Brad Parks - Faces of the Gone

“Okay, let’s start with remedial instruction,” Wallace said patiently. “Heroin is derived from poppy seeds. Poppy seeds come from poppy plants. Poppy plants grown in different parts of the world have unique chemical signatures. My equipment reads the signature.”

“Gotcha. How soon you can turn it around?”

“You’re in luck. My gear is calibrated for heroin right now. I can have it in a few hours.”

“Terrific,” I said. “I’ll drop off the samples right now. Where can I find you?”

“It’s better I have someone find you. Be outside your building in fifteen minutes.”

“Great,” I said. “What part of the government do you work for, anyway?”

“What, didn’t Buster tell you?”

“No.”

“That’s because he doesn’t know.”

The next sound I heard was the line clicking dead.

Fifteen minutes later-possibly to the second-a young man with close-cropped blond hair and an inexpensive suit hopped out of a late-model Crown Victoria in front of the Eagle-Examiner offices.

Obviously, my fed had arrived.

I had taken my two heroin samples-The Stuff and the blank one, both from Wanda’s bedroom-and tucked them in an envelope, which I handed to the man.

“How did you know I’m the guy Irving Wallace sent?” he asked.

“As a newspaper reporter, I’m a trained observer of the human condition,” I said with a grin, although he seemed to come from The Land Sarcasm Forgot. Probably Iowa.

“Yes, sir,” he replied, got back into his car, and drove off.

It left me, for the moment, with nothing to do. I had figured I would need to spend the afternoon protecting my story from the ravages of editing. But it had apparently garnered enough fans so that wouldn’t be necessary. So I drove back down to Ludlow Street, just to poke around. The shrine was more or less the same size as it had been two days earlier, although it was starting to look a little the worse for wear. Some of the candles had been knocked over and all of them had burned out. The cold nights had done a number on the flowers, which now looked like limp spinach.

I pulled on the door to the church, but it was locked. So I wandered around the neighborhood for an hour or two, halfheartedly interviewing a few more people to see if there was any interesting talk on the street. There wasn’t. And with the sun disappearing and the wind picking up, I was losing my will to canvass any further.

I had just turned over the Malibu’s engine when my cell phone rang. The number came up as “unavailable.”

“Carter Ross.”

“You’re not recording this, are you?”

It was, naturally, Irving Wallace.

“Do they teach you to be this paranoid or does it come naturally?”

“Hey, I got to ask,” he said.

“Fair enough. No, I’m not recording this.”

“Good,” he said. “And my name doesn’t go in your story, right?”

“Right.”

“Good. Question for you. Where did you get the sample that was labeled ‘The Stuff’?”

“From a dealer’s stash box,” I said.

“From an active dealer? Or from one of the victims in the Newark murders?”

“One of the victims-a woman who had been dealing out of a go-go bar in Irvington. The box was hidden in a closet in her apartment.”

“I see,” he said, like he was trying to make sense of something. “So you’re sure this is what she was selling on the street?”

“Yeah. Why do you sound so surprised?”

“Because it’s more than ninety-nine percent pure.”

“I take it that’s a lot?”

“The only time I’ve seen it that pure is when it’s been seized at the airport,” he said. “Once it gets to the street, it’s always cut at least a little bit. Now and then you get low nineties, but even the best heroin is usually seventy or eighty. I tested this one three times and each time it came back above ninety-nine percent. You can safely call it the purest heroin ever sold on the streets in America in your article and no one would call the paper to correct you.”

“What about the other sample?”

“The blank one? That was more like fifty. Run-of-the-mill.”

“Anything else you can tell me?” I asked.

“Without making your eyes glaze over with the details, I can tell you the chemical signature is consistent with South American heroin. I didn’t run the full workup, but I’d be willing to bet this came from the central highlands of Colombia, not far from Bogota.”

“Both of them came from the same place?”

“Yes.”

“And the purity is that extraordinary, huh?”

“Put it this way,” Wallace said. “The government takes thousands of kilos of heroin off the street every year, and most of it comes through my lab in one way or another. Yet in ten years of testing those thousands of kilos, I’ve never seen anything this pure. Junkies must have gone nuts for this stuff.”

Maybe a little too nuts, I thought.

“Well, I really appreciate the help with this,” I said, revving my engine a few times just to get the heater going a little more.

“Not at all. Those Newark killings are a heck of a thing, huh?”

“Everyone seems pretty rattled by them,” I confirmed.

“Yeah. Well, they should be. That’s a terrible thing, four people killed like that,” he said. “Is what you gave me the only samples you have?”

“I have one more of each-The Stuff and the generic.”

“And you’re keeping them in a safe place?”

“I’m going to tuck them away in my piggy bank at home.”

“Good,” he said. “Wouldn’t want them getting out.”

I assured him I didn’t, either, and with one more reminder to leave his name out of the story, he hung up.

It was nearing six o’clock-time for him to get home and for me to return to the office and make sure no one had spent the afternoon rearranging letters in my story. The editing process often reminds me of my favorite joke: a writer and an editor are stranded together in the desert. They’ve been slogging over the dunes for days and are about to die of thirst when, miraculously, they come across an oasis. The writer dives in and begins happily drinking the water. Yet when he looks up, he finds the editor pissing in the oasis.

Aghast, the writer screams, “What the hell are you doing?”

The editor replies, “I’m making it better.”

Still, once I returned to the office, I was relieved to find no one with a spastic bladder had been near my story. Szanto had made a few judicious nips and tucks, put a few train-wreck sentences back on track. I added one paragraph about the lab test results and shipped it over to the copy editors, thankful no one had made it “better.”

With my day’s toil complete, I went to round up Tina, only to discover her still chained to her desk, editing copy. She glanced up when she saw me approach, stuck five fingers in the air and mouthed “five minutes.” Then she winked.

I nodded and looked around to make sure no one had caught the wink. Like it mattered. Tina’s love life was an open book, one without the word “discretion” in it. The trade-off for getting to enjoy that slender body of hers would be that everyone was going to know about it.

I returned to my desk, prepared to unclutter my e-mail in-box for at least the next half hour. No journalist’s “five minutes” is ever really “five minutes.”

Except Tina’s was pretty close. After maybe ten she appeared, purse in hand, ready to depart.

“There’s this new wine bar that’s just opened up down the street from my building,” she said. “I’ve been dying to try it.”

“Great. Do they serve beer there?”

“I’m sure they keep something on tap for you and the other Neanderthals,” she said.