Don winslow Don winslow - The Border

“Two bags.”

“You want me to come out for twenty bucks?”

Jesus, why is he hassling her? Her nose is starting to run and she thinks she’s going to puke. “I’m getting sick, Marco.”

“Okay, where are you?”

“The Walgreens on Amboy.”

“I’m at Micky D’s,” Marco says. “I’ll meet you behind the Laundromat. You know where that is?”

Yeah, she does her laundry there all the time. Well, not all the time, when she thinks about it. When it gets too disgusting. “Duh, yes.”

“Half an hour,” Marco says.

“To walk across the parking lot?”

“I just got my food.”

“Okay, I’ll come there.”

“Ten minutes,” Marco says. “Behind the Laundromat.”

“Bring me a coffee,” Jacqui says. “Milk, four sugars.”

“Yes, Lady Mary,” Marco says. “You want, like, a McMuffin or something?”

“Just the coffee.” She’s just going to be able to keep that down, never mind greasy food.

Jacqui crosses the parking lot and walks out to Page Avenue, then up to the next strip mall, which has a CVS, a McDonald’s, a grocery store, a liquor store, an Italian restaurant and the Laundromat.

She walks behind the CVS and waits out the back of the Laundromat.

Five minutes later, Marco pulls up in his Ford Taurus. He rolls down the window and hands her the coffee.

“You drove across the parking lot?” Jacqui asks. “Global warming, Marco? Ever heard of that?”

“You have the money?” Marco asks. “And don’t tell me you’ll get it, you’re totally out of credit right now.”

“I have it.” She looks around and then hands him a twenty.

He reaches into the console and then slips her two glassine envelopes. “And a buck for the coffee.”

“Really?” Marco’s gotten kind of salty since he started dealing. Sometimes he forgets he’s just another addict, slinging shit so he has the money to get himself well. A lot of people are doing that these days—every dealer Jacqui knows is a user. She digs into her jeans pocket, finds a dollar bill and gives it to him. “I thought you were being a gentleman.”

“No, I’m a feminist.”

“Where are you going to be later?”

Marco holds his little finger to his mouth and his thumb to his ear—“Call me”—and pulls away.

Jacqui puts the envelopes in her pocket and walks back to the van.

Travis is awake.

“I scored,” Jacqui says, pulling the envelopes out.

“Where?”

“From Marco.”

“He’s an asshole,” Travis says.

“Okay, you go the next time,” Jacqui says.

Fuck the lazy bastard, she thinks. She loves him, but, Jesus, he can be a pain in the ass sometimes. And speaking of Our Lord and Savior, Travis looks a little like Jesus—shoulder-length hair and a beard, all slightly tinged with red. And thin like Jesus, at least like he looks in all the pictures.

Jacqui finds the cut-out bottom of a soda can she uses instead of a spoon for a cooker and pours the heroin into it. She fills her syringe out of a water bottle, squirts it into the heroin, then flicks on her lighter and holds it under the cooker until the solution bubbles. Taking the filter out of a cigarette, she dips it in water and gently lays it into the solution. Then she puts the tip of the needle into the filter and sucks the liquid into the syringe.

She takes a skinny belt she keeps for the purpose, wraps it around her left arm, and pulls on it until a vein pops up. Then she places the needle into the vein and pulls the plunger back so there’s a little air bubble in it and moves the needle around until a little blood shows up in the needle.

Jacqui hits the plunger.

Unties before she pulls the needle out and then—

Bam.

It hits her.

So beautiful, so peaceful.

Jacqui leans back against the van wall and looks at Travis, who just finished shooting up himself. They smile at each other and then she drifts off into heroin world, so vastly superior to the real world.

Which isn’t that high a bar to clear.

When Jacqui was little, when she was little, when Jacqui was a little girl, she saw her daddy in every man on the sidewalk, on the bus, every man who came into the restaurant where her mommy worked.

Is that my daddy? Is that my daddy? Is that my daddy? she’d asked her mom until her mom got tired of hearing it and told her that her daddy was in heaven with Jesus and Jacqui wondered why Jesus got him and she didn’t so she didn’t like Jesus very much.

When Jacqui was little she stayed in her room and looked at picture books and made up stories and told herself stories, especially when Mommy thought she was asleep and brought home some of the men who came into the restaurant where Mommy worked. She’d lie in her bed and make up stories and sings songs about when Jacqui was little, when she was little, when Jacqui was a little girl.

She wasn’t so little, she was nine, when Mommy married one of the men who came into the restaurant where she worked and he told Jacqui he wasn’t her daddy, he was her stepdaddy, and she told him she knew that because her daddy was with Jesus and he laughed and said yeah maybe, if Jesus is holding down a barstool in Bay Ridge.

Jacqui was eleven the first time Barry asked her if she was going to grow up to be a whore like her mother and she remembers that he pronounced it “who-are,” like “Horton Hears a Who-Are,” and Jacqui would go around the house muttering I meant what I said, and I said what I meant. Barry’s an asshole, one hundred percent . And one time he heard her and smacked her in the face and said You may not love me but you’re sure as shit going to respect me and her mother sat there at the kitchen table and did nothing. But then again she did nothing when he hit her and called her a who-are and a fucking drunk and Jacqui would run and hide in her room ashamed she didn’t do anything to stop him. And when Barry stormed out to go to the bar, Jacqui came out and asked her mother why she would stay with a man who was mean to her and her mother answered that someday she’d understand that a woman has needs, she gets lonely.

Jacqui didn’t feel lonely, because she had books. She would shut herself up in her room and read books—she read all of Harry Potter and the idea that they had been written by a woman led her to go to the library and find Jane Austen, the Brontës, Mary Shelley and George Eliot and then Virginia Woolf and Iris Murdoch and poems by Sylvia Plath and Jacqui decided that someday she’d leave Tottenville and move to England and become a writer and live in a room of her own where she didn’t have to block out the sounds of shouting and crying and hitting outside the door.

She started listening to music—not the pop shit her few friends listened to but good shit like the Dead Weather, Broken Bells, Monsters of Folk, Dead by Sunrise, Skunk Anansie. She bought an old guitar at a pawn shop, sat in her room and taught herself (in both literature and music Jacqui is an autodidact) chords and started to write songs when Jacqui was little (C), when she was little (F), when Jacqui was a little girl (C).

Jacqui is playing her guitar one afternoon when her mother is at work and Barry comes in and takes the guitar from her hand and says This will be our secret, our little secret, I’ll make you feel so good and lays her back on the bed and lies on top of her and she doesn’t tell her mother and she doesn’t tell anyone This will be our secret (D), our little secret (G), I’ll make you feel so good (Em) even when her mother says I can tell you’ve been having sex you’re a little whore who’s the boy I’ll have his ass thrown in jail and Barry keeps coming into her room until one day one early morning she hears her mother screaming and runs and sees Barry hunched over on the toilet and her mother screams Call 911 and Jacqui walks slowly to her room to get her phone and sings This will be our secret (D), our little secret (G), I’ll make you feel so good (Em) before she punches in the number and by the time the EMTs get there Barry is dead.