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Authors: Tom Piccirilli
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been using?”
“I suppose, but it didn’t seem like it to me.”
“You would know?”
“Probably.”
“You can’t tell who’s cooking or distributing. Whole families are involved now. The children act as couriers. They bathe the babies in one washtub and cook in another. They’re raised in the life, it’s normal and natural to them.”
“Sure.”
Finn tops it as the worst street drug to come into vogue the last couple decades. Fuckers are making it in their bathtubs, burning out their eyes with gas fumes, selling corrosive poison because they’re screwing up the proportions of acetone, methanol, and lye. Some of the cookers use paint thinner. It’s getting harder to get pseudoephedrine and iodine nowadays, so these parttime chemists who never finished high school are experimenting with anything that looks like it might have a similar chemical composition. Finn once made a bust on a lab where the teen idiots thought the red phosphorus they needed came off the heads of matches. They’d scraped thousands, not realizing that the phosphorus is on the striker pad. You could only guess at how many people they’d poisoned because they’d gone to the wrong website for instructions.
Still, it still feels odd that it happens here in the hills, the farmhouses, the backwoods. When Finn was a kid this was always his father’s idea of heaven. They’d vacation up around this way a couple times a year. His old man would talk about retirement and how he planned to live out his days fishing, hunting, playing the harmonica, whittling. Finn’s mother would say, You’ll slice your fingers off and I’ll be stuck cutting your steak for you for the rest of my life.
Roz opens the fridge and gets out a full bottle of Chardonnay, uncorks it, and pours two glasses. She sits beside him on the couch, pressing the cold wine lightly against his forearm. He takes the glass and sips from it, wishing he had a double shot of Jameson instead.
She places her hand on his leg and her fingers slide toward his inner thigh, coaxing. Sometimes this meansshe’s worried about him, sometimes it’s a subtle demand for sex. The first time she ever touched him like this was in a grease trap all-night diner, where she spoke in a husky, lust-laden voice and implored him to stop Ray.
She’ll never age for him. She’ll always be twenty-five, wearing the white nurse’s uniform that he first saw her in.
She always tells him when she dyes her hair, reading the colors off the boxes and saying each name with a kind of glee—
Light Golden Chestnut, Creamy Caramel Twist, Almond Rocca, Chocolate Cherry
—they make him hungry. But his image of her will never change. She remains a brunette with natural red highlights that shimmer like copper when she throws her head back. Her hair will always be cropped short. Even when his hands are working through cascades of it falling past her shoulders, he can see only the boyish haircut, parted on the left and feathered across her forehead.
Her smile is knowing and slightly coy. Her laughter discriminating but thick, and she usually raises the back of her hand to stifle the sound. Eyes expressive and full of interest. Lips glossy as if she used balm, but later he found out this is entirely natural.
He remembers how, as she checked Ray’s bandages and fed him ice chips, gentle but tough as she explained how he might lose the foot, Finn thought she’d be the perfect girl for Ray.
Roz likes to talk in bed. Not the fun, dirty stuff, just whatever’s on her mind while he’s trying to get his groove.
Somehow the opening maneuvers of their lovemaking cause her to consider the great questions of her life.He’ll be working away, doing his thing, seeking out her nipples with his tongue, pressing back her knees, slotting himself in, and in the middle of it she’ll suddenly ask something like, Do you think it’s wrong that I haven’t spoken to my father the last fifteen years?
It gets distracting. He loses his
“I suppose, but it didn’t seem like it to me.”
“You would know?”
“Probably.”
“You can’t tell who’s cooking or distributing. Whole families are involved now. The children act as couriers. They bathe the babies in one washtub and cook in another. They’re raised in the life, it’s normal and natural to them.”
“Sure.”
Finn tops it as the worst street drug to come into vogue the last couple decades. Fuckers are making it in their bathtubs, burning out their eyes with gas fumes, selling corrosive poison because they’re screwing up the proportions of acetone, methanol, and lye. Some of the cookers use paint thinner. It’s getting harder to get pseudoephedrine and iodine nowadays, so these parttime chemists who never finished high school are experimenting with anything that looks like it might have a similar chemical composition. Finn once made a bust on a lab where the teen idiots thought the red phosphorus they needed came off the heads of matches. They’d scraped thousands, not realizing that the phosphorus is on the striker pad. You could only guess at how many people they’d poisoned because they’d gone to the wrong website for instructions.
Still, it still feels odd that it happens here in the hills, the farmhouses, the backwoods. When Finn was a kid this was always his father’s idea of heaven. They’d vacation up around this way a couple times a year. His old man would talk about retirement and how he planned to live out his days fishing, hunting, playing the harmonica, whittling. Finn’s mother would say, You’ll slice your fingers off and I’ll be stuck cutting your steak for you for the rest of my life.
Roz opens the fridge and gets out a full bottle of Chardonnay, uncorks it, and pours two glasses. She sits beside him on the couch, pressing the cold wine lightly against his forearm. He takes the glass and sips from it, wishing he had a double shot of Jameson instead.
She places her hand on his leg and her fingers slide toward his inner thigh, coaxing. Sometimes this meansshe’s worried about him, sometimes it’s a subtle demand for sex. The first time she ever touched him like this was in a grease trap all-night diner, where she spoke in a husky, lust-laden voice and implored him to stop Ray.
She’ll never age for him. She’ll always be twenty-five, wearing the white nurse’s uniform that he first saw her in.
She always tells him when she dyes her hair, reading the colors off the boxes and saying each name with a kind of glee—
Light Golden Chestnut, Creamy Caramel Twist, Almond Rocca, Chocolate Cherry
—they make him hungry. But his image of her will never change. She remains a brunette with natural red highlights that shimmer like copper when she throws her head back. Her hair will always be cropped short. Even when his hands are working through cascades of it falling past her shoulders, he can see only the boyish haircut, parted on the left and feathered across her forehead.
Her smile is knowing and slightly coy. Her laughter discriminating but thick, and she usually raises the back of her hand to stifle the sound. Eyes expressive and full of interest. Lips glossy as if she used balm, but later he found out this is entirely natural.
He remembers how, as she checked Ray’s bandages and fed him ice chips, gentle but tough as she explained how he might lose the foot, Finn thought she’d be the perfect girl for Ray.
Roz likes to talk in bed. Not the fun, dirty stuff, just whatever’s on her mind while he’s trying to get his groove.
Somehow the opening maneuvers of their lovemaking cause her to consider the great questions of her life.He’ll be working away, doing his thing, seeking out her nipples with his tongue, pressing back her knees, slotting himself in, and in the middle of it she’ll suddenly ask something like, Do you think it’s wrong that I haven’t spoken to my father the last fifteen years?
It gets distracting. He loses his
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