Page 6 of Road to Ruin
Buckshot.
I snap the thing closed again. “D’you know how close you’d have to be standing to me in order to kill me with this shit?” I don’t look at him. I stare at a peeling poster on the alley wall. “DJ Customize, Foam & Fuck party, Tuesday May 2nd. $20 entry. Doors at 6:30 p.m.” I have no idea what a foam and fuck party is, but 6:30 in the evening seems a little early for anything even remotely related.
“I don’t know. I have no idea, man. I told him I didn’t have a gun, and he told me to find one and fast. It’s all I could get my hands on.”
“Well. You sawed it off behind the choke. You know what that means?” I show him the gun. He shakes his head wildly. He’s sweating badly, beads of perspiration rolling down his face. “The longer the barrel, the better accuracy you have with a weapon like this. If you saw the barrel off behind the choke, you can forget about accuracy altogether though. The blast pattern of your ordinance is gonna go wide. And buckshot is already designed to do that anyway, so… I’m gonna say you would have had to be real close to kill me with this thing. You’d have seriously fucked me up, but I wouldn’t have been dead. And you know what that means?”
Silence.
“It means I would have had plenty of time to take out my knife and cut you open from stem to sternum.” I remove the knife from my pocket as I say the words, and Lucas’s eyes round out, the size of polished silver dollars.
“Please, man. Please. I just needed to clear my debt. I didn’t want to kill you.”
I didn’t want to kill him either. He and I are one and the same. We were both sent here to accomplish a goal, though, and it seems as though shaky, incompetent Lucas was actually going to follow through. I crouch down, turning the blade over and over in my hands.
“I don’t really know what to do with you now, Lucas. I was going to let you go, but…”
“Please. Please, man. If you’re going to kill me, don’t fuck me up with that thing. My mom will have nightmares for the rest of her life. Let me go out high. Let me go out so fucking high I don’t even realize it’s over.”
I cock my head to one side, thinking about this. I’m not really fond of blood. It’s messy, and the copper tang of the iron makes my stomach uneasy. If Lucas dies with a hypodermic hanging out of his arm on the other hand, things will be nice and clean. No mess. No intestines gathered around him like coiled, slick, wet snakes on the filthy concrete. No bile or shit from punctured internal organs.
“Okay. That sounds fair to me,” I agree. “Where is it?”
Lucas cries as he removes a slim, flat glasses case from his pocket and hands it over to me. I almost feel bad for the guy. Almost. Inside the case: a spoon, a length of rubber tubing, a lighter, and a small baggie containing about a hundred bucks worth of heroin, which is to say not very much heroin at all. “Is this it?”
Lucas nods miserably.
“I guess it’s your lucky day, then, huh?” There’s a chance he might not overdose on this amount of H. A small chance, but still. Could be someone finds him and calls an ambulance.
I methodically cook up for him while he sits in a strange, accepting kind of silence. I take his arm, ready to tie off around his bicep, but then I notice his veins are all black and collapsed underneath his skin, and I swear under my breath. “Where?” I demand.
Lucas reluctantly toes off his right shoe, then removes his sock, holding onto the balled-up material tightly in his hand as he watches me. The veins in his foot aren’t much better than the ones in his arm, but I manage to find one that still has flow to it. Lucas begins to sob. Somewhere, distantly, I’m aware that most people would feel something in this situation. They might feel…I don’t know. Remorse? Guilt? Fear of being caught? My emotions are running on an even keel as I slide the needle into Lucas’s foot and I slowly press the plunger down. I do it really slowly. He sighs, the panic and fear melting away as the drugs instantly take hold, crashing over him, and then a strange thing happens. I stop. A thought has occurred to me. What a weird gift it would be to this fucking idiot to not kill him right now. He’s not expecting to wake up from this ride. What would he do if he did? Would the surprising gift of life be the wake up call he needs to stop using? Would he hurry straight home, pack up his shit, and leave town immediately? Check himself into rehab?
I doubt it. Once heroin has a hold on you, it rarely ever lets go. It takes a strong will and an iron determination to wrestle yourself free from the grasps of the kind of addiction Lucas is saddled with, and I don’t think he has either.
Still…
I feel strangely benevolent as I withdraw the needle from his foot and place it on the ground beside his unconscious body. Lucas is lost in his dreams, riding motherfucking unicorns and swimming in rainbows, having the time of his life right now, but there’s a very, very good chance he’s going to wake up at some point and want to die.
Let’s see what he does with that.
I slide the sawed-off shotgun back into his duffel bag, and I loop the strap over my head. The rucksack I brought here, filled with chalk and baby powder, gets dumped in the trash as I make my way out of the alleyway.
I walk away. As I do so, I begin to plan the many entertaining ways in which I could murder Garrett Jonas. Not tonight, though. It turns out I really don’t have the energy for murder tonight, and besides…when I arrive home, letting myself into my apartment, I find I have a visitor. In the darkness, someone is waiting for me, sitting in my favorite chair by the window, moonlight spilling across their chest as they sleep.
David.
For some reason, I’m not as shocked as I should be. I never told him where I was going when I left New Orleans. I didn’t even tell him which state I was headed toward. For all my older brother knew, I could have been in Mexico, and yet somehow here he is, crashed out in my apartment, waiting for me to come home.
He wakes up, blinking blearily into the darkness. It takes him a second to locate me in the shadows, then he looks up at me and smiles grimly. “Hey, Tommy. Long time no see.”
“What are you doing here?” I dump the duffel bag unceremoniously on the floor.
“It’s Genevieve.” He pauses a moment, allowing that to hang between us, and then he says, “You know I wouldn’t have come otherwise. You know I would never have risked your safety. This is bad, though. Really fucking bad.” He takes a cigarette pack out of his pocket, removes a cigarette and lights it. He holds the smoke inside his lungs for a beat, then exhales heavily, sending twin jets of smoke pluming from his nostrils. His eyes meet mine properly for the first time. “It’s time for you to come back to the Quarter, Tommy. It’s time for you to come home.”
