Read Online Hidden River (Five Star Paperback) by Adrian McKinty - Free Book Online Page B

my personal file. Bastard. What does he know? Used me. Buck McConnell used me. Transferred me to narcotics because they knew I’d been arrogant. Curious. Knew I’d pursue the leads wherever they went. So stupid. Messed up. They were smarter than me. Thank God for ketch, ketch saved my life….
    The railway lines. The beach. The heroin. Thank God.
    Everything in my coat pocket. Lunch box. Dry. I find my spot under the tiny cliff. Out of the wind, out of the rain. Open the lunch box. Ketch in a cellophane bag. Needles and syringe. New needles as important as supply. Can’t share needle, ever. AIDS, hepatitis B and C. Death. Distilled water. Cotton balls. Some people use citric acid to make it dissolve better. Basic safety. New needle, alcohol swab, cotton filter. Spoon. Heroin so pure now some smoke it. Smoke it off aluminum foil. Eejits. Get brain damage, lung cancer. Injection safe. Safe as houses. Spoon, water, heroin, lighter under spoon. It boils. Ketch, beautiful. Check it’s a vein. Draw it in. Draw it in….
    The beach.
    The beach is not a beach. The sea is not a sea. The clouds are not clouds.
    The beach is a slick of seaweed, jetsam, garbage, and shopping carts embedded in the sand like abstract sculpture. The sea, a tongue of lough. The clouds, oil burn-off from the smokestacks at the power station, two chimneys that fuck any residual hope of loveliness in the Irish landscape.
    Belfast just across the water, its yellow cranes, its ferry terminus, its back-to-backs, its poison of estates. Everything dissolves. The rain stops. The sky clears. The world ceases to spin. Time slows. The power station vanishes into the sludge of history. The sky quiet. Birds. Gray seals. Sun. It’s Ireland before people came. Before that Viking bark, that pine coffin of this morning, before the coracle. An Eden. A meditation of hill and forest. I stand there—an anachronism. A dead girl walks past me, in bare feet along the golden shore.
    “Hey, you’re a Christian really. What was all that Hindu stuff you were always going on about?”
    “My heritage.”
    “You’re really beautiful.”
    “Death doth improve my face.”
    “No, it never needed improving. But it is true, you are dead.”
    “I am and you’re what, now, a junkie?”
    “Why does no one understand? I’m not a junkie, you have to really try to become a junkie. I’m not a functioning heroin addict, because I’m not an addict.”
    “Sounds like you have that all rehearsed.”
    “Did you come here to give me a hard time?”
    “I didn’t come here at all.”
    “Oh yeah.”
    “It’s just you and me on the boat.”
    “I remember.”
    “I know.”
    Your lips, your hair, oh, Victoria. I was terrified. My first time ever. Your breasts and those dark eyes. Jesus. And it was something you wanted too. You pushed away the silk spinnaker sail and made room. You kissed me and the saliva caught the light as you sat up and climbed on top of me. And you said, “This is position twenty-one from the Kama Sutra” in an Indian princess accent. A joke against yourself, the exotic Oriental. And I thought it was the funniest thing ever and laughed and relaxed and we screwed for an hour and a half. I remember. Truth, is that what heroin brings?
    “No,” she says.
    But that was truth. Her words fade. Gone into the smoke in the air above the river. And in every gasp I can’t help but breathe in ash, little particles of sandalwood and cherrywood and her. The wind changes its direction and the rain comes down and I open my mouth and it’s cold, like the coldness in my heart.
    * * *
    Things happen to fuck you up. Little things. You get chased from a boat and you accidentally forget your heroin. It forces you to go to the pub quiz but you get the crucial question wrong and have to steal more heroin from your dealer—Spider. Spider realizes it could only be you that stole from him and wants to get you. And how to get me? Tell the peelers that an English copper has been seen