Chapter 6

"He wasn't sure why he hadn't left already."

Photo by Nicolas Ladino Silva on Unsplash

Danny led Heath and Nora down a hallway into a very large living room with a high ceiling that had been neatly painted dark crimson and sat down in a wing chair upholstered in purple crushed velvet. He crossed one leg over the other and picked up a meerschaum pipe that had been left on the yard-sale antique sideboard. He gestured expansively at a low couch. “Please, have a seat,” he said, smiling broadly.

Heath sat. He hadn’t needed confirmation that Danny was a pimp, or that Nora was his bottom girl, or that he, Heath, was being set up, but one look at the décor would have been enough if he had. He wondered if they had made a conscious choice to decorate their home like a brothel, as a way of advertising their lifestyle, or if the fact that anyone could see they lived in a whorehouse simply hadn’t occurred to them.

He didn’t know for certain whether or not Nora understood what she was, or whether money was involved in her arrangement with Danny in an explicit way, but one glance at those ridiculous Halloween tooth extensions had told him that Danny was dangerous, although not in the way he obviously thought he was. After five minutes in Danny’s presence, Heath was certain that he had GHB or Rohypnol in his medicine cabinet or in some tacky lockbox full of gear and recreational pills and powders, that there was an unregistered pistol in the house but not close to hand, that Danny had probably not managed to have his criminal record (almost certainly for either intimate partner violence or assault and battery, but possibly also sexual misconduct as a juvenile) sealed or expunged, and that if he somehow had, it was only due to the diligent work of a lawyer of a type Heath associated more with Dominic than either of his hosts. Danny and Nora were enterprising, but as sharks, they were amateur hour.

He looked around the room, patiently letting Danny assess his face and body language, idly wondering if the guy was going to make a move. The only silver lining to dealing with shitheads like Danny, Heath thought, was you slept like a baby afterwards if you had to go hands-on, regardless of what you did to them.

He wasn’t sure why he hadn’t left already. He supposed everyone had self-destructive tendencies, and the trick was to indulge them in ways that were relatively low-risk and only hurt either oneself or people who genuinely deserved it. There wasn’t a doubt in his mind that Danny deserved it, but he wasn’t sure he was going to be the instrument of the guy’s karma. Danny hadn’t actually done anything to him, Heath wasn’t up to picking a fight, and a proposition, if that’s all that was coming, didn’t constitute cause.

Nora leaned her head on his shoulder and put her hand on his knee. Heath kissed her on the forehead, mostly because he knew it would annoy Danny. He hoped she wouldn’t get involved if he had to deal with her man, but he’d hit the “record” button on the micro MP3 recorder in his shirt pocket before he’d walked in, and if he had to put her down for an involuntary nap to keep her from sticking him with a kitchen knife, he’d do it as gently as he could and not worry too much about potential legal repercussions.

Danny leaned over and rummaged in a drawer. He came up with a disposable lighter and a baggie of something bright green. “Aaah,” he said, packing the pipe, and then, in a self-consciously seductive, avuncular voice that gave Heath the creeps: “Do you kids want to get high?”

Nora’s face lit up. Her expression looked to Heath in that moment like that of a very young girl. Too young.

“Yes, Danny,” she said demurely, and took the pipe from him. She lit it, took a big hit, held it, and exhaled without coughing. She offered Heath the meerschaum. “Want me to light it?” she said flirtatiously.

Heath shook his head. “I can’t,” he said. “I’m just off benzos. I gotta stay clean for a while longer.”

Danny laughed. “C’mon, man. It’s not peer pressure, it’s just your turn.”

Heath smiled and shook his head slightly. “Pass. But you go ahead.”

A flash of irritation passed over Danny’s face, and then it was gone. He smiled, or at least he showed Heath his teeth. He leaned forward and picked a wooden puzzle box off the table and manipulated the lid until it sprang open. He took a second baggie, a lighter, and a simpler wooden pipe out of it and began packing dried flower into the pipe.

“Secret stash, huh?” Heath said with a friendly smile.

Danny frowned. “The good stuff,” he said seriously, and applied the lighter to the pipe.

Heath watched with interest. He could see this going one of two ways. Danny might be smoking CBD flower, which would look and smell like cannabis, but was basically non-intoxicating. That would be the right move if he expected Heath to cave and take a hit from the meerschaum down the line; Heath would be high and Danny wouldn’t.

Less likely, but still a possibility, was that he might be smoking CBD or cannabis laced with PCP or a PCP analogue, which would make him super-strong, psychotically aggressive, and invulnerable to pain. Heath was pretty sure it was the first. Danny obviously owned this house, and he’d clearly put a lot of work into it; that argued against his using angel dust for a competitive advantage. On the other hand, it was hard to tell how stupid, horny, and/or invested in “winning” he was, and Heath hadn’t ruled it out entirely. He sat back and put his arm around Nora. He supposed he’d find out which it was in a few minutes.

There was a soft footfall behind him. Danny smiled. “Hey, Ronnie,” he said, looking past Heath.

Heath turned in his seat. Lisa Carver stood in the doorway. Heath couldn’t read her expression, in part because she had her eyes on her owner. She wore tight leather pants over engineer boots and a loose black silk button-up shirt, and there was a black leather collar around her neck with little silver block capital letters at intervals across the front that spelled out the word “SWITCH.” Optimist though he was, the fact that her finger wasn’t too tight against the trigger of the stainless steel .38 Special with the shrouded hammer she was casually pointing at his head was the only positive aspect Heath could see to the situation.