Chapter 2
Several days earlier…
The small room in the rear of Eddie’s house had been converted into something that might be best described as a vault. Its door was the only one in his home, other than the front and back doors, that was actually equipped with a deadbolt. Eddie kept one of the keys with him at all times, on his key ring – a handcrafted gift from his wife that she had made out of a little silver chain attached to a crystal sphere, the interior of which featured a tiny, plastic figurine of Muhammad Ali floating like a prehistoric bumblebee trapped in amber. There was another key hidden outside beneath a rock, in between a lemon tree and a clump of begonias, in case his wife might need access, which would be permitted only under the most exceptional of circumstances. For everyone else, the vault was strictly off-limits.
Eddie grabbed a bottle of beer from the fridge and walked down the hallway to the little room. He unlocked the deadbolt and stepped inside, into a space of almost pure blackness. There was only one small window in the room, and it had been covered over in aluminum foil. When Eddie closed the door behind him, he was swallowed up by the darkness, indistinguishable from every other object in the room. He always liked to just stand there for a while, admiring the skill with which he had blotted out any trace of light. Finally, he reached out his left hand and flipped the light switch, giving form to the contents of the vault.
In the middle of the room were two huge metal bookcases that Eddie had retrieved from a trash heap behind Occidental College. They were filled with old 78s and LPs, over six thousand, which comprised the heart of Eddie’s record collection. Eddie’s vinyl fetish was centered around post-World War II blues and R & B, with a special focus on New Orleans and piano players in particular. Last week, he had laid out thirty dollars for an original 1948 pressing of Wynonie Harris’ “Dig This Boogie,” featuring Sun Ra on piano back when he was still known as Sonny Blount. It had been sitting there on the stacks for a week, and Eddie hadn’t had the chance to give it a spin.
He retrieved the disc and walked back to the living room, careful to lock the door behind him. He slipped the record on the turntable, but just when Wynonie and his band started to settle into a groove, Eddie was interrupted.
Someone was making a racket, knocking at the door with that metal clapper. Eddie had told himself a hundred times that he ought to have the goddamn thing removed, but it was attached to a larger mechanism, one of those little, black wrought iron boxes built into the door that allowed him to peep through a small rectangular opening, like the ones they used to have in speakeasies. It was important for Eddie to be able to size up the people who found their way to his doorstep, and today it was some tall, skinny misfit. He was smoking a cigarette and hiding behind a pair of not inexpensive sunglasses, cloaked in an eruption of dirty blond hair that almost looked like a wig. The stubble on his cheeks seemed as if it were painted on with one of those big, rolling paintbrushes like the ones house painters use. He looked suspicious. He looked like he was wearing a disguise.
“Put that goddamn cigarette out, how many times I gotta tell you?”
The man outside tossed his cigarette into a rose bush. The door opened. He entered.
“How is it,” said the man, “that you live with some chick who smokes, but then you can’t even smoke in your own house? Explain that shit to me.”
Eddie took the record off the turntable and slipped it back into its sleeve.
“I told you a thousand times that you don’t understand anything about relationships with females,” replied Eddie, tersely.
The two of them took a seat on Eddie’s long, leather sofa. The blond man put his feet up on the coffee table.
“I got a relationship,” said the man. “Fuck you talkin’ about?”
“No,” said Eddie. “Here’s what you got. You drive Sophie home after she’s done working at the club and you take her soon as you’re through the door and you screw her till the eyes roll back in her head like a goddamn coma victim. Then the two of you stumble out of bed at noon and she fixes you bacon and eggs and you give her a peck on the cheek and you don’t see her again until later that night, back at the club, where she’s shaking her titties and looking cute as a fuckin’ button, eyes all lit up from all that coke she does… live little fuckin’ wire... But that ain’t no relationship man, that’s every guy’s pornographic fantasy. That’s what you got. But it ain’t no relationship.”
“So what you have is a relationship?” asked the blond man. “What else does your wife do? Pick out your clothes for you? Cut the crusts off your peanut butter and jelly sandwiches?”
Eddie laughed.
“That was funny, man,” he said. “I’ll give you that. That was pretty good.”
Eddie walked to the back of the house to lock up the vault and then came back with his half-empty bottle of beer. He didn’t offer anything to the blond man. The blond man didn’t drink.
“Here’s how it is, Francis,” said Eddie.
The blond man rolled his eyes. He didn’t like to be called Francis.
“This is the twenty-first century,” continued Eddie. “People don’t smoke inside their houses anymore, for chrissakes. Ginger wants to smoke, she goes outside on the patio and smokes. So do her friends. You see, Frankie, women are important because they remind you about keeping up appearances. If I didn’t have a wife, I’d never buy birthday presents. I’d never go to parties that I’m invited to. I’d never return books and DVDs that people lend me, and I sure as shit wouldn’t care about someone smoking in my living room. Not that these things are so important in and of themselves, but if you ignore the little things, people start to look at you like you’re uncivilized, a barbarian. I can’t afford that. Appearances are important. Women remind you of shit like this, and again, if you were really in a relationship, I wouldn’t have to explain something that’s so goddamn obvious to everyone who is.”
“I guess you have a point,” said Frankie. “I suppose I ain’t in that kind of relationship.”
“Not yet you ain’t.”
Eddie leaned back into the couch and finished the beer in one long swig. He was a man of considerable bulk, nearly 6’4”, well over two hundred pounds, and his body sank back into the cushions like a bowling ball tossed onto a bean bag. He was strong enough to strangle someone with just his thumb and forefinger, but nobody ever suspected this because not a single one of his acquaintances could ever recall having seen him in any sort of altercation. His eyes were hammered back into their sockets: two static, sleepy marbles that never betrayed emotion, intermittently bisected by razor blade strands the color of squid ink, calm and rather deceptive in a face that might otherwise be deemed menacing.
“So here’s what I got,” said Eddie. “I got this doctor on the hook for five hundred oxycodone a month, which is nice to have around but more than I can move right now. So of course, I thought of my good pal Frankie.”
“How do you work this shit?” said Frankie. “What’s wrong with this guy that he just doles out that much stuff without blinking an eye?”
“He’s a junkie,” said Eddie. “Likes Mexican dope. I drop by his office in Hacienda Heights once a week with a golf-ball-sized chunk of black tar and his face lights up like a kid at Christmas. The oxy’s just the delivery charge.”
“But a doctor?” said Frankie, a little dumbfounded. “He could write prescriptions for whatever he likes. He could be shooting up morphine back in his office and nobody would be the wiser.”
“Two things,” said Eddie. “First, DEA keeps an eye on you when you’re a doctor. I mean, there are ways around it, but it’s always a situation where you’re playing with fire. What’s more, guy likes his heroin. Hard to explain just why one thing hits the spot and another thing doesn’t. I knew these two dope fiends, a guy and a girl out in Rosemead, used to be in the music business. Pretty successful for a while. They ended up living in the girl’s father’s garage. Hard fuckin’ fall. Anyhow, only way they could cop was that she was banging some guy had access to a bunch of Dilaudid. I’d drive over to Rosemead and trade ‘em some shitty tar for what is arguably the best pharmaceutical dope on the planet. Go figure.”
Frankie yawned and nodded.
“So you got OxyContin?” he asked.
“I got oxycodone,” Eddie corrected him. “Different fuckin’ ballpark. None of that time-released binder that makes OxyContin so hard to cook or snort. This is just pure oxy, thirty milligrams. Gold standard. You can sell them for thirty or forty a piece at the club, easy. Girls can crush this shit on a table with the back of a quarter and it snorts up like a dream.”
“How much?” asked Frankie.
“I’d say I gotta have ten a piece on my end,” said Eddie.
“That’s five thousand,” said Frankie, a bit put off. “I could swing thirty-five hundred right now, maybe.”
“I tell you what,” said Eddie. “I’ll front you the whole five hundred right now, right here. You see if this stuff just doesn’t fly off the shelf, hassle-free. When it’s all said and done, you come back and see me. If you still don’t think it’s worth five thousand after you’ve turned it into fifteen or twenty, then we’ll just say thirty-five hundred and call it quits.”
“Hard to say no to that,” said Frankie.
Eddie smiled. He walked over and put the Wynonie Harris record back on the turntable, then headed to the kitchen for another beer.
“You sure you don’t want something to drink?” he asked Frankie.
“No, I’m alright,” he answered. “But get some new music for the next time I come over. And I don’t mean a new record, either, but something that was recorded in the last ten years, at least.”
Eddie came back and sat down on the sofa next to Frankie. He looked at him sternly, like a father about to lecture his wayward son.
“I can sell you all the dope you want, Frankie,” he said, “but good taste is not a commodity. It needs to be cultivated.”
He reached under the sofa and grabbed a small, metal strongbox. He placed it on the coffee table and opened it up. Inside, there was a huge pile of bills in various denominations and a baggie full of oxycodone. He handed the pharmaceuticals to Frankie.
“You keep that record room of yours sealed up like Fort Knox, but that cash box just sits there? Not even locked?”
Eddie laughed.
“A man has to know where his priorities lie,” he said.
Ginger was raised by her father on the outskirts of the dreary desert municipality known as Palmdale, about an hour and a half north of Los Angeles. One morning, her father apparently woke up and found himself covered in ticks – a species seen only on a certain kind of lama imported to the United States from South America. A psychiatrist in the employ of the county, Ginger’s father quickly put his scientific training to work and uncovered a trail that led straight to the owner of a local petting zoo, whom his wife had been screwing atop of the bales of alfalfa that he kept around for the animals.
Ginger’s mother vanished shortly thereafter. For good.
Ginger’s father was the only man of any erudition in the neighborhood where Ginger was bought up, and he did his best to remind her of this fact. He exposed Ginger to a vast array of pursuits meant to foster in the young girl a desire for the kind of life experiences that would require her to look beyond the meager confines of Palmdale and its immediate vicinities. The one activity that Ginger truly relished was butterfly hunting. The butterflies that lived nearby, on the edges of the Mojave, were brilliantly colored and significant in both variety and number. She remembered how they floated through the hills like the colored tips of flying paint brushes, splashing their hues across the desert vegetation like a sun dress dancing in the wind. Her favorite was the Bramble Hairstreak, whose wings were almost aquamarine in color. She remembered the day she first caught one of these rare insects. Back home, she watched, enthralled as it slowly suffocated in the confines of the little Mason jar. After her father treated the tiny beast with the necessary chemical elements, he handed his daughter a small metal pin. Ginger carefully crucified the lifeless corpse, pinning its slender gray torso against the white matte fabric and enclosing it inside the glass case that would serve as both its sarcophagus and its showroom. She gazed upon her prize and remarked on how the butterfly seemed even more beautiful now, frozen in death, as it were. For all eternity.
“Can I get another beer, Ginger?”
The man’s voice was a long, hard hook that tugged Ginger back from her dreamy butterfly burial and deposited her once more behind the counter at the Pretty Titty. She walked listlessly down the length of the bar, reached into the cooler underneath the cash register, and pulled out a bottle of Corona. She walked back to the customer, every bit as unanimated as before, and plopped the beer down in front of him.
“Seven-fifty,” she said.
“Just what’s taken the piss out of you today, sugar?” asked the customer. He had an English accent. He was a regular and he tipped well and he really liked Ginger. And he was a piece of shit. Ginger couldn’t stand him, but she was usually cordial with the bar’s regular clientele, no matter how hobbled they were by their lack of charm, wit, or any trace of civility.
“Nothing out of the ordinary,” said Ginger.
She stared into the darkness. The club was dark. She liked that. Every now and then, a beam of colored light from a neon Budweiser sign would come bouncing off one of the mirrored pillars and reach her retinas, but it was never enough to really disturb the comfortable murkiness that served as her anchor.
“You know, one day your ass’ll be too goddamned old to be slinging drinks at a strip club. Ever think about that, love? Why don’t you cheer up while you’re still young, before your nipples start sliding across the linoleum?”
Ginger stared back at him confidently and laughed with contempt.
“I don’t need to worry about that,” she said. “I’ve been prudent.”
Her stare burned a hole right through the little Englishman. Her face was motionless – a taut façade of pale skin made all the more stringent by a utilitarian ponytail that drew her black hair back from a pair of deep-set eyes with irises so dark that it was impossible to tell where the pupils began. She was long and lean and athletic, and her sexuality was actually a more powerful asset than the fact that she was marginally pretty. Coupled with the inexorable black gravity of her eyes, it was too much for the inebriated limey, who now felt that he was on the verge of being crushed by a logic he didn’t comprehend.
The Englishman grabbed his beer and walked over to one of the tables near the stage. His vacated seat was immediately filled by someone Ginger held in almost equal disdain.
“Sophie here?” asked the man.
He was dressed in one of those bowling shirts that old Hollywood action heroes start to wear when they get fat. He was big and stocky and thirtyish, and he had a crew cut that sprang forth from his head like a timid fungus. He also had a pair of those ugly, Oakley, wrap-around sunglasses that he wore on the back of his head like that imbecile on the cooking channel who Ginger hated so much. She really didn’t know the guy, but she had to endure the man’s insipid ramblings whenever he had business to conduct with Sophie, who was sucked into his vortex of blowhard charm and unoriginal observations about the nature of things.
“Give me a second,” said Ginger.
She walked back into a store room behind the bar, where she knew she would find Sophie texting away like a teenager who had fallen into a vat of Ritalin.
And there she was…
“Hey, Ginger,” smiled Sophie. “Two minutes. I swear I’m almost done…”
“Hey, take all the time you want,” said Ginger, emotionless. “But that guy’s out there asking for you again.”
“What guy?” asked Sophie.
“Crew-cut, sunglasses on backwards, slob…” said Ginger.
“He ain’t either a slob,” laughed Sophie.
She took a long sip of her Cherry Coke.
“Just don’t take too long,” Ginger reminded her. “You gotta be up there shakin’ a tail feather in about twenty minutes.”
“Yeah…” she sighed, disappearing into the bar.
Ginger followed her out. Sophie made a beeline to the customer in question. A small manila packet the size of a book of matches made its way from her hands to his.
Holding rooms in city jails never look like they do on television. That’s what Jeremy Zheng thought, anyway, as his eyes sized up the dimensions of the cramped and colorless space that looked like a cubicle tossed together for a telemarketer. There was nothing in the room but a shitty Formica table and two plastic chairs, one of which was empty, and the floor was covered with a well-worn strip of grey carpeting that could have very easily been retrieved from a trash dumpster. It was grim, and it was real, and that was exactly the point.
A man walked into the room. He wore a suit that looked like it was probably fished out of the same trash dumpster where city found all the shitty little stuff for their shitty little cubicles.
“Detective Thomas Pander,” he said. “I represent the criminal justice system. Do you understand the implications involved when the criminal justice system takes a personal interest in your life, Jerry? Or do you prefer Jeremy?”
“Whatever…” said Jeremy, seemingly indifferent.
“So do you?” asked the detective. “I asked you a fuckin’ question.”
Jeremy couldn’t help but notice the volatile change in the man’s demeanor, which up until that point had been perfunctory and bureaucratic. The furnishings in the room, the tie around the fat cop’s neck, the unannounced shifts in the tenor of discourse – they were all punctuation marks in an interminably long sentence being written by someone else. Someone who was reminding Jeremy of what he ought to be paying attention to.
The cop pulled Jeremy’s iPhone from his jacket pocket. He started to drag his finger over the screen and came to an abrupt halt.
“This your girlfriend?” he asked. “Man, she’s trashy looking. She looks like one of those sleazy girls who work up at those Rowland Heights hostess bars. You ever go to one of those?”
Jeremy had been busted before, but this was the first time he had been hauled into a station for questioning. He had been stopped and searched before, but this was the first time he was really in trouble. This was the first time they had found something that he should not have been holding. This time, he was over eighteen, and every nerve in his long, wiry frame was painfully aware of all of this.
“You wear a rubber when you fuck her, Jeremy?” laughed the detective.
The nineteen-year-old tried hard to keep his cool, staring back at the fat man with what he believed to be a steely gaze perfected during his long safari of juvenile delinquency on the not-so-mean streets of the San Gabriel Valley. The meager hairs on his failed moustache twitched ridiculously atop his nervous upper lip. He really didn’t want to cave. He didn’t want this fat prick to make him cry, which he felt was a distinct possibility.
“I used to have an Asian girlfriend,” said the cop. “Filipino. What you Chinese like to call a saltwater wetback. Couldn’t understand a goddamn word that came outta her mouth, but man, she gave good head. She used to make adobo for me, you know? That Filipino dish with shrimp and soy sauce and shit. You ever eat that?”
Jeremy remained silent. The fat detective, Thomas Pander, believed that he could see tears welling up in the boy’s eyes.
“What do you want?” Jeremy finally blurted out.
“That’s what I like to see,” said the detective. “A spirit of cooperation.”
The fat man stood up and leaned against the door, which buckled slightly under his massive girth. The first button on his shirt, just above his belt buckle, was threatening to pop open, and Jeremy could see pubic-like hairs sprouting forth from a small fissure in the fabric. The fat man’s middle-aged mouth was squeezed in between a sweaty, bulbous, double chin and a nose that looked to be maybe two years away from being covered in gin blossoms.
“Here’s how thing’s stand, Jeremy,” proceeded the detective. “We found two paper prescriptions in your vehicle, both for Demerol. One is in your name. The other must be the name of some dumbfuck friend of yours, or something, but we’ll get to that later. Then there was a bottle of Adderall, also in your name. Now, either you’re opening a clinic for hyperactive cancer patients or else you’re selling pharmaceuticals for fun and profit. In any case, what you’re doing happens to be against the law all over this fine country of ours. Class A felony. I could convict you on that alone. Thing is, though, I’m really more interested in this Dr. Melanie Hwang. She seems awfully generous about doling out script, wouldn’t you say?”
“So if I help you with this,” said Jeremy, a bit more assertive, “I take a walk?”
“Well, I wouldn’t go getting a hard-on just yet because it’s still quite possible that you’re going to jail, asshole,” said Detective Pander. “The question is where and for how long. Six months in county and a suspended sentence is a far sight better than a trip to Lompoc.”
Jeremy looked around the room apprehensively. He was close to making a decision that could have far-reaching consequences.
“Can I call my mom?” asked Jeremy.
“You sure you wouldn’t rather have a lawyer?” said Detective Pander.
“Let me call my mom and I’ll give you what you want,” said Jeremy. “Maybe more.”
Jeremy looked at Detective Pander’s bloated visage floating above him like a grotesque, inflated balloon character at the Macy’s Day Parade. He knew that bringing his mother into this meant that he would become complicit in whatever underhanded fuckery her chosen course of action would surely involve, but at this point, he had few other options left.
“Don’t jerk me around, Jeremy. I swear to God I’ll saw you off at the knees if you’re screwing with me.”
“Just call my mom,” Jeremy repeated. “Not my dad, either, just my mom. The number’s on my phone.”
There was a moment of silence.
“I need to see my mom walk through that door,” said Jeremy.
The fat man looked at Jeremy. He looked down at the phone and then looked back at the kid.
“O.K.,” said the detective.
The cop picked the phone up off the table,e but he didn’t place the call. He simply stared at Jeremy for what seemed to the boy to be an interminably long period of time.
“Just call my mom,” Jeremy said one last time.
Detective Pander took the phone with him and left the holding room. Jeremy closed his eyes and drifted inward. He knew he had chosen a road that led straight to every disaster.
“I ever tell you about my father?”
Dr. Michael Tsu was asking Eddie if he’d ever told him about his father. Eddie said no. Eddie was very polite.
“He was born during World War II,” said the doctor.
Dr. Tsu lit an expensive Japanese cigarette. Eddie and the doctor were having lunch at a table outside a Korean restaurant on Colima Road in Rowland Heights. The doctor smoked his cigarette and nibbled on some kimchi before coming back to his story.
“My father was raised on a commune,” said the doctor. “Henan province. I even spent a couple of years there before I moved to the States.”
The doctor had a slight speech impediment. It was that thing where the sides of the tongue get stuck in between the spaces of the upper and lower molars and make the saliva bubble up every time the speaker attempts a word that starts with an “s” or an “sh.”
“He used to beat the hell out of me every morning, just for good measure,” said Dr. Tsu. “He used to send me down the road to buy bean curd for our entire family. And I mean our entire extended family – aunts, cousins, everybody who lived on the commune. He was such a cheap bastard that he would make me buy more than we could actually consume because it was cheaper that way. It would go bad before we could eat it all, and then he’d give me another beating because of that. ‘This is waste!’ he’d scream. ‘You’re undermining the people’s efforts.’ Then he’d beat the hell out of me again with the stalks of some dried sorghum plants. I remember once he beat me so hard that there was blood all over the stalks, and he just went and tossed them into this big vat he had – blood and all – that he used for distilling rice liquor, which of course was illegal. He hid the still from the rest of the community. He’d peddle most of the liquor in the next village over and then just drink what he couldn’t sell.”
Dr. Tsu was a big man, like Eddie. A little on the chubby side, but not what one would deem officially obese. He had some sort of wart-like growth pushing its way out from underneath his left nostril. It was like an inverted question mark hanging over his upper lip. He wore horn-rimmed glasses. He was not an attractive fellow.
“That’s a hell of a story,” said Eddie.
Eddie had always found this kind of impromptu exposition to be a little tedious. He had always wondered why people found it necessary, either implicitly or explicitly, to expound upon the reasons why they got high. In fact, Eddie was keenly aware of a truth that popular mythology made impossible for most people to even fathom: getting high is fun. Eddie never wondered why people got high, but rather why they didn’t. These extemporaneous narratives that dopers seemed to be able to weave together effortlessly in order to lend their habit an air of gravitas, well, it all sounded a little phony to him. It was as if they were ashamed of being seen as hedonists and would rather construct an elaborate or even embarrassing alibi that would provoke sympathy for some deep-seated neurosis of theirs.
Still, thought Eddie, that’s one hell of a depressing tale. Probably true.
Eddie passed the doctor a brown paper sack with a big chunk of black tar heroin inside, nestled under a bag of Cheetos. The doctor opened the sack and tore into the bag of cheese doodles. He offered some to Eddie. There was orange cheese dust all over the corners of the doctor’s mouth.
“No thanks,” said Eddie.
“Oh, here…” said Dr. Tsu, passing him a handful of cheesy, wadded-up paper.
Eddie unfolded the whole mess and found the usual: four prescriptions for 125 tablets of instant-release oxycodone, thirty milligrams.
“Listen,” said Dr. Tsu. “Things have been getting a little hairy lately.”
“How so?” asked Eddie.
“I dunno,” said Dr. Tsu. “More people are coming in and asking for narcotics. Freaks me out a little. Maybe we should put the brakes on the prescription stuff for a while. What do you say I just pay you cash next time? I’ll make it worth your while.”
Eddie looked at the doctor very sternly.
“I doubt very much that you could do that, Mike.”
He stared straight at the physician.
“Let me explain to you how capitalism works, doc,” continued Eddie. “We both have access to something that the other person desires. This allows each of us to ask a certain price for the product in question. Supply and demand. I provide you with a product that would be difficult for you to obtain without you making yourself conspicuous in the most undesirable of ways. You provide me with little sheets of paper that are impossible to forge. Your cash is of no use to me, unless you want to pay me twenty times what I pay for that chunk of tar, which I guarantee will end up bankrupting you in the long run. Your ability to write script has made it possible for you to indulge in an expensive luxury, and in high style, I might add.”
“I understand,” said the doctor, “but…”
“Listen,” Eddie interrupted him. “Let’s put it this way. I walk into a restaurant and ask for a cheeseburger. Girl at the counter says she ain’t got no more cheeseburgers, but sure as shit she’ll rustle me up a cucumber and cream cheese sandwich and a cup of Earl Grey tea in a jiffy. What do you suppose I tell her?”
“To go fuck herself?” says the doctor.
“That’s right, Dr. Mike,” says Eddie, smiling. “I tell her to go fuck herself. I don’t want to have to tell you that, Mike. We have a pleasant relationship here.”
“I guess…”
The doctor’s sentence drifted off into nowhere.
“Mike,” said Eddie, taking a long breath. “Here’s what’s happening. You have an ethical dilemma on your hands. You’ve been told, by the medical community and by society itself, that a doctor can’t have a dope habit. I can sympathize. I have an ethical dilemma myself. I’m a drug dealer, for chrissakes. The thing is, Mike, you can get around an ethical dilemma. The bigger question is whether you have a moral dilemma. I can’t answer that question for you. That’s a conversation you’ve got to have with yourself. But don’t let this ethical dilemma make you start believing that things are happening when actually, nothing is happening at all. That’s called paranoia. You should know about that. It’s a medical condition.”
Dr. Tsu pulled hard on his Japanese cigarette. He laughed affectedly.
“No, no…” he said. “Everything’s cool.”
Dr. Tsu didn’t look like the type of guy who would say “everything’s cool.”
“It’s just…” continued the doctor, “it’s just that I want to play it safe. For the both of us.”
“And I appreciate that,” said Eddie. “I appreciate the fact that you’re looking out for me.”
The sarcasm went right over the doctor’s head. Eddie smiled and opened his wallet.
“No, I got this, Eddie,” said Dr. Mike, tossing a credit card on top of the bill.
Eddie shook the doctor’s hand before departing. He walked across the parking lot and got into his black Lincoln Town Car. He pulled out onto Colima and drove west for a few miles before jumping onto the Pomona freeway.
He continued west on the freeway. He drove past car dealerships and suburban malls. He drove past gentlemen’s clubs and two Walmarts and at least four Taco Bells before exiting on Garfield. He took Garfield north past scores of acupuncturists and Chinese restaurants until he reached the city of Alhambra, and then he took Valley Boulevard over to Marengo, finally pulling into the parking lot of the minuscule ABC Medical Pharmacy.
Eddie walked up to the door of the pharmacy and pushed the buzzer, which was installed about six months ago, after their last robbery. And there was plenty of reason for them to have gotten robbed. A person could stroll into an enormous chain pharmacy across the street from any of the biggest hospitals in greater Los Angeles and not even be able to fill a Percocet prescription half of the time. This little hole in the wall, on the other hand, was a treasure trove. Eddie couldn’t remember ever being asked to come back the next day so that they could place an order for him. And he filled everything there – morphine, oxycodone, Ritalin, Valium.
Eddie walked up to the window and dropped off the prescription.
“Hi, Mr. Dufresne,” said the girl at the counter.
Eddie was impressed. The mousy little salesgirl with generic, wire-rimmed spectacles was always friendly to him, but she usually pronounced his name doo-FREZ-nee. She must have gone online.
The clerk passed the prescription over to Brian, the Korean pharmacist who had purchased the store from his sister after she was diagnosed with stomach cancer and decided to move back to Seoul to die. He waved to Eddie and grinned.
Eddie took a seat in the tiny confines of the tiny little crackerbox of a drug store. He was seated directly across from an elderly African American man holding a cane and wearing a Dodger’s cap.
“I come in here every week and they givin’ me this shit ‘bout some hundred Klonopin,” the man complained, saying it loud enough for Brian the pharmacist to hear him.
He was apparently indignant over the extended wait.
Brian was used to the complaining. Ninety percent of his clients were African American, which was odd because there were maybe half a dozen black people residing in the entire city of Alhambra. Most of them were sent there by a guy that Eddie used to know a few years back who ran an insurance fraud scam out of his house in Inglewood. It was a long haul for some half-paralyzed old Medicare recipient to make, and while they were usually pissed off after the long trek out from South Central, Brian always made the trip worthwhile.
Eddie drifted off for a bit, and before he knew it, his name was being called.
“Mr. Dufresne, you’re ready.”
Eddie paid for his meds, walked back out to his car, and sat down behind the wheel. He took two thirty-milligram oxys from the bottle and crushed them into an empty ashtray with the back of a quarter, exactly like he’d described to Frankie a couple of days earlier.
Copyright Paul Knobloch ©2026