Сьюзен Стрейт - Orange County Noir

“Him, Judge Knott, having you send me sailing over the edge?”

“An answer to my prayer, the judge’s offer. Before I knew you, Quentin, or I never would’ve gone along in the first place.”

“This is so much damned nonsense,” the judge said, rising. “What’s done is done. You’re both out from under, free men, and that’s what should matter most to you.”

“Until when?” Lomax said. “For how long? Until you can line up your next patsies, who’ll come after me and Artie so you can protect your precious reputation?”

“I’ll give you my word,” the judge said.

“Why’s that? Run out of two dollar bills?” Lomax advanced on the judge with the open switchblade he’d held out of sight until now. “You let me down, so I gotta put you down like the dog you are.”

He flew the blade across Judge Knott’s neck, opening a river of blood that the judge covered with both hands seconds before his legs gave out. He dropped to the floor, knees first, then over into a fetal position.

“And that’s that,” Lomax said. “We’re outta here, Artie.”

“Not exactly,” Six said. He had pulled his .22 automatic from somewhere and was aiming it at Lomax. “Fair’s fair, Quentin. The judge ultimately honored the arrangement he and I had, so I would feel less of a man, truly guilty, if I were to ignore my responsibility toward him. It would be a sin I’d carry into the confessional, and with me for the rest of my life.”

“Jesus, Artie, you wouldn’t, would you?”

“What do you think?” Arthur Six said.

Tustin

The day had started out with me shitting blood. A little later, I was shivering in Doc’s passenger seat under the warm July California sun, asking Doc about the blood while we were on the way to Tustin to see this friend of his who was supposed to help us get some morphine.

Doc and I called each other friends, but we both knew without saying that we were drug buddies. That if I didn’t have the five hundred bucks in my pocket to pry this hospice-care friend of his from her ethics long enough to give us some terminal cancer patient’s painkillers, Doc would be in this car alone, or with some other human ATM machine. He had the connection, I had the money — and this made us, however temporarily, partners in the world.

I was worried the blood could be an ulcer, maybe something more serious. Lately, I hadn’t been able to get much more than Vicodin for my habit, and it had been corroding away at my stomach, a million tiny pickaxes mining the walls of my guts, so I figured it had caused an ulcer, caused me to rip and bleed into myself and leak slowly away from the inside out. But, too, my mind slid easily to thoughts of cancer and that I could be dying, at least dying faster or in a different way than from addiction. I’d asked my girlfriend Amber and she figured it was nothing. So I asked Doc, “Is blood out of your ass always bad news?”

“It’s never good news,” he said. “I didn’t ask if it was ever good.”

“It’s not ever good,” he said.

I took a deep breath. I had the start of what would be full-blown dope sickness in a few hours. The metallic taste at the back of my mouth, the chills. Soon there’d be sweats. Then puke and diarrhea and my body making a tortured fist of itself. I needed exactly what we were going to get. While, of course, realizing it was what we were going to get that caused this. Every day becomes the same cycle of desperate need met with desperate opposition and sickness. I couldn’t tell today from tomorrow anymore than you can tell the sea from the horizon in a marine-layer fog. It all just blurs together.

“But is it always bad?”

“Not always,” he said. “But it’s never good, so disavow yourself of that silliness right now.”

I looked at him.

He said, “This is your ass and your blood, I’m guessing?”

Sometimes things are simple. Doc was called Doc because he used to be a doctor. Maybe he still was — I wasn’t sure, but I knew he wasn’t allowed to practice medicine, at least not in California. He wrote some bad scripts, and he ended up losing his license. I think it may only have been suspended. But if anyone official was checking on him, he wasn’t living too cleanly. He’d been able to hook me up until the day before with a pretty steady flow of Vicodin, but that only kept me going and didn’t really make me high anymore. Without it, I was sick — a shivering noxious presence to all who had the bad luck or bad sense to enter the debris field I’d made of my life. With it, I could function, more or less, get to another day of clawing myself through the hours, wishing the next day would be better, but not seeing any reason it would be. I looked out the window at the towns under the 22 freeway. We’d left Long Beach maybe twenty minutes before and now we were passing the cluster of suburban sprawl of north Orange County, flashing by under an army of tall palms, blown by the offshore winds. It was a beautiful place, even from the freeway. Roof-tops of homes glided under us to the right — to the left, a series of car dealerships in Garden Grove, and just east of them, out of sight from the freeway, a series of Vietnamese pho joints and body-piercing parlors in strip malls.

I met Doc when he was still able to get OxyContin, eighty milligrams for a while and then forties, but eventually his source dried up. Oxy was a dream for a newly off-the-wagon user like me — a time-released chemical equivalent of heroin, without the messy, sloppy, desperate need to fix with needles. Crush a couple of eighty milligrams to start your high right off, and then top them off with a couple of unbroken eighties for the time-release, and you could live your life in comfort and at something resembling peace. But as they always do, the drugs had stopped working and then, worse, they dried up and the mirage of beauty and ease they gave, they took away with them.

Right now, though, Doc had talked about an old friend he used to work with who could hook us up with some morphine and maybe more in Tustin and was I in? I heard morphine and said yes and committed my last five hundred bucks from a poker win a few nights before. Normally I need a lot more info, but most of Doc’s friends, even the addicts, were very white collar. They were all liars and cheats, but generally not as dangerous as street dope fiends. Plus, we were talking about morphine. The risk-reward was too good and I just jumped without a second thought, quick as a seismograph at ground zero.

Doc said, “You and Amber been, you know, doing anything?”

“What?”

“From what I hear, strippers like to strap one on now and again.”

Amber did, in fact, like to strap one on now and again. And that had caused some blood, but only a little, and only right after. Not for days at a time afterward. “Dude, that’s a stereotype,” I said.

“I’m your doctor.”

“You’re not my doctor.”

“Well, I’m a doctor,” he said.

“Are you?”

“Nevertheless,” he said, “I have been an internist. I have a certain amount of experience with insertables. I’ve seen an astounding amount of things up guy’s assholes. And women’s assholes. You can tell me. Plus, I need to know the facts to know if this blood is an issue. “

“Okay, fine,” I said. “Yes, she has fucked me with a strap-on. Happy?”

“Don’t get so defensive, man. I’m your doctor.”

I let it slip that time.

Doc said, “When was the last time?”

“For the blood?”

“No,” he said, smiling. “When you let your pervert girlfriend sodomize you.” I looked at him and he smiled and laughed. “You need to lighten up.” He was driving and not looking at the road much as he hunted for his smokes in the backseat. I gripped the door handle and flashed visions of car wrecks and blood. Being a passenger scared the shit out of me — if I had any, I would have taken a few Valium before getting in the car. He said, “Everybody loves something up their ass during sex.”