Read Online In Plain Sight by Barbara Block - Free Book Online

pills.
    I bent down and picked them up and thought about when I’d been taking stuff like this. What had Murphy called them? Candy for the mind. The capsules felt smooth. I let them run through my fingers. They plinked as they rained on the cardboard box below my hand. “Try this,” he’d urge, and I’d take whatever he offered. In those days I’d wanted to share everything with him. Sometimes we’d take ’ludes, other times we’d take uppers, lid poppers we used to call them. Murphy knew a Hell’s Angel out in Yonkers who mixed the stuff up in his kitchen. Once a month we’d hop onto Murphy’s Harley and go out and buy some. I liked the rush. As an added benefit for the next three or four days my apartment would be spotless. Mostly, though, Murphy and I stuck to the basics—grass and hash. We’d smoked before we ate, before we went out, before we went to bed together. We’d had some good times. It was when I decided we should go respectable that I think our troubles began. I’d started losing control and that scared me. I figured I’d taken the drug thing as far as it could go. It was time to move on. Too bad Murphy hadn’t agreed. I sighed and took a deep breath.
    The smell of mildew and trash filled my nostrils. I banished the past from my mind and concentrated on the present. It was so quiet that I could hear myself exhaling. I leaned forward and listened. For about thirty seconds I heard nothing; then I heard footsteps up ahead of me. A muffled giggle. And another one. It didn’t sound as if Estrella and her friend were that far away.
    I tiptoed toward the sounds trying to avoid the garbage on the floor, but it was impossible. There was too much of it. Styrofoam and newspaper crackled and rustled underneath my feet. I cursed and continued on. The entrance to the next room was partially blocked by a table. I slipped between it and the door frame and went inside. It was darker than the room I’d been in, and I realized that the farther I went into the building, the darker it was going to get since there weren’t any windows and the electricity had been shut off years ago.
    In the dim light I could see another desk against the far wall. A stained mattress was perched on top of it. Someone had spray painted a giant anarchy sign on the wall. The other wall was riddled with bullet holes. Seeing them made me wonder about the wisdom of continuing on. I couldn’t hear the girls anymore, and by now I’d made enough noise so they had to know I was in the building. This place was like a warren. If they wanted to hide, there was no way I could find them—especially since I didn’t have a flashlight—and I didn’t want to go tromping around and accidentally stumble on one of the building’s residents. Call it brilliance, call it intuition, but something told me this would be a bad thing to do.
    I cupped my hands. “Estrella!” I yelled, hoping I could say something that would make her come out. “Your aunt is frantic. She just wants to talk to you.” I waited for a response. There was none. I tried again. “She wants to make sure you’re all right. Why don’t you come talk to me? Maybe we can work something out.” Nothing. Not that I had really expected otherwise. Estrella didn’t strike me as the kind of girl who put a lot of stock in conversation.
    By now the Colony Plaza was beginning to get to me. It was too quiet, too big, too empty, and too dark. I decided to do one more room, then call it quits and go back to the store and phone Garriques. I had too many other things to do to spend the rest of the day playing hide-and-seek with a high school runaway.
    The third room was even dimmer than the other two had been. I hesitated for a moment before I stepped inside. It was so dark the only thing I could see was a few blurry shapes along the wall. I reached in my pocket, took out my lighter,