Free Orange County Noir (Akashic Noir) by Gary Phillips

chance if I went in
myself. I was the walking dead, but that was a lot better than
him there in his living room, mindlessly chomping on the sad,
gummed tube.
    I could still hear Doc and Sandra upstairs-they seemed
to maybe be fucking, or at least in a conversational intimacy
that suggested fucking. This brought my loneliness crashing
down. I hate being left by myself in rooms, being alone where
I don't know anyone. But it could have been worse-at least
the dying guy couldn't talk. And this was a true blessing-he
couldn't move those wet, sad eyes of his to focus on me. If, for a second, I thought he could see me going through his meds,
going through what was left of his life so I could get high, I
think one of the last things he might have seen was me killing
myself. At least I hope it would have been.

    On a tray next to the bed was a box that looked like it had
scripts in it. Score. They were fentanyl patches. The box had
been opened, but there were several others under the bed. I
grabbed five boxes. I tried several times to carry a sixth, but I
dropped them all when I added one more, so I went with five
and brought them back to my carrying bag.
    Like so much crap in America, the packaging was obscene
and unnecessary. The boxes held six patches each. I tore open
the boxes, trying to be quiet, as I wasn't sure if this was part of
the deal with Sandra or not, and neatly stacked the patches
until I had thirty of them ready for my bag. I would have taken
more-would have taken every single one I could find-but I
didn't want to fuck up our connection for the future. I'd love
to be able to say I was thinking about the dying guy-and it
does happen, the groundswell of a decent human surfacing
in me from time to time, often enough to not seem like a
miracle-but the truth is, in that moment, I'd forgotten about
him and his need for his own painkillers. He didn't exist to
me.
    I chewed another of the fentanyl lollipops I found. They
seemed pretty useless. I wondered if they'd put this guy on
Oxy or anything good, pillwise, before they had him on the
patches and the pops.
    Inside the kitchen, next to the coffee cups, I discovered a
cabinet filled with bottles of pills. The usual useless suspectsAdvil, Tylenol, gaggles of vitamins, and, scattered inside the
cabinet, the snake-oil desperation of shark's fin and whale
cartilage and shit like that. I pocketed a bottle with about ten ten-milligram Vicodin and kept scrambling through the
cabinet until I found something worthwhile in a near-full jar
of eighty-milligram OxyContin. I felt myself smile. I took two
of the eighty-milligram tablets, crushing one and allowing the
other to slide down my throat and release itself over time.

    There was nothing else of value in the cabinet. I swapped
the contents of the Advil and OxyContin bottles and kept the
Advil in my pocket.
    Back in the living room, I looked closely in the guy's eyes.
Nothing registered. He was alive-that's what the machines
seemed to be saying-but there wasn't much going on. I wondered, again, if I could cut him to get that vial out. I supposed
I could-people could do all sorts of things they didn't want
to do in life. Just not think about it, and get it done. It didn't
have to be any more complicated than cutting into a steak, so
long as you turned your brain off.
    I sat on the couch and looked through a TV Guide. I had
no idea about any of the celebrities or shows-that's another
thing dope does. The outside world of news and talk just goes
away. You can't tell anyone a single current event, even if
they offer you a million dollars. The world fades and recedes.
I glanced around. There was an antique musket over the fireplace. Everything about the house felt old. Murder mysteries
piled up by the end table. This guy, or maybe Sandra, really
liked mysteries. There had to be a hundred new hardcovers in
that room alone. There was Luna's great Penthouse CD open
on the stereo-so,