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He nodded, sniffed, coughed; a long, phlegmatic rattle. Shot me a begging glance from under his flip of barely-successful white-boy dreads.

I sighed, and chugged the rest of my latte, letting the caffeine stretch me standing—an unseen chemical noose, just tight enough to make sure I didn’t shake.

“My place,” I told him. “Tag along, we’ll see what I can do. But don’t be obvious.”

He nodded again. I paid, and left.

As I crossed the street, he was already ten steps behind, like some gender-confused geisha. Trying to follow my advice, and failing miserably.

* * *

So: Back around the Tar Baby, through the sump, down the alley and up three flights of rusty metal steps, brain on automatic as I filtered out the ever-present hash reek from Number Two, the teeth-rattling Techno blast from Number Three-A. Key in the door, and into a former dance studio’s worth of dark, square space, lit only by the TV’s thin blue glare and an uncertain thread of light, seeping under three layers of Honest Ed’s thickest curtaining. A half-sprung La-Z-Boy with a remote on its arm—rescued one drunken night from somebody’s Annex curbside—sat angled near enough to the TV to cause serious optic damage. The only other furniture was Jos’ futon, a stained mattress lying half-made in the middle of the floor, its red knot of sheets rumpled like an open heart.

I paused in front of the bathroom mirror to light some incense, the stick’s red tip writing faint haiku on my reflection, just before I blew it out. A rush of smoke wreathed my hair with fragrance.

No movement in the big room. Just Quincy M.E. on A&E’s Daytime Detectives, mouthing righteous ire. If you say it’s almost impossible, then that means it’s at least possible!

“Rennie,” I called, softly.

Silence.

“Hey, Loren Gault. You here, or what?”

Still no answer.

Then I heard the guy push the door open, addict-cautious—and hit the flush before starting to move around the bathroom, making noises like I was looking for my stash.

“Uh . . . Ro?”

Opening and shutting a drawer, I called back: “I’m in the john.” Slammed up the toilet-bowl lid, rummaging inside. “Be out in a sec. Sit anywhere.”

Anywhere meaning the bed, the La-Z-Boy being currently adjusted—courtesy of the apparently absent Rennie—to a level somewhat inaccessible for those of us not six-foot-four.

In the drug world, two truths stand so evident they’re almost Biblical: Hunger stirs hunger—and where one hunger calls, another answers.

When I came out, he was grinning up at me, sure he’d got his figurative foot in my figurative door. Firmly believing, with every possible section of his body but his brain, that I was obviously so hard up for action we could cut some kind of non-monetary deal—and assuming, probably wishfully, that the length of time elapsed since his last score had rendered him once more capable of getting it up far enough to deliver on his end of the bargain.

“You’re lookin’ good, Rohise,” he said. “I tell you that?”

“No,” I replied, slipping off my shirt.

We fell back on the futon together, kissing like cats— all gesture and hot air, with most of the effort put into sounding interested. Amazingly, he actually did have an erection; anticipation does odd things, especially in a trained animal.

“Oh, Ro,” he moaned, with heartfelt sincerity. “Oh, yeah, baby, yeah, baby—yeah, baby, yeah.”

I could barely keep a straight face—but lucky for me, his eyes stayed closed. And so we rolled over, and rolled over yet again, and would have probably just kept on rolling over forever—except that we finally hit something firm looming up through all those sheets, something which felt (at first touch) like another, slightly thicker length of mattress, left there by some unknown helping hand, to keep oversexed drug dealers and their fake-enthusiastic customers from dry-humping themselves right off the side of the bed.

But it wasn’t.

Then a flap of sheet fell over, like the topmost curl of an unraveling chrysalis, and I saw Rennie’s eyes come open in the humid red darkness beneath: Narrow, yellow-touched, under a flaring ridge of brow. Each part, as it revealed itself, successively extrapolating the whole. His elaborate bad-ass ‘do, with its improbable Sonny Chiba sideburns, long since bedheaded into oblivion; his pale fingers grabbing handfuls of air, their nails half-slicked with a choice selection of my unused polishes; his mouth, with its sketchy rim of adolescent moustache, packed full of pointy little teeth. Rennie, hitherto burrowed deep as a tick in the bed’s rucked flesh, roused now by the mingled smell of sex and desperation—the nearby stink of prey. A gangly trap-door spider rising up from under the covers, arms and lips spread wide.

He met my glance, and grinned.

I grinned back, gave my junkie suitor one last kiss for luck, and pushed him—without a single second’s regret—into my little brother’s ravenous embrace. At whose touch the guy’s eyes snapped back open, finally, wide and appalled.

“Hey, shit—” he began.

Then choked off, as Rennie bit deep into the nape of his neck, wrapped his long legs around the guy’s hips from behind and squeezed, neatly snapping his drug-soaked spine in half.