The train was
always crowded, but aside from the noise the cars made over the tracks, it was
fairly quiet inside. For reasons that Carla didn’t understand, people never
spoke when they were inside. If there was any conversation at all, it was in
muted, hushed voices. She didn’t understand it, but then again there were a lot
of things in this city that didn’t make sense to her.
She grimaced,
and winced slightly at the shrieking noise the wheels of the train made on the
tracks. Carla stared at the floor, a slightly pained expression on her face,
remembering the nights work downtown at a show. Carla was a drug dealer for a
good portion of the underground music scene in Newark. You wouldn’t think so with her gothic styled clothes and her raven black
hair that from afar looked like it need a trim and a wash, but was actually
carefully groomed to just appear that way. She stood out in a crowd at first glance, but yet she
blended in at the same time. She took pride in that fact.
The punk
groups and electronic music DJs that play in clandestine clubs and warehouses
around the city are always looking for party favors, and Carla caters to them
all. Cocaine, amphetamines, ecstasy, experimental analogues of whatever you can
think of, you name it and she probably had it. Tonight had her delivering a
packet of 10 Red Bull XTC tablets to a glitch DJ that was playing in the
basement of an abandoned church on Victoria Avenue. It had been a Catholic
church once upon a time, before the rioters looted and burned a good portion of
it out. The city tried to rebuild part of it, but then just quit one day. Her
customer tonight called himself Boy of the something or other. Carla didn’t much care for
the music there, nor did she really care who the hell he was, her only interest
was the crisp $100 note tucked into her black bra for the scant 10 minutes of
work. She didn’t even have to deal with the DJ groping her tonight, which came
as somewhat of a shock to her. Most of them liked to do that.
She grimaced
again as the train slowed and finally stopped at the Military Park station,
opening its doors with the atonal bing
bong noise and disgorging the riders like vomit on a high school bathroom
floor. She rose and slid on her black Wayfarer clone sunglasses and stepped
onto the concrete with a click clack
of her high heeled boots. The stench of the city hit her like a ton of bricks.
Car exhaust, the probably toxic fumes from the river mingling with the
factories pouring smoke into the sky, the unwashed sweat and shit smell of the
homeless sleeping on the benches. Disgusting,
she thought to herself as she took a cigarette from the silver case in her bag,
wrapping her blood red lips around it and lighting it with a flick of a match.
She knew Erich liked his Zippo, but she preferred the smell and the taste of a
common match.
She had one
last stop to make before she headed home. Where was home? Pearl Street was
home, about 5 and a half blocks from the station, on the outside of the
Springfield-Belmont neighborhood, in an on again, off again, sometimes
abandoned, thrice renovated office building turned apartment building. In other
words, the place was a fucking mess. But the current landlord, a stubby little
Asian man with a bowl haircut, asked no questions as long as she was quiet and
paid her rent on time. Her last stop was at a small delicatessen about only about 2 blocks from the station.
She drew hard
on her cigarette as she left the station area and started the walk down to the
deli on Market Street. She wasn’t quite nervous, but not quite at ease either.
The area around the former Prudential Center was not a very good place. After a
terrorist’s bomb that detonated during a Stanley Cup game turned the
building and the surrounding parking lots into a fucking crater, well, the
entire area just collapsed into Shitsville. The city sounded a resounding fuck
that and just set up fences around the crater, and looked the other way. Technically
speaking though, nowhere in Newark was a nice place, so don’t fucking kid yourself.
The entire city was one big shithole, if you wanted the honest opinion. But it
was home, a far cry from where she was born in Illinois. Nothing there but corn
and cow shit, and the occasional meth lab in the cornfields.
She arrived
at the shop and saw her customer inside, the owner of the delicatessen,
standing at the counter. He was a greasy looking, extremely hairy Russian man
in terrible need of a shave. Carla wrinkled her nose in disgust as she entered
and inhaled the all too familiar smell of cooked cabbage, fresh bread, sweat, and
a little bit of ass smell mixed in. “Ah, Carla! Zdrastvooyte, kak pazhivayesh?” the man said with a smile. She gave
him a trademark grin and approached him. “Spaseeba
preekrasna.” She replied, still grinning. “You haff what I ordered, da?” the man inquired, wiping his dusty
hands on his apron. “Of course.” Carla replied, pulling a small, vacuum packed
foil package from her bag. “Three grams of the finest Uzbeki heroin,
100% purity. Absolutely no cut at all, tovarich.”
The man’s eyes seemed to gleam then, like starlight. He extended his hands greedily
toward the package, but Carla pulled it away and snapped her fingers twice to
grab his attention. “Payment first, tovarich,
then the goods. Da?” He reached into
a pocket of his apron and removed a
roll of hundred dollar bills and peeled off five of them, folding them once and
passing them to her over the counter. She counted them quickly and added it to
the other money inside her bra and patted it with a grin. “Da sveedaneeya, tovarich.” She said as she walked to the door and
stepped onto the sidewalk.
She lit
another cigarette as she stepped onto the sidewalk and took a long drag,
preparing herself for the walk home. She walked up Market Street to the corner,
and headed south down Broad Street. Pearl Street was about 4 blocks away or so.
She walked, taking the occasional drag on her cigarette, when she stopped suddenly.
Something felt…off. The hairs on the back of her neck were tingling. She got a
heavy, creepy vibe and a feeling in her gut that something was about to happen.
The city was relatively quiet for just after midnight. She didn’t hear any
gunshots, any screams, barely any insects. The
calm before the storm, she thought to herself. She kept walking until she
got to her apartment building. Suddenly, she heard a loud rumbling noise and
looked up to see two plumes of fire rise from a spot across the city in the West Ward like twin
pillars. Maybe a meth lab blown
sky high, she thought. No, that’s not it. Maybe Erich will know what it is,
he’s over in that area a lot. She thought. She pulled out her cell phone
and tried to call him three times in a row, with no answer. That wasn’t like
him. He always answered her. Now she was slightly worried. She decided to walk
to his apartment. It was only a short jaunt from her own building.
She arrived
at the parking deck down the street from his apartment building about 15 minutes later. The heavyset black woman in the attendant’s booth appeared to be asleep
or dead, judging from the complete lack of movement on her part. Carla didn’t
much care to investigate, she needed to see if Erich’s truck was there.
It wasn’t.
Now she
really was worried. An explosion in the West
Ward, Erich not answering his phone, and not even being home? Coincidence? No. This is just too
odd. She walked out of the parking garage and onto the sidewalk, deciding
she would go up to his apartment and wait. The sudden shrill scream of a police cruiser,
followed by several more, momentarily startled her and she coughed and gagged
on the last inhale of her cigarette as the line of vehicles sped by toward the
West Ward, sirens screaming and lights strobing in an epileptic’s nightmare.
“Get ahold of yourself bitch, you’re fine.” She said to herself out loud, as
she ground the cigarette out beneath her boot, and walked inside the building.
How does he bear these fucking stairs, she asked herself as she reached the
top, breathing slightly heavily. She wrinkled her nose again as the pervasive aroma
of the building entered her nostrils. She pulled a small bottle of perfume from
her bag and sprayed it liberally in the air around her. Much better, she thought. She pounded on Erich’s apartment door,
but no one answered. She pressed her ear to the door, but heard nothing. “Duh,
if his truck isn’t in the garage then he isn’t going to be able to answer the
door, dumb bitch…” she said out loud to herself. Best to just wait here for
him. She stepped to the window at the end of the hall and lit another cigarette,
drawing it deep into her lungs as she looked out towards the plumes of smoke
and fire from the West Ward, hearing more and more sirens move towards it.
She heard the
door at the bottom of the stairs open almost an hour and 7 cigarettes later, and shut with a heavy thud. She could
smell him before she heard him. The heavy smell of ash, the acrid stink of
smoke that invades everything he touches. And then, she knew who had caused the
incident in the West Ward. She heard his heavy boots scrape up the stairs, and
then they paused momentarily. They started climbing again, and stopped at the
top of the stairs. She heard the jingling of keys, and she turned. It was
Erich. He raised an eyebrow at her, half smirking. But then his face changed
when he noticed her expression. It was a mixture of surprise and anger. She
took a long drag from her cigarette and blew it out of her mouth in a long
plume.
“Boy, you
really fucked up now.”
