Altered Carbon

Chapter TWENTY
Ortega dropped me on Mission Street as evening was falling over the city. She’d been withdrawn and monosyllabic on the flight back from the fightdrome, and I guessed the strain of reminding herself I was not Ryker was beginning to take a toll. But when I made a production of brushing off my shoulders as I got out of the cruiser, she laughed impulsively.
“Stick around the Hendrix tomorrow,” she said. “There’s someone I want you to talk to, but it’ll take a while to set up.”
“Fair enough.” I turned to go.
“Kovacs.”
I turned back. She was leaning across to look up and out of the open door at me. I put an arm on the uplifted door wing of the cruiser and looked down. There was a longish pause during which I could feel my blood beginning to adrenalise gently.
“Yes?”
She hesitated a moment longer, then said, “Carnage was hiding something back there, right?”
“From the amount he talked, I’d say yes.”
“That’s what I thought.” She prodded hurriedly at the control console and the door began to slide back down. “See you tomorrow.”
I watched the cruiser into the sky and sighed. I was reasonably sure that going to Ortega openly had been a good move, but I hadn’t expected it to be so messy. However long she and Ryker had been together, the chemistry must have been devastating. I remembered reading somewhere how the initial pheromones of attraction between bodies appeared to undergo a form of encoding the longer said bodies were in proximity, binding them increasingly close. None of the biochemists interviewed appeared to really understand the process, but there had been some attempts to play with it in labs. Speeding up or interrupting the effect had met with mixed results, one of which was empathin and its derivatives.
Chemicals. I was still reeling from the cocktail of Miriam Bancroft and I didn’t need this. I told myself, in no uncertain terms, I didn’t need this.
Up ahead, over the heads of the evening’s scattered pedestrians, I saw the holographic bulk of the left-handed guitar player outside the Hendrix. I sighed again and started walking.
Halfway up the block, a bulky automated vehicle rolled past me, hugging the kerb. It looked pretty much like the robocrawlers that cleaned the streets of Millsport, so I paid no attention to it as it drew level. Seconds later, I was drenched in the machine’s image cast.
…from the houses from the houses from the houses from the houses from the houses from the houses …
The voices groaned and murmured, male, female, overlaid. It was like a choir in the throes of orgasm. The images were inescapable, varying across a broad spectrum of sexual preference. A whirlwind of fleeting sensory impressions.
Genuine …
Uncut …
Full sense repro …
Tailored …
As if to prove this last, the random images thinned out into a stream of heterosex combinations. They must have scanned my response to the blur of options and fed directly back to the broadcast unit. Very high-tech.
Theflowendedwithaphone numberinglowing numerals and an erect penis in the hands of a woman with long dark hair and a crimson-lipped smile. She looked into the lens. I could feel her fingers.
Head in the Clouds, she breathed. This is what it’s like. Maybe you can’t afford to come up here, but you can certainly afford this.
Her head dipped, her lips slid down over the penis. Like it was happening to me. Then the long black hair curtained in from either side and inked the image out. I was back on the street, swaying, coated in a thin sheen of sweat. The autocaster grumbled away down the street behind me, some of the more streetwise pedestrians skipping sharply sideways out of its cast radius.
I found I could recall the phone number with gleaming clarity.
The sweat cooled rapidly to a shiver. I flexed my shoulders and started walking, trying not to notice the knowing looks of the people around me. I was almost into a full stride again when a gap opened in the strollers ahead and I saw the long, low limousine parked outside the Hendrix’s front doors.
Jangling nerves sent my hand leaping towards the holstered Nemex before I recognised the vehicle as Bancroft’s. Forcing out a deep breath, I circled the limousine and ascertained that the driver’s compartment was empty. I was still wondering what to do when the rear compartment hatch cracked open and Curtis unfolded himself from the seating inside.
“We need to talk, Kovacs,” he said in a man-to-man sort of voice that put me on the edge of a slightly hysterical giggle. “Decision time.”
I looked him up and down, reckoned from the tiny eddies in his stance and demeanour that he was chemically augmented at the moment, and decided to humour him.
“Sure. In the limo?”
“S cramped in there. How about you ask me up to your room?”
My eyes narrowed. There was an unmistakable hostility in the chauffeur’s voice, and a just as unmistakable hard-on pressing at the front of his immaculate chinos. Granted, I had a similar, if detumescing, lump of my own, but I remembered distinctly that Bancroft’s limo had shielding against the street ‘casts. This was something else.
I nodded at the hotel entrance.
“OK, let’s go.”
The doors parted to let us in and the Hendrix came to life.
“Good evening, sir. You have no visitors this evening—”
Curtis snorted. “Disappointed, hah, Kovacs?”
“—nor any calls since you left.” The hotel continued smoothly. “Do you wish this person admitted as a guest.”
“Yeah, sure. You got a bar we can go to?”
“I said your room,” growled Curtis, behind me, then yelped as he barked his shin on one of the lobby’s low metal-edged tables.
“The Midnight Lamp bar is located on this floor,” said the hotel doubtfully, “but has not been used for a considerable time.”
“I said—”
“Shut up, Curtis. Didn’t anyone ever tell you not to rush a first date? The Midnight Lamp is fine. Fire it up for us.”
Across the lobby, adjacent to the check-in console, a wide section of the back wall slid grudgingly aside and lights flickered on in the space beyond. With Curtis making sneering sounds behind me, I went to the opening and peered down a short flight of steps into the Midnight Lamp bar.
“This’ll do fine. Come on.”
Someone overliteral in imagination had done the interior decoration of the Midnight Lamp bar. The walls, themselves psychedelic whirls of midnight blues and purples, were festooned with a variety of clock faces showing either the declared hour or a few minutes to, interwoven with every form of lamp known to man, from clay prehistoric to enzyme decay light canisters. There was indented bench seating along both walls, clock-face tables and in the centre of the room a circular bar in the shape of a countdown dial. A robot composed entirely of clocks and lamps waited immobile just beside the dial’s twelve mark.
It was all the more eerie for the complete absence of any other customers, and as we made our way towards the waiting robot, I could feel Curtis’s earlier mood quieten a little.
“What will it be, gentlemen?” said the machine unexpectedly, from no apparent vocal outlet. Its face was an antique white analogue clock with spider-thin baroque hands and the hours marked off in Roman numerals. A little unnerved, I turned back to Curtis, whose face was showing signs of unwilling sobriety.
“Vodka,” he said shortly. “Subzero.”
“And a whisky. Whatever it is I’ve been drinking out of the cabinet in my room. At room temperature, please. Both on my tab.”
The clock face inclined slightly and one multi-jointed arm swung up to select glasses from an overhead rack. The other arm, which ended in a lamp with a forest of small spouts, trickled the requested spirits into the glasses.
Curtis picked up his glass and threw a generous portion of the vodka down his throat. He drew breath hard through his teeth and made a satisfied growling noise. I sipped at my own glass a little more circumspectly, wondering how long it had been since liquid last flowed through the bar’s tubes and spigots. My fears proved unfounded, so I deepened the sip and let the whisky melt its way down into my stomach.
Curtis banged down his glass.
“Now you ready to talk?”
“All right, Curtis,” I said slowly, looking into my drink. “I imagine you have a message for me.”
“Sure have.” His voice was cranked to snapping point. “The lady says, you going to take her very generous offer, or not. Just that. I’m supposed to give you time to make up your mind, so I’ll finish my drink.”
I fixed my gaze on a Martian sand lamp hanging from the opposite wall. Curtis’s mood was beginning to make some sense.
“Muscling in on your territory, am I?”
“Don’t push your luck, Kovacs.” There was a desperate edge to the words. “You say the wrong thing here, and I’ll—”
“You’ll what?” I set my glass down and turned to face him. He was less than half my subjective age, young and muscled and chemically wound up in the illusion that he was dangerous. He reminded me so much of myself at the same age it was maddening. I wanted to shake him. “You’ll what?
Curtis gulped. “I was in the provincial marines.”
“What as, a pin-up?” I went to push him in the chest with one stiffened hand, then dropped it, ashamed. I lowered my voice. “Listen, Curtis. Don’t do this to us both.”
“You think you’re pretty f*cking tough, don’t you?”
“This isn’t about tough, C—urtis.” I’d almost called him kid. It seemed as if part of me wanted the fight after all. “This is about two different species. What did they teach you in the provincial marines? Hand-to-hand combat? Twenty-seven ways to kill a man with your hands? Underneath it all you’re still a man. I’m an Envoy, Curtis. It’s not the same.”
He came for me anyway, leading with a straight jab that was supposed to distract me while the following roundhouse kick scythed in from the side at head height. It was a skull cracker if it landed, but it was hopelessly over-dramatic. Maybe it was the chemicals he’d dressed up in that night. No one in their right mind throws lacks above waist height in a real fight. I ducked the jab and the kick in the same movement and grabbed his fool;. A sharp twist and Curtis tipped, staggered and landed spreadeagled on the bar top. I smashed his face against the unyielding surface and held him there with my hand knotted in his hair.
“See what I mean?”
He made muffled noises and thrashed impotently about while the clock-faced bartender stood immobile. Blood from his broken nose was streaked across the bar’s surface. I studied the patterns it had made while I brought my breathing back down. The lock I had on my conditioning was making me pant. Shifting my grip to his right arm, I jerked it up high into the small of his back. The thrashing stopped.
“Good. Now you keep still or I’ll break it. I’m not in the mood for this.” As I spoke, I was feeling rapidly through his pockets. In the inner breast pouch of his jacket I found a small plastic tube. “Aha. So what little delights have we got tubing round your system tonight? Hormone enhancers, by the look of that hard-on.” I held the tube up to the dim light and saw thousands of tiny crystal slivers inside it. “Military format. Where did you get this stuff, Curtis? Discharge freebie from the marines, was it?” I recommenced my search and came up with the delivery system: a tiny skeletal gun with a sliding chamber and a magnetic coil. Tip the crystals into the breech and close it, the magnetic field aligns them and the accelerator spits them out at penetrative speed. Not so different from Sarah’s shard pistol. For battlefield medics, they were a hardy, and consequently very popular, alternative to hypo-sprays.
I hauled Curtis to his feet and shoved him away from me. He managed to stay on his feet, clutching at his nose with one hand and glaring at me.
“You want to tip your head back to stop that,” I told him. “Go ahead, I’m not going to hurt you again.”
“Botherf*cker!”
I held up the crystals and the little gun. “Where did you get these?”
“Suck by prick, Kovacs.” Curtis tipped his head back fractionally, despite himself, trying to keep me in view at the same time. His eyes rolled in their sockets like a panicked horse’s. “Ib dot tellig you a f*ckig thig.”
“Fair enough.” I put the chemicals back on the bar and regarded him gravely for a couple of seconds. “Then let me tell you something instead. When they make an Envoy, do you want to know what they do? They burn out every evolved violence limitation instinct in the human psyche. Submission signal recognition, pecking order dynamics, pack loyalties. It all goes, tuned out a neuron at a time; and they replace it with a conscious will to harm.”
He stared back at me in silence.
“Do you understand me? It would have been easier to kill you just then. It would have been easier. I had to stop myself. That’s what an Envoy is, Curtis. A reassembled human. An artifice.”
The silence stretched. There was no way to know if he was taking it in or not. Thinking back to Newpest a century and a half ago, and the young Takeshi Kovacs, I doubted he was. At his age, the whole thing would have sounded like a dream of power come true.
I shrugged. “In case you hadn’t guessed already, the answer to the lady’s question is no. I’m not interested. There, that should make you happy, and it only cost you a broken nose to find out. If you hadn’t dosed yourself to the eyes it might not even have cost that much. Tell her thank you very much, the offer is appreciated, but there’s too much going on here to walk away from. Tell her I’m starting to enjoy it.”
There was a slight cough from the entrance to the bar. I looked up and saw a suited, crimson-haired figure on the stairs.
“Am I interrupting something?” The mohican enquired. The voice was slow and relaxed. Not one of the heavies from Fell Street.
I picked up my drink from the bar. “Not at all, officer. Come on down and join the party. What’ll you have?”
“Overproof rum,” said the cop, drifting over to us. “If they’ve got it. Small glass.”
I raised a finger at the clock face. The bartender produced a square-cut glass from somewhere and filled it with a deep red liquid. The mohican ambled past Curtis, sparing him a curious glance on the way, and apprehended the drink with a long arm.
“Appreciated.” He sipped at the drink and inclined his head. “Not bad. I’d like a word with you, Kovacs. In private.”
We both glanced at Curtis. The chauffeur glared back at me with hate-filled eyes, but the new arrival had defused the confrontation. The cop jerked his head in the direction of the exit. Curtis went, still clutching his wounded face. The cop watched him out of sight before he turned back to me.
“You do that?” he asked casually.
I nodded. “Provoked. Things got a bit out of hand. He thought he was protecting someone.”
“Well, I’m glad he ain’t protecting me.”
“Like I said, it got a bit out of hand. I overreacted.”
“Hell, you don’t need to explain yourself to me.” The cop leaned on the bar and looked around him with frank interest. I recalled his face now. Bay City storage. The one with the quick-tarnishing badge. “He feels aggrieved enough, he can press charges and we’ll play back some more of this place’s memory.”
“Got your warrant, then?” I put the question with a lightness I didn’t feel.
“Almost. Always takes a while with the legal department. F*cking AIs. Look, I wanted to apologise for Mercer and Davidson, the way they were at the station. They act like a brace of dickheads sometimes, but they’re fundamentally OK.”
I waved my glass laterally. “Forget it.”
“Good. I’m Rodrigo Bautista, detective sergeant. Ortega’s partner most of the time.” He drained his glass and grinned at me. “Loosely attached, I should point out.”
“Noted.” I signalled the bartender for refills. “Tell me something. You guys all go to the same hairdresser, or is it some kind of team bonding thing?”
“Same hairdresser.” Bautista shrugged sorrowfully. “Old guy up on Fulton. Ex-con. Apparently mohicans were cool back when they threw him in the store. It’s the only goddamn style he knows, but he’s a nice old guy and he’s cheap. One of us started going there a few years back, he gave us discounts. You know how it is.”
“But not Ortega?”
“Ortega cuts her own hair.” Bautista made a what-can-you-do gesture. “Got a little holocast scanner, says it improves her spatial coordination or some such shit.”
“Different.”
“Yeah, she is.” Bautista paused reflectively, gaze soaking up the middle distance. He sipped absently at his freshened drink. “It’s her I’m here about.”
“Oh-oh. Is this going to be a friendly warning?”
Bautista pulled a face. “Well, it’s going to be friendly, whatever you call it. I ain’t looking for a broken nose.”
I laughed despite myself. Bautista joined me with a gentle smile.
“Thing is, it’s tearing her up you walking around with that face on. She and Ryker were real close. She’s been paying the sleeve mortgage a year now, and on a lieutenant’s pay that ain’t an easy thing to do. Never figured on an overbid like that f*cker Bancroft pulled. After all, Ryker ain’t exactly young and he never was a beauty.”
“Got neurachem,” I pointed out.
“Oh, sure. Got neurachem.” Bautista waved an arm with largesse. “You tried it yet?”
“Couple of times.”
“Like dancing flamenco in a fishing net, right?”
“It’s a little rough,” I admitted.
This time we both laughed. When it cranked down, the cop focused on his glass again. His face grew serious.
“I ain’t trying to lean on you. All I’m saying is, go easy. This ain’t exactly what she needs right now.”
“Me neither,” I said feelingly. “This isn’t even my nicking planet.”
Bautista looked sympathetic, or maybe just slightly drunk. “Harlan’s World’s a lot different to this, I guess.”
“You guess right. Look, I don’t mean to be unsubtle, but hasn’t anyone pointed out to Ortega that Ryker’s as gone for good as it gets without real death? She’s not looking to wait two hundred years for him, is she?”
The cop looked at me through narrowed eyes. “You heard about Ryker, huh?”
“I know he’s down for the double barrel. I know what he went down for.”
Bautista got something in his eyes then that looked like shards of old pain. It can’t be much fun talking about your corrupt colleagues. For a moment I regretted what I’d said.
Local colour. Soak it up.
“You want to sit down?” said the cop unhappily, casting around for bar stools that had evidently been removed at some stage. “Over in the booths, maybe? This’ll take a while to tell.”
We settled at one of the clock face tables and Bautista fumbled in his pocket for cigarettes. I twitched, but when he offered me one I shook my head. Like Ortega, he looked surprised.
“I quit.”
“In that sleeve?” Bautista’s eyebrows lifted respectfully behind a veil of fragrant blue smoke. “Congratulations.”
“Thanks. You were going to tell me about Ryker.”
“Ryker,” the cop jetted smoke out of his nostrils and sat back, “was working with the Sleeve Theft boys until a couple of years ago. They’re quite a sophisticated bunch compared to us. It ain’t so easy to steal a whole sleeve intact and that breeds a smarter class of criminal. There’s some crossover of jurisdiction with Organic Damage, mostly when they start breaking down the bodies. Places like the Wei Clinic.”
“Oh?” I said neutrally.
Bautista nodded. “Yeah, someone saved us an awful lot of time and effort over there yesterday. Turned the place into a spare parts sale. But I guess you wouldn’t know anything about that.”
“Must have happened as I was walking out the door.”
“Yeah, well anyway. Back in the winter of ‘09, Ryker was chasing down some random insurance fraud, you know the stuff, where re-sleeve policy clones turn out to be empty tanks and no one knows where the bodies went. It split wide open and turns out the bodies are being used for some dirty little war down south. High level corruption. It bounced all the way up to UN Praesidium level and back. A few token heads roll, and Ryker gets to be a hero.”
“Nice.”
‘In the short term, yeah. The way it works round here, heroes get a very high profile and they went the whole program for Ryker. Interviews on WorldWeb One, highly publicised fling with Sandy Kim even. Bylines in the faxes. Before it all could tail off, Ryker grabbed his chance. Put in for a transfer to OrgDam. He’d worked with Ortega a couple of times before, like I said we overlap here and there, so he knew the program. No way could the department turn him down, especially with some bullshit speech he made about wanting to go where he could make a difference.”
“And did he? Make a difference, I mean?”
Bautista puffed out his cheeks. “He was a good cop. Maybe. A month in you could have asked Ortega that question, but then the two of them hooked up and her judgement went all to pieces.”
“You don’t approve?”
“Hey, what’s to approve? You feel that way about someone, you go with it. It just makes it tough to get any objectivity on this thing. When Ryker f*cked up, Ortega was bound to side with him.”
“Did she?” I took our empty glasses to the bar and got them refilled, still talking. “I thought she brought him in.”
“Where’d you hear that?”
“Talk. Not a massively reputable source. It’s not true, then?”
“Nah. Some of the street slime like to talk it up that way. I think the idea of us ratting each other out makes them cream their pants. What happened was, Internal Affairs took Ryker down in her apartment.”
“Ohhh.”
“Yeah, ain’t that a laser up the ass.” Bautista looked up at me as I handed him his new drink. “She never let it show, you know. Just went right to work against the IAD charges.”
“From what I heard, they had him cold.”
“Yeah, your source got that bit right.” The mohican looked into his glass pensively, as if unsure he should go on. “Ortega’s theory was that Ryker was set up by some high ranking a*shole who took a fall back in ‘09. And it’s true he upset a lot of people.”
“But you don’t buy it?”
“I’d like to. Like I said, he was a good cop. But like I also said, Sleeve Theft was dealing to a smarter class of criminal, and that meant you had to be careful. Smart criminals have smart lawyers, and you can’t bounce them around whenever you feel like it. Organic Damage handles everyone, from the scum on up. Generally we get a bit more leeway. That was what you, sorry, what Ryker wanted when he transferred. The leeway.” Bautista tipped back his glass and set it down with a throat-clearing noise. He looked at me steadily. “I think Ryker got carried away.”
“Blam, blam, blam?”
“Something like that. I’ve seen him interrogate before, he’s right on the line most of the time. One slip.” There was an old terror in Bautista’s eyes now. The fear he lived with every day. “With some of these turds, it’s real easy to lose your cool. So easy. I think that’s what happened.”
“My source says he RD’d two and left another two with their stacks still intact. That sounds pretty f*cking careless.”
Bautista jerked his head affirmatively. “What Ortega says. But it won’t wash. See, it all went down in a black clinic up in Seattle. The two intacts made it out of the building breathing, grabbed a cruiser and flew. Ryker put a hundred twenty-four holes in that cruiser when it lifted. Not to mention the surrounding traffic. The intacts ditched in the Pacific. One of them died at the controls, the other one in the impact. Sank in a couple of hundred metres of water. Ryker was out of his jurisdiction, and the Seattle cops ain’t all that keen on out-of-town badges shooting up the traffic, so the retrieval teams never let him close to the bodies.
“Everyone was real surprised when the stacks came up Catholic, and someone at the Seattle PD wasn’t buying. Dig a little bit deeper and it turns out the reasons-of-conscience decals are fake. Dipped in by someone real careless.”
“Or in a real hurry.”
Bautista snapped his fingers and pointed a finger across the table at me. He was definitely a little drunk now. “There you go. The way IAD read it, Ryker’d screwed up letting the witnesses escape, and his only hope was to slap a ‘do not disturb’ sign on their stacks. ‘Course, when they did bring back the intacts, they both swore blind that Ryker had turned up without a warrant, bluffed and then smashed his way into the clinic, and when they wouldn’t answer his questions, started playing Who’s Next with a plasma gun.”
“Was it true?”
“About the warrant? Yeah. Ryker had no business being up there in the first place. About the rest? Who knows?”
“What did Ryker say?”
“He said he didn’t do it.”
“Just that?”
“Nah, it was a long story. He’d gone up on a tip, bluffed himself inside just to see how far he could push it and suddenly they were shooting at him. Claims he might have taken someone out but probably not with a head shot. Claims the clinic must have brought in two sacrificial employees and torched them before he arrived. Claims he knows nothing about any Dipping that went on.” Bautista shrugged blearily. “They found the Dipper, and he said Ryker paid him to do it. Polygraph-tested. But he also says Ryker called him up, didn’t do it face to face. Virtual link.”
“Which can be faked. Easily.”
“Yeah.” Bautista looked pleased. “But then, this guy says he’s done work for Ryker before, this time face to face, and he polygraphed out on that too. Ryker knows him, that’s indisputable. And then, of course, IAD wanted to know why Ryker didn’t take any backup with him. They got witnesses in the street who said Ryker was like a maniac, shooting blind, trying to bring the cruiser down. Seattle PD didn’t take too kindly to that, like I said. ”
“A hundred and twenty-four holes,” I muttered.
“Yep. That’s a lot of holes. Ryker wanted to bring those two intacts down pretty badly.”
“It could have been a set-up.”
“Yeah, it could have been.” Bautista sobered up a little and his voice got angry. “Could have been a lot of things. But the fact is that you, shit, sorry, the fact is that Ryker went too far out, and when the branch broke there was no one there to catch him.”
“So Ortega buys the set-up story, stands by Ryker and fights IAD all the way down, and when they lose…” I nodded to myself. “When they lose, she picks up the sleeve mortgage to keep Ryker’s body out of the city auction room. And goes looking for fresh evidence?”
“Got it in one. She’s already lodged an appeal, but there’s a minimum two-year elapse from start of sentence before she can get the disc spinning.” Bautista let go of a gut-deep sigh. “Like I said, it’s tearing her up.”
We sat quietly for a while.
“You know,” said Bautista finally. “I think I’m going to go. Sitting here talking about Ryker to Ryker’s face is getting a little weird. I don’t know how Ortega copes.”
“Just part of living in the modern age,” I told him, knocking back my drink.
“Yeah, I guess. You’d think I’d have a handle on it by now. I spend half my life talking to victims wearing other people’s faces. Not to mention the scumbags.”
“So which do you make Ryker for? Victim or scumbag?”
Bautista frowned. “That ain’t a nice question. Ryker was a good cop who made a mistake. That don’t make him a scumbag. Don’t make him a victim either. Just makes him someone who screwed up. Me, I only live about a block away from that myself.”
“Sure. Sorry.” I rubbed at the side of my face. Envoy conversations weren’t supposed to slip like that. “I’m a little tired. That block you live on sounds familiar. I think I’m going to go to bed. You want another drink before you go, help yourself. It’s on my tab.”
“No thanks.” Bautista drained what was left in his glass. “Old cop’s rule. Never drink alone.”
“Sounds like I should have been an old cop.” I stood up, swaying a little. Ryker may have been a death-wish smoker, but he didn’t have much tolerance for alcohol. “You can see yourself out OK, I guess.”
“Sure.” Bautista got up to go and made about a half dozen paces before he turned back. He frowned with concentration. “Oh, yeah. Goes without saying, I was never here, right.”
I gestured him away. “You were never here,” I assured him.
He grinned bemusedly and his face looked suddenly very young. “Right. Good. See you round, probably.”
“See you.”
I watched him out of sight, then, regretfully, let the ice-cold processes of Envoy control trickle down through my befuddled senses. When I was unpleasantly sober again, I picked up Curtis’s drug crystals from the bar, and went to talk to the Hendrix.