The Children of Hamelin (39 page)

“One ounce,” said Tex California.

“AN OUNCE OF ACID?”
shrieked the guitarist. Blue Denim gaped. Baldy took a long drag on his joint. The guy balling the chick on the floor rolled off her and stared up at us through steel-rimmed glasses. The skinny chick on the floor with him zipped up her Levis and sat up. Even the nodding fat girl opened her eyes.

“Ah bullshit!” Baldy said. “Nobody ever had an ounce of acid around here...”

Tex California brought out the bottle. “Jesus Christ,” the just-fucked chick said.

“Is that
really
acid?” Blue Denim said, getting up and joining Baldy who was peering dimly at the bottle. The guitarist joined the mystic circle, then Steel-Rims, finally his chick. The fat girl was too far gone to move and Terry was using the opening to grab for the works on the table.

“It’s acid,” said Tex California.

“How do we know it’s acid?” asked the guitarist.

“Are you called me a liar?” Tex California inquired.

“I just don’t believe in Santa Claus,” the guitarist said. “That’d be an awfully expensive bottle of water to buy. Unless you want to wait around till we take it and see if we get high.”

“You’d need a chem lab to cut it into doses,” Tex said.

Steel-Rims giggled. “We got it,” he said.

“I don’t have the time to wait around here while you try it,” the California Lizard said.

“That doesn’t exactly give me a trusting feeling,” said Baldy.

Tex started to flare, caught a glimpse of me, cooled it. “Tell you what,” he said. “Terry here is our partner, right Terry?”

“Right man,” Terry said, pulling the needle out of the pit of his elbow and unwrapping the tubing from his arm.

“You guys know Terry?” Tex asked. Somewhat unenthusiastic nods. “Then you know what a paranoid freak he is. Terry, you know that’s real acid, don’t you?”

“Sure man,” Terry said.

“Okay,” said Tex California, “so our partner stays here till you’re satisfied. If you get burned, you can always kill him. Got that Terry? Are you scared?”

Seemed to me Tex had laid an awful lot on a very weak commodity. But Terry was paranoid enough to know not to act scared even though he must’ve been scared shitless despite having no reason: “No man, I’m not scared.”

“You got a deal,” Blue Denim said. “But we can’t buy all that. What are your prices?”

“How much money you got.”

“First tell me your prices,” Blue Denim insisted.

“Tell you what,” said Tex. “You tell me how much bread you got and I’ll tell you how much acid it’ll buy and I guarantee it’ll blow your minds.”

“How much we got, treasurer?” the guitarist asked.

Steel-Rims did some arithmetic in his head: “...kilo last week... the smack deal... about two thousand dollars.”

“Told you these cats had bread,” Robin said.

Tex California did not seem happy. “Fuck it...” he muttered under his breath. Then: “You guys got a medicine dropper?”

Blue Denim rummaged around the Shooting Gallery till he found a medicine dropper. He handed it to Tex.

Tex opened the bottle, stuck in the tip of the dropper, and sucked up an inch of acid. “Think that’s about two thousand dollars worth of acid?” he said.

“Oh wow!”

“Get the bread, man, get the bread!”

Steel-Rims fished a giant roll of bills out from under one of the mattresses and started counting it out. Sacramental silence until he was finished. He handed the money to Tex, who pocketed the bottle, handed the dropper to the guitarist who handled it like the Holy Grail, and slowly counted the money.

As Tex counted the money, the guitarist said: “Look, will you take an amp and a guitar? Man, I don’t know why you’re selling so cheap, and I don’t care, but you can have anything in this pad...”

“Shit, you can even have Suzy,” Steel-Rims said, pointing to the recently-fucked chick. “She gives great head.”

Tex ignored them and finished counting the money. Sticking it in his pants pocket, he said: “Cash and cash only.”

“But man—”

“Are you guys cleaned?”

“Yeah, but listen—”

Tex turned his back on the entire scene, and to Robin and me said: “Let’s split.”

We split.

“This is getting us nowhere fast,” Tex California said as we got into the car. “Chick, you gotta come up with some real heavy-bread men.”

“What about Terry?” Robin said in a tiny voice. “I mean, it really
is
acid...?”

The California Lizard turned and leered his rotten teeth into the back seat at us. “Does it really matter, chick?” he said.

Robin turned pale, clutched my hand, stared at the convertible roof and giggled. Either I was too high or not high enough because something working my vocal cords made them say: “Fucking-A it does! If you burned those freaks, they just might do it to Terry and Terry knows Robin and Robin knows me—”

“But you don’t know me,” said Tex California.

“If you burned those guys, I’d see to it that New York got mighty hot for you...”

Tex California laughed an ugly laugh. “Who gives a shit?” he said. “The whole United States is too hot for me as it is. I might as well be radioactive.”

He paused for effect. “Now that you know what the scene is, what the fuck you think you can do about it?”

The cold of the night seemed to seep in through the windows. The California Lizard was wanted by the Feds, a killer behind acid had pulled a gun thrown Terry Blackstone to the wolves—how could anyone believe he was above burning The Meat Factory? Who in turn were probably not above wasting Terry or Robin or me...

At that moment, I crossed over the line, flashed all the way, cut the anchor to the shores of my life—my fate was in the hands of a psycho murderer on his way out of the country one step ahead of the Feds and god-knows who else; my life was spinning on the roulette wheel of the gods and there was not one fucking thing I had to say about it.

“Dig,” said Tex California, “I got no reason not to put pure water in the bottle.” Then with a horrid smile: “And that’s why you can trust me when I tell you the acid is the real thing. Now ain’t I just put you through some interesting changes?”

Then he turned around, started the motor, and was all business. “Come on chick let’s find some real dealers. Enough of this fucking around. You
do
know some real dealers?”

Robin came back long enough to say, “I know a pad uptown... crash pad for dealers coming through town...” But she seemed awfully uptight about something. “I don’t like to go there...”

“Sounds like just what we want,” the California Lizard said.

“But... I don’t like to go there....” in a tiny scared voice.

The dealers’ crash pad was an apartment in a cruddy building in an obscure Puerto Rican neighborhood in the East Twenties. Only two flights up: class.

Robin knocked on a black door with no less than three shiny new brass locks showing. A sound of lots of hard metal chittering inside, and then the door opened just enough for a tall spade in a red double-breasted silk suit with a huge bush of natural to peer out into the hall.

“Robin. Friend of Manfred’s. Business. Big.”

The spade ushered us into a pitch black kitchen, closed two door locks and a police lock behind us, and opened the door to the inner sanctum—

A big room all painted a Day-Glo blue seared your eyeballs to look at with an electric orange carpet wall-to-wall and hot red light from a ceiling fixture, felt like the inside of a blast furnace or a nuclear reactor. Low black backless couches formed three sides of a continuous rectangle rimming the walls. An inner rectangle of gleaming white formica tables surrounded the huge stereo rig at the reactor’s core. The stereo was playing some ghostly kind of acid rock that was mostly ultra- and sub-sonic; felt it with my skin more than heard it, so creepy. On the tables were several ounces of pot, three big brass hookahs and two huge bricks of hash. The air was full of smoke. On one of the couches, a long-haired cat in a white suit, white tie, and black shirt, sucked on his hookah. On another, an A-head type, white, but with a bush of blond natural as huge and wiry as the spade’s, also in an expensive mod suit, this one kelly green. Near where we stood, I could see a light behind a closed door, heard girls muttering from within.

“Well?” said the spade.

“This is... uh... Tex,” Robin said. “He’s got a lot of acid to sell and he’s selling it cheap.”

The cat with the hookah giggled.

“Well now, the little chicky has brought us a big horse-trader out of the wild west,” the spade said. “Well now, I’m Ali, and those creatures are Marvin and Groove, Mr. Tex-ass. Now what’s all this about acid? We’re not exactly in the market for a box of sugar cubes.”

“If you’re trying to impress me, you’re wasting your mouth,” said the California Lizard. “I gotta get rid of an ounce tonight.” He palmed the bottle. Ali oohed.

“I’m Marvin,” said the cat with the hookah. “Do sit down.”

Tex sat down next to Marvin. Ali sat down on the other side of Tex, boxing him in. Robin and I huddled together on the empty couch and tried to fade into the woodwork. You could smell Dope Power in the air.

“Can you guys handle it?” asked Tex California.

“Well now, I think we can scrape the bread together,” Ali said. “First we’ve gotta be sure it’s acid, though.”

“I got no time to wait for you to get high,” Tex said. But he said it nice and easy and matter-of-factly—these were
heavy
cats.

“Won’t take but a minute,” Groove wheezed. “I’ll shoot some.”

Shoot it??
The cat was out of his mind!

Groove reached into his inside breast pocket and took out a black leather case. In the case was a hypodermic syringe.

Tex looked at the spike as Groove took it from the case as if suddenly confronted with someone crazier than he was. “It’s your funeral,” he said.

“Well now, and it’s
your
funeral if it’s water, fair enough?”

“Gimme!” Groove said. Tex somewhat reluctantly handed over the bottle. Groove dipped the point of his spike into the bottle and drew up about half its contents—enough acid to turn on the whole Red Army!

“You’re out of your fucking mind!” Tex yelled.

Groove giggled. He squirted all of the acid in the syringe back into the bottle, stoppered it, and handed it back to Tex. “Now I just shoot up with a spikefull of water and if that was pure acid, I’ll get loaded from what’s still sticking to the sides.”

Groove went through the kitchen and into the bathroom. Gurgling sounds. A couple of minutes of tense silence...

Then Groove came back into the room waving his arms and giggling. “Do business with the man,” he said, flopping back onto the couch. “I’m stoned out of my mind.”

I looked at Groove staring at the light fixture with a big happy smile and couldn’t help feeling an idiot admiration. He could’ve shot a hundred mikes or ten thousand-and he’d done it without a prayer in the world of knowing which. I saw a cat who had casually done something nothing in the world could make me do. Groove was either totally mindless or the world’s heaviest saint.

“Well now,” said Ali, “it looks like the Dope Exchange is open for business. The whole bottle, eh? What do you think, Marvin?”

“I think $3000,” said Marvin. “Yes, that’s just about exactly what I think.”

“You guys are crazy!” Tex whined. “You know what this is worth...”

“So we do,” Ali said ominously.

“We know what it’s worth to us,” said Marvin, “and we know what it’s worth to you.”

“And it’s just not the same thing,” said Ali. “Not the same thing at all.”

“How do you figure that?” said the California Lizard, squirming a bit on the couch between Ali and Marvin. For the first time, I saw gaping holes in his cool.

“Well now,” said Ali, “to us that stuff is worth maybe $20,000, which is the profit we figure to make over what we pay you. But you’re in a bind, Mr. Tex-ass, or you wouldn’t be up here using a nickel-bag dealer for a connection and selling acid an ounce at a time, now would you? Man, everything about you is screaming Heat. You are a leper, you are a pariah, you are a walking dose of clap. You need bread instantly. You oughta be down on your Tex-ass knees thanking us for being softhearted enough to lay on 3Gs.”

I mean, that Ali was a genius! Genius in the black magic of dealer’s logic. Tex California was a heavy-bread berserker, but these boys were pros. Paisanos in full standing in the private Dealer’s Mafia. Tex California the Ice Lizard death-on-acid big bread berserker was like a bar-room brawler suddenly come up against a karate-freak.

They had him and he knew it.

“Come on man,” he begged, “I’ve gotta hole up in Tangier or somewhere. I need
bread.”

“We’ll make it four thousand,” said Marvin. “‘Cause we like your groovy white coat.”

They were bargaining for real now. “Come on man, make it seven.”

“Four,” said Ali. Sounded like the bargaining had ended one step after it had begun.

“Shit, a lousy five thousand bucks, five, okay?”

“Well now,” said Ali, “tell you what. My old lady is in the next room cutting some hash into sticks. We’ll leave it up to her. Okay, things?”

Marvin nodded. Groove just giggled.

“Hey Tanya, haul ass in here!” Ali shouted. At the sound of the name, a shudder went through Tex that spent itself moving his hand with a seemingly-random twitch into his right coat pocket.

Out of the other room came a slim chick in a tight black dress, pale and skinny and spookily good-looking, a sinister A-head Madonna.

“This here is—”

“You know who that is, you dumb jive spade!” Tanya shrilled when she saw Tex. “That’s Larry Allen! Oh Jesus, oh shit... Larry-the-Depthcharge Allen!”

I saw Tex’s right hand close on his gun; apparently he didn’t like someone calling him by his rightful name.

“Well now, who the fuck is Larry Allen, you crazy speed-freak bitch?”

“Wait a minute! Wait a minute...” said Marvin. “The Depthcharge... I know that name from San Francisco—”

“Bet your ass you know the name from San Francisco!” Tanya said, staring hot razorblades at Tex. “Remember the cat was supposed to be sticking cyanide in one cap out of five hundred? Larry Allen!”