The Whisper, page 2
They smoked in silence for a little while, looking out the windows. Jasper knew precisely how much sympathy Glen could accept before becoming annoyed and angry. That was why he didn’t utter a word until Glen broke the silence.
“Nothing’s going to change tomorrow,” Glen said.
“At least you can show Arlington that you made the most of the time you were given.”
“Thank you for the priceless advice.” Glen gave Jasper an icy gaze. “And thank you for shitting the bed again.”
“What?” Jasper asked.
“Kenneth Blair? Ross Higgins? You thought I’d forget about them?”
Jasper looked away in shame.
“If I refused everyone who asked to loan coke,” he said, “I’d have nothing to pay the rent.”
“And you decided it would be better to…give the coke for free?”
“I gave it intending to get the money later. There’s a difference.”
“There’s also a tremendous difference between what you intend to do and what you’ve done.”
Jasper let out a heavy sigh.
“Here’s the thing,” he said, “I have to sell in shitholes like Foster Valley and Copper Hills. There are very few people in those neighborhoods who can afford something as expensive as coke. I have to stick with every possible buyer.”
“I know what people live there, but if you’re not okay with it, feel free to join Luis, Morgan, or even Ben.”
It was a jab directed at Glen’s chin. Jasper knew it, but there seemed to be nothing else he could say in his defense. Arlington himself assigned each horseman to particular territories, and Jasper wondered why Glen constantly got the most unfortunate regions to cover. Jasper didn’t stop to doubt whose team he’d feel most comfortable working in. However, his longing to explore better places was quite understandable. You wouldn’t believe how diverse the clientele of the drug industry was.
“Do you really think it’s all about the debts?” Jasper said. “I mean, if I have two debtors, then those who cover the East Side must have dozens of them to make a three-thousand-dollar shortage in revenue.”
“I don’t give a fuck about those who cover the East Side. I get shit for people I’m responsible for. How much does Blair owe this time?”
“A little over sixty bucks.”
Glen’s eyes widened. He turned to Jasper with his whole torso.
“You know, it’s really hard to say now that Arlington’s being unfair,” he said.
“I’m never gonna make the same mistake again, I promise,” Jasper mumbled.
“Make it sound convincing when you say it to him.”
“I’ll go to Foster Valley first thing in the morning, collect the debts, and everything will be fine.”
“I’ll go with you,” Glen said.
A brief silence fell between them before Jasper found something to say.
“You’ve got enough on your plate right now.”
“That’s why it’s in my best interest to deal with Blair as soon as possible.”
“Glen, do you even hear yourself? It’s ridiculous. You will go to an old, shriveled junkie with me because…what? You think I can’t handle him on my own? I doubt the others will lift a finger to do something the street dealers could do for them.”
The street link of the drug-dealing chain was the largest of all. Every dealer who believed he was above street sales had people all over the city to do dirty jobs for him. Jasper knew the dealers, not to mention the horsemen, would be too indolent to collect the debts themselves. That was why the mere idea of Glen approaching Kenneth Blair seemed ridiculous—ridiculous and, to put it mildly, disturbing.
“I’ll go with you because I’m already fed up with this prick. Blair has given us enough headaches,” Glen said.
Jasper took a moment to look for another excuse to get Glen off his back, and when he failed to find one, he laid out everything as it was.
“Glen, I don’t want you to go with me because I don’t want to deal with him your way.”
“There is no other way to deal with him anymore.”
“You start to sound just like him,” Jasper said with a mix of surprise and disappointment in his voice.
“Who?” Glen asked.
“Arlington.”
“Not everything Arlington says or does is wrong.”
“Of course, and what he did to that APD officer is not at all wrong, is it?”
Glen leaned in as if somebody might overhear them.
“Who did you hear that from?” he asked.
“It’s easier to name those who I didn’t hear it from,” Jasper said.
The examples of Arlington’s cruelty floated over his people like evil spirits. It was easy to sort them out for true and false. The false quieted down pretty fast, but if you heard the same rumor multiple times from multiple people, it was most likely true.
The latest rumor was that on the night of September 19th Owen Arlington had paid a visit to an APD station. The place was deserted except for a couple of officers on duty. One of them was the devil’s target. What frightened Jasper the most in this story was that Arlington didn’t end his victim with a gunshot or one swift swing of a jackknife. Arlington instead brought a claw hammer so he could squeeze maximum pain out of the poor creature.
The hammer made ten cracking sounds, one for each finger. The officer kept screaming at the top of his lungs while his companion sat aside with a shaking hand over his mouth. Only when the devil made sure his victim had no voice to scream did the grand finale come—the claw of the hammer hit the officer’s left eyeball. The sound resembled a piece of raw beef hitting a tiled floor. The screaming stopped in an instant as the officer’s eyeball was dripping out of its socket like melted ice cream.
“I said not everything,” Glen remarked. “Plus, he must have a reason to do something like that. I don’t think he’d…”
“Are you really defending him right now?” Jasper exclaimed.
“I’m not... It...” Glen took a deep breath. “Don’t forget this job has different principles.”
Jasper kept his eyes fixed on him, condemning him with a scowl.
“I’m wondering now whether you’ve always been this way,” he said.
“Turns out I’m not as generous as you think. I’m going with you tomorrow.”
“You’re not going with me anywhere.”
“It’s not a request. I obey Arlington, and you obey me. If Ken doesn’t give the money...”
“He will!” Jasper appealed.
“Sixty bucks? Sure, he’ll wrap it up and put a bow on it.”
“I told you I can handle this.”
“It’s a little late to try to look strong and independent. Tomorrow, I’ll be here, in this very spot, at seven. By that time...”
“Glen, I said I’m gonna deal with—”
“You gotta be outside and wait for me. Any questions?”
Jasper looked away in exasperation. He didn’t answer as he grabbed his backpack and climbed out of the car.
“Seven!” Glen called after him.
Jasper’s apartment was on the second floor, consisting of two rooms, nothing fancy. Not that he needed anything fancy. This apartment had been his home for the last four years, and he could no longer imagine living anywhere else.
Jasper turned on the lights, took his shoes off, and walked straight to the kitchen. His rumbling stomach reminded him of his last meal, a mushroom pizza almost six hours ago. Three remaining slices were still on the table, the cheese hard as rock. Jasper devoured them cold and took a big gulp of tap water.
Then he walked to the living room, took Great Expectations out of his backpack, and squeezed the novel into a dense row of books. Although he hadn’t transported the biggest part of his father’s library to Acheart, the bookshelves were packed with novels, tales, and collections of poems.
Jasper ran his index finger over the book spines in search of the one he needed and stopped at the title Atlas Shrugged. He fished the book out—over a thousand pages in hardcover, heavy as a brick—and was about to open it when he glimpsed a toddler smiling from a framed, black-and-white picture.
It was one of the few pictures where he and his parents were captured together. His mother held little Jasper in her hands, their cheeks pressed together. His father stood on her left with one hand gently on her waistline. The cuckoo clock, which up to this day collected dust in Summerhold, hung on the wall behind them.
Jasper had grown into a perfect combination of his parents’ features. He had his mother’s light-brown hair and slightly protruding chin and his father’s ocean-blue eyes and prominent forehead. It was a weird combination, but it reminded him that in certain ways he was like his parents. Even after all the years they had been gone, they still made Jasper feel guilty for the person he had become, as if two reproachful gazes were fixed on all his vices.
He put the picture face down, plopped on the couch, and opened the book, revealing a hole carved into the thick layer of pages. Inside the hole was a small plastic bag containing a few grams of white powder.
Owen Arlington was many things. Fool was not one of them. He knew that revenue shortages resulted from many factors—loaning the product was one among many. He also knew that a minority of drug dealers could resist the temptation of benefiting from their job. Some people thought they had the right to take a bit of what Arlington had in abundance, but apparently there were too many people who thought so.
Three thousand dollars was an immense sum for an average citizen but definitely not for a multimillionaire. Neither three thousand bucks nor a kilogram of missing cocaine would make any difference to Owen Arlington, but it would make a huge difference to the lower links of the drug-dealing chain.
Cocaine was a medicine with plenty of side effects. Jasper was well aware of that, but with everything that was going on in his head he could not find a better sedative.
He spilled half of the bag’s content on the coffee table and put the rest in the front pocket of his sweatshirt. An overdue electricity bill was nearby. Jasper tore it in two, rolled up one half, and used the other to form three thin tracks. He snorted each one with an interval of not more than half a minute then leaned back on the couch and waited.
That wonderful feeling always came suddenly, struck like lightning in a clear sky.
Jasper didn’t notice as his flesh had turned into something light, something that could easily float in the air. His heart raced. He felt like, with one push, he could easily take off from the ground. All his worries were suppressed. Whatever he heard or saw, it all seemed to be meaningless, but that was the thing about drugs—they made everything meaningless. Maybe it was an illusion, but for the time being he wanted to get lost in it. Jasper was flowing along the stream of his subconsciousness with no particular destination. There was no tension, no boundaries.
It always felt so great.
2
THE LOST SOULS
Glen pulled up in front of a rusted chainlink fence. Neither he nor Jasper had seen where Kenneth Blair lived. Their rare meetings usually took place at an abandoned mall a few blocks down, which was the unofficial headquarters of Foster Valley’s drug-and-booze-addicted souls. Now that they could personally see Ken’s house, both could tell the place was just as worn out as its owner.
The roof shingles looked as if a single gust of wind could blow them away, front porch completely without railings. A track of crumpled beer cans and cigarette butts followed through the overgrown lawn all the way to the front door.
Foster Valley’s demography never changed. People showed up here when they hit the very last step of the social stairs, which had happened to Kenneth Blair a long, long time ago. Jasper knew about him only what he had overheard from the other junkies at Amber Mall. Ken had used to teach high school mathematics before he met a woman who married him and hooked him up on drugs.
Jasper didn’t know if it had happened in that order. The path from a respected citizen to the scum of society was always this short. There were plenty of other examples in Amber Mall. All it took was meeting one wrong person.
Jasper got out of the car first. He idled by the open door, waiting for Glen to turn off the ignition and take things he needed, hoping a gun wouldn’t be one of those things. He felt relieved for a fraction of a second, but as Glen was climbing out Jasper glimpsed a black handle sticking out of his belt. Glen promptly concealed it behind the bottom of his black, leather jacket.
He called it Old Harry, a Colt 1911 named after its previous owner. In the old days, shootings with rival gangs had been as casual as taking a lunch break during a workday, but of all the gangs Owen Arlington had to deal with, Frank Whitney’s was the most problematic. The war between them had been long and exhausting. Now the stories were the only thing left of it. Jasper hadn’t heard all of those stories, but the story about Glen shooting Harry Powell (one of Whitney’s confidants) with Powell’s own gun couldn’t stay out of his reach. To Glen, Old Harry was a trophy. To Jasper, it was a reminder of his capability to kill.
They sauntered up the front porch steps, both squinting from the sun. Acheart was known for its overcast sky with occasional bursts of sun rays, but that day there wasn’t a single cloud in the sky. Peeling swamp-green paint highlighted the house number that had used to hang on the door. Glen knocked.
“Why did you bring a gun?” Jasper asked as they were waiting for someone to open the door.
“Cause beating the shit out of Ken apparently is not that exciting for him anymore.”
“Why can I never shut up at the right moment?” Jasper exhaled. “I could be dealing with it alone right now.”
Glen dismissed his remark and knocked on the door a few more times. A thunderous female voice erupted from inside the house.
“GET UP! I’M NOT A FUCKING DOORMAN!”
“Who’s that?” Glen asked.
“Ken’s wife, I suppose,” Jasper said.
“Can’t believe somebody was willing to marry that piece of shit.”
Glen waited a bit more and having run out of patience started banging on the door with all the strength his fist could command. By the time the woman’s curses were directed at him, the hinges struggled to hold the door in place.
“BANG YOUR HEAD, ASSHOLE!”
They heard footsteps approaching. The door opened a little, enough for the woman to show her ugly face, bags under her eyes, a hooked nose, and threads of greasy hair stuck to her forehead. The furious look on her face completed the look of the Wicked Witch of the West.
“Trick or treat!” Glen uttered with expressive, childish glee.
“Halloween’s next week, you motherfucker!” the woman snapped.
Glen propped the door with his foot a moment before she could slam it shut.
“Unfortunately, we can’t wait that long,” he said.
Glen pushed the door in so hard that it sent the woman sprawling on the hallway floor. There was nothing behind her to cushion the landing. Jasper heard a faint thud as she hit the back of her head, which provoked in him a mix of disgust and pity. The latter feeling was much stronger. He didn’t expect the situation to escalate so quickly and hesitated before following Glen inside. Looking through the thick dust floating in the air all around them, he saw mountains of dirty clothes piled up in every corner of the room.
The woman sat up, rubbing the back of her head.
“The hell is wrong with you, man?” she said with a hint of fright in her voice.
“We need to talk to your hubby,” Glen said, extending his hand and helping the woman up to her feet.
“Do I even know you?”
“Don’t worry. Ken sure does.”
Kenneth Blair was in the living room, peacefully snoring on an old couch, its foam rubber poking through the upholstery in a few spots. Ken’s gray-haired head rested on a giant, ragged pillow, which made his neck curve at a sharp angle. Yet his sleep seemed to be sweeter than ever.
With the tip of his shoe, Glen nudged him on the shoulder, leaving a small speck of dirt on the grayish-white t-shirt.
“Hey!” the woman protested. “What are you, a fucking caveman?”
“You wanna help me with this? Go ahead,” Glen said.
The woman kneeled by Kenneth and patted him lightly on his back.
“Wake up, wake up, honey,” she whispered into his ear.
No reaction.
“Wake up, you son of a bitch!” Glen grabbed Ken by the forearm and pulled him off the couch.
Lying on the floor, struggling to comprehend what had happened, Ken rubbed his eyes. His wife helped him sit up as gently as a mother waking up her child in the early morning. Ken stared blankly ahead, his eyes heavy. For a moment, it seemed like he was about to fall back asleep.
“Honey, honey.” The woman pulled him by his arm. “Somebody came to see you.”
He waved her off, muttering something to himself.
“BLAIR!” Glen roared. Everyone flinched. Ken blinked his eyes rapidly, doing his best to stay awake. “Had a lot of fun last night, didn’t you?”
Ken looked up and smiled, the kind of smile one would try to hide flatulence behind. Forced to acknowledge the presence of the unexpected guests, he got to his feet. Ken saw Jasper quite often, but people of Glen Harding’s rank never interacted with someone like him directly. He accepted that truth with an equal amount of gladness and insult. Yet Glen was right there in front of him, and his eyes were cold as metal. Ken knew what they wanted from him. He knew this meeting could not possibly end well. The least he could do was to stall for some time.
