Free Blood Groove by Alex Bledsoe

know to look for, which means it’s new.”
    “New,” Leslie repeated flatly. Then her eyes opened wider. “A new disease?” she whispered.
    Danielle shook her head. “Maybe. If I could’ve held on to the body longer, I might’ve found out. But the boy didn’t
look
sick, except for the fact that he was dead. The more I go over it, the more I think it’s a new drug.”
    “Drug,” Leslie repeated.
    Danielle nodded. “I don’t know if it’s an upper, downer, hallucinogen, or what, but I think one of the side effects may be the complete and total breakdown of blood, and its absorption into the surrounding tissue.”
    “That’s pretty weird.”
    “Of course it is. The whole idea of taking drugs is weird, if you ask me.”
    Leslie scowled at Danielle as she blew out a puff of smoke. “Uh-huh,” she said ironically.
    Danielle laughed. “Come on, you know what I mean.”
    “I know I sympathize with these kids’ desire to get away from the world. Watergate, the energy crisis, the situation in the Middle East, the Russians, black versus white . . . it’s aterrible time to be young. You see no hope for the future, so why not have a good time now?”
    “That’s a cop-out,” Danielle snapped. She actually knew very little of what was happening in the outside world; current events only interested her when people died from them. “And immaterial to this. Have you busted any kids with any new drugs, or run across rumors about something you haven’t heard of before?”
    She shook her head. “No, and believe me, I’d have heard of it if anyone else in the department had. Juvie is a gossipy bunch, and sometimes they still forget I’m on staff and not one of the cleaning crew, so they’ll talk about anything around me.”
    “Then maybe we’re lucky. Maybe this is the first one, and we can catch it before it spreads.”
    “ ‘We.’ ”
    Danielle scowled, annoyed. “This is your problem as much as mine.”
    “What do you plan to do?”
    “First I want to talk to some of the kids. On the street, as they say. I was hoping you could help me with that.”
    Leslie snorted. “There’s no such place as ‘the street,’ you’ve been watching too many cop shows. And if we go down to any of the regular hangouts, we won’t find anyone who’ll talk to us about drugs. They all know me.”
    “And none of them trust you?”
    “The ones that
do
trust me aren’t down there anymore, they’re in schools or halfway houses or jobs.”
    Danielle twirled her lighter absently. “Well . . . what if I go alone?”
    Leslie stared at her. “Then you’ll get raped, and killed. Probably in that order, but I wouldn’t swear to it.”
    Danielle stubbed out her cigarette in the ashtray. “I have to do it, Les. I have to
know
. If I can confirm my suspicion onthis, maybe even get a sample, then we can get the word out before it gets out of hand.”
    “The ‘word’?” Leslie repeated. “Danny, you sound so earnest, you’re like a public service ad. Do you even remember what it was like to be a kid? ‘The word’ comes from ‘the Man,’ and he’s over thirty, white, still thinks we should be in Viet Nam and that black people shouldn’t be allowed to vote. They won’t listen to ‘the word.’ ”
    Danielle sighed, defeated, and shook her head. “Then we may be scraping dozens of them off the street.”
    “Yeah, well, we should’ve thought of that before we criminalized marijuana and bombed Cambodia. I’m sorry, but I can’t condone sending my best friend off to buy illegal drugs. Promise me you won’t go. Please.”
    Danielle nodded, keeping the crushed expression. But it was an act. Leslie’s political leanings were coloring her professional opinion; Danielle doubted more than a fraction of the kids Leslie dealt with could even tell you who was president, let alone how he got that way. They were kids being kids, in an unsupervised and potentially deadly environment.
    Besides, she already had her plan.