George Pelecanos - Right as Rain

Strange reached for the phone. He called his old friend Lydell Blue and left a message on his machine. He didn't want to leave the cruiser's identifying number on Lydell's tape. He phoned Quinn, got his machine, told him they had work to do the next day, told him where and when he'd pick him up.

It was going to be an early day. I shouldn't have drunk so much tonight, thought Strange. I shouldn't have…

'Ah, shit.'

Strange saw a PayDay bar sitting on a piece of paper on the corner of his blotter. He lifted the bar and looked at the paper. Janine had drawn a little red heart on the paper, nothing else. Strange looked away and saw the Redskins figure, the one Lionel had painted for him, staring at him from the back of the desk.

'You all right, Derek,' said Strange. But his voice was unconvincing, and the words sounded like a goddamn lie.

Edna Loomis was straddling Ray Boone atop their bed, sliding up and down on his thick, short cock, moving her hips in awkward rhythm to the Alan Jackson tune that was blasting in the room. Her head was bent forward as she whipped her orange-blond, feather-cut hair across his pale chest, shaking her head in time to the music.

'She's gone country,' sang Edna. 'Look at them boots!'

Ray chuckled and grabbed one of her tits real good and hard. Edna kind of grunted. He couldn't tell if it was from pleasure or pain.

Ray shot off inside her, and right after that she faked like she was coming, too. He almost laughed, watching her shiver and howl, making a sound like a dog did when you went and stepped down on its paw. She must have seen some actress do that on one of her TV shows. Ray didn't know why she felt the need to fake it; he didn't care if she came or not.

Edna got off him and walked across the room. She turned the music down, then lit a Virginia Slims cigarette from that leather pouch of hers. The hand holding the lighter shook some from the speed that was still racing through her body.

'Turn that music off all the way,' said Ray. 'I'm tired of listenin' to it.'

Edna clicked off the compact stereo. Ray watched her, and when she caught him looking at her she sucked in her stomach. Aside from those dimples she had all over the tops of her legs, the girl was gettin' a belly on her, too.

'Me and Daddy gotta get goin',' said Ray, sitting up on the edge of the bed. He squeezed the rest of his jiz out and wiped it off on the sheets.

'You gonna leave me a little somethin', so I'll have somethin' to do while you're gone?'

'You just smoked up a mess of that crystal before we fucked, girl.'

'Bet your daddy's gonna leave his girlfriend a little somethin'.'

'Aw, shut up about that,' said Ray.

Edna stuck her tongue out playfully at Ray, then dragged hard on her cigarette. She wasn't going to make a fuss over it or nothin' like that. She still had that key to the room where he kept his stash, out there in the barn.

Earl Boone zipped up his trousers and looked at the girl stretched out there on his bed. She drew the sheets up to her birdlike shoulders and gazed at him with those funny, sexy, different-colored eyes. He didn't have no, what did you call that, delusions about her or anything like that. Sure, once he had got her out here in the country and cleaned her up, and kept her showered and smelling nice, she almost looked like any other good-looking young lady you'd see out there on the street. She was just a junkie, he knew, and if she kept up that pace of hers, she wasn't gonna live too much longer. But damn if she wasn't the prettiest junkie he'd ever seen.

'You gonna be all right, honey girl? 'Cause me and my boy, we got to make a trip into the city.'

'You'll leave me somethin', Earl?'

'Course I will. You know I wouldn't let you have any pain.'

Ray finished dressing. He heard that godawful music Edna was playing in Ray's bedroom down the hall. He hated that new stuff sung by those pretty boys with the department store-bought hats and the tight jeans, wondered why anyone would want to listen to that shit when they could be listenin' to Cash, Jones, Haggard, or Hank. Just when he thought he couldn't stand to listen to it any longer, the music ended. He figured his boy was getting himself ready for their last run.

Ray took a small wax packet of brown heroin from his coat pocket and dropped it on the dresser.

'Be back in a few hours,' he said.

Sondra Wilson watched him leave, closing the bedroom door behind him. She tried not to look at the packet on the dresser. She didn't want to do it up now; she wanted it to last. But then she began to shake a little, thinking of it sitting up there all alone. She thought of her mother and her brother, and began to cry. She wasn't sure why she was so sad. Everything she wanted was here, ten feet away from where she was lying now.

She wiped the tears off her face and got out of the bed. She walked naked across the room.

From the bedroom window, Edna Loomis watched Ray and Earl out in the yard, arguing over something, Earl pointing to a row of stumps at the edge of the woods, where Ray had set up empty beer cans. Ray had his gun in his hand, and Edna figured he was getting ready to shoot the cans off the stumps. Ray liked to do that before their runs, said it got him 'mentally prepared' to deal with those coloreds down in D.C. Earl didn't like Ray shooting off that pistol; he didn't care for all that noise.

He must have talked Ray out of it, because Ray left, then came out of the barn with his gym bag and loaded the heroin into the space behind the bumper of the car. Edna drained her third Jack and Coke of the afternoon, watching him complete his task.

She felt kind of funny, clammylike, and her heart was racing really fast.

You can always be higher, though. Ain't no question about that.

She rattled ice in the glass and sucked out the last few drips of mash as Ray and Earl got in the Taurus and drove away.

Edna got dressed, slipped the barn key into her jeans, and went down the hall, knocking on the door to Earl's room, where that half-colored junkie, Sondra, spent all her time. She opened the door and went through it when the girl didn't respond.

Sondra was naked, sitting on the edge of the bed, using a razor blade to cut out lines of heroin on a glass paperweight. Edna didn't think she'd ever seen a girl that skinny, not even those New York models she'd seen on TV. She didn't know what Earl saw in her, but it wasn't any of her business, and anyway she didn't care.

'I'm goin' for a walk,' said Edna.

'Okay,' said Sondra, not even raising her head.

'I feel like takin' a long one in the woods.'

'Okay.'

'Fine.'

Edna didn't know why she bothered covering her tracks with this one. She left the room.

Sondra bent forward and snorted up a thick line of heroin. She snorted the one beside it at once.

The warmth came almost immediately to the back of her neck. It spread behind her eyes and to the top of her skull. Then it was in her legs and buttocks and traveling like hot, beautiful liquid up her spine and racing through her veins. The edges of the room bled off, and Sondra lay back on the warm bed.

Sondra remembered that she had been crying moments earlier, but she couldn't remember why.

Edna patted her pockets as she walked into the barn and strode briskly through the saloon area toward the back room. She had her little brass pipe in one front pocket, the key in the other. She had wedged her leather pouch holding her pack of Slims and Bic lighter in the ass pocket of her jeans.

Edna used her key in the lock of the steel-fortified door, opened the door, and flicked on the lights. She closed the door behind her. She went quickly to the shelf mounted over Ray's homemade lab. She snatched a vial off the shelf and opened its lid. The vial was filled to the top with crystal rocks.