Free Pain Killers by Jerry Stahl

life.
    “Buckets,” she replied, “and now you’re making me go.”
     
     
     

Chapter

7
     
     
Fucking on the Edge of a Cliff
     
     
    Once you saw how your wife killed her husband, you lived with a certain back-of-the-head hum. You knew what could happen. You’d seen the evidence. But still…You didn’t think about it. Not all the time. Just on special occasions.
    Had anyone asked, I’d have explained it like this: If you were fucking a beautiful woman on the edge of a cliff, would you look down the whole time? Or would you look at her? By definition, if a woman is beautiful enough for you to fuck on a cliff, she’s beautiful enough to make you forget to look down. Except when she wants to remind you how close you are to the edge. What would happen if you rolled off. Or she pushed you. The problem was, the beverage I’d found under the snailback sink had skewed my perception. Not one part of me believed Tina could have feelings for the inked-up skeek I’d glimpsed out the trailer window. Wedding an ALS brother seemed like a long way around just to make a point. But maybe there was something else going on. What did I know? The box wine left me pining for something more full-bodied, like Listerine.
    I did not even realize I had passed out until I picked the leech off my eye. It turned out to be a waterlogged Band-Aid. I tried to sit up and banged my head off the bottom of the trailer. Facedown, if the variety of floor-flora stuck to my mouth was any indication. I’d thrown my jacket on and found the lighter. I flicked it, illuminating a pit of moldering magazines, old-fashioned brogans and dental molds, metal cabinet drawers stuffed with carbon and typewritten files. A flaky
Time,
wedged under a brick, showed J. Edgar Hoover on the cover, staring down Commies. Underneath the
Time,
a rusted Red Cross lockbox jutted from the ranks of other antiquated but seemingly freshly dumped items.
    I didn’t care about the garbage. I remembered the first time I arrested a junkie Dumpster-diving behind a hospital. He had four bottles of expired resperidine, an antipsychotic favored by families who needed to shut up senile screamers, and a gross of tongue depressors jammed in his army jacket. Hospitals could be gold mines. (The only better pickings, drugwise, were the trans cans outside airport customs. Many an international traveler with pills in their pockets lost their nerve and dumped them. But the airport janitorial staff had the trash can action sewn up.)
    Grabbing two Red Cross boxes, I headed back inside and scraped the side of my face on something that turned out to be the missing light switch. Thus illuminated, I pulled down the bed. I spread a
San Francisco Chronicle
on top and dumped the boxes on it. Then I re-hit the files. I needed to distract myself from rerunning the Tina highlight reel in my head. Thankfully, the love-hut lights had gone off. If I focused, I could pretend I’d hallucinated everything and go back to work.
     
DAVID “DAVEY” ZELOVSKY

Caucasian, 21 months for parole violation. Weapons possession.
     
    This one was bad. This one was
wrong.
    The face just stopped above a nubby bottom lip, which barely covered his gums and left his teeth exposed, giving him the look of some feral hillbilly insect.
     
Five years, domestic abuse.
     
    In a blackout, Davey jammed his wife’s hand in a waffle iron in front of his twin son and daughter. Under occupation, he had put “catalogue model.” He had also had a small part in a soap opera. He was that kind of handsome.
    Reading details of his “weapons possession,” I marveled at the immense variety of fate. Davey’s crime: he botched a suicide attempt and got violated for having a gun. Hard luck. But the law’s the law. That’s what’s wrong with it.
    A sketchy psych eval shed no light but added details.
     
Perp’s wife had taken their twins with instructions to relatives not to tell him where she went. He visited her father to plead.