Free Cracked by Barbra Leslie Page A

constituted intent to distribute, but I was pretty sure that this wouldn’t meet it. My fingers nimbly put together my pipe. I realized I didn’t have a screen or any cigarette ash to use as a screen but I was too close to relief in the form of crack to go and find the cigarettes I had thrown into my suitcase at the last minute, light one, and generate some ash. This was down and dirty but it would still work.
    I broke off a tiny chunk of rock and placed it on the pierced tinfoil and lit it.
    Heaven.
    My grief faded as the high shot through my synapses and down to my fingertips. I closed my eyes. This is what would help me get through the next days, the next weeks. I could do what I needed to do – see my family, find Ginger’s killer, kill Ginger’s killer. I couldn’t do too much, I couldn’t binge on it. I would be sensible and controlled. Just enough to let me do what I had to do. After that, nothing else mattered.
    I was probably in the bathroom for half an hour, sitting on the edge of the tub with the exhaust fan on, taking another hit or two until the bit of crack was reduced to crumbling black ash. I washed my face, brushed my teeth, stuck my head under the tap to wet my hair and get the worst of the vomit out of it. I would have a shower once I had had a quick sleep, and by then Darren and the police might even have the boys back here, and I could do what needed to be done. I hadn’t done enough crack to stay awake, not being as tired as I was. I carefully put the pipe and the drugs in the Ziploc baggie I had brought for my shampoo, left my shampoo on the edge of the tub, and went back to my room. I closed the door.
    Alone and high.
    I slowly lay back on the bed. I closed my eyes and let myself drift.
    * * *
    There were voices in the room, a man’s voice, and a woman’s. I couldn’t quite recognize who they were, or what they were talking about.
    I opened my eyes, and I wasn’t in my room at Ginger’s house. I was somewhere else, somewhere I had never been before. Something was around my right arm, around my bicep. It hurt. I looked down and there was a belt tied around it, a woman’s belt, but not one of mine. And in my left arm was a syringe. I looked at my hand, at the strawberry birthmark between my index finger and thumb.
    Ginger’s hand. Not my hand, but Ginger’s.
    I was Ginger.
    I was crying. Ginger was crying. The woman was slapping the inside of my elbow.
    “There,” she said. “Right there. I showed you how. It’ll be easy. It’ll be beautiful.”
    “No,” I said. I looked at Ginger’s hand, at the syringe. “My boys.” I could feel tears running down my face, and a sadness at a level I had never before experienced.
    “You’re saving your boys,” the woman said. She was gentle, but insistent. She slapped the inside of the elbow again, the long tanned arm I stared down at. “You must do it now.”
    And I did. I knew I had to, so I let her lead my hand with the syringe to my arm, and her finger pushed my thumb over the plunger.
    I felt it immediately, a rush to my brain, something beautiful for a second before the purity would stop my heart and my brain.
    I looked at the woman. I saw her face.
    “Look at her eyes,” someone said. “They’re brown.” Then I closed them, and it was over.
    * * *
    It was the most comfortable bed I had ever slept in. Scratch that, it was the most comfortable bed ever
made
. Artisans in a hillside village in South America must have spent a year putting this bed together by hand. It had probably cost more than a car. It
should
cost more than a car. It was light out when I woke up. Someone had come in and put a blanket over me. Darren? Rosen? I hoped the fan in the bathroom had taken any crack smell away.
    The dream came back to me in patches but I put it out of my head. Here and now. Here and now, my twin sister was dead and I didn’t know if her sons had been kidnapped by murderers.
    Downstairs, Darren and Miller were sitting in the living room.