“I’m giving you the straightest answers I have,” Twenty-Two replied.
Greg drank his coffee. Twenty-Two straightened the edge of his saucer with one finger, aligning it with the table’s edge.
“What does Fourteen want from me?” Greg asked. “He gave me product for free. Your people gave Curtis three thousand dollars for nothing in return. Nobody does that without wanting something back.”
Twenty-Two looked at him with those deep-drilled pupils and said: “The sun does not invoice the field for the harvest. What Fourteen offers, he offers because the offering is the point. The return is not a calculation he makes.”
“Everyone makes that calculation,” Greg said.
“Most do,” Twenty-Two agreed pleasantly. “Fourteen is not most.”
Greg slid out of the booth, stood up, put forty dollars on the table for his meal. He pulled his jacket straight and looked down at Twenty-Two, who was looking up at him with that expression of patient and permanent warmth.
“You’re all insane,” Greg remarked. “Every one of you numbered weirdos.”
“Safe travels, Greg,” Twenty-Two said.
Greg walked out into the spring morning, stood on the sidewalk, breathed the cold air and thought about his next plan of action.
He turned toward the transit mall and started walking.
The meth was gone by noon.
He’d been rationing it since morning, small touches of the pipe, barely enough to keep the fog from settling. Somewhere on the bus ride back from Northwest Everett he’d tipped the last of it into the bowl, held the flame under the glass, and pulled in what amounted to almost nothing, a ghost hit, the residue of residue. He held it for as long as he could, let it out, and waited for the lift. All he got was a pale approximation of one that lasted twenty minutes before the exhaustion from the sleepless night began pressing down on him from all sides like something physical.
He did not want to go back to Vic.
He got back to camp to find Trace sitting in her spot with a paperback that was missing its cover, reading with the focused economy of someone who’d learned to carry whole afternoons inside a book. She looked up when he came through the fence gap.
“You look terrible,” she said.
“I need a connection,” Greg said. “Crystal. I’m not going to my usual guy.”
Trace looked at him for a moment over the top of the coverless book. “How much you working with?”
“I need a good stock for a while. Lets say a hundred for now.”
She closed the book, set it on her knee, and appeared to run through some internal index. “There’s a guy,” she said. “I’ve used him twice. He’s alright. Sketchy spot but the product was fine.”
“That’s all I need,” Greg said.
She led him out of the camp and east, away from the river, into the grid of streets behind the industrial stretch where the blocks got longer and the foot traffic thinned to almost nothing. They walked for fifteen minutes with Trace setting a pace that was faster than her usual and Greg matching it, his hands in his pockets, the afternoon light flat and grey now with cloud cover moving in off the coast.
The alley was between a storage facility and the back of a building that had housed several businesses in succession and currently housed none, its rear loading dock empty and padlocked. The alley itself was narrow, running half a block before ending at a chain link fence, and it had the particular atmosphere of a place that discouraged lingering, damp concrete and old bins and the compressed shadow of two tall walls cutting out most of the sky.
The dealer was at the midpoint, a lean man in a canvas jacket sitting on an overturned crate with his hood up despite the mild temperature. He looked up when they came in, his eyes moving from Trace to Greg, doing a quick circuit of assessment.
“He’s good,” Trace said. “He’s with me.”
“Whoa,” the dealer said.
“What?” Greg asked.
“Whoa, whoa, whoa.” The dealer was stepping back, his hands coming up and out, the transaction dissolved instantly. “No. No, I don’t know what this is but I don’t want any part of it.”
“What are you talking about?” Greg asked.
“You brought a cop,” the dealer said. “You brought a cop into my spot.”
“I didn’t bring anyone,” Greg said. “It’s just us.”
“Then who the hell is that,” the dealer said, and pointed.
Greg turned around.
At the mouth of the alley, where it opened onto the street, a man in a white suit stood. Facing Greg.
The exhaustion left Greg’s body completely, replaced by something that had been building since yesterday morning.
He turned fully toward the mouth of the alley and took one step before the man in the white suit turned and walked out of view, onto the sidewalk.
Greg started moving.
By the time he hit the alley mouth he was running.
Greg’s boots hit the sidewalk hard. He kept his eyes on the white suit moving half a block ahead of him, not running, still walking, that same measured pace that somehow kept the distance between them constant no matter how fast Greg moved. He pushed harder, his knee firing with every impact on the concrete, the sleep deprivation and the crashed meth hitting him in waves that he ran through by sheer forward momentum.
The man turned left on Davis without looking back.
Greg turned left on Davis.
He turned right on Sixth. He crossed Morrison against the light. A car laid on its horn, but Greg went around its hood without breaking stride. The white suit stayed ahead of him by the same half block, same distance, same pace, and Greg had the nauseating sense of chasing something that was allowing itself to be chased.
They went north, then east, then north again through blocks that got quieter and more industrial, the lunch crowd thinning out, the buildings getting lower and further apart, more parking lots, chain link, and less foot traffic. Greg’s breathing was ragged and his knee was a sustained complaint, yet he ran anyway.
The man in the white suit turned into a lot.
Greg slowed as he reached the lot’s entrance and looked in. A commercial building, two stories, brick, the windows on the ground floor boarded with plywood that had been there long enough to grey and warp at the edges. A sign above the main entrance had been partially removed, leaving only the bolt holes and a ghost of lettering. The front door was steel, painted red once, and it stood slightly open.
The white suit was gone. Inside.
Greg stood at the entrance of the lot with his hands on his knees and breathed for thirty seconds. Then he straightened up, crossed the lot, and went through the red door.
Inside was the specific darkness of a building that had been closed long enough for the eyes to need a moment, the only light coming through the gaps in the plywood boarding, thin blades of afternoon grey cutting across a concrete floor covered in the sediment of vacancy: old paper, broken glass, the collapsed remains of shelving units along one wall. The smell was damp brick and rust.
He stood still and let his eyes adjust.
The ground floor was a single open space, gutted down to the concrete and the brick. No white suit. No movement. At the far end a stairwell went down, not up, below grade, and from it came a faint light, warmer than the grey coming through the boards, yellowish, and a sound.
Someone moving. Someone breathing.
Greg crossed the floor carefully, stepping over the debris, and went down the stairs.
The basement was low-ceilinged and dark except for a camping lantern on the floor near the far wall, the cheap kind that threw more shadow than light. In the circle of its reach, crouched on the concrete with his back against the wall and his hands pressed against both sides of his head, was Curtis.
He was shaking. The same rhythmic muscle clenching Greg had seen before but without the manic energy behind it, without the wild eyes and the need to run. This was the same motion with all the joy stripped out, the body doing it without the mind’s participation, compulsive and continuous, his forearms jumping, his jaw working.
Greg approached slowly, the way you approach an animal that’s been hurt.
“Curtis?”
Curtis’s head came up. His eyes were his own again, the regular bloodshot eyes, but hollowed out in a way that went past tired, past strung out, past anything Greg had a word for.
“I need more,” Curtis said. The words were slow now, nothing like the rapid-fire morning voice. Each one placed carefully, like he was lifting something heavy. “I need more ichor, Greg.”
“I don’t have any,” Greg said.
Curtis’s hands pressed harder against the sides of his head. He made a sound that was not quite a word.
“I don’t have any on me,” Greg said. “Curtis. You can get more. You can go to the guy, Fourteen, on the north side. He gives it out for free, you just have to sit through a sermon.”
Curtis lowered his hands from his head and looked at Greg. The look stopped Greg from saying anything else.
“Why did you kill me?” Curtis asked.
Greg went still. “Nobody killed you. You’re right here.”
“You knew,” Curtis said. “You knew what it would do. You knew and you sold it to me anyway. You looked me in the eye and you handed it over.”
“I didn’t know what it would do,” Greg said. “I still don’t. I’d just gotten it myself, Curtis, I hadn’t even tried it.”
“You let me go first,” Curtis said. “To see what happened. You watched, you saw, then you sold me more. You looked me in the eye this morning, you took my three thousand dollars, you handed me two vials, and you watched me run away.”
Greg opened his mouth.
“You damned me,” Curtis said. “You knew and you damned me anyway.”
“Curtis, listen to me. You can get more ichor. You go north, I’ll tell you exactly where the building is, you sit through one sermon and he gives it to you free. You can have as much as you want.”
Curtis looked at him for a long moment. The lantern light moved slightly in some draft from the stairwell and the shadows on his face shifted.
“That’s not good enough,” Curtis said.
“It’s what I’ve got,” Greg said. “It’s the only option.”
“No,” Curtis said. “No, I need you to do it for real. I need you to actually kill me. Not this slow way. The real way.” He said it with a flat sincerity. “I’m already gone, Greg. You already did the damage. Finish it.”
“I’m not going to do that,” Greg said.
“You owe me,” Curtis said.
“I’m not going to do that.”
Curtis stood up.
The movement was fast in a way that didn’t correspond to how he’d looked thirty seconds ago, crouched, shaking, and hollowed out. He came off the floor in a single motion. Greg took a step back automatically.
“Curtis…” Greg said.
Curtis moved.
He crossed the distance between them before Greg’s body had finished processing that he was moving, his hands finding Greg’s jacket. Greg went backward, hitting the brick wall hard enough to drive the air out of him and make his vision flicker. He got his forearms up and pushed, but Curtis was immovable.
Greg swung, his fist connecting with Curtis’s shoulder, but Curtis turned with it like the impact was nothing, like Greg had thrown something soft at him. Curtis’s return was much more impactful. Greg went down.
The concrete met his hip and his elbow. He scrambled up, got to his knees, but Curtis’s hand closed on the back of his jacket collar and lifted. Greg felt his feet leave the ground briefly before he came down again, his cheek against the cold concrete, the lantern light somewhere to his left throwing the shadow of Curtis enormous against the basement wall.
Greg tried to get up and couldn’t. He lifted his head from the floor and looked toward the stairwell.
The man in the white suit came down the last three steps and into the basement with the same quality they all had, that sense of time operating differently inside them, and stopped at the edge of the lantern’s reach. Greg could not tell if this was the same man from the alley mouth or one of the others. It didn’t matter. The suit was the same. The eyes were the same.
Curtis turned and saw him.
The transformation was immediate and total. The thing that had been holding Greg’s collar and lifting him off the concrete let go. Greg looked up. Curtis was across the room. Not attacking. Collapsing. He went down at the man’s feet with his palms out, his forehead nearly touching the concrete.
“Please,” Curtis was saying. “Please, please, please.”
The man in the white suit looked down at Curtis with the expression they all had, that patient and permanent warmth, as though this behavior from Curtis was expected. He reached into his jacket. Greg thought for a moment he was reaching for a vial before the light caught the blade.
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