Thirteen

Lola drove back and forth, back and forth, on a grid of extra-wide streets and extra-long blocks that managed to be both simple and bewildering at once, their names an odd jumble of numbers and directions—streets with North and South in their names, even though they ran east and west? Two sets of numbers and directions designating a single building? Really?—changing altogether if the street in question took the slightest bend.

It didn’t matter. She wasn’t looking for a specific address, but a kind of neighborhood. Jan had described Salt Lake as the squeakiest-clean city in the country. At the time, Lola accused her of exaggeration, and of the added insult of falling back on cliché. Now she feared Jan had been right. She’d yet to see a scrap of trash on the streets and the sidewalks were nearly empty of pedestrians, let alone the kind she sought: a disreputable, shifty-eyed sort. The kind of person who might sell pills.

Her hands slipped on the steering wheel. Lola told herself her sweaty palms had everything to do with wandering in a new place, and in no way were a sign of incipient, let alone full-blown, addiction. She could quit the pills. Would quit, in fact, once she was safe at home again. But here, dealing with the stress of a strange city, it would be foolish not to seek a little solace. She shoved aside memories of her time in Kabul, where she’d managed without pills in a place where seemingly every other person carried an AK-47 and every few weeks brought the news of another reporter’s death. She passed a convention center—no people at all outside—took a turn, and then another. And let a long breath escape.

A park stretched before her, filling one of Salt Lake’s super-size blocks, at first glance so green and inviting as to explain the crowds.

A longer look told a different story. The throngs were male, poorly dressed, and lacking in purpose—at least the sort of purpose typically found in parks. No one jogged or even speed-walked on the paths. No one played tennis, volleyball, or basketball, despite the inviting courts. The people lounging on the grass could be mistaken for picnickers until one noticed the preponderance of brown paper bags with bottles poking from them and the utter absence of food. Every city, even Kabul with its burgeoning population of heroin addicts, had someplace where the down-and-out congregated. Lola found it reassuring that Salt Lake, too, grappled with normalcy.

She parked the rental car and waded in. The trick, she thought as she shook her head at repeated requests for change—holding her breath against the fug of unwashed bodies, alcohol fumes, and even the occasional whiff of weed—would be to avoid the rummies and find the pill-poppers, and then hope that the latter were dealers, too.

So far, except for her guilt-inducing foray into Alice’s medicine cabinet, her stash had been acquired legally. Lola had no idea how to go about buying drugs on the street. She strode through the park, trying to look like she knew what she was doing. The older guys were probably alcoholics and therefore useless to her. But the older guys predominated. She heard the sound of wheels on concrete and whipped around, not fast enough to catch the skateboarder as he zoomed past. Damn. He might have been a prospect.

Lola cast an eye skyward, assessing how much time she had before dark. Not enough. She had handled her fair share of sketchy situations, but thought that even in Utah, a park full of vagrants after nightfall probably wasn’t the safest place. On the other hand, the thought of spending a night alone and teeth-grindingly awake in the hotel room was unbearable. She’d make one more circuit.

This time, nobody bothered hitting her up for change. Maybe they thought she was a tourist from one of the nearby upscale hotels, oblivious to her surroundings as she logged some mandatory steps on her fitness tracker before erasing the day’s gains in a steakhouse. A few blocks away, high on the hill that marked the city center, lights glowed golden within the office buildings. Spotlights around the temple cast bright beams against a cobalt sky.

She quickened her pace. Maybe it was time to give up on the park. Buy a bottle of something on the way home, although she didn’t enjoy getting drunk and hated a hangover. Besides, she was pretty sure she remembered Jan saying that even though Salt Lake had relaxed its straitlaced ways mightily in order to accommodate the 2002 Winter Olympics, buying alcohol could still be a tricky proposition. In the deepening gloom, Lola couldn’t quite see the golden statue of the Angel Moroni—thanks to Google, she knew his name—that topped the temple, but she glowered in his direction. “This is all your fault,” she muttered. In Baltimore, where she’d lived for so many years, it would have taken her all of about five minutes to find pills, despite her inexperience in procuring them.

A voice floated her way.

“Need a hit?

The youth’s face shone thin and pale beneath a black watch cap. A hank of sandy hair had escaped, flopping over his forehead.

“Well?” The boy shuffled his feet.

Lola glanced around. No one near them. Still, she stepped off the path and under a tree. Bad move, maybe. In the dark, no one could see their transaction. Nor could anyone see if he decided to rob her. She edged back toward the path, close enough to leap into the light if necessary, and tried to sound tough. “What you got?”

“Pills, a little weed.” His voice shook.

He was as least as nervous as she. Not necessarily a good sign. Jumpy people were prone to panicked violence. The quicker she completed this transaction, the better. “Oxycontin?”

The watch cap moved from side to side. “Vikes.”

“Vibes?”

“Vikings, Vees, Vitamin V.”

Lola shook her head. So much for her knowledgeable pose.

“Come on. Vicodin. That work for you?”

Lola remembered a lazy dreaminess from a long-ago wisdom tooth extraction, not the knockout punch of Oxy but pleasant nonetheless. “It’ll have to. How much?”

“Uh, five bucks apiece.”

Lola had stashed a hundred dollars in her pocket before venturing into the park. She hadn’t expected the pills to be so cheap. “How many you got?”

The youth backed farther into the shadows. “How much you looking for?”

She calculated. What if she didn’t like it? She didn’t want to be stuck with a bunch of useless pills. On the other hand, having a substantial stash would obviate the need to raid Auntie Lena’s medicine cabinet again when she got home, erasing the crawly feeling of guilt.

“Twenty.”

“Holy shit. That’s all I’ve got. I mean, sure. Here.” The boy shoved a baggie toward her. Lola reached for it.

“Hey. Aren’t you forgetting something?” He rubbed the fingers of his free hand together.

Lola extracted five twenties from her pocket. He snatched them away at least as eagerly as she grabbed the bag from his hand.