighter and warmed the bloody rig. It bubbled for just a moment, and then he put the lighter down and dropped the cotton swab into it. The cotton soaked up the contents of the spoon and became a dull, reddish brown colour.
It looks like a partially deflated eyeball,
he thought.
I’m
gonna have to remember that one.

He stuck a clean syringe into the cotton ball and drew the rig. The cotton was more than just a gross-looking way for him to pull heroin into a syringe; it was a filter used to keep particles out of the bloodstream. From the look of the cotton swab, there were a lot of them. Rabbit counted flecks of broken enamel among the more usual impurities that came from heroin use. He slapped his arm to bring up a vein. He followed it with his finger to make sure it was strong enough to hold a syringe. He wasn’t sure what saliva might do to his blood, but he was sure the blood in the syringe itself wouldn’t do anything harmful. All the same, he needed a stable vein to take the shot. He found it, as always.

The needle slid in smooth, with practiced ease. Rabbit was a regular user himself, but he also fixed rigs for a lot of his customers; party girls like Alice and college kids who were sick of spending all their tuition on junk they smoked or snorted. New heroin users getting onto the needle could get blasted for less than it cost to buy a cup of coffee. Unfortunately that didn’t last. Rabbit knew those kids would be back to spending their tuition cheques before long, unless they somehow managed to kick (unlikely) or overdosed and died (probably) with cash in the bank still (almost never).

Rabbit wasn’t here to judge though. People did what they want. That was the great fucking thing about being alive. You got to choose what kind of directions your life went. If you wanted to be a slave to the buck, you were welcome to it. But Rabbit wasn’t part of the rat race, he was in a different hole altogether. And something big was going to happen in his future, he could tell. All he had to do was look at his watch and he could see it, plain as the nose on his face.
A nose with little arms for a moustache, swinging wildly while his eyes rocked back and forth like one of those black cat clocks...

...what was he thinking about? He’d lost his train of thought for a moment. It was all good though, because another train was going to come along sooner or later. He didn’t have to worry about being late, he lived in the city. And though the city was full of demons and monsters, there was one thing you could always count on: You could never be
too
late for anything, could you? There was always another one coming along.

Rabbit shook his head. He was drifting. He looked down at the syringe in his arm and giggled. There was a small crust of blood forming around the entry point, and a long thin line of it had dried to his arm. How long had he been sitting here? It didn’t matter, someone had pushed the plunger on the syringe all the way in. He felt warm and snuggly and safe, and the room smelled like blood and baby powder and burning electronics. The door was open. The sun had just about set, and it was a beautiful blue-gray outside. He had to find Alice and Dorothy, but there was time for that. That was the great thing about living in the city. There was always time for everything.

Dorothy stared at Alice as she drove. “Well?” she said finally.

It was clear Alice was doing her best to ignore the girl. “Well what?” She glanced at Dorothy for an instant and then back at the road. Her blue eyes looked black under the reflected glare of the streetlights.

“
Well what
?” Dorothy repeated. “Well what do we do now?”

“Now we get you some cheeseburgers, and we find a hotel room.
That’s
what we do now.”

Alice looked at Dorothy, then at the opiate shield in her hands. She shook her head. Then she reached over and pushed the brick back into Rabbit’s bag. “It’s a lot, okay?”

“
How much
?” Dorothy repeated.

“I honestly don’t know,” Alice said.

Tell her,
the Hater said.

She didn’t want to. She really wasn’t sure of the value, to be perfectly honest. She had a thought that it might be worth quite a lot. It was just a feeling though.

Tell her.

No.

You’re so useless, darling.

No.

“
Alice!
” Dorothy shouted.

Alice blinked, saw the red light out of the corner of her eye just as she passed under it. She slammed on the breaks, but the car was moving too fast and slid into the intersection. Alice straightened the wheel and pumped the gas, then floored it. The cab of the car lit up for a moment to the sound of shrieking tires and angry horns from other cars.

“
OH FUCK YOU!
” Alice shouted. Her face collapsed in a snarl.

“
...the hell!
” Dorothy said. “Are you crazy? You could have killed us!”

“I would not,” Alice said. “Don’t be so fuckin’ dramatic all the time.”

Dorothy’s eyes bulged like she was choking on a toffee. Her mouth flapped open, and then she shut it. After a moment her fish-look was replaced by black hurt, and she sank back into her seat. “Go to hell.” The bag of heroin was still in her hands, and now she threw it to the floor like it was a lump of dogshit.