Hidden River (Five Star Paperback) by Adrian McKinty Page A

from?”
    “Ireland.”
    “Where’s that at?”
    “England.”
    “See your money,” he said, the light gleaming on his smooth baby-face cheeks.
    I opened up my wallet, he looked at me. His face had a scar under the chin. I stroked my beard nervously. He took out five twenty-dollar bills, put them in his pocket, said nothing, walked off to a door, went inside. I waited for about ten minutes. Had they stroked me? Was I ripped off? It would be the easiest scam in the world. Who would I complain to? I didn’t care about the money. I wanted the goddamn heroin. Let them rip me off, just give me the bloody ketch.
    The sun disappeared behind the mountains and I stood there watching the oblique light illuminate the vapor trails of airplanes flying west.
    Venus came out. The sky turned a deep blue.
    From the Colfax side of the alley a homeless man shambled over to me with a brown paper bag.
    “This is for you,” he said.
    I opened the bag, inside was a plastic bag containing a white powder. Easy to get bait and switch in a situation like this, so I opened the bag, tasted the heroin. Milky, acidic, the real McCoy.
    “Where’s this from?” I asked the homeless man.
    “I don’t know,” he answered. I wanted to know where the heroin had originated—Burma, Afghanistan, South America. I wanted to know its purity, but the man was drunk, he knew nothing, just the fall guy on the outside chance that I was a peeler. I put it in my pocket and jogged back to the hotel. Night. Almost no pedestrians. I took a shortcut through the grounds of the state capitol, no one paying me any mind at all.
    When I slid back into the motel room, John was asleep and the place stank of shampoo and hair conditioner. John washed that long mane of his twice a day.
    “Who the hell is that?” he muttered from the bed.
    “Me.”
    “Did you get your ketch?” John asked from under the covers.
    “I did. No pot, though.”
    “Shit, ok. Was the guy trustworthy? I mean, you’re going to shoot that stuff into your veins. Did he look trustworthy?”
    “He looked fine.”
    “Ok, then it’s your life.”
    “It is.”
    I took out my syringes. I went into the bathroom and brought out my spoon and the distilled water. I took the heroin out of the plastic bag. I sieved it through my fingers. I boiled it in the spoon. Injected, drew it in, saw there was blood, I always find a vein first time, always. I injected myself.
    A weird hit. A deep high.
    I lay down on the bathroom floor. Goddamn, this stuff was purer than the gear that made it to Ireland. Wow. Everything that was hurt in my body disappeared. My thoughts became clear. The shower curtain, the tiles on the bathroom floor, the cream-colored ceiling. The traffic on Broadway. The fan from the AC in the bedroom, the bathroom pipes. One irritation. Helicopter, probably from the TV news. In Belfast there are no civilian choppers, all belong to the British Army. A copter is an ominous sound meaning trouble. I had to get rid of it. Blend it into the cars, pipes, air conditioner. Going, going, gone.
    Noises, absence of pain.
    Until you take heroin you don’t know how much pain there is in your body. Most humans just get used to it. With heroin every little ache disappears. Every ache of body and spirit. The wound of memory, the fear. That nagging fear that never quite goes away. For how can you live happily on Earth, knowing that your consciousness will be annihilated along with everything else you cherish? All the matter in the universe will someday decay into random photons and neutrinos. Diamonds are not forever. Nothing is forever. All the works of man will be lost in the Heat Death of the universe. Doesn’t that make everything pointless?
    The girl is dead? We are all dead.
    Heroin relieves you of these thoughts. And it was heroin, after all, that had saved my life. But for heroin I would be dead in a ditch somewhere in Ulster. Rain on my beaten body.
    But I was smarter than them. Maybe not smart. But