South Florida in June can bear a serious resemblance to the classic idea of Hell. Like Jules had always said – “I’m not gonna lie to you, Mike. I’m not gonna say Fort Lauderdale is hell…but they share a zip code.” Mike shook his head, rubbing his face with both hands and coming up with twin palms full of sweat. Jules’s voice, in memory, led directly to memories of Jules’s blood, of Jules’s intestines tangled in the seaweed when Mike had found him, face down on the beach on South Beach. It was coming up on three years since Jules caught a bad case of dead, and Mike was finally ready to finish what they’d started back then.
Rounding the corner onto Los Olas, Mike turned right off twelfth and dodged the latinos stumbling out of the Castaway. Closing his eyes, Mike counted his steps, and came to a stop. He turned right, then left, then right again, looking up and down the avenue. The sky was still pink, even at three AM, and still busy – knots of kids from the projects across the street were here and there, drinking and walking in packs. The police were nowhere in sight.
A moment’s panic mounted at the base of his spine. He shook his head, hard, and pushed on the buzzer to the right of the doorway in front of him, ringing apartment 6E.
The door opened let him in. Kid Sinister, an angry-nosed Mulatto out of Miami, leaned out to peer up and down the street, then opened the door fully and stepped back. Mike let it fall shut behind him, squinting in the dim and flickering fluorescents of the stairwell.
“Yo, Mickey Mouse. What’chu need, man?”
The silver row of top front teeth were the Kid’s trademark – he’d had the canines elongated into fangs. Which, while admittedly being intimidating as all get out, made the above into an incomprehensible slur along the lines of ‘Yo, mi’mouf, ‘shoonee, ma’?” Mike thought about telling him to go fuck himself and his short-counted sacks. A sigh, and he answered, “I’ll take a bundle. And I need to see Turkey Joe.” Ninety dollars in five bills, folded into quarters, were pulled from his back pocket and offered over.
Tugging on his Lakers cap, the mulatto bared a wide grin and plucked the cash from Mike’s trembling fingers, then pulled a rolled bundle of wax paper baggied from the pocket of his ankle-length shorts and offered it back in exchange. He laughed, shaking his head, and pointed at a door behind the stairs. “Damn stupid, looking for Joe…but he’s waiting, anyway.”
Mike didn’t answer, instead he simply pocketed the heroin, walked over to open the door and step into Turkey Joe’s office. Joe had never come any closer to Turkey than Key West. As a matter of fact, he was probably of Swedish descent – pale hair and paler skin. Mike’d never seen his eyes, since Joe’d been affecting a pair of lennon glasses ever since Mike knew him. But Joe had, at some point, become the go-to for the Turkish Mafia in this part of the South. So he became Turkey Joe, and so he was the man Mike needed to see.
Joe was sitting at the janitor’s desk in his office. The air conditioning was cranked, and Mike watched the cloud of condensation his breath formed, shuddering as it seemed to writhe, as though trying to spell some warning before it dissolved into tendrils of meaningless dissipation. Joe didn’t say anything as the door shut – he shook his head and stood, walking over to an antique refrigerator in the corner and pulling out a small, six ounce bottle of Coca Cola with a faded and peeling label. He sat down, laid the bottle on his desk, and spun it.
“Finally making your run for it?” Joe’s glasses distorted Mike’s reflection. Swallowing dryly, Mike nodded and crossed the linoleum floor to the desk, where the bottle was slowly wobbling to a halt, its dented cap facing squarely at his navel.
“I’ve got everything I need lined up, Joe. I’m gonna make it.”
“You know this bottle leaves this building, they’ll be onto you. Won’t have much time.”
“Yeah. They won’t catch me.” Mike tugged a thick roll of bills from the other back pocket and dropped it onto the desk. “Six grand. Like we said.”
“That was three years ago, Mike, and I owed Jules a favor. The price is seven five. There aren’t many left, and lots of people are looking these days.”
Mike’s mouth opened and closed, but he simply nodded. This was not a place to waste one’s breath. Digging into the front pocket of his ragged jeans, he found a fold of money, and snapped it open, counting crisp hundred dollar bills onto the green formica table. When fifteen had been laid down,he returned the much reduced fold to its pocket, and reached a hand for the bottle.
Joe’s hand closed around his wrist before he’d gotten there. “Listen to me, kid. Your friend got you into this, he was the one who knew what was going on around here, and he bought it trying for the prize. You touch that thing, you go outside with it, and you are in the game. No turning back. Better hit the street running and don’t plan on stopping in this lifetime. The cryptophage, he’s in town. No way he won’t be coming after you. You get me?”
Another mute nod as Mike slid his wrist free and picked the bottle up. His skin stuck to the glass, colder than anything had a right to be, the chill settling immediately into the marrow of his bones and weighing there. “Yeah. I get ya. Be seeing you, Joe.”
And then, he was walking out – past Kid Sinister and the savagely skinny punk rock nypmhette in the stairwell. Past the Castaway and back up twelfth, his steps accelerating slowly, strides lengthening, the panic rising like bile to the back of his throat, until he was running down first avenue for the bus at 4th Street. The bottle was his, but God only knew if he’d be able to get the rest of the ingredients together before they found him. This could be his last chance to die…but with odds like this, no way he needed a second one.
