A cup of coffee appears on the counter and I take it. She digs for a minute in the back and comes out with their battered copy of the city directory.
“Leave it on the counter. My boss doesn’t want you walking off with it.”
“Sure.”
She either doesn’t notice or care as I uncap the coffee and produce a flask from my jacket. If she watches me take it out she’s got to see my iron also. I top off the coffee with booze. She sets a half and half creamer carafe before me and I drop a single white tear into the cup, as milky as the skin running down from her jaw and disappearing into her blouse.
I take an envelope out from my jacket and open up a printed copy of my notes for the case. James Dobbins. Arrested two months ago on possession with intent to distribute. Released on bail. Arrested two years back for public intoxication. Three DUI’s. Criminal use of weapons. Resisting. Obstruction. Assault. I look at the address I found for him; look in the phone book. Bingo. Got him. Maybe four miles away. Too early for a convicted junkie to be awake.
I look at the girl. She’s still standing there, watching me. She has her own cup now, a tall one with very little coffee lurking at the bottom. She smacks her gum. I make eye contact. Hazel. Her left ear is pierced twice; her right once.
I look at her breasts. She taps her cup on the rim. Must be the fee for staring.
I shrug. I top her off with the rest of my whiskey. Tear out the page with Dobbins’ address just to be safe. I don’t pay. She doesn’t say anything.
The door closes behind me and the mountain-side air washes over me. This place feels so clean and pure, as if it were a pocket of Heaven cradled into the planet.
And I am going to look for the devils that nest here.
29
Three crisp cigarettes later and I hail a cab, maybe half a mile away from the breakfast joint.
The cab disgorges me a few blocks east of Dobbins’ place. I walk the rest of the way. Scouting.
Dobbins’ house: a shitty bungalow in a shitty neighborhood. Fifty feet by one hundred feet of land, all bland, flat and featureless. No bushes. One tree, struggling to be anything more than an oversized twig. Dead brown grass exposed through the snow by rings of dog piss. The siding is old. The windows are old. The roof is peeling like scales on a diseased reptile. The front door looks cheap. Easy to kick in. No car in the splintered, uneven driveway. No garage at all. One story. A stoop held up by two rotting wooden beams with the house numbers nailed into it.
He must have inherited this place from his folks. They probably paid it off back in the late ’70s, died in the late ’90s and now he crashes here and lets it rot. A junkie’s dream: having a safe pad to bump and virtually no responsibility for it.
Derne said this cat walked the straight and narrow for the time he was in and out of Delilah’s life. Married to a gal for a year or so before he started dating Delilah. Able to land a semi-respectable job with the skills he learned in some trade college before he doped out. Met Delilah, ruined it all. Got back on the poison. Leads him here.
You see them around; you went to school with them. They were all in elementary. All but one or two were in middle. Less made it to high school. A few held their brain cells together long enough to graduate.
The rest: folks who have talent, smarts and a good beginning to their lives. Clean-cut people who have a jagged edge to their decision making process. Sometimes the important choices fall into the crack underneath that jagged edge. They just up and try drugs one day. Then you see those same folks two, three, five years later and they’ve aged eighty years. They’re skeletons with no teeth, lines running through their patch-colored skin so deep you can’t imagine the things they’ve seen over dope. The things they’ve done over dope. Open sores are little more than a nuisance to be nervously picked at.
I go around back. A few lawn chairs on a patio. Mounds of cigarette butts and beer bottles strewn about. I smell ordure and vomit. Party place. Opium den.
I draw my iron and nudge the backdoor. Quiet.
The rank scent inside hits me: a wet ashtray mixed with alcohol mixed with emesis mixed with the metallic odors of burning drugs. The hardwood floors are so chewed up and marred they might as well be firewood. The kitchen is filthy; the sink is spilling garbage and food like a dumpster after an animal picks through it.
I smell dog shit. I don’t see a dog. The curtains in the living room are drawn but the morning sun fights through. It creates an ashen, smoggy haze; a dungeon gloom. The bathroom is grimy. One bedroom is empty. Used and dirty drug paraphernalia litter the next bedroom. Inside it a TV is still turned on with some tripped-out Japanimation porno running in the background.
Cartoon sex and needles. A burnt spoon.
The third bedroom has a male, maybe thirty, scrawny, passed out face down on a mattress. No box springs. No frame. Just a mattress sitting on the floor. There is an indent where his head lays. There is one brown stain on top of the next where his crotch lays. I get the feeling he’s had this mattress for a long time and he’s been abusing it since day one. A single dresser with one drawer missing.
A wallet sits on the dresser. I open it. James Dobbins. Non-driver state-issued ID. He’s got two twenties. I take both.
I don’t see any weapons. I don’t see anything that could be used as one. No one asleep anywhere else. He snores like he hasn’t slept in days. Might not have. I kick him.
“James.” My voice carries through the still house like a titan’s demand rattling out of a cave.
He barely stirs. I kick again. Harder. Ribs.
“James.”
“Huhhh...what?”