They drove through Fairmont Park, which had all the trappings of a middle-class neighbourhood. Large houses stood in big plots at the side of wide, tree-lined streets, but here and there were the gnawing rust patches of poverty. Gaunt men and women with hungry eyes gathered outside apartment blocks, repossession notices were pasted to the doors of a few homes, children in filthy clothes played in yards.
‘Synthetics,’ Rasul said, nodding at a couple of emaciated men who couldn’t have been more than thirty.
They were sitting on the porch of a large house, rubbing something on their gums, and when they looked up at the passing motorcade, Pearce saw their spaced-out eyes. Their young faces were wrinkled and covered in sores and bruises. Unemployment had rocketed around the world, and with it a desperation to escape.
‘Sometimes I disagree with my father,’ Rasul remarked. ‘There’s a lot of profit in these drugs. But then I see what they do to people, to neighbourhoods. This one is already turning. In Washington state, more people die from synthetic opioids than from car accidents. And the death toll hides the true cost, the destruction of lives. Of cities.’
Pearce thought it odd to hear a smuggler denigrating other drug dealers, but in any field of human endeavour there was a moral pecking order that made some believe they had the right to judge others. ‘Supplied by the people we’re going to see?’ he asked.
Rasul nodded. ‘The East Hill Mob manufacture and distribute synthetics. Small scale, but enough to feed the parts of the city they control. Which is why their sudden shift to a more natural product –’ Pearce guessed he was talking about heroin – ‘didn’t go unnoticed. No one starts trying to shift that kind of volume from nowhere, unless they’ve ripped off someone else’s stash.’
‘What kind of opposition are we expecting?’ Pearce asked.
‘That’s what we’re going to find out,’ Rasul replied.
Four blocks later, the convoy stopped on Fauntleroy Way beside two apartment blocks. Tucked beside them was a small tumbledown single-storey house. The yellow paint that covered the aluminium siding was chipped and flaking, and the dusty front yard was covered by scattered toys, scraps of rusty metal and garbage. A couple of women spilled out of the little house and staggered across the porch to a two-seater swing that might have once looked charming, but was now bone-white with neglect and age. The women were in their underwear, revealing skeletal frames covered in bruises and sores. One pulled her lank hair away from her face and sparked a lighter that ignited the contents of a glass pipe. She inhaled deeply and her eyes rolled back momentarily before she came to. With her mind somewhere else, she handed the pipe to her ponytailed friend, who repeated the process.
‘In there,’ Rasul said, pointing at the house, ‘you’ll find a man called Otter. He’s a corner boy who shifts product for the East Hill Mob. He’ll know where they’ve got the merchandise. Make him tell you.’
‘Alone?’ Pearce asked.
‘Consider it your initiation,’ Rasul replied.
If Pearce had been commanding these men, he too would have sent his most expendable asset into this potentially volatile location. If that asset was lost, the cost to the organization would be minimal. Pearce had assessed the situation correctly; he was cannon fodder.
He stepped out of the car, slipped the pistol into the waistband of his jeans and lifted his leather jacket over the butt to conceal it. He crossed the pavement and walked through the litter-strewn front yard towards the porch.
‘Hey, friend,’ the woman with the ponytail said. ‘You got any dough?’
‘I’m looking for Otter,’ Pearce replied.
‘Otter can’t give you what we can,’ she said, stroking her companion’s arm.
Pearce guessed she was trying to be suggestive, but her companion was completely out of it; she keeled at her touch, and hung limp over the arm of the swing.
‘Is he inside?’ Pearce asked.
‘Twenty bucks for an answer,’ she slurred.
Pearce ignored her and walked inside. He had seen some hellish places, but this house ranked as one of the worst. Everything of value had been stripped; light fittings, switches, sockets, pipes, even patches of plasterboard and flooring. Rot was eating the outer structure and Pearce could see bare earth through the holes in the floor. He peered into the first room, which was in a similar state of dilapidation, and saw a figure huddled beneath a blanket, head turned towards a television that had been smashed. A breeze came through a broken window and Pearce could hear one of the women on the porch humming an unrecognizable tune. Something in the room was giving off a terrible stench, and Pearce noticed a bucket in the far corner. He didn’t need to see inside to know it was a makeshift toilet. He’d had to take morphine a couple of times to deal with the pain of injury; he knew drugs didn’t stop people being human, they just stopped them caring. He imagined the snatched moments of sobriety experienced by the inhabitants of this house, when they’d look around in horror at what their lives had become. What better way to escape the rotten squalor than the carefree bliss of narcotics? And so their descent became inevitable and eternal.
Pearce pressed on, navigating a section where all but one floorboard had been removed. There was a two-foot drop to the house’s outer aluminium shell, which was rotten in places.
‘It’s to stop the kids,’ a voice said, and Pearce looked up to see a man sitting on a stool in what might once have been a kitchen.
About six feet four, the man wore a WBC contender T-shirt and a pair of torn denim shorts. Pearce thought his remark was some kind of joke until he saw a toddler totter across the filthy hallway on the other side of the single-plank bridge. The boy’s long blond hair was matted, and he had the blank eyes of a child who’d lost hope. He wore a pair of Spider-Man briefs, which were yellowed and foul, and his ribs stuck out like hateful question marks.
‘Don’t mind him,’ the man said, unmoved by the child’s condition. ‘He knows better than to cross the bridge. Learn ’em the hard way, that’s what my pops always said.’
Pearce made it across the solitary plank and peered inside the room the toddler had entered. There were four other children, all wearing nothing but underwear, ranging from about one to about seven years old. They all had the same hollow expressions and were as filthy as the blond toddler.
‘Oh my god,’ Leila said through the concealed earpiece.
‘They yours?’ Pearce asked, trying to control his rising anger.
‘Uh-huh.’ The man nodded.
Pearce was close enough now to see his glazed eyes and smell the sour stench of cooked heroin.
‘Different moms, but I sired ’em,’ the man said. ‘Why? Ya wanna buy one?’
Pearce fixed the man with a furious stare that must have penetrated his stupor.
‘Just kidding, man. I love those younglings.’
Pearce had been abandoned by his parents, and couldn’t remember the love of a family, so he found it difficult to see children so casually neglected by blood. He swallowed his anger and remembered what he was there for. ‘You Otter?’ he asked.
The man stiffened slightly, as Pearce entered the room. All the units were gone. The walls were cracked and bare and there were no appliances, just a paper bag on the floor, the contents of which had spilled from a split in its side. There were tins of tuna and packets of ramen noodles. Pearce couldn’t see any taps or basins and when he looked at the table next to the man, he saw a half pack of noodles. They’d been eaten dry.
‘You a cop?’ the man asked.
‘Word is some people you work for came by some horse,’ Pearce said, looking pointedly at the burned spoon, foil and detritus that gave away what the man had been up to. ‘Word is you’re moving it for them.’
‘Moving?’ the man said. ‘Me? I can hardly move myself. Moving?’ he scoffed. ‘Get the blow, smoke the blow. Sellin’ don’t come into it.’
‘Are you Otter?’ Pearce asked again.
‘I’m Otter,’ another voice said, and Pearce turned to see a stocky man in a Chicago Bulls vest and boxer shorts, standing in the doorway of the room the toddler had emerged from. Otter held a huge revolver – it looked like a .44 – and had it trained on Pearce.