What a drag, Arctor thought as he let the two guys coerce him to a seedy-looking overstuffed couch. Dismal walls, he noticed. Dismal low-quality donated paint. They subsisted, though, on contributions; difficulty in getting funded. "Thanks," he grated shakily, as if it was an overwhelming relief to be there and sit. "Wow," he said, attempting to smooth his hair; he made it seem that he couldn't and gave up.

The girl, directly before him, said firmly, "You look like h.e.l.l, mister."

"Yeah," both guys agreed, in a surprisingly snappy tone. "Like real s.h.i.t. What you been doing, lying in your own c.r.a.p?"

Arctor blinked.

"Who are you?" one guy demanded.

"You can see what he is," the other said. "Some sc.u.m from the f.u.c.king garbage pail. Look." He pointed at Arctor's hair. "Lice. That's why you itch, Jack."

The girl, calm and above it, but not in any way friendly, said, "Why did you come in here, mister?"

To himself Arctor thought, Because you have a bigtime runner in here somewhere. And I'm the Man. And you're stupid, all of you. But instead he muttered cringingly, which was evidently what was expected, "Did you say-"

"Yes, mister, you can have some coffee." The girl jerked her head, and one of the guys obediently strode off to the kitchen.

A pause. Then the girl bent down and touched his knee. "You feel pretty bad, don't you?" she said softly.

He could only nod.

"Shame and a sense of disgust at the thing you are," she said.

"Yeah," he agreed.

"At the pollution you've made of yourself. A cesspool. Sticking that spike up your a.s.s day after day, injecting your body with-"

"I couldn't go on any more," Arctor said. "This place is the only hope I could think of. I had a friend come in here, I think, he said he was going to. A black dude, in his thirties, educated, very polite and-"

"You'll meet the family later," the girl said. "If you qualify. You have to pa.s.s our requirements, you realize. And the first one is sincere need."

"I have that," Arctor said. "Sincere need."

"You've got to be bad off to be let in here."

"I am," he said.

"How strung out are you? What's your habit up to?"

"Ounce a day," Arctor said.

"Pure?"

"Yeah." He nodded. "I keep a sugar bowl of it on the table."

"It's going to be super rough. You'll gnaw your pillow into feathers all night; there'll be feathers everywhere when you wake up. And you'll have seizures and foam at the mouth. And dirty yourself the way sick animals do. Are you ready for that? You realize we don't give you anything here."

"There isn't anything," he said. This was a drag, and he felt restless and irritable. "My buddy," he said, "the black guy. Did he make it here? I sure hope he didn't get picked up by the pigs on the way-he was so out of it, man, he could hardly navigate. He thought-"

"There are no one-to-one relationships at New-Path," the girl said. "You'll learn that."

"Yeah, but did he make it here?" Arctor said. He could see he was wasting his time. Jesus, he thought: this is worse than we do downtown, this ha.s.sling. And she won't tell me jack s.h.i.t. Policy, he realized. Like an iron wall. Once you go into one of these places you're dead to the world. Spade Weeks could be sitting beyond the part.i.tion, listening and laughing his a.s.s off, or not be here at all, or anything in between. Even with a warrant-that never worked. The rehab outfits knew how to drag their feet, stall around until anyone living there sought by the police had zipped out a side door or bolted himself inside the furnace. After all, the staff here were all ex-addicts themselves. And no law-enforcement agency liked the idea of rousting a rehab place: the yells from the public never ceased.

Time to give up on Spade Weeks, he decided, and extricate myself. No wonder they never sent me around here before; these guys are not nice. And then he thought, So as far as I'm concerned, I've indefinitely lost my main a.s.signment; Spade Weeks no longer exists.

I'll report back to Mr. F., he said to himself, and await rea.s.signment. The h.e.l.l with it. He rose to his feet stiffly and said, "I'm splitting." The two guys had now returned, one of them with a mug of coffee, the other with literature, apparently of an instructional kind.

"You're chickening out?" the girl said, haughtily, with contempt. "You don't have it at gut level to stick with a decision? To get off the filth? You're going to crawl back out of here on your belly?" All three of them glared at him with anger.

"Later," Arctor said, and moved toward the front door, the way out.

"f.u.c.king doper," the girl said from behind him. "No guts, brain fried, nothing. Creep out, creep; it's your decision."

"I'll be back," Arctor said, nettled. The mood here oppressed him, and it had intensified now that he was leaving.

"We may not want you back, gutless," one of the guys said.

"You'll have to plead," the other said. "You may have to do a lot of heavy pleading. And even then we may not want you."

"In fact, we don't want you now," the girl said.

At the door Arctor paused and turned to face his accusers. He wanted to say something, but for the life of him he couldn't think of anything. They had blanked out his mind.

His brain would not function. No thoughts, no response, no answer to them, even a lousy and feeble one, came to him at all.

Strange, he thought, and was perplexed.

And pa.s.sed on out of the building to his parked car.

As far as I'm concerned, he thought, Spade Weeks has disappeared forever. I ain't going back inside one of those places.

Time, he decided queasily, to ask to be rea.s.signed. To go after somebody else.

They're tougher than we are.

4

From within his scramble suit the nebulous blur who signed in as Fred faced another nebulous blur representing himself as Hank.

"So much for Donna, for Charley Freck, and-let's see ..." Hank's metallic monotone clicked off for a second. "All right, you've covered Jim Barris." Hank made an annotation on the pad before him. "Doug Weeks, you think, is probably dead or out of this area."

"Or hiding and inactive," Fred said.

"Have you heard anyone mention this name: Earl or Art De Winter?"

"No."

"How about a woman named Molly? Large woman."

"No."

"How about a pair of spades, brothers, about twenty, named something like Hatfield? Possibly dealing in pound bags of heroin."

"Pounds? Pound Pound bags of heroin?" bags of heroin?"

"That's right."

"No," Fred said. "I'd remember that."

"A Swedish person, tall, Swedish name. Male. Served time, wry sense of humor. Big man but thin, carrying a great deal of cash, probably from the split of a shipment earlier this month."

"I'll watch for him," Fred said. "Pounds." He shook his head, or rather the nebulous blur wobbled.

Hank sorted among his holographic notes. "Well, this one is in jail." He held up a picture briefly, then read the reverse. "No, this one's dead; they've got the body downstairs." He sorted on. Time pa.s.sed. "Do you think the Jora girl is turning tricks?"

"I doubt it." Jora Kajas was only fifteen. Strung out on injectable Substance D already, she lived in a slum room in Brea, upstairs, the only heat radiating from a water heater, her source of income a State of California tuition scholarship she had won. She had not attended cla.s.ses, so far as he knew, in six months.

"When she does, let me know. Then we can go after the parents."

"Okay." Fred nodded.

"Boy, the bubblegummers go downhill fast. We had one in here the other day-she looked fifty. Wispy gray hair, missing teeth, eyes sunk in, arms like pipe cleaners ... We asked her what her age was and she said 'Nineteen.' We double-checked. 'You know how old you look?' this one matron said to her. 'Look in the mirror.' So she looked in the mirror. She started to cry. I asked her how long she'd been shooting up."

"A year," Fred said.

"Four months."

"The street stuff is bad right now," Fred said, not trying to imagine the girl, nineteen, with her hair falling out. "Cut with worse garbage than usual."

"You know how she got strung out? Her brothers, both of them, who were dealing, went in her bedroom one night, held her down and shot her up, then balled her. Both of them. To break her in to her new life, I guess. She'd been on the corner several months when we hauled her in here."

"Where are they now?" He thought he might run into them.

"Serving a six-month sentence for possession. The girl's also got the clap, now, and didn't realize it. So it's gone up deep inside her, the way it does. Her brothers thought that was funny."

"Nice guys," Fred said.

"I'll tell you one that'll get you for sure. You're aware of the three babies over at Fairfield Hospital that they have to give hits of smack to every day, that are too young to withdraw yet? A nurse tried to-"

"It gets me," Fred said in his mechanical monotone. "I heard enough, thanks."

Hank continued, "When you think of newborn babies being heroin addicts because-"

"Thanks," the nebulous blur called Fred repeated.

"What do you figure the bust should be for a mother that gives a newborn baby a joypop of heroin to pacify it, to keep it from crying? Overnight in the county farm?"

"Something like that," Fred said tonelessly. "Maybe a weekend, like they do the drunks. Sometimes I wish I knew how to go crazy. I forget how."

"It's a lost art," Hank said. "Maybe there's an instruction manual on it."

"There was this flick back around 1970," Fred said, "called The French Connection, The French Connection, about a two-man team of heroin narks, and when they made their hit one of them went totally bananas and started shooting everyone in sight, including his superiors. It made no difference." about a two-man team of heroin narks, and when they made their hit one of them went totally bananas and started shooting everyone in sight, including his superiors. It made no difference."

"It's maybe better you don't know who I am, then," Hank said. "You could only get me by accident."

"Somebody," Fred said, "will get us all anyhow eventually."

"It'll be a relief. A distinct relief." Going farther into his pile of notes, Hank said, "Jerry Fabin. Well, we'll write him off. N.A.C. The boys down the hall say Fabin told the responding officers on the way to the clinic that a little contract man three feet high, legless, on a cart, had been rolling after him day and night. But he never told anybody because if he did they'd freak and get the h.e.l.l out and then he'd have no friends, n.o.body to talk to."

"Yeah," Fred said stoically. "Fabin has had it. I read the EEG a.n.a.lysis from the clinic. We can forget about him."

Whenever he sat facing Hank and did his reporting thing, he experienced a certain deep change in himself. Afterward was when he usually noticed it, although at the time he sensed that for a reason he a.s.sumed a measured and uninvolved att.i.tude. Whatever came up and whoever it was about possessed no emotional significance to him during these sessions.

At first he had believed it to be the scramble suits that both of them wore; they could not physically sense each other. Later on he conjectured that the suits made no actual difference; it was the situation itself. Hank, for professional reasons, purposefully played down the usual warmth, the usual arousal in all directions; no anger, no love, no strong emotions of any sort would help either of them. How could intense natural involvement be of use when they were discussing crimes, serious crimes, committed by persons close to Fred and even, as in the case of Luckman and Donna, dear to him? He had to neutralize himself; they both did, him more so than Hank. They became neutral; they spoke in a neutral fashion; they looked neutral. Gradually it became easy to do so, without prearrangement.

And then afterward all his feelings seeped back.

Indignation at many of the events he had seen, even horror, in retrospect: shock. Great overpowering runs for which there had been no previews. With the audio always up too loud inside his head.

But while he sat across the table from Hank he felt none of these. Theoretically, he could describe anything he had witnessed in an impa.s.sive way. Or hear anything from Hank.

For example, he could offhandedly say "Donna is dying of hep and using her needle to wipe out as many of her friends as she can. Best thing here would be to pistol-whip her until she knocks it off." His own chick ... if he had observed that or knew it for a fact. Or "Donna suffered a ma.s.sive vasoconstriction from a mickey-mouse LSD a.n.a.logue the other day and half the blood vessels in her brain shut down." Or "Donna is dead." And Hank would note that down and maybe say "Who sold her the stuff and where's it made?" or "Where's the funeral, and we should get license numbers and names," and he'd discuss that without feeling.

This was Fred. But then later on Fred evolved into Bob Arctor, somewhere along the sidewalk between the Pizza Hut and the Arco gas station (regular now a dollar two cents a gallon), and the terrible colors seeped back into him whether he liked it or not.

This change in him as Fred was an economy of the pa.s.sions. Firemen and doctors and morticians did the same trip in their work. None of them could leap up and exclaim each few moments; they would first wear themselves out and be worthless and then wear out everyone else, both as technicians on the job and as humans off. An individual had just so much energy.

Hank did not force this dispa.s.sion on him; he allowed allowed him to be like this. For his own sake. Fred appreciated it. him to be like this. For his own sake. Fred appreciated it.

"What about Arctor?" Hank asked.

In addition to everyone else, Fred in his scramble suit naturally reported on himself. If he did not, his superior- and through him the whole law-enforcement apparatus- would become aware of who Fred was, suit or not. The agency plants would report back, and very soon he as Bob Arctor, sitting in his living room smoking dope and dropping dope with the other dopers, would find he had a little three-foot-high contract man on a cart coasting after him, too. And he would not be hallucinating, as had been Jerry Fabin.

"Arctor's not doing anything much," Fred said, as he always did. "Works at his nowhere Blue Chip Stamp job, drops a few tabs of death cut with meth during the day-"

"I'm not sure." Hank fiddled with one particular sheet of paper. "We have a tip here from an informant whose tips generally pan out that Arctor has funds above and beyond what the Blue Chip Redemption Center pays him. We called them and asked what his take-home pay is. It's not much. And then we inquired into that, why that is, and we found he isn't employed there full time throughout the week."

"No s.h.i.t," Fred said dismally, realizing that the "above-and-beyond" funds were of course those provided him for his narking. Every week small-denomination bills were dispensed to him by a machine masquerading as a Dr. Pepper source at a Mexican bar and restaurant in Placentia. This was in essence payoffs on information he gave that resulted in convictions. Sometimes this sum became exceptionally great, as when a major heroin seizure occurred.

Hank read on reflectively, "And according to this informant, Arctor comes and goes mysteriously, especially around sunset. After he arrives home he eats, then on what may be pretexts takes off again. Sometimes very fast. But he's never gone for long." He glanced up-the scramble suit glanced up-at Fred. "Have you observed any of this? Can you verify? Does it amount to anything?"