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The day is February 23rd 1993, a fact Crash only knows because after he phones it in he cuts a line with the edge of somebody’s desk calendar, heightened in point of unreality because they been checking the days off with big red Xs like in the fucking movies, so it lingers with him, that today is February 23rd, 1993. It’s a Tuesday. And it means no more and no less than any other Tuesday because he’s long since resigned himself to dying on a day like a Tuesday — Tuesdays, in the drug running business, convey no bureaucratic drudgery — and anyway, if he’s resigning himself to dying on today as a Tuesday it’s not because today is today or a Tuesday but because it’s a thing he does every morning when he wakes up, if he even went to sleep: resigns himself to dying that day.
So far, no dice, but he’s feeling good about this one.
And so Today’s the day, he said on the phone to Morales, Bring your guys in to-fucking-day because Miles ain’t hanging around a goddamn second longer. Hates Port Houston, so Miles says, reckons the place is crawling with narcs and besides never trust a stevedore, guy content to live among salt and rust without ever going out on the water evinces (Miles doesn’t use the word evinces) a real fucked-up inability to commit to something.
Today’s also the day because today somebody found him crashing in Ginger’s bed; Ginger wasn’t there, hence why he’s still alive, but he figures that ain’t gonna last, figures Ginger’ll drop him the second he becomes anything like a queer liability: Fucking fag’s got some sorta hard-on for me, knew there was something off about him. And then he’d get passed around, probably, bullet to the head being on the luckier end of the spectrum of results that would ensue, and none of it would look very good in Morales’s final report. Ginger wasn’t there and it was stupid of them both, stupider of Crash, since Ginger can be stupid ‘cause Ginger can generally do what he wants and you gotta be smarter when you got less room to maneuver. Ginger pulled him back down after fucking him, not even fucking him, exactly, something sentimental and quaintly like a reversal, getting Crash to straddle his hips and fuck himself, cowboy-style, like Ginger’s dope-hazed trailer was more the set of a porno than the place where he cut his meth and sharpened the edge of his Bowie knife; Ginger pulled him down and even sort of touched his side a little, clumsy and male, as he decayed out into sleep.
Crash didn’t sleep but Crash didn’t move, neither, until finally the coke wore off and the comedown was enough to drag him under someplace, though as a heroin addict it’s getting nigh impossible to sleep without heroin. And he woke up dulled and sick-feeling and jonesing for a hit and there was somebody watching him from the doorway, her arms folded over her chest and her old black eye gone yellowed and staring in some sort of accusation. Brandy, and Brandy was not a good person to find him in Ginger’s bed, because Brandy is generally known to warm Miles’s and all these last two years Miles has just been looking for an excuse.
Brandy was smoking. She said, You got coke?
Crash was naked as a jaybird but he got out of bed anyways. Brandy watched him with idle interest that turned less idle when he found a glassine package and tipped out a bright white line on Ginger’s little mirror kept special for that purpose. She knelt and cut it with her own credit card, which was so maltreated the numbers had rubbed off. Snorted it with somebody else’s dollar bill still lying there grimy and powdered with residue. Crash pulled pants over his hips and did the third line she cut, which threw everything into prismatic relief and it’s usually then, the opening glow of a morning hit, when he thinks about dying today. So he did.
He said, coughing into his wrist and using it to wipe his nose, What’re you doing here.
Hedging my bets, she said. She’s so skinny — tweaker-skinny, sagged collection of bones looking forty when really he has no idea how old she is-skinny — that her clavicles stick out like razors beneath a sweep of dried-out straw-brown hair. He fucked her once and he remembers little of it except how hard and unforgiving, almost bruising, her hips were under his hand. That he’s fucked her doesn’t amount to much, w/r/t how much danger he’s in now; neither of them can use it against each other because Miles is the sort whose jealousy makes no gender distinctions and he’d likely kill them both.
Fuck does that mean, he said.
Means somebody’s fixing to die out there today, ain’t that right? And if it’s Miles I gotta have shit like assurances.
Ginger don’t take hand-me-downs.
Oh, ‘cause you’re so bright and shiny and pretty like a silver dollar, huh? Like you’re so fucking new. I ain’t asking to be no goddamn concubine. Role seems plenty filled to me already.
Crash sniffed and looked away, skated coke-twitchy eyes over bottles and ashtrays and the blood-stained fucking banner. He said, Brandy–
Assurances, she said again. Where the fuck’s Ginger?
Don’t know. You’re the one woke me up.
She sneered. She’s got these big dark eyes that could be pretty and on occasion remind him of somebody, but there’s some perilous warning surface in his head, danger deep water, that stops him remembering who. She said, Ain’t gonna matter to me if you’re the one gets shot in the head today. So we’re clear.
Oh, we’re clear, Brandy. But Ginger ain’t here and he likes me, which you could use, probably, but not if it’s Miles who dies today. If Miles dies and Ginger gets to running shit then you and me, we switch places, you see it?
I see it. I see too that if Ginger dies then you’re totally and absolutely fucked, whether I tell them about you being his bitch or not, which I reckon I’m fixing to consider. Telling them. Telling Miles.
Fuck are you looking for? he said, biting it out, coke making him pissed. You want a concubine’s assurance? Fuck did you even get that word, anyways? Ain’t the kinda thing you get passed around a crackhouse.
Don’t only hang out in crackhouses. She’d gone sullen, pulling her knee up to her chest on the floor by the table. Hell, if somehow it’s you comes out on top in this–
It ain’t gonna be me.
But if it is. She looked up at him and by some magical trick of the light she made all the junkie cynicism melt out of her face, clawed back some feminine desperation the way a whore could put on a mask. We got a thing going, right? You and me, we understand each other.
So now you’re appealing to Ginger’s fag.
Did I fucking call you that?
Called me his bitch.
Which is what you are. Evidently. So I’m saying, figure we understand each other.
He thought about Morales, thought about diner eggs and state attorney and how this should go in a file someplace but won’t because he won’t tell anybody and even if he did they’d seal and erase it from the record and so–
And so. Brandy did another line and seemed to take it on trust that he would tell Ginger she needed looking after. Like she had him by the balls, which she does, if he doesn’t die today. Which he might. And now he’s in a shipping clerk’s office with the shipping clerk trussed up tight in the bathroom and he had to talk quiet on the phone to Morales because if the shipping clerk heard he was a UC then he’d rat to Miles, maybe, when Miles turns up to start this whole thing because the clerk thinks it would grant him favor because people do stupid shit in extremity, neglecting the fact that Crash might ostensibly be here to save him only Crash can’t blame him for doubting it, doubting his ability to save him, UC or not, because Crash can’t hardly save himself.
Sits grinding his teeth and checking his Desert Eagle, hates the repeating cycles coke puts him in, hates the waiting. When the clerk starts to shout again through the tape he kicks the door and the clerk shuts up. Today’s the day. Today’s the day and he does another line like that’s gonna make the repeating or the cycles any better, he’s started to get this thing where he gotta count out his sniffs after he snorts one, like there’s something amiss if he only gotta sniff twice, not three times, which is another reason he’s getting to hating the uppers, that they make him think about it. That they make him think about anything. When really he could be dissolving into fluid purple decay, could be sinking out beyond a place where he’s waiting for Ginger and Miles and Morales too, waiting for the other shoe to drop, waiting for the boot at his neck calling him to heel. Waiting–
Waiting.
When the door opens he points the gun at it and doesn’t lower it even when it’s Ginger, Ginger breathing hard with eyes rolling in his skull, grabbing for the back of Crash’s neck and pulling him close. Saying, Fuck, man, Miles done lost his fucking mind.
What? What’s going on?
What’s going on is there’s a rat, huh? Or else Miles done lost his mind and there ain’t a rat but he’s taking people out back and shooting them dead like horses anyway. You seen him? Talked to him?
Miles hates me.
Miles does fucking hate you. Fuck. Ginger passed a hand over his mouth and laughed, still had a hand at Crash’s nape. Well, gotta stick to the plan.
Stick to the– shit, Ginger, if we pull this off and I get put down anyway–
You ain’t getting put down. I got you, Crash, you remember that? I got you.
He did that same thing the night before, tugging Crash down harder onto his dick, thumb bruising into the side of his windpipe. Crash is in thirteen places at once, thirteen pieces, and today is the day. Today has to be the day. The whine of static in his ears and the way the coke hones the corners of his vision sharper than Ginger’s Bowie knife. The way if this ain’t the end of it then he’ll beg for Miles’s bullet, maybe. He’ll beg for it.
So what’re we doing? Crash manages to say, voice grinding out like an ashed cigarette. ‘Cause I got the guy in there for you–
See, this’s why you always the motherfucker for the job. Yeah. Okay. Come on now, we gotta–
And so they stick to the plan. No CCTV and no witnesses, shipping clerk salient only to the point of purpose, destined for a couple .50 slugs to the cranium in the end. Looks at them balefully as he enters the codes, Desert Eagle held close to his skull. Pistol-whipped into the dark. Ginger kisses Crash now he got no audience and Crash wonders if he can sense it too, the end of it all. If that’s where this strange grasping of affection arises, if Ginger is only counting down.
They open the door to Miles’s crew. Watch on the feeds as they find the tagged container, fanning out with informal but still brutal efficiency like how they used to on the narco raids Crash doesn’t think about anymore, all things being the same as other things, all everything going nowhere and doing nothing because he’s this, huh, Crash is just this. Counting down.
One of them signals to the camera. Crash and Ginger heft the clerk between them, groggy, leaving nothing to chance. Get him downstairs and then Miles’s smile is gleaming in the dark, meth-gappy teeth through a beard that’s dark and wiry as pubic hair. Running a hand over the crest of his head, pistol and ring touching the light — ring to match the nick caught in the round of Brandy’s eye socket — and pistol then held loose in their direction, the clerk or maybe Ginger or maybe Crash, shit, who fucking knows. Miles says, You’re gonna give us the code now.
The clerk trembles and looks at them all. Steps a little closer to Crash, textbook. I don’t–
Yeah, you do.
Miles got the kinda deep voice thrums through your sternum, bones. Same tenor as the rich bass of a V-twin engine. So the clerk nods and tells them the code. And Miles looks over the guy’s head at Ginger, not at Crash, and tells them, Fucking deal with this, huh, since you’re so attached at the hip like a pair of queers.
Miles–
Ginger, Miles returns, slow. Syrupy, that sweet octane putter, means a girl like Brandy’ll drop to her knees for him without even getting paid for it, not that Crash is neither.
Ginger twitches, bites at nothing. Grabs for the clerk’s shoulder and drags him back, the guy squawks, Crash wants to tell him scream, yeah, come on, fucking scream, you think they’re coming for you? You think they’re gonna fucking help? And he would, maybe Miles’d like it, Ginger certainly would, only it wouldn’t come out that way. Even four (five? nine?) years in, Crash don’t trust his voice. Just folds his fingers around his Desert Eagle and out, alleyway, waiting van, the clerk starts to cry. Shits himself, which ain’t an unfamiliar odor in the HIDTA. Ginger throws him against the van and the clerk says, Please don’t.
Fuck is this? You think you got a choice here? Oh, yeah, fucking run. Please do run. Crash here’ll run you down like a rabbit’s already fucking dead.
There’s extra security, shit y’all don’t– shit you don’t know about, I can help, you gotta keep me alive, I can–
Crash says, How long’re we gonna listen to this shit, fixing to get fucking bored here, Ginge, just do it.
Ginger turns eyes on him. Pupils like pits. Fuck did you say? You don’t wanna get your hands dirty? What, you wake up this morning and get fucking castrated?
Well, shit, if it matters to you that much, then I’ll do it.
He raises the Desert Eagle but Ginger too high is distractible and intense and he grabs Crash’s wrist so tight the bones grind together. Snarls, Don’t you forget what the fuck this is.
What’m I forgetting man. Tell me what I’m forgetting.
Crash can see it playing out behind his eyes: attached at the hip like a pair of queers. And the question, what does he know, how does he know, how much does he know? Crash figures Brandy ain’t told Miles just yet but they got all that to look forward to in their bright and rosy future coming up, the one approaching with the inevitability of the dawn, which ain’t inevitable at all ‘cause looking at it necessitates still having eyes with which to see. There’s a sorta relief in that.
You’re forgetting, Ginger says, slow and low, you’re forgetting that you’re in here only ‘cause I let you in here, and you gotta do shit for me. I don’t do shit for you. It’s you, Crash, and if I gotta go in there and tell Miles you won’t bend over and do what you’re told to do–
Fuck Miles.
Huh? Comes out like a threat.
Yeah. Fuck Miles. Since when’re you scared of him, huh? This is your fucking time. Your time, man. You got the gun. The maquiladores and the cartels, they got–
They got what. They got my name? Yeah, they got my name. I’m hot shit and I fucking know it, don’t gotta be telling me that.
Telling you, keep a cool fucking head.
Keep a cool fucking head, Ginger repeats, slow. On coke he’s jumpy but on ice he’s unpredictable, and Crash can read it, that today it’s just coke. He nods and doesn’t lose his shit. Turns back to the clerk raising his own gun and that’s when —
Back there, the air shatters into sound and Morales brings the goddamn fucking cavalry.
Meaning–
Meaning Ginger grabs Crash’s shoulder and drags him down on instinct that tastes like soft fucking candy, like want of a kind Crash maybe hadn’t reckoned for, like then there are shouts of Narcs and Fucking rat and Eat shit you fucking pigs, like then the clerk is seizing the opportunity that kind of rabbit that runs, flight not fight not freeze and the clerk takes flight and Ginger’s taking his gun outta his waistband but Crash got his in his hand, Ginger says Fucking get him, Crash, and Crash got an eye and an aim and levels the Desert Eagle and imagines it, the Desert Eagle’s kick, the clerk crumpling down to the ground in shoot of blood, copper, rust.
Doesn’t shoot.
Ginger shakes him by the shoulder and he doesn’t shoot and by the time he gets his gun out the clerk’s disappeared around the corner, wild eyes and shit-stained pants and everything, gone, and Ginger don’t got a moment to stare at him because then a shot peppers the wall over their heads and he’s shooting back and when one of them drops Crash catches Miles’s eyes, knowing, watching, adrenaline across the dark.
This is the day. Today.
And the narcs are shouting drop it, drop the gun, and they’re shooting back and Crash ain’t designed to be anything other than this so he runs down the alley after the clerk with his gun in his hand and when he rounds that corner the clerk’s gone which Crash wasn’t wanting for nothing else anyways, he tightens his grip on his gun and the clerk’s gone but then–
Dark leather and a skull, wings, IC Brotherhood skinhead turning to footsteps hefting his own gun and not putting it down though the guy knows Crash, knows him by name, face twists as he starts to say, If you’re the fucking rat– and Crash guns him down.
Looks over his shoulder. No one in sight but then there is, there’s a voice, Thought Ginger got more balls than that, getting his bitch to do his work for him–
Crash wheels and fires. Kills number two. Killing is easy but always he thinks of his first when he does it, skull of a deer in deep summer, skull of a tweaker in a den filled with fumes. Reek of Houston waterways muddy blue like being a child, like being a parent, things don’t change, all things stay the fucking same and here, the third gets the jump on him and he pulls the trigger but not before
not before
in time for, maybe, though as white-red pain spreads and cleaves him open, butter, turning yellow into bright pain of ash
as pain
as everything
and he’s panting on the ground, whited out but aware but nothing like the purple relief of a hit, what he wouldn’t give for a fucking hit, fingers grappling at his pulse Ginger he struggles can’t stand the thought of Ginger not Ginger not
“Cohle,” somebody is saying. Morales is saying. “Cohle, you hear me? Shit, stay fucking with me, you don’t get to die on me, you don’t get what I know you fucking want–”
S’fucking today, Crash says. End of it today.
“Who the fuck is that?”
“C’mon, Morales, we got bigger problems than some junkie bleeding out, you getting a guilt complex over–”
“That’s fucking Crash, you moron, that’s–”
“Cohle,” Morales says again. “Cohle, I told you, stay fucking with me, ordering you to stay with me. Fucking ordering you. Cohle–”
Somehow he gets to looking at a clinical ceiling. Somehow there’s a masked face in biocide blue and they’re working with their tubes and their wires, they’re introducing a sting, familiar, Morales says, “He’s a fucking junkie, you can’t be giving him–”
And they tell Morales to get out. And the sweet purple calls. And Crash looks to the ceiling and out, out towards the stars, and in the voids inbetween he ain’t Crash no more, he’s not Crash, he’s not anybody and for a moment, he thinks, for a moment he’s thinking for the last fucking time, and there’s no one to meet because there is nobody and no more today, no more time, not even this. Not even–
In March, Rust wakes up.