Cracked (13 page)

I didn’t own a red lipstick.

I looked down at myself. I was covered in vomit, and there was a hypodermic needle in my arm, taped there to keep it in place. The plunger was down. I ripped off the tape and took the needle out and applied pressure to my arm in case it bled. Throwing the needle across the room, I moved quickly to the phone. I was wide awake and more alert than I’d ever felt in my life. I stepped on Dom’s blood on the carpet, and it squished under my bare feet. I retched again as I picked up the phone. No dial tone. Nothing.

“No!” I was shouting. I slammed the receiver into the phone over and over. “No, no, no.” I ran past Dom and crossed myself. Jack had been Catholic, and I had picked some of it up by osmosis.

Wrenching open the door, I ran outside, barefoot, covered in puke and some of Dom’s blood, I could see now, splashed onto my bare legs and feet. Had I killed him? No, no, no.

“Help,” I was yelling, running toward the office. I cut my foot on something in the parking lot and kept running. “Someone call the fucking cops!”

A couple of girls on the street moved forward to get a look at what was going on, and a man who looked like he could be dealing walked quickly in the other direction. Toward Lucky’s.

Before I reached the office, a police car and ambulance careened into the parking lot, sirens blazing. Fuck, I thought. That was fast.

Detective Miller got out of the car, Detective French right behind him. I pointed at the room. “He’s dead! He’s dead in there!” They rushed past me and into the room, guns drawn. A paramedic approached me with a silver foil blanket.

“Ma’am?” he said cautiously. “Where are you hurt?” He looked like he was scared I was going to spray HIV-tainted bodily fluids all over him. I didn’t blame him.

“I’m fine, I’m fine, go get him, get him!” I yelled, pointing at the room. A crowd was starting to form. The paramedic wrapped the blanket over me. It seemed important that someone went in to take care of Dom. I knew he was dead, but I didn’t want him in there alone. Someone in a uniform should be in there. All the uniforms in the world should be in there.

Poor Dom. Oh, God.

“We have to wait until the officers indicate it’s okay to enter,” he said calmly. “Please come and sit down so I can check you out.” He led me over to the back of the ambulance. I sat there as he flashed a light into my eyes and asked me a few questions to determine if I was of sound mind. What was my name? What year was it? Who was the president? Another EMT was taking my blood pressure. Second time in one day. He frowned at the reading, got me to lie back, and did it again.

“Do you suffer from hypertension?” the second EMT said.

“High blood pressure? No. I mean, I don’t think so.”

Where were Miller and French? They hadn’t come out of the room yet. I started shaking again. Then my body seemed to take over, and the shaking turned into convulsions. I was aware of everything, but I just couldn’t stop my body from moving. The paramedics snapped into action, strapped me onto the gurney, and one of them slipped something into my arm.

“Stay with us, Danny,” one of them was yelling into my face. He was too close, and it made me panic more. My body wrenched back and forth, up and down. The paramedic was talking on a walkie-talkie or something as he ran around to the front of the vehicle and started it up, sirens on again. I closed my eyes and gave in to my body. “Danny! Danny! What did you take?”

I could hear him, but I couldn’t talk. But the shaking was slowing down.

“She’s responding to the drip,” the EMT yelled to the one in the front. “Danny. You’re an IV drug user. Is that right?”

I shook my head. I’d never put anything into my arm. Just up my nose and into my lungs.

“Danny, there’s a bruise and a track mark on your arm,” the paramedic said, more gently. “We’re here to help. You don’t have to lie. We’ve seen worse.”

“Somebody drugged me,” I managed to say. “I woke up with a needle taped to my arm.” EMT guy relayed this info to the front, and I could hear that guy radioing ahead for the hospital to inform the police. “It was just supposed to be crack, and it was crack, but I think there was something else in it.”

“Don’t worry, Danny,” the paramedic said to me. He was cleaning the vomit off my face. “We’ll be at the hospital soon. You’re going to be just fine.”

“I don’t think so,” I said. “But thanks for saying so.”

* * *

I was admitted to the hospital, poked for blood, given an EKG, six stitches on the bottom of my foot, cleaned up, fed some clear broth and given something to relax me.

“Ativan?” I said, swallowing the pills the nurse handed me.

“You know your pharmaceuticals,” the nurse said, no expression on her pretty face.

“Everybody has to have a hobby.” I was just closing my eyes when Miller and French walked in.

“I’m in a private room. I can never afford this,” I said. I was pleasantly sleepy.

“You’re under police protection here, Danny,” Miller said. “There’s an officer outside this room.” He indicated the bed. “Mind if I sit?”

“What about Dom,” I said, nodding for Miller to sit. “I don’t suppose…”

“He’s dead,” Detective French said. She was standing at the foot of my bed with her arms crossed. Miller shot her a look.

“That note on the mirror,” I began, but French cut me off.

“Written in your friend’s blood,” she finished crisply.

“The twins?” Oh God. Please tell me they’re safe. Please, God, let them be safe. I was out getting high. No matter what I had told myself, I was doing drugs while the boys were still missing. What would Ginger say?

“You tell us,” French said. “You sure you have no idea, Ms. Cleary?”

I sat up straighter. “Lady, what is your fucking problem,” I said slowly. “I didn’t kill him, you know. You might want to brush up on your people skills. In the space of the last several days, my twin sister has been murdered, my nephews have been kidnapped, I was attacked in a bathroom, and then drugged, while someone two feet away from me died from whatever knocked me out. It’s a good thing I didn’t choke on my own vomit.”

French looked out the window. Miller spoke up.

“Danny,” he said gently. “That man did not die from an overdose, or a tainted dose. Someone held him down, while someone else cut off his tongue.”

“And left him there, unable to move, while he bled to death,” French finished quietly. “They gave him a blood thinner, first, to speed up the process.” She was still looking out the window.

“Oh my God, oh my God.” I grabbed Miller’s hand and held it tight. “Why didn’t they kill me too?” I wished they had. But maybe not like they’d killed Dom. “Oh God, poor Dom, poor Dom; he was a nice guy, too. He knew my sister.”

Miller looked over at French, who took a notebook out of her back pocket and started writing. “How do you know that, Danny?”

The drug was working its magic, and there was nothing in the world, nothing I wanted more than sleep. “Please,” I said. “Can we do this tomorrow?”

Miller started to say no, but I was already drifting out. Just before I went under, I heard Detective French’s voice. “She’s two steps ahead of us,” she said, and then I slid into oblivion. Finally.

Ginger was patting at the back of my head with something, gently.

“You did a real number on yourself this time,” she said. She very softly punched me in the shoulder. “Good thing you can handle it.”

“I didn’t do it to myself,” I was trying to protest. But she was busy writing something down in a notebook. There was a tube down my throat. Why was there a tube down my throat?

Ginger was singing something as she wrote in her notebook. I was listening to it as hard as I could. It was “King of the Road.” We’d always sung this when I was growing up. The whole family.

Ginger looked at me as I tried to sing along. “Don’t you remember the lyrics?”

I was trying to nod, but she cut me off. “Get some rest
, ma cherie amour
,” she said. I tried to laugh. We used to sing the Stevie Wonder song together.

I couldn’t do anything through the tube in my mouth. It was so frustrating, and I tried to pull it out and I kept pulling and pulling, but more and more tube kept coming up, until I realized that I was pulling out my own intestines. It vaguely bothered me.

“Danny,” Ginger was saying, gurgling through the blood that was seeping down her face. “Find it.”

* * *

“Hey, fuckface. Beanpole,” Darren was saying. My eyes were open. My head hurt as though I’d been hit on the head by a two-by-four swung by David Ortiz, aka Big Papi.

Hey. I’m a baseball fan. So sue me.

“Hi,” I whispered, looking around.

“It was horse tranquilizer,” Darren said. “Cooked into the crack.”

Ketamine. Nearly anything could be mixed together to get the effect addicts wanted. So many addicts, so many amateur chemists. “Get right to the point, why don’t you,” I replied. My voice cracked a bit. I was very thirsty. I looked around, and Darren grabbed a glass of water sitting next to my bed and put it up to my lips. I drank, and it tasted like springtime in the Alps.

“Thank you,” I said, leaning my head back and wincing. Oh yeah. The knock on the back of my head.

“The doctor who let you walk out of here yesterday is going to be in big trouble,” Darren said conversationally. “You were supposed to be held here.”

“They ain’t built a jail that can hold me, homes,” I said. Darren laughed. He got up and kissed my forehead.

“Do you have any fucking idea how worried I was yesterday? How worried everybody was?”

Everybody. Oh Christ. This meant he had told Skipper and Laurence.

“The twins?” I said. Darren shook his head. He didn’t look like he’d slept. I closed my eyes.

“Did you see Ginger?” I asked. My voice was hoarse. Darren passed me more water.

“I did,” he said. When I was finished with the straw, Darren filled the glass again with the pitcher on my bedside table and took a big swig. “I saw her.”

“It wasn’t Ginger,” I stated. “Somebody who looked like her?”

“Danny,” Darren said gently. “It was definitely Ginger. Okay? It was Ginger.”

Then he sat down on the edge of my bed and cried. Hard. Not like, I didn’t get the promotion and my wife is leaving me kind of crying, but it’s the end of the world as I know it kind of crying.

“Oh, Darren,” I said. I sat up, with difficulty, the pain in my head stabbing in different directions. “Darren. I’m so sorry. I’m sorry.”

“Danny,” he said. “Don’t ever do this to me again.”

“Get hit on the head?” I said, fingering the bump back there. Ouch.

“Take off and not tell me where you’re going. Disappear, Danny.” He was crying full out now, like he was eight years old. “I can’t do this by myself. Don’t leave me by myself.”

We sat like that for a while. I patted Darren’s back like Mom used to do, and promised him that I would never, ever leave him again. That even if I was going to do something stupid, I would tell him, or bring him. For the rest of my life, amen.

I knew even as I said it that it was a promise I might not keep.

“She didn’t look like her, Beanpole,” Darren said, trying to clean his face up. I was so proud of him for not apologizing for crying, or trying to hide it. My heart was swelling so much with loving him that I thought I would burst. “I mean, it was Ginger. Don’t get any wrong ideas. But… it wasn’t our Ginger.”

“What do you mean?” I asked quietly, still stroking his back. I was frozen inside, but I didn’t want to interrupt his flow.

Darren shrugged. “She looked… homeless. Not cared for.”

“But she was in a morgue. They must have cleaned her up.”

“I don’t know,” Darren said. He got up and walked to the end of the bed. “Danny. Don’t take this the wrong way, okay? I love you more than any other living person.”

“I know,” I said. I did, all of a sudden. And it made me want to live.

“She looked like you, Danny,” he said. “She looked like you do, right now.”

I looked at my hands. “Darren. I still haven’t seen the note.” He wandered to the window and looked out, not saying anything. He glanced outside the room.

“Detective Miller is here. I think he wants to be the one to show it to you.”

Danielle, my sister
, the note started, and I laughed and cried. Ginger had always loved Elton John’s song “Daniel.”

I’m sorry that it had to end this way. I know it’s going to hit you hard, and I wish I could change what’s happening.

You have chosen a way of life. I wanted to see what you saw. I wanted to change my life. I wanted to take it all back. Except the boys. Okay, Danny? Not the twins.

I’m in so much pain, Danny. I’ve tried so hard to be strong like you.

Take care of the boys. Please. I don’t know if Fred can.

You are the wind beneath my wings. Ha, ha. Except that I mean it. You are.

Love and Kisses,
Ginger

P.S.
Find Jack
.

Ginger had written it. It was weird, and I would have to process it later, alone, but it was most definitely her handwriting, and the in-jokes were Ginger. The music stuff, the “Danielle, my sister” and “wind beneath my wings” stuff. The syntax was hers, though it rang a little strange. But she was being made to write it, sometime before that needle went into her arm. It didn’t make much sense to me, not really. But she was still writing to me, even if they were telling her most of what to say. She was talking to me.

I had to find her boys.

“Detective Miller,” I said, looking up at him after reading the note a few times. “I want to tell you something, and I want to know if I can trust you.” Darren had gone to call our brothers and tell them I was all right. Or alive, at any rate. Detective French wasn’t around, for which I was grateful.

Miller rubbed his palm across his forehead a few times quickly. “Danny. I don’t know if you can trust me.”

“What a shitty answer,” I said.

“If you’re about to confess that you know something about your sister’s homicide and want me to keep it in strictest confidence between the two of us…”