drove on.
“Spill it, man.”
“All right,” he said. “Soon as I walk in the bar, I can see everyone working the place is wired. I strike up a conversation with the barkeep and ask if he remembers Kim Lazarus, used to work there. I’m a good friend of hers from D.C. Not only does he remember her, she was in town last week. I steer the conversation to coke, and how Kim told me I could look him up if I wanted to cop. He gets suspicious now and I ease off. But I get him back on the track when I tell him I’m used to spending one-forty, one-fifty for a gram.” He looked at me and smiled.
“Keep going,” I said.
“This guy can’t resist the high dollar. He offers to sell me a half for seventy. I gotta try it first, I say. We go into the john, he turns me on. Let me tell you, this shit is good. I know you’ve found Jesus and all that, but if this was the old days, you would concur on this, Jim.”
“Get to the meat, Johnny.”
“We go back out to the bar. I tell him this freeze is so serious, I’ve got to cop more. How can I get my hands on some quantity?”
“Kim and the boys, right?”
He nodded. “Let me tell it, man. The bartender, he’s juiced now, he’s my buddy. He tells me that it was my friend Kim that sold him the shit.”
“Where are they?”
“This bartender was too small-time to take on quantities. There was another guy, though, a surf rat by the name of Charlie Fiora who used to work with Kim at Casa Grande. He’s got his own gig now down the coast, a little bar called the Wall. He’s the one that Kim and Eddie and your boy Broda went to see to sell their supply to.”
“Where?” I said.
“Wrightsville Beach.” He took a swig and looked at me out of the corner of his eye.
I slapped the steering wheel as we pulled into the lot of the Arizona. “Good job, man.”
“I know,” he said.
In our room I laid out maps and ferry schedules. McGinnes tapped out some lines on the mirror he had removed from the wall.
“You want a blast?”
“No,” I said. But like any former cokehead, I really did.
He did a couple that had the width of fingers. “Let’s go out and have a few.”
“Not tonight. We’ve got a shitload of miles to travel in the morning.”
“Wrightsville’s down there.”
“You want to go, go ahead. My keys are on the dresser.”
“I think I will,” he said. “For a short one.”
“Thanks for tonight, Johnny.”
“No sweat,” he said casually. “See you in the A.M.” He took my keys off the dresser and twirled them on his finger. He was coughing as he bolted out the door.
TWENTY-ONE
CROSSING WHALEBONE JUNCTION, we passed the sign for Cape Hatteras National Seashore and blew down Route 12 very early the next morning. The sun sprayed over the dunes to our left, highlighting sea oats and myrtle.
We rolled our windows down as the dawn chill faded, and sipped our coffee from Styrofoam cups. I had a neo-country tape playing in the deck—Golden Palominos, Dwight Yoakam, T Bone Burnett, and Costello, with some Merle Haggard and Johnny Cash thrown in for tradition.
McGinnes was singing along to what he knew, and laughed at my voice as I joined him on the occasional odd chorus. The lines around his eyes crinkled out from behind his aviators.
“This is beautiful!” he said emotionally, his arm straight out the window, his palm catching the wind.
“‘Everything Is Beautiful,’” I said.
“Ray Stevens, right? Worst Top Ten song ever recorded.”
“Right about Ray Stevens. Wrong about the honors. They go to ‘Daddy, Don’t You Walk So Fast’ by Wayne Newton. That’s the worst song to crack the Top Ten.”
“You mean, ‘Daddy, Don’t You Hump So Fast,’ don’t you?”
“Whatever you say, Johnny.”
Soon we were on the Herbert C. Bonner Bridge over the Oregon Inlet. Scores of trawlers and charter boats were heading out into the ocean. On the other side of the bridge lay the Pea Island Refuge, where flocks of snow geese and shorebirds flew by at regular intervals. Egrets laced the wetlands to our right.
We drove through the nearly empty beachtowns of Rodanthe, Waves, and Salvo, then cruised a long stretch along the coast to Avon and beyond. Near Buxton, McGinnes had me stop at a windsurfing mecca on the soundside called Canadian Hole. He peed on the grass next to my