The Deal of a Lifetime

This summary is not available. Please click here to view the post.

Billy, Pagers, Deals and Hitches

Chapter Seven: Billy

Billy’s trailer was down on the other side of the tracks… well, the other side of the freeway and the tracks… in a storage lot… where RVs, boats, trailers and storage bins were hidden away from the eyes of the tourists and locals. The lot was fenced in and secured with razor-wire running the whole perimeter. Billy felt relatively secure in the depths of the lot while he fixed another syringe of black tar. His pager beeped while he was in the midst of shooting up. “Who the fuck can this be.”

            He checked the number on the display. Billy was a long term user of heroin and it had been ages since he ever got a rush out of a fix. It now amounted to little more than to keep the dope sickness at bay. The number on the pager wasn’t one he was familiar with. “Damn,” he muttered, putting his flannels on over a stained wife-beater undershirt, “Another of the French bitch’s friends?”

            Still, he had to get a few more bucks together to score another 100 grams. He had about ten halves wrapped and ready that he had to unload before he had enough for that. He jumped on his bicycle and made it over to the Scolaries on Milpas to use the pay phone. His chest sank as he heard the Hispanic accent on the other end of the line, “Hey, Billy, meet me at three.”

“I’m not ready yet, Miguel.”

            “Sheet, Billy, wotchew mean… not ready?”

“Just a couple bucks short…” Billy wanted to bitch about using his name on the phone but he’d gotten even by using Miguel’s, “… didn’t expect to hear from you so soon.”

“I’m in town joss a few hours… I give you a good deal; have a grand on you when I call.”

“Can I get credit for the diff…?”

“No, I call you back…”

“Give me ‘til five…” the line was dead before he could finish.

As Billy pulled up to the chain-link fence he almost rode away before he remembered he’d been so eager to get to the phone that he’d forgotten to lock the gate., “Can’t get too hungry, Billy,” he chided himself.

“Whew,” he exhaled when he saw Nick’s car in front of his trailer. He might be able to unload all his stash on Nicky.

“What’s up, Nick!” he hit the driver’s side window with the palm of his hand as he saw that Nick was nodded out… “Yo, Nick!”

“Uh?” the window came down… “I tried pagin’, where you been?” Nick muttered.

“No, you didn’t… I ain’t got no calls.” Billy knew it didn’t matter now.

“We need to talk… let’s go inside.” Nick started to open the car door.

Billy pushed it shut, “We can talk here” then he looked around… always paranoid… glancing over his shoulder towards the gate, “C’mon, let’s take a walk.”

As they got fifty feet away, Nick asked, “How much you got.”

“Right now?” Billy knew Nick was good for much more, “About ten hits.”

“I’ll take ‘em… you got a deal for me?”

“A buck-fifty…”

“One-fifty? Are you shittin’ me?” Nick had to bargain for everything… even though a hundred and fifty dollars wasn’t such a bad deal for fifty grams of tar. “I got a C-note… that’s all.”

Billy turned towards the trailer without answering: Nick followed.

“Okay, maybe?” Nick had a c-note and a fifty on him that he’d lifted from Adriane’s stash of cash the last time he’d been at her place but it was in his DNA to wheel and deal. He knew he couldn’t get change from any drug dealer, and especially not Billy, so he had to get him down to a hundred bucks or give up the whole fifty.

“Get the fuck outa here, you know one-fifty is the best I can do.” Billy was only playing along. He only needed about eighty bucks to score more and a hundred would have been a little gravy on top of what he needed but he hated these rich-bitches when they tried to milk him.

Nick played it too hard one more time, “One-hundred, you prick… and that is my final offer.”

“One-twenty-five then,” Billy stepped around to the end of a boat trailer.

Nick followed him, pulled out the c-note without saying anything more and handed it over rolled up. The deal was done… Billy pulled the trailer-hitch off the boat-trailer, taking out a snack-sized baggie with ten wadded-up foils of tar from the square tube the hitch is usually bolted within… He passed the bag to Nick as they walked back to his trailer, satisfied that he had enough now to buy the hundred grams from Miguel on time.

The Wheels Were Turning

Chapter Six:

The Wheels of Justice

Reversed: Obstacles, adversity, calamity.

Mickey was able to visit Adriane at her house when she was sent home. Her bedroom was upstairs and it was hard for her to get to the kitchen to help herself, so he used the couch on his time off and helped her change the dressing on the hole left by the abscess and faithfully brought chicken soup up to her. His feelings for her were stronger now than ever but he was able to control them. While in jail Mickey had done some thorough soul searching. He’d been able to sort out his emotions concerning Adriane and put them second to his own sanity.

During that time, Nick had been serving her and she confessed to Mickey that she delighted in making Nick go up and down the stairs to get this and that for her: “bring me a book… go to the garden shack and fetch my drawing board. I want a cup of coffee …something from the freezer.” Guilt motivated Nick to become her slave and she took out her spite on him in this manner. Mickey thought it was way too soft a punishment for the asshole and her lawyer agreed, but, what was anybody to do? She was the only one who could have had the bastard prosecuted.

“Do your folks know about any of this?” Mickey asked, thinking surely her family would want to do something about it.

“No, I do not want a scandal, they would go nuts and God knows what Gotson would want to do.”

“Who is this Gotson again?”

“Gotson, a dear friend of our family, was a Basque Maquis… a separatist… called a terrorist by the USA after the war… you know, Hitler and shit…when Franco ran Spain,” she spoke so proudly of him that Mickey was almost jealous of her obvious affection.

“Hmm, he must be old now… Franco has been gone a while,” he assuaged his envy.

“He is still very healthy and capable of doing some damage to Nick and his connections I think. I don’t want him to get in trouble over me.”

He thought, Shit, this could be an answer. Naw, he wanted vengeance but not so badly that he or anyone else could end up in prison for it. He wondered, could this Gotson character have some interesting covert suggestions? He shoveled that thought way to the back of his head.

“Yes, but Adriane, what Nick did to you... How can you live with this?”

“Yes, sure… He tells them that I am a slut and a junkie, that he is only trying to help me and that he gets frustrated at my relapses,” she sighed.

“Yes, but can’t you see that he is dangerous and he might kill you the next time?’

The wheels were turning…

Mickey left her house. A patrol car was parked down the street. Was it Richards?  He suspected so with a cascading series of rational… "What was that guy up to and why was he watching me?" It isn’t like Mickey had the potential of being anything like a dangerous criminal. "Perhaps it wasn’t  me he was watching…could it  be Adriane?" Whoever it was it didn’t seem to be official police business. "Something stinks of this whole thing and I have no idea how I am going to deal with it."

Homer greeted him on the driveway of his place, leading him to the porch, looking back to make sure he was being followed as Mickey dismounted from the bike. What was inside the door that was left ajar was not a pretty sight. It was… well… everything was on the floor…. The Remington… and the monitor screen as well as all his papers. He approached the desk to see that the side of the case to the computer was open and the hard-drive was missing. Damn, who? What? Why?

His neighbor, Jack, came down from his apartment upstairs and stood at the door surveying the mess, “Some guy was here… what the hell, I didn’t know he was doing this?”

“What did he look like?”

“I never seen him before… he was tall… a big guy.”

“Did he walk up or did he come in a car?”

“I didn’t see a car; he could have been parked around the side. I didn’t really look… I didn’t know he’d done…” his tone was a little too apologetic. I knew Jack would have stayed low and wouldn’t have done anything to stop it.

“How many were there?”

“Just one… I think maybe I saw him before… tall, like that inspector… you know?”

That was better. He is at least giving up some useful information. Jack went back up to his apartment. Mickey picked the phone off the floor and set it on the desk. Should he call the police and report it? Sure, why not? He called, thinking, there were some obvious prints on the door, that they could dust the place. If it was Ryan, why would he leave prints? Was he sending Mickey a message? The place was trashed… that got his attention. He wondered, “So, what was I doing that would deserve this much attention and what is on my hard drive that he would want?” At that time most of what he wrote was on “A” disks but he was beginning to put it all on CD’s. Where are they? The “A” disks were all there but with screwdriver punctures in the cases. The CD’s were scattered from where he kept them in the desk drawer and gouged with X’s on the surface. All the other drawers were pulled out and dumped… What the f…? “My novels… thank God I have the manuscripts.” He had his two latest on CD’s in his cab anyway. The cab was parked on the street… He checked it. The doors were still locked. The visor still had his CDs there. He went back into the apartment to wait.

There was a knock at the screen door on the porch. My god, he thought, they’re here already? He looked out to see two Hispanic young men in suits with brief-cases. It was not the right time for this shit! Not sure what he expected of them but he opened the door.

“Hello,” the older of the two greeted him, “We would like to share some information from the Bible.”

“Oh, thank you very much but I’m good with it.” Mickey cut him short, trying not to be rude, he shut the door.

Other times he would have invited them in and offered them some tea. It is always good to be polite when someone has a Bible and the burden of hauling a vision of the dead prophet around. Mickey admired them because they didn’t even know him and yet they were at his door, personally, and trying to save his soul. He wished them well but he had business to attend... clean up this mess and think…. “Maybe I should wait ‘til the cops get here?”

The police arrived a mere minute or two after the Jehovah Witnesses left. He thought, “… like they had to be waiting around the corner: or am I getting paranoid? The cops took the information and did the usual report. Mickey had only the computer and disks damaged and nothing but the hard drive was missing… TV, VCR, tapes … all went untouched. It was just a matter of the place being trashed. The cops turned to leave.

“Wait a minute,” Mickey demanded, “Aren’t you going to dust for prints or anything?”

“So,” the #1 cop smirked, “you want us to get unit with a print-kit over here for this?”

“Sure I do… I want to prosecute the fuckers that did this.” Frustrated, he pointed to the smears that were so obvious on the window of the front door. “Here’s some, right in front of you.”

“Okay, okay… we’ll dust ‘em.” The cop humored him.

He didn’t realize it at the time but it didn’t take a wild conspiracy to explain the reticence of the police to dust for prints. As in all small, affluent cities like Santa Barbara, the police have their hands full going to calls for burglaries where real items with serial numbers are taken off to Oxnard to be hawked for a fix. A trashed room, a wrecked computer, and a few damaged disks, don’t amount to much as far as the case load goes. Still, he was peeved and saw the workings of Nick, Ryan or Richards in the shadows behind all this. He made his annoyance clear by glowering at the cop as he did his job.

“When you find out who these guys are will you let me know tomorrow?” he pouted.

“Hey, will you back off a bit?” The print-kit officer pulled a piece of clear tape off the spot he’d dusted, “I don’t know what you expect to come of this but by this time tomorrow your report will be at the bottom of a pile of seventy-five on some corner desk in the assistant D.A.’s office.”

“Won’t you like… run the prints through some list or something?”

“Naw, it ain’t like that,” he ripped another piece of tape off of the door and pressed it onto a card, “this ain’t exactly a murder, you know?”

“Really, if this was a house in Montecito you’d run ‘em, huh?”

“You know that stack of reports I told you about? They’re mostly from folks who actually lost something… jewelry, silverware… you know, from houses in Hope Ranch and Montecito.” He closed up his print kit, handed me a carbon copy of his report but stopped before going out onto the porch and said, “You can replace that hard drive for less than a hundred bucks, you know?”

“No, I don’t know…you know?” His annoyance went unappreciated as the duster was already halfway to his car.

It was hard to read his name on the carbon paper copy but he made it out to be, through the feint ink and scrawl, Schmidt or maybe Schultz…. some sort of Schitz. He threw it in a corner and went to work putting things back in order. A mess like this was incentive to clean house so he did that and felt pretty good about it around midnight when he finished.  Mickey called the dispatcher to let him know he wouldn’t be coming in that night and stayed home with his tidy desk and trusty Remington. He held the phone back from his ear as the dispatch, Stella, cussed him out, typed out the events of the past few days on paper and finally hit the sack by three a.m.

A week or two later Adriane called. “I have a package from my father… it has journals… all in French but it has an ‘A’ disk with it. It came, Fed-Xed, today. I opened it up but I don’t want to read the damned thing… too hard right now. It has a lot in it about the Resistance and Gotson and Mama. Do you want the disk?”

““Yes, I’ll check it out.” He was connecting the dots and didn’t bother to say anything about his trashed apartment, “I’ll drop by tomorrow.”

“Are you okay?” as he hadn’t seen her in a couple of weeks maybe she’s done with him for awhile, “Are you off the oxy… er… oh, what is it, cotton something?”

“Oxycotin… no, I have a few left. But my crater is pretty well healed up. Can you come over? I miss you.”

 “I’m a little busy today.” He had nothing to do at all but he was beginning to hear from her medicated speech that doing nothing was more productive that wasting another day with her.

“Sure, okay… the postman hasn’t come yet; I’ll send the package to you,” she moaned, “You can sort it out if you want. It could be interesting, eh? Oh, I gotta go now, Billy is….” She stopped herself, “…uh, someone is at the gate. I have to see who it is.”

“Okay, I’m good with that…” He said that but didn’t believe she didn’t know exactly who it was. He thought, “One lie deserves another. Seems that Billy is back in the picture and it won’t be long… if not already.”

An Old Country/Western Song

Mickey was there again, in County jail. His life was looking like an old country/western song to him, “I’m in the Jailhouse Now.” His thoughts were running wild… “Pardon me, Hank Williams, but I don’t want to be in one of your songs at this moment, eh? I thought I’d broken that cycle when I got sober but here I am… Surely, I ought to be able to get out on O.R. first thing in the morning… no outstanding warrants or fines… living pretty clean too…what does all this have to do with a cosmic plan?”

A now familiar calm came over him as he sat on his bunk after all the noise of the concrete and steel settled down. He was at peace and it felt as though a hand was on his shoulder. He had a private cell, in isolation they call it, and waited while his mind leafed through old catechism stories, “Would an angel appear before me and unlock my cage?" The gentle hand on his shoulder assured him and he laid down to fall into a deep sleep.

It was about a week later that he was awakened at three in the morning, “McKee, roll it up, you’re goin’ home.”

“What… Someone bailed me out?”

“I don’t know… just roll it up!”

Three in the morning: What the hell? He didn’t like the feel of it. Was he out? He could get a ride home from another cab driver but shit. He noticed that Richards was parked at the far end of the parking lot. Just for the hell of it he walked over to his squad car. When Richards opened his window, he asked, “Don’t suppose you could give me a ride into town… eh?”

“I don’t think so, punk.” Richards rolled up his window and pulled away.

 The cab finally arrived; his sponsor and friend, Jim, behind the wheel. They drove for a good five minutes before Jim asked, “So, what did that cunt do to get you in jail this time, Mick?”

“You haven’t heard?” at that moment Mickey discovered he had a newfound distate for the "C" word... especially when applied to Adriane, "Drop the 'C' word, Jim."

“Yeh, yeh, okay," Jim grinned, pleased at this change in attitude, "it was on the front page of the News Suppress… but I wanted to hear your side.”

"I can't believe it Jim, but back there in my cell, a calm came over me and I felt a hand..." Mickey gave Jim all the details.

"The Hand of Gawd, eh?"

"Something like that."

“We didn’t think you did it and you still have your shift on the roster at the cab company.”

Jim assured him.

“I have to check and see if the city hasn’t pulled my license,” he would have been surprised if they hadn’t.

“I’m sure you can still dispatch if they did… you got everyone in the office behind you.” Jim had one eye on his rearview mirror, “That cop is tailing us.”

Sure enough, Richards was following the cab, making no attempt to make his presence unknown all the way back into town. He even parked at the end of the cul-de-sac just past Mickey’s place. Mickey tried to sleep but couldn’t nod out while thinking of Richards out there and wondering what that damned S.O.B. was up to.

It wasn't Adriane who bailed Mickey out, though he didn't know all charges against him were dropped. When she was finally able to communicate through her own lawyer the DA saw no chance for a conviction. She’d also had the restraining order on him lifted. It was very unusual for charges of spousal abuse or assault against any woman to be dismissed so easily. Mickey was curious about this lapse at what he suspected to be a covert corruption of the justice system. He seriously wanted to know, or do, something about it but what? It was his powerlessness over it all that bugged him the most. He was damned if he was going to do nothing. Had he spent a week in jail without an apology from the law? But he already knew that the justice system rarely, if ever, apologizes for its mistakes. Once they sink their teeth into you, no matter whether you are guilty as charged or as innocent as a new born baby, an ambitious prosecutor will comb the books to hit you with anything to get a conviction… unless you have connections.

A Damned Good Liar...

Bed-rest… She was sent home after the oxygen mask was taken off the open wound on her hip. Nick had a restraining order put on Mickey. Her protests were ignored at first. Nick had insisted that he nurse her and she was so doped up on oxycotin she let him. He wasn’t there much though and she had to struggle out of bed to get to the kitchen for chicken soup or to the toilet. She was weak and could barely make it back up the stairs. It would have helped had Nick been there but she didn’t miss him. She slept and let all his manipulations and lies rest with her. She wasn’t going to give up but, right then, she needed to rest.

CHAPTER Five:

Sean McKee: Mickey

From that first day back in September when he rolled out of bed, fell to his knees and asked for guidance, he was aware that his life was under new management. Having no idea of what that would entail, he began the task of, not only doing the next right thing, but tapping into the intuition of what that might be. He often said, “I knew, without being told, that I would have to make amends to the people I had harmed, short-changed, lied to and otherwise stepped on, throughout those dark days of my drinking and drugging.” The first that came to mind was the abandonment and neglect of his daughter and the rest followed. He wanted to do it all right away but understood that it would be vanity to start this Herculean task without some sort of guarantee that he would not be inclined to repeat the same mistakes.

He went to AA meetings and listened to what others did to resolve these problems, knowing it wouldn’t be enough to just say I’m sorry, that he had to get serious about digging deeply into the causes and the fears that were the sources of these inclinations. He dreamed of having someone he could relate his innermost thoughts about these secrets and somehow knew that he would be able to handle them better if he did. Still obsessed with Adriane and unable to imagine his life without her, whenever she called he came running. For instance, he was at home on lunch break from the cab when she called. It was as though his heart was hit with a sledge hammer when he could hear the heroin in her voice over the phone: He was crushed.

Crushed is the best word for it. His heart could have been vomited out; it stuck so in his throat. This was the first real test of his new-found sobriety. The manner in which she had banned him from her bed, and then got tangled-up with any low-life she could, puzzled him. What was worse was that she kept him around as if he was her personal eunuch and that drove him nuts. He was furious to see her face and wanted to murder whoever banged her up. Then, when she showed him her abscess, his anger was smashed along with any hopes for her. She nearly died and that was the closest he had ever gone back to drinking.

Sitting on his couch…. thinking… his credit was still good at Willy’s Liquors, only a block away from his place, he  struggled with the whys and the hows and the what-the-fuck’s of it all. What was he supposed to do? Homer jumped up on his lap and calmed him down for a few minutes. A pack of smokes his friend Jim had left on his last visit was in the drawer of the desk for whenever he came back. Mickey had quit smoking before he’d gotten sober and was glad to not have to struggle with smoking as well as drinking. However, he sat there and decided to have a smoke and think about it before he went to Willy’s.

All the old hands at this say you are supposed to call your sponsor or help a newcomer when tempted to drink but Mickey chose to smoke a cigarette. Perhaps it was a way to slap back at GAWD. Not so sure of his motives he prayed, “Please help me,” as he lit one up. Immediately, before the smoke filled his lungs, he knew that he had awakened the monster of tobacco and had merely traded addictions. Still, it was a better option for him than drinking.

As he smoked the cigarette there was a knock on the door. Having nothing to hide, regardless, he felt more than a little bit concerned when he saw a uniformed cop standing on the porch; “Can I help you?”

“Sean McKee?” he had a note pad out.

“Yes.”

“”You dropped off Adriane Baker at the emergency room today?”

“Uh, yes,” Mickey answered unsure. This guy looked like the rookie from way back… the Beatrice… what’s-her-name… uh-huh, it was him with a new rookie in tow.

“Do you mind telling me why you left the ER before the police arrived?” he was surly. His name-tag read, Richards, Dan Richards. Was he promoted to detective? Then why was he in uniform? Detectives are usually in plain clothes.

“Yes, I had to get back to work. She called while I was on break and I had to get back before…”

“Turn around and put your hands behind your back.” He sneered towards the new guy, “This one’s trouble.”

Number two rookie put his hand on the hilt of his gun… just in case.

He had thought that Adriane would have told the police what had happened and he would be cleared of suspicion… unless something worse had come about…, “Is Adriane okay?”

Of all the times Mickey had to go to jail… just when he started smoking again. Damnit, they don’t allow smoking at all in the Santa Barbara Police holding cells and certainly not in County. He would have confessed to anything for a smoke. His feelings were running all over the place… Wondered what Adriane had told the police and then smelling Nick’s B.S. on it. What the hell, he knew he was innocent and knew that he had luck with him… but, what if… what if? What then?

Mickey was kept in an interview cell where the powers that be had him cooling off. It seemed like a long wait... at least an hour… there are no clocks. Because of that his heart skipped when detective Ryan opened the door to peek in.

Ryan’s face lit up too. He then entered the door, “Mr. McKee, what the hell? I haven’t seen you in a while,” plopping down a thick file on the Spartan table between them he was almost jovial.

“Under these circumstances, I can’t say that I’m all that pleased to see you again, detective Ryan,” But Mickey was glad to see him. It’s hard to explain it but a familiar face gave him hope.

“Let me get some coffee for us and I’ll be right back.” Leaving the file on the table, Ryan went towards the door.

 “I ain’t goin’ nowhere.” Mickey tried to sound nonchalant.

Ryan kept going without comment and was gone for something like a half hour. Time means nothing in there. “Right back,” can mean any day now. While he was waiting Mickey flipped open a corner of the file… enough to see that the report on the top had Richards’ name on it.

Ryan finally came back into the room with two Styrofoam cups of coffee… black, “See here, Mr. McKee, we seem to have a problem…”

“What do you mean, we, no cream or sugar?” Mickey took a sip of the bitter brew, “…Or, do you mean, me, I have a problem.”

“Why don’t you just tell me your version of what happened and…”

“All due respect, sir, police station coffee sucks.” Mickey’s lips burned from the coffee, “and aren’t you going to read me my rights?”

“I can tell you now that the courts will go easier on you if you cooperate,” he said as he thumbed through the reports.

Would it do any good to talk? Mickey suspected, by the detective’s tone, that anything he’d say one way or another was going to be used against him, It didn’t matter a whit whether or not his rights were read. If he refused to say anything they’d be able to avow he was uncooperative and if he did talk… what then?

“I took a break and went home for lunch.” He explained. “I didn’t have much time.”

“Did you stop by Adriane’s house then?” Ryan folded his arms and leaned back in his chair…

Mickey wondered how far Ryan could lean without flat out falling, “I had no plans to see her. I just had time to get home, wolf down a ham sandwich, and get back in the hack …”

“Then, are you saying you didn’t go to Mrs. Baker’s house?”

“No, I went there alright… I got a phone call. She was hurting.”

“How did you know she was hurting?”

“Listen, maybe you want to get this interview over and read me my rights?”

“Mr. McKee, we have enough to hold you in jail for more than a few days,” Ryan thumbed through the files, “You’ve already been tagged with a restraining order. We have enough of your past on record to throw the book at you. Do you want to cooperate or not? Tell me now, because I’d just as soon get home to dinner.” He slammed the file shut.

“She called me at home and she was hurting. I could tell she was hurting because she could hardly talk.” Mickey’s eyes were fixed on the pack of smokes in Ryan’s shirt pocket…Chesterfields, non-filtered.

Ryan pulled the pack of cigarettes out of his jacket … lit one and passed it to Mickey.

“Thanks, man, that was the best smoke I’ve ever had,” pulling on the smoke and letting the harshness of the vapors smack his lungs, he coughed, “I mean it.”

Ryan watched him take the drag and leaned back again in his chair. “So, you’re telling me you didn’t beat the crap out of her too, are you?”

To tell the truth Mickey wasn’t sure what to think… was he getting set up?

“Do what, smash her face up or inject her butt with tar?” he was tired… “Tell me, Ryan, is she going to be okay?”

“You tell me, McKee, you know what you did…” Ryan opened the file again, “the last time we had a talk… the Bea Brinker case… it turned out that the judge thought you hadn’t done anything wrong… lack of judgment were his words, I recall.”

“You were there in court?” Not remembering that far back or seeing Ryan in court… Mickey was concerned.

“Yes, when one of my cases gets to court the DA doesn’t care to lose cases and I thought we had enough on you for something… maybe not spousal abuse… maybe something like creating a disturbance… anything.”

“Sorry to disappoint you.”

“Don’t get smart with me, asshole. This time we have a clear-cut case of bodily injury. Mr. Baker saw you on the way up the hill on your motorcycle as he was leaving and, guess what? When he left home he says Adriane was okay…”

“I was in my cab.”

“Whatever.”

“So, does this mean you will read me my rights and tuck me in for the night?” he resigned knowing by then that there was no chance of going home today.

“Just tell me what happened and stop wasting my time.”

“I went up there… her face was bashed in and her eye was swollen shut…. Then she showed me the abscess on her hip and I took her to the ER in my cab… not my motorcycle. I had to get back to work… Time is money in a cab after all… so I took off thinking she could explain what happened.”

“According to this report she did tell officer Richards what happened.”

“Was he the rookie that was with you on the Bea Brinker case?” He couldn’t help but to grin, thinking of the tomato soup the rookie had mistaken for blood.

“And it ain’t lookin’ good for you.” Ryan pulled out the Miranda card and read it.

“Could I ask one more question before you go, Ryan?”

“Go ahead, Mick, make it a good one.”

Ryan kind of pissed him off. He consider the word, Mick, akin to using the “N” word. Ryan’s an Irish name … but, he got the point, Ryan wasn’t a friend… figuring it was all over anyway… “What kind of pull does Nick’s daddy have over you guys… eh?”

Ryan just stood up and had another officer cuff him to take him back to a holding cell. But before they parted paths he said, “Keep asking those kinds of questions and you will be in deeper shit than you are now.”

Ryan stood by the water cooler oblivious that he was smoking in the non-smoking police station… Richards approached him waving the smoke aside and coughing… “What do you think?”

“He didn’t do it.”

“What do you mean, he didn’t do it? He was seen by Nick coming up the hill on his motorcycle…”

“Then how did McKee drop her off at the hospital in his taxi?” Ryan glared at Richards now, “The receptionist at the ER attested to that much and I already know that Mrs. Baker’s husband is a damned good liar.”

Are You Ready to Detox?

“Thank God you are here, Mickey… I need help,” falling into his arms she felt safe.

“Was it Nick?”

“No… it isn’t what you think… it was my fault. I hit him first. I started it… ouch,” each word sent searing pain through her jaw, “It hurts when I try to talk.”

“Don’t worry; I’ll get you to the damned ER.”

 “You might have to take care of the dogs a few days too.”

“What? They don’t keep you overnight… even if your jaw is broken…”

“I have an abscess…”

“An abscess, what, I thought you were clean?”

His expression of pity… deep hurt…moved her… guilt… shame all mixed with a strange comfort in his arms, “Oh, Mickey, it hurts to talk.”

“No problem, I’ll get you to the hospital…”

The abscess had to be cleaned and they knocked her out to fix the broken jaw (mandibuler fracture they called it)… Adriane’s nose and cheek bone were broken too: her left eye was swollen shut by the time Mickey dropped her off at the E.R. He had to get back to his cab. She told him to go ahead and that she’d be okay.

They had to do some fixing and put her up in a private room… quarantined at that. The abscess left a crater; a gash, at least an inch deep, four inches long and an inch and a half wide, down to the muscle. An oxygen mask was taped down on her face and another taped onto the gash. The oxygen mask on the gash was weird… something about oxygen speeds the healing. Her jaw was wired shut. She tried to talk through her teeth and the mask. One of her doctors was a young, and, she thought, a handsome man who must have been an addiction specialist. She relaxed as she intuitively knew he was kind.

“Just show me some fingers or nod yes or no. How long have you been using?” he asked.

She held up two fingers.

“Two years?”

“Uh, uh…nuh…” She knew he couldn’t understand her if she tried to speak through her teeth and the mask but she tried anyway.

“Two months?”

She nodded a yes.

 “Well, the anesthetics and Demerol will stave off withdrawals while you are on them. Are you ready to detox?”

She weighed her options… If I don’t have something I will go back to drinking and if I don’t drink I will go crazy. The last time in France was particularly bad because I did it cold-turkey. I dread so much the muscle aches, the stomach cramps. I couldn’t sleep… and more than anything the gnawing, the restlessness, vomiting, diarrhea… as the demonic mania of heroin calls me…

“Nu-uh!” She tossed her head back and forth and exclaimed through her wired teeth.

“If you are afraid, we have some pretty good medications that help with the symptoms,” he tried to assure me.

“Pleeeezh, nuh.” She knew she could withdraw on the medications but what will she do after that?

“You know, we could have lost you?” He hesitated but could sense she wasn’t ready, “I’ll keep checking on you though, okay?”

She loved warmth in his tone. There was no hint of medical superiority. His bedside manner was more like a visit from a concerned friend. She didn’t want him to leave. She slept… for a few hours.

She awoke to see Richards, the cop’s, face. He was cold and dead serious.

“I have to make a report on what happened. Can you help me with that? Just nod yes or no.” He pulled up a chair next to her. Unlike the doctor she felt uneasy about this cop. What the hell was she going to be able to tell him through her wired jaw and oxygen mask? She didn’t want to rat out Nick. Then again, she knew he’d probably do the best he could to protect Nick. No one would believe anything his junkie wife said if ever it went to court for spousal abuse.

She tried to shout… It probably sounded more like a muffled, “eee---iiit---me, duumut!”

“Who hit you, Mickey?”

“Nuuh, Nick!”

“Mick?”

Shit, she thought… this is useless. I can’t talk and this guy is obtuse. I want to sleep… “Guuh-uhhhwuh!” she tried to say, “Go away!”

She closed her eyes and ignored him until a nurse showed up at the door. “Mrs. Baker needs to rest. You can try again in a few days.”

“I have enough now, thanks.” He got up to leave.

 He went for the door; she ripped off the taped mask and yelled as best she could through her teeth… “No, it was Nick… Nick! And it was my fault!”

He didn’t stop or acknowledge this plea at all. She heard him talking with the nurse in the hall outside the door.

“Yes, her husband says she was fine when he left to run some errands. That is when he saw Mr. McKee coming up the street in his taxi.”

She feared for Mickey and that this Richards would use him to cover Nick.

Adriane: Abscess and Abuse

Chapter Four:

Abscess and Abuse

Adriane sat on the stool in her studio again after laying in bed for an hour. Then she got up and took to the easel with renewed energy. The blank canvas held no fear as she swathed it in blues, blacks and greens… framed by zig-zags of yellows and red energy… another portrait but not exactly angry… more like an agitated distance with a hint of pathos. The conflict was gone and she was no longer suffering. Yes, a junkie doesn’t suffer addiction. Up to a certain point addiction is the solution to suffering for the likes of Adraine. When heroin leaves the body it exits the same path that it entered… only it leaves with a vengeance. Every cell, muscle and nerve-ending cries out as the hunger makes itself known.

            The sad fact for her was that she needed to paint and heroin helped her do that. Why does she need to paint? It certainly isn’t for the fame or fortune of selling any of her paintings. She does have a dealer in Paris but that fucker doesn’t think she is doing anything progressive or avant-garde by her paintings… Adriane thinks again, “Or by painting at all.” Painting on a canvas with oils is more of a fetish to her than a devotion to art. Is it a fetish for retrieving something of the past, perhaps? They said that painting was obsolete with the first Daguerreotype until Braque and Picasso blasted our perceptions. Then the Dadaists and surrealists took art out of the studio and onto the public stage making even the idea of ART seem somewhat silly and arcane. When Jackson Pollack came along and splattered his canvasses with action paintings, it made the act of painting a self-obsessed hobby for the moronically elite that would be better off if we all went to go get a job in a factory than to toil away trying to find relevant meaning with oil on canvas. Andy Warhol didn’t mistakenly call his loft The Factory and he made it clear that the highest purpose of art in the later half of the twentieth century was to make money. He made himself even clearer if ever it was posited, “My five-year-old can do as well as that!” He answered, “Oh, that’s interesting.” Implying, “Can your five-year-old make the kind of money I make with it?”

“And, art schools! Psshhhaw!” Art schools were to her just places where semi-affluent parents put their kids before they finally make up their minds to go out into the world selling real estate. These places create in each student the delusion that there is a place to put their scribblings. The big secret is that the “Art World” only opens the window of opportunity to a few selected artists each decade and then slams it shut. These artists are touted as the winners of the lottery and are encouraged to believe that what they do matters somehow. Artists who somehow stumble or get diverted… loose interest or see through the guise… are pushed aside for the next crop out of New York or Los Angeles.

“Why then should I imagine that painting is any more important than keeping a personal diary? Either my desires, my intuitions, my experiences are universal and have an appeal to other people; or, it is all a vain pursuit and I am just spending my time between birth and death, pretending to be more important than all that,” she concluded.

She wrote in her journal, “Between birth and death… between one fix or another… I no longer wonder what it is that I am doing here. It is a dreamscape I occupy for a spell… a spell cast by an illusionist… the master illusionist… you call it God? Mickey calls it the Great Whazoo. How many theologians can we count dancing on the head of a pin? But in the dreamscape something else is going on. Angels or Demons, I can’t tell which”

The doorbell chimed and Adriane descended the stairs displaying the contours of her body, pulling her robe over the purity of her nakedness…. aka Duchamp… and closed it with a strap. She opened the door. Two police officers were standing close, noses nearly touching the door trying to peek in through the peep hole. They stepped back, startled, “Eh hem, Officer Dan Richards, are you Mrs. Adriane Baker… Nicholas’s wife?”

She supposed she might have left the gate open… it annoyed her when people got all the way onto the property and to the door while she was working.

“Yes,… no, er… I am… that is at least until the divorce is final. What did he do now?” She truly never knew about Nick when the police showed up at her door.

“He’s okay. I simply need to know if you will let him in your house.” Officer Richards spoke somewhat sneeringly.

“I don’t like the looks of this… what is going on?”

The officer was more congenial, “… he told me to take him here.”

“Why not?” She had no idea. Nick’s dad had some sort of pull with the SBPD and DA’s office. She was sure what; but, whenever Nick got stopped for driving all smacked-out or drunk, he never went to jail or got a ticket for it. She thought of his sense of entitlement… “What do you want me to do?”

“Okay, I just needed to check with you.” He went back down and fetched Nick out of the squad car. He could walk on his own but he was in one of those Zombie trances. She had Nick escorted into the music room to the couch. He sat without saying a word.

“Here’s the keys to his car. I had to park it down the street.” She swears he leered, “You are okay to drive, right?”

She didn’t think she looked fucked-up. The question annoyed her and the prospect of putting up with Nick in her house was more than she could take. She snapped back asking, “Do I look okay to you? You are the police, aren’t you? You should know…”

“I’m sorry; I’ll be on my way.”  He went back to their squad car and waited until she got in Nick’s car before he left. She was fearless and not afraid of being nailed for a DUI. She was high, alright, but she wasn’t drinking. Besides, she doubted whether that cop had been able to see her irises through her transition lenses. Even though Richards did made her nervous the way he was eying her up. Of course, she put on a tease walking down to the car in her lightly transparent kimono style robe. It didn’t make any difference to her any longer as she got into the car and parked it up in back in car-port. While parking it, she rammed the garage wall, breaking a stanchion… she’d get someone to fix it later… and then she made her way down to the house with Sushi and Tofu in tow.

“So, what the hell, Nick: are you planning on staying here?”

“Uhhh, mmphmutter mumph.”

“I can’t understand you!” She shouted directly into his ear.

“Uh, I’m not deaf, do you have any coffee?” he slurred.

“Sure…”

“How about coke?” he spoke more clearly.

“A Coke?” She was pissed and wanted to needle him.

“Coke….,” his head slumped, chin to his chest, “c’mon, girl, Coke.”

“You can say that clearly enough now… damn it, Nick!” She went into the kitchen and poured a cup of coffee, opened the fridge, grabbed a can of Coke, put an iced-glass on a tray with the Coke and coffee, and served him like a waitress.

“Thanks… Not that coke! Can I use your phone?” he bent down to the tray, brushing the glass aside and sipped from the cup without lifting it.

“You’re a cow at the trough… eh?”

He looked up at her with big cow eyes… “You got Billy’s number?”

“Billy? You know Billy too?”

“I introduced you,” he paused a minute and asked, “didn’t I?”

“No, Rod introduced me to Billy.”

“Who do you think introduced Rod to Billy?”

“Small world?” She had no idea that Rod had any contact with Nick before they’d...

“Yeh, I told Rod that you would soon be available and I’m the one that told him he could go ahead. I hoped he’d fuck the shit out of you.”

He was goading her now and she was playing right into his hands.

Adriane felt dirty with Nick in her house. She shuddered to think that she once loved the man but he became a shadow of his former self. “You have to go, Nick. I can’t live in the umbra of doom you bring in my door.”

He didn’t answer. The fucking mute provoked more anger and she wanted so badly to lash-out but feelings of indifference prevailed. She went upstairs and changed into street clothes, putting his car keys in her pocket. She came back down to the foyer; he was standing in front of the door, blocking the exit. He towered over her and weighed at least a hundred pound more than she, but he wasn’t going to intimidate her: not today anyway. “Get out of my way, Nick.”

“No.”

Taking off her shoe, it was only a canvas deck-shoe; she whacked him across the face… once… he didn’t move… twice…. he flinched… the third time, he came at her. She backed off, “What are you going to do?”

She suddenly realized how stupid it was to attack him with a little shoe. He was so doped up she could have hit him with a poker and he wouldn’t have felt it. He wrapped his arms around her in the straight-jacket of his embrace.

“Stay here Adriane, call Billy. I need to talk with him.”

“Talk?”

“Yes, I’m broke, I need to see if he’ll give me credit… or maybe you, my beloved, can do that for me?” he let her go, “You know, for old time’s sake?”

“No… I won’t do it. You are already into me for more than twenty grand, you bastard.”

She came to… not knowing what hit her or how long she lay there. She looked in the hallway mirror. Half her face was black and blue. The keys to his car were gone… shit, what now? She felt like she couldn’t go anywhere with her face like this. Should she call the cops? What good would that do? He has too much pull with them. Call Billy? Make sure he doesn’t score? Oh, God, if only Gotson were here…

Confusion… a doped and confused state of mind… that is what heroin does. She counted the benefits… I can still paint when stoned. Methadone would be a good idea…did that once and was okay with it but hated it when they start cutting back on the dose. They do that to gradually wean you off it but that doesn’t work for most addicts unless they truly want to quit enough to suffer that… and she never really did. All that process did for her was… well, she calls Billy for something better and sometimes ends up waking with tubes and crap in the ICU.

As she stood there she felt her hip where she usually hit up. A bruise has been there for a few days… maybe a week and it is getting worse. Everyone knew about all the bugs… a flesh-eating virus had been going around town. Damned tar, she thought: That bruise on my hip is full of puss now. My face black and blue… my jaw hurts… It hurts to open my mouth… I need to get to a doctor for some antibiotics and check on this jaw. Forget Nick. Forget the house. She called Mickey to see if he could come over. Maybe he can give her a ride to the E.R.?

It was at least an hour before Mickey showed up in his taxi, “What the hell happened to you?” he said as she let him in.