Richard Hoggins was a young black man who had lived his entire life in Detroit, Michigan. He had been addicted to the fine white powder he called "hehrawn" for the last five years. During the actual superflu epidemic, he had gone through extreme withdrawal as all the pushers and users he knew died or fled.
On this bright summer afternoon he was sitting on a littered stoop, drinking a warm 7-Up and wishing he had a pop, just a small, minor skinpop.
He began to think about Allie McFarlane, and something he had heard about Allie on the streets, just before the shit hit the fan. People were saying that Allie, who was about the third-biggest in Detroit, had just gotten a fine shipment. Everybody was going to get well. None of that brown shit. China White, all kinds of the stuff.
Richie didn't know for sure where McFarlane would keep a big order like that - it wasn't healthy to know about such things - but he had heard it said at different times in passing that if the cops ever got a search-writ for the Grosse Pointe house that Allie had bought for his great-uncle, Allie would go away until the new moon turned to gold.
Richie decided to take a walk up to Grosse Pointe. After all, there was nothing better to do.
He got the Lake Shore Drive address of one Erin D. McFarlane from the Detroit phone book and walked out there. It was almost dark by the time he made it and his feet hurt. He was no longer trying to tell himself that this was just a casual stroll; he wanted to shoot and he wanted to bad.
There was a gray fieldstone wall around the estate and Richie went over it like a black shadow, cutting his hands on the broken glass embedded in the top. When he broke a window to gain entry, a burglar alarm went off, causing him to flee halfway down the lawn before he remembered there were no cops to answer. He came back, jittery and slicked with sweat.
The main power was off, and there were easily twenty rooms in the f**king place. He'd have to wait until tomorrow to look properly, and it would still take three weeks to dump the place upside down in the proper way. And the stuff probably wasn't even here. Christ. Richie felt sick despair wave through him. But he would at least look in the obvious places.
And in the upstairs bathroom, he found a dozen large plastic bags bulging with white powder. They were in the toilet tank, that old standby. Richie stared at them, sick with desire, dimly thinking that Allie must have been greasing all the right people if he could afford to leave a stash like this in a f**king toilet tank. There was enough dope here to last one man sixteen centuries.
He took one bag into the master bedroom and broke it open on the bedspread. His hands trembled as he got his works out and cooked up. It never occurred to him to wonder how much this stuff was cut. On the street the heaviest hit Richie had ever taken was 12 percent pure, and that had put him into a sleep so deep it was nearly a coma. He hadn't even nodded. Just bang and off he went, outta the blue and into the black.
He injected himself above the elbow and pushed the plunger of his spike home. The stuff was almost 96 percent pure. It hit his bloodstream like a highballing freight and Richie fell down on the bags of heroin, flouring the front of his shirt with it. He was dead six minutes later.
No great loss.
BOOK I CAPTAIN TRIPS Chapter 39
Lloyd Henreid was down on his knees. He was humming and grinning. Every now and then he would forget what he had been humming and the grin would fade and he would sob a little bit, and then he would forget he was crying and go on humming. The song he was humming was "Camptown Races." Every now and then, instead of humming or sobbing, he would whisper "Doo-dah, doo-dah" under his breath. The holding cellblock was utterly quiet except for the humming, the sobbing, the occasional doo-dah, and the soft scrape of the cotleg as Lloyd fumbled with it. He was trying to turn Trask's body around so he could get at the leg. Please, waiter, bring me some more of that cole slaw and another leg.
Lloyd looked like a man who had embarked upon a radical crash diet. His prison coverall hung on his body like a limp sail. The last meal served in the holding cellblock had been lunch eight days ago. Lloyd's skin was stretched tightly across his face, limning every curve and angle of the skull beneath. His eyes were bright and glittering. His lips had drawn back from his teeth. He had an oddly piebald look, because his hair had begun to fall out in clumps. He looked crazy.
"Doo-dah, doo-dah," Lloyd whispered as he fished with his cotleg. Once upon a time he hadn't known why he had bothered hurting his fingers to unscrew the damn thing. Once upon a time he had thought he had known what real hunger was. That hunger had been nothing but a slight edge to the appetite when compared with this.