“Wu dai zuo meng shi zher!” another yelled. “My bad dream is here!”
So much for the intimidation factor, Nolan thought, picking up a few key words. He quickly retreated to a dark, unoccupied corner, while Twitch began a long, rambling conversation with one of the stoned gunmen, a man with a crooked mouth. Nolan couldn’t hear much what they were saying, other than this man knew they were making their way to the Ba Xi and at first seemed to promise help. But by the time the dialogue ended, the gangster was holding up a bag of white powder and shaking it in front of Twitch’s nose.
All Nolan could think was that the powder was cocaine or heroin, and the guy wanted them to buy or sell it.
But Twitch told him differently.
“They want us to snort some of this stuff,” he said, joining Nolan in the corner. “It’s ketamine. Also known as Chinese LSD. It’s intended as a gift, and is a lot stronger than opium.”
But Nolan shook his head furiously. His expression said it all: no fucking way.
Twitch grabbed him by the arm. “We got no choice, Major. If we don’t play nice with these guys, if we don’t prove that we are like them in every way, we’ll be in big trouble. Believe me, he was quite clear on that point.”
Nolan could only glare back at him. He wanted to scream at Twitch that they were already in big trouble. They were stuck in the process of trying to get close to Sunny Hi, yet they no longer had the poison to use on him. So, there was no point in trying to get closer. But if they tried to drop out now, Sunny Hi’s men would definitely smell a rat and, yes—they would wind up as fish food, as would the guys back on the boat.
It was a classic catch-22.
The goon with the bag poured out a line of ketamine on a nearby table. With the gunmen looking on, Twitch accepted a rolled-up dollar bill, bent down and snorted the line. The gunmen cheered. They seemed to like Twitch.
Then the gunman handed the rolled-up bill to Nolan and poured another line on the table. Nolan had no choice. He bent down and snorted it as well.
The gunmen merely grunted in satisfaction for him, the monster. They went back to smoking their glass pipes. Meanwhile, Twitch and Nolan slid down the side of the apartment wall, landing in awkward sitting positions, to await the drug’s reaction.
Time went by. A few seconds. A few minutes. A few hours. Nolan couldn’t tell. Everything was spinning, and nothing was making sense.
At one point, one of the gunmen approached him and asked in crude English, “Do you pee regularly?”
Nolan tried to ignore him, but the man persisted.
“How about that one eye you got,” the man said. “You got good vision in it? How’s your blood sugar these days?”
Finally, Nolan just pushed him away and the man retreated back to the clutch of gunmen smoking their opium pipes.
The next thing Nolan clearly remembered was looking up at the drug den’s slowly rotating ceiling fan and watching it dissolve into a swirl of colors.
Reds. Blues. Greens. Yellows. Going round and round.
The colors grew in intensity, taking on the brightness of the sun. Nolan could see the moon and the stars, too, a little galaxy floating above his head. And then, poof! It was gone.
He was sitting across from a shuttered window; he could see his reflection perfectly. The puffed-up face. The strangely shaped eyes. The missing tooth. The vaguely yellow skin. That line of infected sutures along his neck. What was really going on here? Who the hell was he? Did he live here? Was he from here?
Orders or not, he had to ask someone, anyone. He opened his mouth and began to speak … but nothing would come out.
He tried again.
Still nothing.
He went to touch his lips, his throat, his tongue. But his fingers only passed through empty space. He felt nothing.
His spirits crashed. He began to get dizzy again. Someone sitting to his left tapped him on the shoulder and passed him a cigarette. Though he didn’t smoke, Nolan accepted it, took a long drag and handed it back.
“Thanks, mon,” the person said from behind the cloud of smoke.
The voice sounded familiar. Nolan waved away the smoke and was astonished to see Charles Black, the Muy Capaz pirate leader,