Drift (25 page)

“Right. You didn’t by any chance get those other test results back, did you?”

“Test results? You’re un-fucking-believable. Yeah, as a matter of fact I did get the results back. Where did you say that shit came from?”

“The crop-duster plane. It was all over the place.”

“Yeah, but where did you get your sample?”

“I told you, it was from the windowsill in my kitchen.”

“Your kitchen, huh? Well, that’s hilarious, Betty Crocker, because that was flour, too.”

“Flour? Wait a second, Stan—”

“Doyle, I hope we get to work again together in an official capacity, but in the meantime, I want you to write my name and my number on a piece of paper and throw it the fuck away.”

And then he was gone.

Before I could get back to that last message, the phone started ringing in my hand. I felt a strong urge to stash the thing under the sofa cushions and run away, but I looked at the display and saw it was the hospital. For a moment it took me back to the call about Frank.

“Hello?”

“Hello, is this Mr. Carrick?”

“Yes.”

“Hi, this is Janie Walters from St. Mark’s. Bruce is ready to be discharged, but someone needs to come and pick him up.”

“Is he okay?”

“He did fine. Sometimes it can be pretty tough when we give them the Narcan. You know, if they’re … You know, if they’ve got a big habit. But he did good.”

“So, what was it, anyway?” I asked.

“We don’t know, exactly. Probably heroin, maybe morphine. Could have been fentanyl or oxycontin, something like that.”

“He wouldn’t tell you?”

She paused. I think she could sense my annoyance, and she was choosing her words carefully. “He denies taking anything, but that’s pretty common. He’s probably scared. The fact that he’s not shooting up and didn’t have too much trouble with the Narcan suggests he’s probably not too far into it, although people can get pretty deep before they start injecting.”

“Right. Okay, should I come over now?”

“Sure. I’ll have them get him ready.”

“I’ll be there in ten minutes.”

*   *   *

The hospital was even busier than before. There weren’t enough seats in the waiting area, and people were milling around while the staff rushed back and forth. Moose was sitting in a wheelchair by the front desk, tapping his fingers on the armrest and fidgeting his feet. I smiled when I saw him. Not because I was happy to see him, but because he looked like he’d been through hell, and I was glad. He deserved to have been through hell. Maybe he’d learn a lesson.

Janie Walters was standing next to him. She looked like she’d been through hell, too.

“Hi, Doyle,” she said with a tired smile. Then she looked down at Moose, like she expected me to say something to him.

I didn’t. I ignored him completely. It was reciprocated, which annoyed me even more: Who did he think he was, ignoring me when I was there to pick him up? Janie nodded, as if she suddenly grasped my anger at the idiot who had almost killed himself in my mother’s house messing around with substances I was professionally committed to fighting.

“Well,” she said, awkwardly clapping her hands together. “You be careful, Bruce. And remember what we talked about.”

To his credit, Moose closed his eyes before he rolled them. Otherwise I might have backhanded him across the room.

He started to get up, but Janie put a hand on his shoulder and pushed him back into the chair. “Not until we get outside,” she said. “Those are the rules.”

He huffed, like it was a hardship for him to stay in the wheelchair. Janie started to wheel him out.

“Don’t be too hard on him,” she said, looking up at my face. “He’s had a rough night.”

I wanted to tell her a thing or two about my rough night, but when I looked into her eyes, I caught myself. She’d had a rough night, too. “Okay. Any special instructions?”

She shrugged. “Just keep an eye on him.”

As soon as we were outside, Moose looked up at Janie. “Can I get up now?”

She stopped and put the brake on. “Yes, you can get up now.”

He scrambled out of the wheelchair, almost tripping when his feet got caught in the footrest.

“If you’re going to break something, go ahead and do it here,” I said. “Save me the trip.”

He gave me a dirty look and stalked off toward my car.

I gave Janie a smile. “Don’t work too hard,” I told her.

“Take it easy on him,” she said.

*   *   *

Moose slumped down in the passenger seat, one hand covering his eyes. “Thanks for coming to get me,” he said when we were halfway home.

He was making an effort, but I wasn’t quite there yet.

“Well … thanks for not puking in my car, or dying. Yeah, thanks for not dying in my car when I was driving you to the hospital, or in my parents’ house. You know, while you were overdosing.”

Moose sighed.

I gripped the wheel tighter, clenching my teeth as well. Janie had said to be easy on him, but having started, I could feel my anger building.

“ODing on heroin?” I yelled despite myself. “Jesus Christ! Are you fucking kidding me?”

“I didn’t take any heroin!”

“Oh, you didn’t? Oh, that’s a relief. You should have told me that last night while you were choking on your own vomit and slipping into a coma. It would have saved me a trip to the fucking hospital.”

“I’m not using, I swear to God.”

“Oh, well, you must be telling the truth, because a junkie would never lie about using drugs. That’s never happened.”

“You’re a real asshole, you know that?”

We drove in silence after that.

I wasn’t totally unsympathetic. I knew he felt like shit. And I know he was upset about Squirrel. I had done some pretty boneheaded things when I was young, too. And boneheaded was still very much in my repertoire. But I hadn’t ODed on heroin, for God’s sake. And I definitely hadn’t done it while staying in the home of a narcotics detective in a precarious professional state.

When we pulled into the driveway, I got out of the car first, but I dutifully hung back and waited for him, making sure he didn’t fall. When we got inside, he went straight upstairs, the steps creaking loudly.

I stayed downstairs, but I couldn’t relax knowing he was up there. I didn’t want to leave him alone in the house, but I couldn’t stand the thought of being there with him. Once he was settled in, I got back in the car.

52

Twenty minutes later, I was parked down the street from Crooked Creek Farm, where the bust had gone down. Even at three kilos it was probably still the biggest police story out here in the last ten years, but I was still surprised to see a patrol car parked on the street out front. Between the busted bust and the flu from hell, I didn’t think the Dunston Police Department would spare the manpower to guard the scene. I was about to turn around and go when the uniform took a call on his radio. A minute later, he started up his car and drove off—no lights, no rush, like he had just gotten word that he had more important things to do.

I waited a few minutes, then approached the same way I had before, diagonally across the field next to the driveway, so I could say I hadn’t seen the police tape. It rankled that the police tape was meant to exclude me along with the other civilians. It made my suspension seem very real.

As I walked up to the cinder block building, I noticed a distinct quietness, like the place was still in a state of shock after the violence of the bust.

The house was taped up tight, and I left it that way. Walking across the lawn was one thing. Breaking into a sealed house was something else entirely. Through the windows, the place seemed empty of both people and things, and I was relieved. I’d been dreading the sight of pizza boxes and beer cans, the spore of young men who didn’t give a shit. Because it would bring home the fact that I had killed three of them. Three lowlife criminals, to be sure. Probably three animals with long histories of violent crime. But three people that I had killed.

I went over to the cinder block building where all the shooting had taken place. Both doors were closed and taped. The oil drums were gone. I walked around the whole building, past the windowless back. When I got to the far side, I saw a single window set in the wall. Cupping my hands around my eyes, I peered through the window and saw a plain room with another doorway at the far end, the frame spattered with blood. Beyond that was the spot where I’d landed in the hallway, where Stan had found me. Next to it was the spot where the guy called Paulie had died, after I shot him.

I stifled a shudder and kept walking. The two metal shacks looked exactly the same as before, except the padlock had been snipped off the second one.

The first one—the one where Roberts and his crew had been loading the bundles of whatever the hell it was that wasn’t heroin—was empty. The second shed was not empty. It was half-filled with stacks of wooden crates filled with apples—five high, six wide, and three deep. Ninety cases.

Not what I expected. I hadn’t had breakfast, so I took an apple from the case on top of the nearest stack and bit into it. It wasn’t very good—mealy and not very sweet, maybe even a little bitter. When I let the door close, the entire structure sang with the quavery warble of thin metal flexing.

My stomach grumbled when the apple reached it, reminding me how hungry I was.

As I followed the gravel path up toward the silo, I took a few more bites, but the apple didn’t get any better. The silo was old and rusty, looming ominously over everything else. It was empty except for a layer of pigeon crap on the bottom and a bunch of pigeons at the top.

I turned and walked back to my car. Apart from a deep melancholy to go with the sick feeling that had occupied my stomach since talking to Bowers, I hadn’t found a thing. I took a last bite out of my apple and flung the rest of it at the side of the silo. It banged loudly, splattering in all directions and sending a whoosh of pigeons out the opening at the top of the silo.

I don’t know what I had hoped to find there, some kind of clue as to what had really been going on, maybe how the flour fit into this all. But there was no evidence of a sinister bread-making operation, no gangster elves making cookies in a tree. There was nothing.

Even right after the bust, I had known something else was going on, but at least there had been an illusion of closure. Now there wasn’t even that. There was just an ominous feeling settling over everything, like that damned mist from the crop duster. In Philly, there was a shitstorm with my name on it, and it was getting worse. In Dunston, the big case was fucked; something was going down and the bad guys were getting away with it. People I loved were dead, and now people I cared about were sick. Maybe the whole town was. Maybe the whole world was.

53

It was noon, and apart from a few bites of apple, I still hadn’t had breakfast. An image of it flashed in my mind—eggs, bacon, toast—and the grumbling from my stomach grew louder. As soon as I remembered that Branson’s served breakfast all day, I knew where I was headed.

I called Nola as I drove.

“Hello?” she said, sounding worse than she had the night before.

“How are you feeling?”

“Rough night. I feel like crap, and I look like crap. How’s Moose?”

It took me a moment to realize she was referring to his mental state after Squirrel’s death, not the OD. “He’s okay,” I told her. “He’s upset.” She didn’t seem ready to handle more than that. “I got the results back from my friend at DEA. That powder they were spraying, apparently it was flour.”

“Flour? Like bread flour?”

“Apparently.”

“Why would they be spraying flour?”

“I don’t know, maybe to send a message. But that’s what the tests said. Maybe your doctor was right, maybe it’s just the flu. There’s some bad stuff going around.”

“It’s not the flu,” she said brusquely. Then she took a deep breath. “Doyle, it’s … it’s not the flu.”

She started coughing, and I wondered for a moment if she was doing it for effect. But I immediately felt guilty as the cough got away from her, getting deeper and harsher.

“That sounds pretty bad,” I said when she stopped. “Maybe you need to go to the hospital.”

“I can’t go to the hospital.”

“Why not?”

“The chemicals, Doyle.” Like it was obvious. “Hospitals are worse than hotels. They’re full of sick people and medicines and disinfectants and other stuff. They’re so concerned about the germs they don’t even think about the chemicals. Last time I got sick, I went into the hospital. It might have saved my life, but it could have killed me. No hospitals.”

I could tell she was getting irritated at me. “Okay,” I said. “I’ll check on you later.”

When I walked into Branson’s, the glorious smells of breakfast still hung in the air, but the place felt different. The tables were almost empty. Squires was behind the bar as usual, but he wasn’t wiping down surfaces or washing glasses or inventorying. He was just standing there.

I thought he saw me and I waved, but he looked right through me.

The waitress came over immediately. She looked tired. I ordered two eggs over, hash browns, bacon, scrapple, rye toast, and coffee.

The coffee came, and as I sat there and sipped it, the exhaustion seemed to sink back in, but it wasn’t the aching exhaustion of the night before; it was a mellow, comfortable, almost snuggly exhaustion.

I closed my eyes for a moment and just enjoyed the fact that I was sitting. I heard a noise across the table, and when I opened my eyes, I saw I had been joined by my friend Chief Pruitt.

“Well, you sure screwed the pooch on that one, didn’t you?” He shook his head. “Five dead over a vanload of baking supplies.”

“And some heroin,” I reminded him.

“Yeah, you’re right,” he conceded, taking off his shades and waving for the waitress to bring him a cup of coffee. He gave her a wink when she did, and I wondered if he was going to pay for it. “Tox results came back on the Squires boy. They said if he hadn’t fallen, he probably would have died of an overdose anyway.”

“The Squires boy? Wait, you mean Squirrel?”