A Scanner Darkly

“You’ll have to plead,” the other said. “You may have to do a lot of heavy pleading. And even then we may not want you.”

“In fact, we don’t want you now,” the girl said.

At the door Arctor paused and turned to face his accusers. He wanted to say something, but for the life of him he couldn’t think of anything. They had blanked out his mind.

His brain would not function. No thoughts, no response, no answer to them, even a lousy and feeble one, came to him at all.

Strange, he thought, and was perplexed.

And passed on out of the building to his parked car.

As far as I’m concerned, he thought, Spade Weeks has disappeared forever. I ain’t going back inside one of those places.

Time, he decided queasily, to ask to be reassigned. To go after somebody else.

They’re tougher than we are.

4

From within his scramble suit the nebulous blur who signed in as Fred faced another nebulous blur representing himself as Hank.

“So much for Donna, for Charley Freck, and—let’s see …” Hank’s metallic monotone clicked off for a second. “All right, you’ve covered Jim Barris.” Hank made an annotation on the pad before him. “Doug Weeks, you think, is probably dead or out of this area.”

“Or hiding and inactive,” Fred said.

“Have you heard anyone mention this name: Earl or Art De Winter?”

“No.”

“How about a woman named Molly? Large woman.”

“No.”

“How about a pair of spades, brothers, about twenty, named something like Hatfield? Possibly dealing in pound bags of heroin.”

“Pounds? Pound bags of heroin?”

“That’s right.”

“No,” Fred said. “I’d remember that.”

“A Swedish person, tall, Swedish name. Male. Served time, wry sense of humor. Big man but thin, carrying a great deal of cash, probably from the split of a shipment earlier this month.”

“I’ll watch for him,” Fred said. “Pounds.” He shook his head, or rather the nebulous blur wobbled.

Hank sorted among his holographic notes. “Well, this one is in jail.” He held up a picture briefly, then read the reverse. “No, this one’s dead; they’ve got the body downstairs.” He sorted on. Time passed. “Do you think the Jora girl is turning tricks?”

“I doubt it.” Jora Kajas was only fifteen. Strung out on injectable Substance D already, she lived in a slum room in Brea, upstairs, the only heat radiating from a water heater, her source of income a State of California tuition scholarship she had won. She had not attended classes, so far as he knew, in six months.

“When she does, let me know. Then we can go after the parents.”

“Okay.” Fred nodded.

“Boy, the bubblegummers go downhill fast. We had one in here the other day—she looked fifty. Wispy gray hair, missing teeth, eyes sunk in, arms like pipe cleaners … We asked her what her age was and she said ‘Nineteen.’ We double-checked. ‘You know how old you look?’ this one matron said to her. ‘Look in the mirror.’ So she looked in the mirror. She started to cry. I asked her how long she’d been shooting up.”

“A year,” Fred said.

“Four months.”

“The street stuff is bad right now,” Fred said, not trying to imagine the girl, nineteen, with her hair falling out. “Cut with worse garbage than usual.”

“You know how she got strung out? Her brothers, both of them, who were dealing, went in her bedroom one night, held her down and shot her up, then balled her. Both of them. To break her in to her new life, I guess. She’d been on the corner several months when we hauled her in here.”

“Where are they now?” He thought he might run into them.

“Serving a six-month sentence for possession. The girl’s also got the clap, now, and didn’t realize it. So it’s gone up deep inside her, the way it does. Her brothers thought that was funny.”

“Nice guys,” Fred said.

“I’ll tell you one that’ll get you for sure. You’re aware of the three babies over at Fairfield Hospital that they have to give hits of smack to every day, that are too young to withdraw yet? A nurse tried to—”

“It gets me,” Fred said in his mechanical monotone. “I heard enough, thanks.”

Hank continued, “When you think of newborn babies being heroin addicts because—”

“Thanks,” the nebulous blur called Fred repeated.

“What do you figure the bust should be for a mother that gives a newborn baby a joypop of heroin to pacify it, to keep it from crying? Overnight in the county farm?”

“Something like that,” Fred said tonelessly. “Maybe a weekend, like they do the drunks. Sometimes I wish I knew how to go crazy. I forget how.”

“It’s a lost art,” Hank said. “Maybe there’s an instruction manual on it.”

“There was this flick back around 1970,” Fred said, “called The French Connection, about a two-man team of heroin narks, and when they made their hit one of them went totally bananas and started shooting everyone in sight, including his superiors. It made no difference.”

“It’s maybe better you don’t know who I am, then,” Hank said. “You could only get me by accident.”

“Somebody,” Fred said, “will get us all anyhow eventually.”