Page 13 of Absinthe Dreams
“Okay, I think we’re not only looking at burns, but we have an overdose happening here,” I called out. “Let’s get a unit of Narcan going and do what we can to get a nerve block going.” I sighed and stood up and felt for her, I really did. Narcan was going to cut off any sort of opioid pain relief, along with whatever she’d taken. The trap houses around here, it could be anything between meth and heroin. Usually, when they got too wired on the uppers, they turned to downers to come down. It was a dangerous cocktail and an even more dangerous cycle.
We saw it a lot in this city.
Substance abuse was at an all-time high.
I sighed again, this time with relief, once she was stable and we moved on to our next customer. My relief was here, but the ER was running as though we’d had a mass-casualty event. Sure, it wasn’t one event but four – but all roads led to Mass General in the end, around here.
CHAPTER SIX
Chainsaw…
Axe and I stood outside the Trap House we’d been assigned. We were a little over halfway up the block, scoping the place out. It wasn’t overly busy, but it was inhabited enough.
It was barely a house. One of the old ones, still barely left standing after Katrina. They were getting fewer and farther between, but they were still around. Too tired, too broken for anyone to wanna take a chance on fixing or flipping. Why tear it down and build when you could already get plenty of the empty lots around here to spare you the expense of a teardown?
Firefighters only needed to do so many controlled burns and training exercises in any given year, and yeah, most of them went to that – but this one? This one hadn’t seen working air conditioning, electricity, or running water in a decade or more, but she was still standing.
Made her perfect for squatters to take over. Then, addicts, and eventually, the sales associates supplying said addicts.
Yeah. The people inhabiting this one had a good run, but anybody inside? They were pretty much so far gone on the shitthey pumped into their veins or inhaled into their lungs that they were walking corpses anyhow.
The ones who weren’t pretty much deserved what they were about to get. I didn’t have any illusions about that.
Shit, if it were me an’ Axe running the place, we’d deserve it just as much as these fuckers.
We’d had our hands in some illicit shit in the past, during Ruth’s days, and some of us even before that. We were no angels. We were the very devils and haints of New Orleans that the world cautioned you about before your feet ever hit the cracked sidewalks or our Spanish Moss brushed your shoulder.
Tonight? Tonight, we were going to do our best as changed men to release the souls in their drug-addled purgatory. We damn sure weren’t on the devil’s side tonight. No, that was all Ruthless and his merry band of fuckwits handing out poison like a pack of pedos handed out candy out the back of a van.
Luring the lost and the destitute like lost little lambs to slaughter. It was a slow one. A fucked-up damned shame of one.
“You ready?” Axe asked me, and I nodded.
“Let’s cut ‘em down,” I said. We strapped on our gloves, the ones that fit well with the reinforced knuckles. I slid my blackjack out of the back of my belt so that we could hopefully subdue anyone who wanted to make a fuss at us.
We couldn’t be sure the sellers weren’t staying free of their product, and there was a good chance that this place was handing out uppers just as much as downers. There wasn’t anything more dangerous than someone wound up tighter than a fuckin’ Timex on shit that made them paranoid and felt no pain.
It was best to crack ‘em and drop ‘em where they stood before we lobbed any grenades.
Which we intended to do by way of some pipe bombs we’d assembled and were backing.
We split up, Axe taking the front, me ghosting around the perimeter, around back. There were a few zombies on the back porch – drugged out to the point they ain’t moving for nothing. I sucked on my cig and pushed open the back door with caution.
I lit the bomb with my cig and hollered out at the same time Axe’s voice crashed into me from the front with the same phrase, “Fire in the hole!”
I heard his bomb clack just a second before mine did, and it was time to bail out. I went straight off the back porch, ran like hell, and dove over the back fence, skirting around the house that was behind the one we were taking down.
I was halfway down the block, a street over, when the bombs went off in an echo of one another and the sky lit up like a son of a bitch behind me.
I banked left, and saw Axe running at me, grinning like a lunatic dog with his head hung out the car window as we both booked for the bikes mid-block, where we had them parked against the curb. We jumped on, fired up, and rode for broke out of there while the whole neighborhood, or what was left of it, started lighting up. Lamps came on, and people came out to see what the fuck.
There was panicked screaming back there, too, and someone hollering to call the fire department. But with as much powder as we’d packed into those two pipes, there wasn’t any saving anybody who was in that house.
We rode the fuck out of there, slick-backed and headed for the rendezvous point. We weren’t texting, calling, or doing shit. As far as anyone was concerned, we were all at LaCroix’s old daddy’s place cooking out and fucking ’til the cows came home.
I smiled to myself as the wind cut across me and thought about good ol’ Lucille Bogan. I’d have to play that song when we got where we were goin’.
CHAPTER SEVEN
