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I ought to know.
Three months later I proved that all over again.
Because two months later I was using again.
That was after a kid who was clean and college-bound got hit in the crossfire of a drive-by. He lived. His Grandmother, who’d raised him, who ran out instantly to his side, did not. Because she got shot when the shooters circled back around.
I wasn't the only member of the Vancouver Brotherhood who started using. Vanessa did too, young and black and full of anger and unable to do anything constructive with it. We'd sit together in her apartment and drink Absinthe and shoot up until the night she got busted.
I was on my way back to the apartment with cheap Chinese food and a bag of chips, anticipating nothing more than getting high and getting some more information. I hadn't even started thinking about getting clean yet. Partly because there was nothing big going down. If the gang was busted now, everything would be small change. There was no point putting someone undercover for a few drug busts. I was waiting for something big. It would come.
Only there was gunfire from Vanessa's apartment as I got close enough to see the flash and smell the burn, and that was enough to send me running. I heard her scream and I heard it cut off. I didn't have any doubt she was dead.
I took the bike. Two streets over I found an actual goddamned payphone and called it in.
Then I ran. I ran because it was possible my cover was blown and I ran because I couldn't go in as fucked up as I was.
I ran all the way to Vegas. Not that I knew how to find him.
Billionaire philanthropist pharmaceutical kings can buy a lot of privacy.
The first day I rode around the desert and tried to find anything at all that reminded me where I had been.
Vegas is a big damn place and the desert around it is even bigger. Vast. Warm, at least. In Seattle, November would be getting cold.
When that didn't work, I tried everything I could think of to connect with Samuels, but he seemed to have gone to ground after being fired. His phone had been changed. He didn't respond to texts. He didn't respond to email. I tried to think of anybody who might have been tied into his interesting little sideline of selling people to Cole St. Martin and whoever else he might have dealt with but to be honest, I knew little about my handler. He had a shaved head and a big moustache and he was a thin, wiry guy with nervous habits that should have screamed junkie to PD. He worked nearly undercover within the department, definitely autonomous because it was safer that way.
He'd stayed that way after he was fired.
On the fifth day I was in Vegas, Cole's people found me.
