Cracked (8 page)

“Don’t you believe it,” I said, hugging my little brother. “Hey, D.”

Darren hugged me extra tight. I missed him. He rented a place in Toronto, where Jack and I lived, but he had been on the road for a long time. “No matter what happens, I’ll always be taller than you.” It was something he said to me every time we met after a time apart. I always teased him about being younger and less experienced than me, and he came back with the lame height thing.

“Hey, Beanpole,” he said. He kissed my forehead. I shot up so quickly as a kid that at nine I was by far the tallest kid in the class, and it stayed that way until seventh grade. Dad had started calling me Beanpole, and it stuck.

Some things never change. It was comforting.

Fred seemed to snap out of his current mood, and within an hour he was happily barbecuing steaks and burgers, and Darren and I played water polo with the boys, while Ginger and Jack played backgammon by the pool.

I started laughing so hard at Darren’s attempts at spiking the ball that I swallowed some pool water. I started coughing, laughing at the same time.

“Hey, Danny,” Ginger called. “Breathe, why don’t you?” The boys thought that was hysterical.

It was a nearly perfect day.

It was the last one I would be able to remember.

Soon after that visit, the demons haunting Jack began to take him over, the paranoia and psychosis became more pronounced, and nothing would ever be the same again.

Darren filled us in, while Detective French paced and talked quietly and urgently into her cell phone.

A woman with my I.D. and matching my description had showed up at the facility where the boys were being housed until family could collect them. She had convinced seasoned social workers that she was their aunt, Danielle Cleary, and was taking them home. She had had identification and the correct paperwork. The boys, the social worker said, had seemed to know the woman, and were happy to go with her. She was about my height and weight, and had choppy dark hair like mine. Said social worker had even phoned the number she was given for detectives who were responsible for the case, and was told with all seriousness that she should release the boys to this woman’s custody.

Detectives Miller and French, of course, had never heard of any of this. And after thorough checks with the Newport P.D., no one else had either. And according to the social worker, the business card was a standard-issue Newport Beach Police Department card. She knows them, sees them all the time, and didn’t see anything amiss.

An Amber Alert was being issued. I could hear sirens in the distance.

Ginger’s boys were gone. Somebody had kidnapped the boys.

A part of me broke quietly as I listened to Darren. I stopped being able to take it in. I needed to get high. I needed to fuel my body with a bit of sleep and a bit of food.

And then I would get out of this house, and find whoever did this. Whoever took the boys had to be the person, or people, who had taken my sister from me. Missing children should mean that every law enforcement agency in the state should be looking for them. They would find them, or I would find them.

Either way, I was going to kill them.

Half an hour after Darren told us about the boys being taken, while everyone downstairs went into action, I quietly pleaded headache and emotional fatigue, and excused myself to lie down for a moment. No one particularly seemed to notice. Darren was speaking to Miller, trying to be calm, and Detective French was talking loudly to someone on her phone.

As soon as I got to my room I closed and locked the door and ripped my jeans and underwear off. In seconds I was in an undignified position, retrieving the balloon of drugs from between my legs. Quicker than you could think possible – and with more certainty of movement than I’d had in days – I pulled an old pair of yoga pants from my bag, and rooted around in the various plastic bags I’d thrown in for the seemingly-innocuous, disassembled parts of a homemade crack pipe: a small bottle of Tylenol (with one or two in it, in case my bag got searched) that had a hole gouged in the side, a few Bic pens (to empty the ink cartridge to use as the mouthpiece), and in my travel sewing kit, needles, elastics, a few inches of duct tape and a bit of tinfoil. I threw it all in my toiletries bag, along with the balloon, and before I could go looking for a bathroom, noticed that this bedroom had an en-suite.

Perfect and perfecter.

I rinsed the balloon and emptied it – two grams of coke, and a rock of crack cocaine, not quite an eightball. It was all I could get my hands on before I left, and in truth all I felt comfortable bringing. My general lack of paranoia regarding my drug use meant that I wasn’t clear on the laws around what amount 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. It almost looked like they hadn’t moved since I went to bed. Two uniformed cops were chatting quietly by the front door, take-out coffees in their hands.

Darren motioned for me to sit down next to him on the couch. He put his arm around me and kissed my head. Between the two of them, they filled me in.

The boys’ kidnapping was all over the news. The FBI had been called in and a command post was being set up, along with lots of equipment in the dining room to record all phone calls in case of a ransom demand. Everyone was looking for the twins. Darren and I had been asked to not leave the house. We were to leave the search to the professionals. The police had even contacted our brothers Skipper and Laurence and advised them not to fly down, and to take extra precautions for their own safety.

Without saying so directly, it was obvious that they thought we might be targets as well.

But Fred was still in custody. DNA is DNA, and due to the sensational nature of the crime – beautiful Newport Beach matron murdered in a no-tell motel on the wrong side of the tracks – and Fred’s wealth and profile, all testing had been rushed. The police believed that the woman who took the boys could be Fred’s accomplice. He was being questioned.

No matter how angry at me Fred had seemed the night before, I simply couldn’t believe that he was capable of a crime of passion, especially against Ginger. But the police were right, if the phony suicide note was addressed to me, and somebody had bothered to pose as me – fake I.D. and all, and an elaborate enough network to pull off pretending to be police detectives in one of the wealthiest areas of the world? I was pretty certain that somebody wanted to get my attention. But other than to break the hearts of everyone who loved me, I couldn’t figure out why I would be anyone’s target. I had nothing anyone could want. I was a divorced crack addict on the verge of bankruptcy who rarely left my crappy apartment. Even I could see that my life was pathetic. I might have had some illegal habits, but I doubted that the bank that had issued my Visa card was going to go to these lengths to fuck with me.

I leaned against Darren. I knew that I needed food, and I needed a shower and probably some caffeine, if my body could handle it. I needed my sister to come into the room and tell me that this was all a bad dream, some kind of drug-induced psychosis. I closed my eyes, willing the cravings to pass. I needed crack. I needed a new life. I needed my sister to be alive. I needed Matty and Luke to be brought back here, safe and sound and without anyone having touched them. Because if anyone hurt those boys, I didn’t think I’d be able to manage. I’d lost my parents and my twin sister, and my husband – whom I still loved, and always would – was following the demons living in his brain. If my nephews were lost, my twin sister’s twin sons, all I could imagine was losing any humanity I had left in me, and turning into a killing machine. Then I could let myself disintegrate into a million tiny pieces and disappear into the ether.

I needed to talk to Gene. Regardless of how fucked up he was, he was my best friend. Outside the family, he understood me better than anyone in the world. At least these days, since Jack and I were no longer, and I had nose-dived into druggie oblivion.

I excused myself from Darren and Miller, mumbling something about a shower. There was a phone on the bedside table. I hadn’t bothered to bring my ancient cell phone with me down here; it was a 90s-style flip phone and I doubted it would even get service here. I was old school, used a landline. I sat up in bed and dialed my own number. He was probably still there. As crummy as my place could be, especially after one of our benders, it was still better than Gene’s. He had keys, and usually spent most of his time there.

I let it ring until the voicemail picked up, then hung up when I heard my own voice. I tried again with the same result. Then I called Gene’s number and let it ring ten, twelve times before giving up. He didn’t have a machine. He never wanted to be found. True addicts, people as far along as Gene was – which was even worse than I had gotten, despite my best efforts – only wanted to be found by their dealers. When, of course, they didn’t owe them money.

“Fuck,” I said out loud.

I stepped into the shower and the blood seemed to seep back into my veins. Sleep in the best bed ever constructed, hot water, and the prospect of anything that Marta might have to eat in the kitchen brought me around enough to make coherent thinking a little more possible.

I threw on a short black jersey skirt and a sleeveless black silk top. It was the closest I had to anything that fit me. Somewhere in the back of my head, I was thinking that this outfit could take me from whatever dive bars I might have to hit to look for the low-lifes my sister had apparently been associating with, and also not be out of place when – when, not if – we found the boys. I had no intention of staying in the house all day. And I was pretty sure they couldn’t prevent me from leaving. If they did, I’d call Chandler. I was pretty sure he liked me, and might throw me a bit of legal advice at the family rate. I threw on an old pair of sandals – with a pang, I realised that they were probably Ginger’s – that I found sticking out under the bed. It made me wonder if Ginger hadn’t been sleeping with Fred anymore. I liked wearing them.

Before going downstairs, I went into the bathroom, made sure the sink counter was dry, cut a couple of quick lines of coke and snorted them with my last twenty.