American Elsewhere - By Robert Jackson Bennett Page 0,102

knowing things. So I’ll let you be. For now.” She picks Parson back up. Once more he seems to weigh no more than a feather to her. Without a word, she begins walking toward the open door.

“Where are you taking him?” asks Mona.

“To my home, where it’s safer,” says Mrs. Benjamin over her shoulder.

“Why’s it safe there but not here?”

“Because I’ll be there, silly,” says Mrs. Benjamin. “But maybe nowhere’s safe anymore. If I were you, dear—and I’m not, but if I were—I would stay inside for the rest of the night. I know you probably have something important to do, but I assure you, it can wait until morning. Who knows what’s out here with us? Even I can’t say.” And she totters across the parking lot with the limp body in her arms until she passes out of the light of the neon sign, and disappears.

CHAPTER TWENTY-FOUR

A bump for David Dord isn’t a bump for your average cocaine user, if such a thing could even be said to exist. He does not sniff at a tiny dot of coke balanced on the rim of a novelty spoon, or haltingly insufflate a fragile line running along the edge of a bowie knife. No, Dord prefers his cocaine to be administered in heaps, hillocks, veritable mountains, tumbling, tumbling piles and pyramids and pylons of cocaine. He wants each bump to be so significant that he has trouble actually getting it into his nostril, like a man wrestling a big sandwich into his mouth. He wants it to inadvertently coat his upper lip and maybe his chin and cheeks; he wants there to be accidents, damn it, needless, wasteful accidents, immense avalanches of cocaine lost en route between the bag and his sinus lining. For David Dord does not use or abuse cocaine (and the difference between the two when they refer to an illegal, highly addictive drug is mystifying to Dord); no, he applies it liberally and generously, not only to his mucous membranes and from there the tangle of tissues that form his nervous system, but also to his face, neck, shoulders, arms, fingers, and, if he’s entertaining someone, maybe even his junk.

This is because Dord holds to one rule and one rule only: If you’ve got it, flaunt it. And you had better motherfucking believe Dord has it. Dord has it big-time. He’s been sitting on a pile of gold ever since things started picking up at the Roadhouse. Ever since they got that visitor from Wink, in fact.

“You’re getting it all over the goddamn seats,” says Zimmerman. He glances at Dord disapprovingly as he pilots his Chevy truck around another M. C. Escher–like bend in the road.

“So?” says Dord. He takes another pinch from the bag (which never leaves his vest pocket), places it in the general vicinity of his nose, and takes a big waft. He can feel that peculiar banana perfume start broiling away in the bottom front of his brain. Soon it will suffuse each lobe and tickle his spine, making everything dance and jitter to an engaging rhythm.

“You do know that we’re doing some pretty fucking high-pressure shit here, right, Dave?” asks Zimmerman.

“I been made aware.”

“So it probably isn’t too advisable to be coked to the gills for this, is what I’m saying.”

“I know what you’re saying. I’d generally argue in the opposite direction, though.”

“And why is that?”

Dord stares into the highway ahead of them. The headlights make pools of light on the asphalt. Sometimes it feels as if they are chasing the pools rather than following the road, like they are about to leap up off the earth and dive into that glittering stream of tarred rock and white streaks. “You been in to see Norris lately?” asks Dord.

Zimmerman shifts uncomfortably in the driver’s seat. “No.”

“Well. That’s why.”

“Norris is why you’re getting fucked up?”

“Sort of, sure.” Dord takes a massive pinch of coke—costing upwards of seventy bucks, he’d guess—and rubs it on his teeth. Then he laughs, amused by his own decadence. He’s worked for dealers and movers before, but never on this level. Bolan is the prime conduit of a variety of interesting substances for most of the American Southwest, and apparently he’s able to fund this little venture solely through the goodwill of the man from Wink, that spooky fuck in the panama hat.

Or at least the revenue his heroin brings in. But as things have heated up in Wink (and especially since Norris staggered into the Roadhouse, shrieking like