Cigarettes & Mirrors - Chapter Eight

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.”