John Sandford - Wicked Prey

He'd left Peterson, heading downstairs, when his phone rang: took it out, saw that he'd missed three calls, all from Weather, while he was in the underground ramp-no reception there-and answered: "Weather?"

"Lucas: where have you been?" She sounded frightened.

"Working-out of range, in a parking ramp."

"Oh, God, I've been frantic. It's Letty."

Randy Whitcomb had checked himself out of the hospital against medical advice, and they drove across town to the house, the asshole guy and his girlfriend trailing behind. They got the asshole guy's cash at the house, and then Briar, leaking tears again-Whitcomb told Ranch that he'd beat it out of her eventually, dry her up-had gone off to the motel, with the assholes right behind her.

So Whitcomb had big money but no way to get downtown to spend it. Ranch woke up when Whitcomb came in with the money, and offered to walk downtown and find George, but there was no way that Whitcomb would trust Ranch with more than two dollars, and maybe not that.

So they waited, and stewed, and sweated, as hours crawled by, and Ranch even went down the hill where a pill seller sometimes set up, but the guy was not there, and he came back in a mood and he and Whitcomb had a screaming argument, because both of them were seeping back to a drugless world.

Ranch shouted, "You're a tit. You're gonna grab this cop's kid, and what do we do? Nothin." Not a fuckin' thing, you tit."

"Gonna get her," Whitcomb shouted.

"Bullshit, because you're a tit," Ranch shouted back.

"Gonna get her. Gonna suck some smoke, then we're gonna get her. You're gonna fuck her. I'm gonna beat her with my stick until she's hamburger."

"Maybe I'll fuck her, if I say so," Ranch shouted. "I'm not gonna fuck her because you say so, because you're a tit."

"This is my house…"

Then Ranch tumbled facedown into a beanbag chair and didn't move anymore, though he snored every couple of minutes. Whitcomb rolled between the kitchen and living-room windows, looking out, looking out, looking out'

Briar got back after dark. Whitcomb had whipped himself into several furies, and had gone into a half-dozen emotional slumps, looking at the two thousand dollars, right there, and not a fuckin' thing in the house, wouldn't you know it, and when the van finally turned into the driveway, he could hardly believe it.

He met Briar at the door: "You fuckin' moron, you, we needed that van. I'm fuckin' crippled…"

"I got arrested by the cops," Briar said.

Ranch woke in the beanbag chair. He was used to the disappearance of large parts of his life. Sometimes, he passed out at ten o'clock in the morning, and when he woke up, it was nine o'clock in the morning-some other morning. At first, the time changes were disorienting, but over the course of a couple of years, he got used to it. He simply gave up on time-now life was daytime and nighttime, strung along like beads on a string, and the minute, hour, and date were irrelevant.

When he woke up in this darktime, he could hear Whitcomb screaming in the kitchen, which wasn't unusual, and wouldn't normally have shaken him out. He pushed up, and a string of drool drained away from his lip. He wiped it off, heard the noise that woke him. Telephone, right under his head.

Whitcomb had backed Briar against the wall, extracting details of her arrest, when Ranch wandered in from the other room and handed Whitcomb a phone and said, "I got George, scrote."

"Who you callin' fuckin' scrote, you fuckin' douche bag?" Whitcomb shouted, and then stopped, as Ranch's words penetrated, and said, "George?"

Ten minutes later, Whitcomb was careening around the living room and kitchen in the wheelchair, waving his head-shop pearlescent-gold-twirl glass pipe over his head, shouting, "George is on the way." And he whirled in the chair and chanted it, waving the pipe as though directing an orchestra: "George is on the way; George is on the way; George is on the way."

He was rolling back toward Briar, pipe over his head, spasmodically jerking it back and forth, in time to the arrhythmic chant, and it slipped from his sweaty fingers in a long dangerous arc. Briar reached out to catch it, fumbled it, fumbled it again, and then it hit the side of the stove and shattered, and they all three stood looking at it, in all its pieces, scattered along the kitchen floor.

Whitcomb's mouth opened and closed, and, stunned, he said to Briar, "My fuckin' pipe. You broke my fuckin' pipe."

He looked around for his stick, saw it, looked back at her, hate in his eyes, but then Ranch said, "Fucked-up yuppie pipe anyway You waste half the smoke; I can make a better pipe in eleven minutes, yo."

Whitcomb said, "Make a pipe?"

Ranch had skills: there were a few ancient tools under the sink, left behind by a previous tenant. Included in the greasy, cobwebbed old green canvas bag was a pair of side-cutters and a rusty file. Ranch unscrewed a forty-watt GE Crystal Clear bulb from a sconce at the bottom of the stairs, and said, "A perfect bulb. Don't even have to wash the motherfucking white shit out."

"What white shit?" Whitcomb asked.

"Some bulbs got this white shit in them," Whitcomb said. "Tastes terrible."

They gathered at the kitchen table, and Ranch used the side-cutters to cut off the contact at the bottom of the bulb, and then carefully crack out the ceramic insulator that had held the contact in place. With the insulator gone, he broke the glass rod that held the light filament in place, and pulled the broken pieces of glass out of the bottom of the bulb by the wires that led to the filament. All that, he brushed onto the floor.

"This is the hard part," he said. "This is where you can fuck up if you don't know what you're doing."

Using the edge of the file, he scratched a line across the glass of the bulb, then went back into the scratch and drew the file across it again, and again, slowly, carefully. In two minutes, he'd opened a narrow hole to the inside.

"Really careful now, so's we don't break the glass…" He was breathing his words, holding the bulb, working the file with some delicacy. In another two minutes, he had a hole an inch long and an eighth of an inch wide. "That's where you load the shit," he said. And, "I need some tape."

They didn't have any tape, but Briar remembered that one of the seats in the van had a piece of duct tape on it, patching a rip, and she went out and peeled it off and brought it back inside, and Ranch pronounced it perfect. Using pliers, he made five small cuts in the aluminum screw-in base on the bulb, pushed the ragged tabs across the width of the bulb until they formed a small hole, and pushed a McDonald's straw into the hole and taped it in place.

"There you go," he said, holding up the bulb. "Best pipe in the world. You'll see."

Whitcomb took it, his hand shaking, looked at it, and said, "That's the greatest fuckin' thing I ever saw."

Even Briar was proud of Ranch.

Then George came.

George had the crank in little Ziploc baggies, and they bought three. Whitcomb, eyes narrowed, cracked one of the baggies, said, "Pretty fuckin yellow."

"It's right out of the coffeepot," George said. He was a short fat man with short black curly hair, most of it sticking out of the neckline of a Vikings T-shirt; and he wore cargo shorts and Nike shoes. "Just come out that way, but I got no dissatisfied customers. It's good shit."

Whitcomb dampened a finger with his tongue, stuck the finger in the bag, picked up a schmear of the crank, tasted it and winced: the taste was bitter, cutting, perfect. No sugar, no salt, no baking soda.

"Okay." He passed over the money; George looked at each bill, then tucked it in his side pocket. "Call me."