Small Mercies

She steps back. Holds it up. “This gun?” She places the gun in her waistband at the small of her back. “No more gun.”

He looks at the door behind her. Doesn’t move.

“All you have to do is go through me,” she tells him.

He considers his options.

“Just push me aside, George.”

“Think I can’t?”

She laughs loud. She can’t help herself. “That’s exactly what I think, George. You’re running out of time.”

“Wait.”

“No,” she says. “Make your move. Get me out of your way.”

“Give me my product.”

“Fuck your drugs.”

“Give me—”

She steps close to him again. “You will not get your drugs until I walk out of here with everything I want. So either try to fight me right now, or drop the act and let’s move this along.”

George goes back to the dead eyes. She can see him practicing it in the mirror over the years in his mother’s house.

“I’m a businessman,” he says. “Let’s negotiate.”

“You’re a fucking boy,” she says. “Did you notice what was in your trunk?”

“It wasn’t my product.”

“The drugs are what’s not in your trunk, yes. Did you notice what was in there, though?”

He thinks about it. “There was a gym bag.”

“What’d you do with it?”

“I dunno.”

She indicates with her head. “You tossed it aside, George. It’s right behind you. Go get it.”

His face scrunches in contempt. “You go get it.”

She pulls the gun from behind her back and hits him in the forehead with the butt.

His eyes water and he stumbles backward. “Holy fuck!”

“Next time it’s your perfect nose.”

He gets the bag.

“Put it on the hood and open it.”

He does. Stares inside. Can’t compute what he’s seeing. After a bit, she’s pretty sure the hesitation on his face stems from understanding what the items in the bag mean, as opposed to any confusion.

Under the sudden harsh light, the items in the bag pick up a sallow, garish glow—

A needle, a spoon, a lighter, a length of rubber tubing, an eyedropper filled with water, and a small plastic baggie with brown powder inside.

“I assume you recognize your own supply.”

He looks at it. “So?”

She sighs. “I’ve always given you credit for a brain. Maybe not a heart but a brain.” She indicates the items with a flick of the gun. “You sell it. Now you’re gonna try it. Or you will never see your ‘product’ again.”

He laughs. It’s supposed to sound derisive, but it sounds scared. “No fucking way.”

She fires at his feet. He jumps. Grabs his ears.

She doesn’t grab her own, but now she can’t hear shit. That’s what happens when you fire a round in a seven-by-four box with a metal door. Stupid, Mary Pat. Stupid, stupid, stupid.

Maybe the time for talk is over, though, because George is reaching into the bag. He wraps the rubber tube around his bicep, ties it off. He slaps the flesh around the inside crook of his elbow, looking for a vein. He’s not very good at it because he’s not acting from experience, only from years of observing the poor saps from whom he made his money.

Eventually, the ringing in her ears subsides enough for her to speak. “Lemme help.”

She puts the gun back by the base of her spine. Prepares the powder on the spoon, adds the water, and cooks it with the lighter. She watched Noel do it once, near the end, after she’d thrown him out of the house before there’d be nothing left to steal. At that point he was beyond caring and sat on the bench in the playground under the half-broken streetlight. She watched him from the other side of the playground, out of his sight line as she leaned against the Jefferson Building, aware that she was watching suicide. Might take months, might take weeks (it took somewhere in between), but it was premeditated murder of the self nonetheless. He’d been in and out of rehab by that point, had robbed from her, robbed from his sister, robbed from Ken Fen, robbed from every friend he had until he had no friends left.

Except George. His supplier.

She sees George patting the flesh around the inside of his elbow again, and she reaches out and pinches the flesh so hard he yelps. “Hey!”

“That’s how you get a vein.”

He takes the needle and draws the mixture off the spoon. Once the syringe is full, he holds it out to her.

She shakes her head. “I’m not helping you shoot yourself up with your own poison.”

It takes him four hesitant pokes before he hisses and drives the needle into the vein. He meets her eyes, his thumb over the plunger, and she waits him out.

He depresses the plunger.

He pulls the needle out. Hands it to her. “What now?”

“We wait.”

Noel would talk about anything in the early stages of a high, back when he still lived with them and would use the bathroom to shoot up. He’d come out all dreamy-eyed and relaxed, sit at the kitchen table with her, and shoot the shit about anything — no defenses — for about ten minutes before she’d lose him. It’s that sweet spot — about five minutes in but no longer than fifteen — that she waits for.

“What happened to Jules after you killed Auggie Williamson?”

He shrugs.

“George,” she says, “what happened?”

Another shrug. “Dunno. She left with Frank.”

“And after that?”

“Told ya — dunno.”