Altered States (2 page)

Brand-slang was what they called it. No-one was fluent. That was the point. It was a language that you could never pin down. It morphed over time; never persisting long enough for anyone to really know it, for meaning to ever stick. That was just one necessity for avoiding the law.

As the money was changing hands neither of them noticed the black Mercedes roll up across the street; a tinted window gliding down silently. The first shot went through the dealer’s upper arm, the second through his chest. Then the car was gone.

The client had been thrown to the floor uninjured. He acted quickly, pouncing to the aid of the victim as he punched nine-one-one into his phone. He knew that at the first sound of sirens he would have to make his move. He couldn’t afford to be seen here.

Blood bubbled up through the client’s fingers relentlessly as he pressed his hands down on the dealer’s chest wound. Then he noticed that blood was pumping out of his back too – the hole went straight through.

As the crimson pool he knelt in grew larger, Detective Conner Alvisa glanced at the holdall lying beside him, its red-splattered contents now worthless.

What a frustratingly crazy world, he thought, that so much blood should be spilt over this...

Over a bag of t-shirts and jeans.

* * * * *

The ‘rug trade’ was the term coined by the media to describe the trade in fake branded textiles. There were no rugs of course, mainly shirts and jeans and the like, but the term had a nice familiar ring to it which sat neatly in the front-page headlines.

The story of the rug trade began over a decade before in New Zealand with a seemingly unrelated incident. A musician and recreational drug user was enjoying himself at a house-party when he was unfortunate enough to witness the horrific and public suicide of a friend high on meth. The musician had already lost one family member to drugs and this episode finally made him determined to kick his own habit for good. He began to experiment with legal alternatives, and he even sought out a professor of neuropharmacology to tutor him and aid in his search. Eventually, from papers published in the States, he identified a compound called benzylpiperazine, or BZP. It acted like methamphetamine but was non-addictive and carried an extremely low risk of overdose or death. What was more, it was a legal substance in most countries. The musician went on to set up a multi-million dollar company selling legal highs.

This development was what turned the tide against illegal street drugs across the world. And it wasn’t just BZP; there was a massive selection of psychoactive substances designed to mimic the effect of pretty much every illegal drug on the street. Stimulants, opiates, hallucinogens – whatever your taste you could buy it online; you could even buy some at the grocery store.

All this meant that over time the bottom fell out of the illegal drug market and suddenly there were a lot of underworld dealers with nothing much to deal.

The attention of some wily dealers turned from white powder to white cotton, from Brazil to China. They realised that if you could manufacture an item for a dollar in China which had a street value of fifty in the West, then there was some serious money to be made. It was all about stitching in the right label.

The counterfeit goods market had been around as long as there had been goods to counterfeit, but this all happened at a time when intellectual property rights were big news. Record labels and movie companies were losing millions to illegal downloads and fake discs and they were putting massive pressure on world governments to do something about it. And the governments responded. Suddenly, protecting the profits of multinational corporations seemed to become the number one priority for the law.

So these two events collided. The counterfeit fashion industry gained the regimented structure and firepower of former drugs gangs; and the law enforcers gained a huge resource boost and impetus to shut the industry down. The result, predictably, was a mess. A bloody mess. And it got no messier than on the streets of New Meadows.

* * * * *

It was early evening when Conner Alvisa got back to the station. Only a few people milled about the large open-plan office. He was pleased to see Mila still at her desk. He knew that when someone died all over you, it was good to have someone to bitch to about it. Mila swivelled her chair to face Conner as if she’d been awaiting his return.

‘
That
bad?’ Conner slumped himself at his desk. ‘Go on, shoot. Make my day.’

‘Bigby’s been arrested.’

‘What?!’ Conner immediately stood up again and moved over to Mila’s screen displaying the arrest report.

‘
Murder
?’ he exclaimed with genuine confusion and leaned in to read the detail. ‘Six-year-old girl, twelve months ago? What the f–’ He held himself back from barking any profane rhetoric at Mila. ‘Is he in?’ he asked instead and marched off without awaiting a response.

‘
Let
them? It was a federal thing. I didn’t even know about it till it was too late. Hell, I still don’t know anything.’

‘Well, they might just as well be nailed to your desk,’ Conner fired as his parting shot. He stormed out and whistled past Mila who was standing outside.

‘That wasn’t fair, Conner,’ she said in pursuit.

‘Well ... life isn’t.’

Bigby wasn’t a dealer. He was a supplier. Or, at least, he was a go-between, a runner. It took six months of investigation just to find out his real name – nobody was stupid enough to use their own name in this game. He was called Jackson Burch, hence his dealer name, Bigby – ‘Big B’.

The investigation hadn’t uncovered enough solid evidence to pin anything on Bigby. But then, they didn’t want to arrest him anyway. He connected people. He was far more useful outside, doing his job. He could take them higher.

Home would be dark and empty. It was always empty, but all the more so on days when you had seen someone die; when you had let someone’s life bubble through your fingers. It was a stark reminder that your own life was bubbling away too, just at a slower pace.

Conner knew he would be making a detour on the way back home that day.

He found Crystal Seth skulking behind a cheap hotel; one of his favourite skulking spots. The two men briefly exchanged pseudo-pleasantries, before Conner handed over some cash in exchange for three grams of kratom extract. Kratom is harvested from the leaves of a tree native to south-east Asia, and offers an energising and euphoric effect similar to opiates. You can buy kratom products in any of the specialist shops in the area. But some people are not so keen to be seen buying drugs, legal or otherwise, in the same way that some people are not so keen to be spotted visiting a sex shop. As such, there is a small niche market of street-trading legal highs.

Plus, rumour had it that Crystal Seth pepped up his wares a little. Conner wasn’t sure exactly what Crystal Seth did to his products but the effect was real enough, and he knew it could only be
slightly
illegal. Certainly nothing compared to selling fake Levis on the street. Conner had been governed by the force for so long that he failed to see the irony in this sentiment.

What Conner also failed to see was that the gear he bought from Crystal Seth was identical to what he could have bought from a store around the corner at a far more reasonable price. The extra kick was purely placebo; a false high created by the thrill of obtaining drugs from a dodgy guy in a back alley; rendered even more potent by the fact that Conner was a cop.

After a muggy walk home Conner stepped into his apartment and checked the fridge. There was nothing in it that constituted food but there was three-quarters of a pint of milk, two days out-of-date. He unscrewed the lid and sniffed at the neck. Concluding that it wouldn’t kill him, he poured it into a glass and added the three grams of recently purchased powder and two spoons of honey, before whisking it briskly with a fork.

In the lounge he placed the glass on the coffee table and moved over to the mantelpiece, boasting two photographs in matching aluminium frames. It wouldn’t take a detective to determine that this was the mark of a woman’s touch. But the layer of dust upon them revealed that the touch had not alighted here for quite some time. Fittingly, therefore, one of the pictures was of his wife and their son. It was taken when his son was about four, when he still had fair hair. That was about a year before they – well
she
– walked out on him. Conner gets to see his son every other week now, for the weekend. He gets to see his wife every other week too, for the passing of their timeshare progeny across the threshold and back.

The other picture on the mantelpiece was of his parents. He didn’t see them as much as he should either. He always felt a pang of guilt when he thought about his parents, though he wasn’t sure why exactly. It was as if he hadn’t yet made enough of his life to justify the sacrifices they made to have him. Or something like that.

What he did know was that all of the people staring at him should be a larger part of his life than they were, and that one day he might get around to doing something about that.

He ran a finger down the face of his wife and smiled at her. Then he turned both pictures face down; turned away four pairs of disapproving eyes so they could no longer scrutinise him.

Slumped in the sofa he held the glass of milky-cocktail for a moment. Milk seemed such an innocent drink to be taking drugs with, albeit legal ones. It felt oxymoronic, but he didn’t let it trouble him for too long. He necked the drink, laid back and let euphoria wash away another day.

Bailing Out

I had come to New Meadows to meet an alleged murderer. There are a lot of people in New Meadows who might make you contemplate murder – if only in an idle musing fashion. Though it is not the kind of place I would wish to vacation in for the sake of idle musing. In fact, not even if my life, wealth or sexual health depended upon it. The beautiful rolling fields promised by such a pretty place-name are realised only by the endless green baize of gaming tables that stretch as far as the eye can see. Smoking is still legal here so as-far-as-the-eye-can-see is about fourteen feet, because as smoking enclaves around the globe get fewer and smaller, so the smoke gets denser and denser.

New Meadows is a border town that started life as a filling station in 1924. Now it’s a gambling haven. It’s fair to say that for all the things New Meadows is, meadowy it is not. To the best of my knowledge, the town has never nurtured the existence of a single blade of grass, rabid rodent or, in fact, any organism not sufficiently evolved to comprehend the rules of craps – and then lose their money playing it. Coincidentally, I have never evolved sufficiently to comprehend the rules of craps, which may have something to do with me being English. But, then, by the time I arrived in New Meadows it was the small hours of the morning and the only thing I felt sufficiently evolved to do was sleep.

As it turned out, I couldn’t even do that very well, and I awoke the next morning to a fuzzy head. For a while I attempted to hide from the day and all that it represented, but the day was on top form and found me almost immediately, cowering under a hotel duvet. I peeled open my eyes and tilted my head toward the clock on the bedside table. The clock was partially obscured by the photo I had propped against it the night before. I reached out for it and stared into it once more. A habit I’d almost shaken until the previous day.

The picture was of a young girl on a sunny day – Pearle. A bob of fair hair bounced beside her face and a mischievous smile played on her lips. I drifted away to a better time; an imaginary time. I’d never met the girl, but at that moment I was with her. Her smile infectiously spread to my own face and I was at peace. Just for a moment.

The ability to enter altered states of consciousness is a powerful ability of the human mind. One that is very much under-utilised. Few people realise that our daily lives are littered with experiences of altered states – you don’t need to be hypnotised or intoxicated. If you have ever arrived at work with no recollection of the journey in, then you experienced an altered state – a kind of ‘autopilot’ altered state. Or if you’ve walked out of a cinema after watching a superhero movie and felt invincible then this too was an altered state – a superdelusion state maybe.