The Spider Inside (21 page)

The truck was loaded. The money had changed hands. Nik was
standing in the parking lot in front of the motel talking to Boyardee when the
police pulled up. They seemed to come from everywhere. One minute there was
nothing but the low moan of the hot desert wind and then the world was filled
with the howl of sirens and pigs screaming orders through megaphones, two black
helicopters in the air above and flashing lights, red and blue red and blue,
all of it pulsing a single message across Nik’s brain: I’m Fucked, I’m Fucked,
I’m fucked.

He put his hands in the air and so did the cook and everyone
else and before he knew it Nik was on his stomach, his nose pressed flat
against the hot blacktop of the parking lot, the heat from which was slowly
becoming unbearable. There was a boot on the back of his neck and his hands
were cuffed tight against his back and he managed to somehow roll his face over
so he was laying on one cheek which made his nose feel better but soon his
cheek was starting to burn, and the cop with his boot on Nik’s neck was not
about to let him move again. Nik watched from the ground as an unmarked blue
sedan pulled up, about ten feet from his face. All he could really see were the
tires and the lower half of the car. He saw the passenger door open, and then,
stepping out, a pair of snakeskin boots that he recognized. The boots walked
over to him. There was a mumbled word from above and the boot was gone from his
neck. Nik rolled over onto his side as Xander hunkered down next to him, wearing,
in fact, the same exact suit that he had been wearing on the day Nik first met
him. The day Xander had asked him if he was a cop.

The smile on Xander’s face told Nik he knew what he was
thinking.

“Sit up,” Xander said, grabbing Nik beneath one arm and
helping him into a sitting position. “You okay?”

“Go fuck yourself,” Nik said.

Xander smiled, the scar across his lips making the grin much
more sinister than it was probably meant to look.

“Now, that’s no way to speak to an officer of the law,” he said.

“This is fucking entrapment, cock sucker. You know it.”

“Actually, no...no, I don’t think it is. You approached, me,
remember? In fact, as my good friend Agent Barclay will testify--you know him
as Martin, by the way--you actively sought me out, through him. We’ll also be
offering a very generous deal to the man you know as Gomez--real name Roberto
Jesus Gonzales, if you were wondering--to testify to the same effect. Him being
a family man and all, we’re confident he’ll take that deal.”

“You know he did more weight than me!”

“Now, I know you’ve been advised of your rights but I’ll go
ahead and pretend I didn’t hear that. Not that we need it. We got you, son.
With your pants around your ankles and your dick in the cookie jar, so to
speak,” Xander said and laughed.

“Then why me?” Nik asked.

Xander shrugged. “I don’t like your face,” he said. “And we
got everything we need, right here, and with the testimony we’re going to line
up well...it’s going to be quite some time before you breathe air as a free man,
so I’d take a breath of it right now. You are fucked, my friend.”

Nik stared at him, wishing with all the hate in his heart
that the pig fuck would drop dead of a massive embolism or at the very least,
form a huge and malignant tumor inside his brain. He felt the years ahead of
him closing tightly around his chest. All he did was deal a little dope, and he
was going to be locked up with fucking murderers and child molesters and
fucking rapists unless he could figure a way out of this.

“What about Frog?” Nik asked. “I can give you him.”

“Frog?” Xander asked, looking genuinely interested. “You got
a real name on this guy?”

“No, man, just his street name.”

“And he’s a heavy?”

“He’s a fucking psychopath that also happens to sling a shit
load of ice, man. You never heard of him? From anyone?”

“Not part of our investigation, but we’ll look into him. You
however, are still fucked.” Xander smiled. “Look at the bright side, though.
You’ll probably give a lot of great tattoos in prison.”

Nik launched himself forward, prepared to rip Xander’s
throat out with his teeth. He got nowhere near it. He was forced back down by
the same cop that had been using his neck as a footrest a few minutes ago, and
two other cops beat and kicked him while Xander, still hunkered down, laughed
in his face.

Jim and Cherry stared at the television.

“In what police officials are saying may be the largest bust
of its kind in the last year, Los Angeles County Police have apprehended
several key players in what they believe to be one of the largest meth rings in
the city,” the reporter was saying. Through all this there were clips of the
truck, video footage of the camera panning alongside it to give people an idea
of how big it was, and then right in through the rolled-up door in the bag
where there was just brick after brick after brick, stacked about halfway to
the roof of the truck and, as far as Jim could tell, all the way to the front.

“Police have not given us an official number, which may take
several days simply because of the sheer quantity you see here, but our source
has estimated this to be well over one ton of raw crystal meth, a street value,
he says, of well over a million dollars. I have with us now a member of the DEA
Task Force who was in charge of this operation.”

Next to the newscaster stood a man with short brown hair,
cropped close. He was wearing sunglasses and a nice suit and had a scar slashed
diagonally across his lips.

“This is a major victory for us,” he was saying. “We put
well over a year into this case; we had field agents, undercover agents, wire
taps, the whole thing. We knew this would be huge when we first got wind of it,
and a few months back you recall we busted several of the key distributors,
which eventually led us to this shipment you see behind us. Unfortunately, as
always, this is just the tip of the iceberg.”

As the man with the scar across his lips spoke there was
footage of arrests, still photos of men in police cars and mug shots. There was
a short video of Tattoo Nik, in the background, being tucked into the back of a
police car. That was when Jim turned off the television.

The only dealer they knew now was Frog, so that was where
they went.

Jim could feel his heart pounding in his chest with nothing
close to a rhythm. It would bang and thud and skip and stop and then stutter
like a machine gun and that was when he told Cherry to call 9-1-1 and by the
time she hung up the phone he could feel the machine gun bursts starting to
come apart, upset by bigger thuds and longer pauses and it was getting so hard
to breathe he felt hot, so hot, he was pouring sweat and gasping, fighting for
each breath. He wanted to lie down. He tried to get out of the ratty, fucked up
little chair they had, but couldn’t. He slid to the floor instead. He could
hear Cherry but not see her, he didn’t seem to have the strength left to turn
his head and look for her. He heard a familiar scrape and squeak and knew she
was sliding open the little cabinet hidden in the back of the headboard to
their bed.

She can’t be thinking of getting high at a time like this,
right? Jim asked himself. Of course not, she was hiding their stash, because
police would most likely come with the ambulance and though the place they kept
their drugs was a good one, it was an obvious one, or at least, would be to a
cop with any kind of experience looking for drugs. It was really a place of
convenience, a place they could put their stash and retrieve it without getting
off the bed.

Besides the chair Jim was now laying next to, the bed was
the only other place to sit in their tiny studio apartment, so that was where
they spent most of their time...spinning out the days, sometimes fucking but
not near as often as they used to, and hardly ever sleeping. Most of the time
they were just sitting there, backs against propped up and filthy pillows, bare
feet bopping and tapping out that beat on the mattress, listening to music or
watching the small color TV that sat on top of the mini-fridge.

Cherry walked through his field of vision. She stopped and
bent and looked down at him. She still had that light, that energy that had
always drawn him to her. It was a little duller perhaps, a little weaker, but
he still saw it as bright as he once did and that was what counted because when
they finally decided to stop fucking around and get serious about things, he
was going to ask her to marry him.

She walked away. When he saw her again she was wearing his
old black hooded sweatshirt. It was big on him and huge on her. She had her
sunglasses on, and the way her hands were stuffed in the big front pocket, her
just knew somehow that their drugs were there, clutched in her sweaty hands.
Why would she bring them with her? He tried to speak and tell her this was a
terrible idea, but nothing came out of his mouth.

Or maybe it did, he wasn’t sure, because then it looked like
she was saying something to him and he couldn’t hear her, either. Her lips were
moving but he couldn’t make out what she was trying to tell him, but his mind
kept insisting it was goodbye, but that was ridiculous.

She walked out of his field of vision again and he heard the
rattle of the chain on their front door, and he heard it open and close, and
then there was nothing but if he could hear the door open and close, how come
he hadn’t been able to hear her speak? And why had she been crying? Did he
remember that one tear track down her face from beneath her sunglasses or was
that his imagination?

All Jim could see now was the ceiling, cracked and stained
with cigarette and joint and meth smoke, and that ugly fucking chair. They’d
gotten it when they moved in, someone was moving out and getting rid of it and
they had taken it in. It was an ugly mustard-baby-shit yellowish color, the
color of dried cum and old paint and desperation. Did desperation have a color,
Jim wondered.

Yes, and it is the color of that shitty little chair. Cats
had clawed it to pieces long before Jim and Cherry ever got hold of it. Cherry.
Where was Cherry?

Cheryl May Allen, where are you, Jim thought.

She was nowhere, and so was he. Jim closed his eyes.

Cherry stood outside watching the ambulance arrive and the
police car shortly after it. She waited a few minutes, the tears still hot in
her eyes, biting her lower lip, unmindful of the blood that was shining on her
chin. She kept the hood of Jim’s sweatshirt pulled up, sunglasses on, tucked
back in the shadows as best she could, watching.

She glanced at her watch and noticed not the time but how
fucked up her fingernails were, covered in chipped black polish, chewed down to
almost nothing. She flexed her hand and could see all the bones in it. Across
the street they had been inside now for what? Two minutes? Three? Ten? If it
was ten he was dead, he had to be dead and if he wasn’t he’d be brain-dead at
the very least, like Lance.

Hard to believe not an hour ago they saw Lance on TV, the
lump of clay that used to be Lance, anyway. It was funny but he looked
healthier the way he was now than any other time Cherry had seen him, the acne
had cleared up, he’d filled out, put on some weight. Problem was he had to do
everything through tubes, and machines had to do it for him. The reporter on TV
said it had drawn recognition as a national debate. Cherry assumed it was
because all these different people, people that didn’t even know Lance, had
come forward to argue about whether or not he should be taken off the life
support machines that the tax payers of California were providing him with.
They couldn’t know him, Cherry thought. Anyone that knew him would pull the
plug themselves.

Another long, slow minute passed. She chewed on what was
left of one of her nails and drew a little blood from the finger when she
pulled it free and spat it on the ground. The paramedics came out carrying a
stretcher and they were really moving, another medic was practically running
alongside the stretcher, carrying some kind of equipment that had a couple
wires that led to Jim. Cherry started across the street and was almost hit by a
car. She wished she had been. She deserved it, to end up splattered all over
the street like fucking Two Step had been. She got to the ambulance just as
they were about to close the doors.

“What hospital are you taking him to?” Cherry screamed above
the siren. A black paramedic in the back of the ambulance looked at her.

“You family?”

“No I’m...” What was she? She had once been his girlfriend,
had once wanted to be his wife, but she figured all that had ended when she
left him alone on the floor of their apartment. She was nothing now. She was no
one.

“We’re going to County,” the medic screamed over the wail of
the siren. “You wanna ride in?” He gestured to the back of the ambulance and
she could redeem herself by stepping in and sitting next to Jim and holding his
hand all the way and just taking whatever heat there was to take when it came.
Instead Cherry found herself stepping away, shaking her head. She turned around
before she could watch the paramedics close the doors, and she was running in
the other direction by the time the ambulance left. There was only one place
she could think of to go.

Jim watched but couldn’t see, listened but couldn’t hear any
sound but the sound of bells in his ears, and the ocean. Was it the ocean or
was it the sound of death come to greet him, was it death whispering in his
ear? He couldn’t move. He was pretty sure he’d pissed himself and his whole
body flared in pain and then the world grew bright again, brighter than he ever
knew it could be, brighter and sharper than right after taking a huge hit of
meth from the pipe--why did he
ever
start smoking it?--but he could
finally see the world that was in front of him, the real world, the one he’d
left behind when he was four and spinning in front of a funeral home, the one he’d
always been trying to find, as if searching for a magical door on the beach or
a wardrobe or a rabbit hole that would take him back and it turned out there
was a door after all.

But the door was death

And the world, the real world, it started to fade, the color
went first like there was a huge drain in the floor except not in the floor but
right in Jim, as if his solar plexus was a drain and all the color started to
slide down that drain and left behind a world of black and white and a million
different shades of gray and then the whites went out and then the lighter
grays and the middle grays and then as there was nothing left but black; he saw
three figures standing over him, one nothing but teeth, the last thing he saw
was a big smile of big white teeth and was it Death was it God laughing in his
face as he flushed him down some cosmic toilet to the sewer of the afterlife to
which he had condemned himself and he felt something--two somethings--cold and
hard and square on his chest and he didn’t hear them say clear but they must
have because that was what they always said on TV and in the movies but he felt
it, it was like being shot with a bullet full of sunlight and fire exploding in
his chest and all the colors that had felt so nice draining into him were now
ripped out all at once like someone putting a huge fist inside him and pulling
out his heart and lungs and the sun was too bright he tried to ask them for his
sunglasses but couldn’t speak and the world was back the real world it was hard
and clear and somehow clean and the colors were bright and the lines were sharp
and he was being lifted this was it he was dying after all and he could feel
his soul leaving his body but it only got up a few feet and started rolling
toward the door with a guy and a girl medic moving him and another moving with
him and shouting things was he shouting at Jim or about him he didn’t know and
he thought he saw the fat smug smile of a cop but it was there and gone in only
a second and his eyes were burning and there was nothing but white hot light
and he felt like his eyes were boiling in his head but it was only the sun and
he was stuffed inside the ambulance and he thought he heard Cherry saying she
would hold his hand all the way to the hospital but the door closed and they
started to move.

Later his eyes opened on a cool dark room and his nose felt
raw and dry and had an oxygen tube in it and he looked down at himself, at his
wasted nothing-of-a-body underneath the pastel hospital bed blankets. Cherry
stood at the foot of his bed with his hoodie on, still wearing her sunglasses
and he wanted to tell her she could take them off because it was light out and
was this a dream she told him she loved him and kissed him and he felt the scar
tissue crisscrossing her lower lip and could taste a faint trace of her blood
on them and she was gone and he was hot, too hot, the room was spinning and Two
Step was there, looking fine except his head was caved in and one eye was
bulging so far out of the socket it was almost resting on his cheek and his
skull gleamed white and he smiled at Jim and then it was Lance in bed next to
him and on TV like they saw him with all these suits arguing over whether or
not they should pull the plug or not and everyone kept saying Terry Five-O, it
was just like the case of Terry Five-O, but that wasn’t quite right not Five-O
but something close and with his dented forehead Lance just lay there, and that
was all he’d ever do and then Nik but Nik was in jail and Lego was in Jail and
Martin was in jail and so was Gomez and Alice and Carmex and Old School was
there but Jim had heard he finally OD’d a couple months back and he didn’t know
anything, he didn’t know any of them but he recognized all of them all the
faces just started to blend together and he couldn’t tell who was there or who
was dead or who was in jail or even who the doctors and nurses were and Cherry
where was Cherry he kept asking, and a nurse that looked like a bullfrog told
him she didn’t know no Cherry and then finally, someone put a shot of something
into one of his tubes and despite the burning in his whole body he could feel
that little extra bit of heat in his arm as the shot went into him and then the
darkness came up to meet him, not swallow him, because that would be the easy
way out. He had a feeling the darkness would spit him back out when he was
still sick and still weak but when he was able to fully comprehend the things
he’d done and the thing he had become.

Jim closed his eyes.

He slept for the next forty-five hours and was re-hydrated
and fed intravenously and pumped full of antibiotics and medicine and a young
woman, a pretty young woman who was on the job as a nurse for her first day,
she saw Jim and how skinny he was and how close to death and in the middle of
her shift she locked herself in a bathroom stall and cried furiously and was
almost sick. She emerged as a little older and a much better nurse.

Jim suffered through the horrors of withdrawal while
unconscious and while this was surely a kinder fate than some of the doctors
felt a fucking burnt-out junky like him deserved, they didn’t stop to think
about the dreams he was having. In his mind Jim was being tortured for years
and years and years without break. He was the age he was now but at his
brother’s funeral and this time his mother let him go up to the front to say
something about Davey and when he was about to the tiny coffin lid banged open
and a little skeleton wearing a suit climbed out and knocked Jim to the floor
and crawled up his body and with tiny skeleton hands forced his mouth wide open
and climbed inside Jim to live there and Jim was roasted over a spit while his
fever peaked and he was falling down an endless black crevasse when his heart
stopped again and he was shoved through with thousands of rusted spikes when
they got it going again and he was so thirsty he would cry in and in his dreams
his throat exploded in a burst of dust and cracked porcelain flesh over and
over.

As he cried in his dreams he would cry for real and the
nurses would wipe away his tears and when he finally woke up, he woke up to see
his mother sitting in a chair next to the bed, reading a book.

The doctor looked down at him, but Jim didn’t get the
feeling he was looking down on him. He didn’t think the doctor gave a shit
about the drugs.

“You’ve developed an arrhythmia in your heart,” the doctor
said. “That means your heart beat is irregular, and it may be for the rest of
your life, even with surgery. You’re young, which is good, and you seem to be
healing faster than I expected you to, which is better, but if you go back
to...your…previous lifestyle...I can only guess at how much time you will have,
but I can tell you for certain that you will die, and I would feel comfortable
saying it would be within a year at the outside.”

Jim stared up at the young doctor. They looked about the
same age.

“You aren’t even thirty yet,” the doctor said, his face
softening. “You stay clean, take care of yourself, you could live a long life.
It’s up to you.”

Jim looked over at his mother and she wouldn’t look at him
and when she finally did she was crying.

When they let Jim out of the hospital he went home with his
mother. She asked him if he had anything he wanted to bring with him. He was
quiet for a long time, and finally said no, nothing, so his mom stopped at a
mall somewhere and left him in the car. She took the keys with her. He didn’t
want to try and open the door because he thought if he did, he would find she
had locked him inside.

She came out twenty minutes later with a plastic shopping
bag. In it was a package of socks, a package of boxer shorts, a couple pairs of
jeans, a couple pairs of pajama pants, and a package of plain white t-shirts.
She handed Jim a pair of sunglasses and he started crying.

“We can get you more clothes when you feel a little better,”
she said. Jim put his sunglasses on and stared out the window as they drove,
occasionally wiping his cheeks dry.

At home he watched TV. On the news they talked about a guy
named Lance that was in a coma, brain-dead, and Jim recognized him, wondered
where he knew him from, but thought he remembered the face and the name. Twenty
minutes later when he remembered how he knew Lance and what had happened
between them he went into the bathroom and knelt in front of the toilet. He
didn’t puke, but he almost always felt like he would.

He tried writing, nothing fancy, just writing, like a diary.
It was a struggle to put together a coherent sentence on the page. He thought
of the big box of notebooks that was somewhere, now, or maybe nowhere, and how
each of those notebooks had been full of books and stories and poems he’d
written, and how he’d never see them again, and how even if he thought really
hard he couldn’t really remember what they were about, any of them.

He had to be given a prescription sleeping aid, or he would
sit up for days at a time, racked with insomnia.

Another six months passed. Cherry lay on a bare mattress
trying to smoke the taste of cum out of her mouth. Had Jim seen her he would
not have recognized her. She was shadow of her former self, a ghoul of skin and
bones, a pale and acne-covered wraith with graying teeth and a dead dull look
in her eyes that would only light up when they looked upon drugs. The door to
her tiny room opened and a Frog poked his head in.

“Let’s go, Zit.”

The first time Frog had called her that she’d attacked him,
she’d clawed his face and tried to claw his eyes and had kicked and punched him
until he knocked her out with one crushing blow to the point of her chin. She’d
woken up some time later with him sitting in a chair over her, smoking a
cigarette, the furrows in his face still leaking a little blood, and he’d told
her that if she ever did that again he would beat her to death, and reminded
her that she had come to him with nothing but a small bag of dope and fairly
tight pussy asking could she have a place to crash for a day or two. He
reminded her how kind he’d been, to let her in, despite knowing she used to
hate him. He reminded her that any fucking time she wanted, the city was full
of alleys and boxes where she could lay her head.

But now? She didn’t care. Fuck him. What mattered was her
pipe was empty. He could call her anything, do anything to her, she would do
anything to anyone as long as at the end of the daze there was a full pipe.
Time passed in a kind of horrible slow motion sickness like a fever dream where
she was always fucking or sucking but at the end of that dark tunnel if she
just kept her eyes closed and got through it there would be light, and that
light would be the small torch in her hand as she huddled on a dirty mattress
in a dim room and once more emptied her pipe.

Through the fever there were rare moments of painful glaring
clarity, and during some of them she thought of Jim, or the time Frog had held
a knife on her, back when he still had that shitty little rat’s nest of an
apartment. Times were good for Frog though. Now he had a shitty little rat’s
nest of a house.

Those moments were growing further apart all the time, and
for this she was glad.

If Cherry had known where to go and had a car to get there,
it would have taken her less than half an hour to drive to where Jim was
standing on that cool, clear afternoon.

Jim looked at the endless possibility of the blue sky and
couldn’t be sure exactly where it met the ocean. The horizon was a long,
blue-gray haze. He looked back down again, at the finality of the tombstones,
the gray of the granite; the dates carved into them that would take a handful
of centuries to erode, one bearing the name of his father, next to it the name
of his brother. His mother’s tombstone was there, too, next to his father’s,
only there were no dates yet carved into hers. She was waiting for him in the
car.

Jim knelt in the grass and put his hand on his brother’s
headstone.

So long ago, he had died so very long ago...would there be
anything left? Would there be a little smiling skeleton with big and empty
sockets for eyes, dressed in a little dark blue suit? Would the skin be a
grayish brown and stretched tight, the hands laying on the chest twisted like
dried twigs you would scrape from the gutter in the fall? Would there be just a
pile of dust and bones, dust and bones; or would there be a mummified version
of the smiling, chubby, little face from the photographs that hung throughout
his mother’s home?

Try as he might, Jim could only recall Davey’s face if he
looked at one of those pictures He knew his brother wasn’t down there, never
had been, his brother was gone, was someplace better, someplace else. Jim hoped
his brother was someplace where he couldn’t watch. He didn’t want Davey to have
seen all the terrible things his big brother had done, or how he’d fucked up
and abandoned every good thing that had ever happened to him.

The stone was cold beneath his hand, despite the bright sun
that had been shining down upon it. And what of his father?

The last time Jim had seen his father he had been a living
version of the mummy he imagined might be lying in his brother’s coffin. Full
of tubes, talking in a low croak, eyes seeming to bulge and follow you wherever
you went. Jim knew his father was someplace better, too. Maybe it didn’t even
have to be heaven; it could just be...nothing. It could be like dozing
peacefully in a cool room for all eternity...that was all Jim hoped for. He
didn’t need heralding angels and pearly gates, and wasn’t sure he would see
them in any case. He probably didn’t deserve that. He didn’t deserve to be
boiled alive for eternity either, though. He couldn’t hope for heaven but
didn’t think he would go to hell so he just hoped for nothingness, a black and
quiet nothingness that would just go on and on forever.