Squall

chapter five

RONNIE AND DALE REACHED the cottage at 7:30, the new day coming on blue and cold as Dale parked the Ram in the yard and got out to find the key. The road in from the highway had been plowed and sanded, only the winding cottage road, a distance of about three miles, requiring 4-wheel drive and a little care.

The cottage itself stood on the last piece of private property on this stretch of sideroad, perched on the tip of a narrow peninsula where the road dead-ended, the nearest neighbor six miles back, a summer dwelling Dale could see was vacant as they passed it on the way in.

He found the key where Uncle Frank had hidden it since Dale was a kid, in the flared nostril of a grim figure on a thirty-foot totem pole Frank had picked up at a yard sale someplace.

He got the front door open and Ronnie pushed past him saying, "I'm going to bed." She snatched the truck keys out of his hand and took the gym bag and the briefcase upstairs with her. Dale said, "Make yourself at home," and listened to her—boot heels stabbing the wood floors up there, the squeak of bed springs and then silence—before getting his coat and boots off, turning up the heat and taking a stroll through the place.

Being here, amidst Uncle Frank's weird antler furniture and hunting trophies, made him feel like a kid again. After his mother died and his father buckled down for the serious drinking, Dale had come up here as often as he could. Uncle Frank had always treated him like a prince, teaching him to fish, letting him take the power boat out by himself and telling him stories about how crime didn't pay and he didn't have to turn out like his brother if he didn't want to. What Uncle Frank never understood was that in those days Dale wanted nothing more. Nobody messed with Ed, that was the thing. Ed always got what he wanted, one way or another, and Ed never felt fear, something Dale had lived with since his mother died, a withered stick figure in a prison hospital bed, eaten alive by cancer while still in her thirties.

Fucking fear.

In the kitchen Dale checked the fridge: a half-used jar of raspberry jam in there, six cans of beer and not much else. He helped himself to one of the beers and sat on the couch facing the big picture window overlooking the lake. Nothing moving out there in the cold, not even a breeze. The sun was out now, but muted by a gray sky shading to near black in the south.

The beer tasted flat and Dale set it aside, little comfort there. His demons were awake now, capering and hungry as hell.

He listened into the remote silence of the place, the starkness of it serving only to amplify his need. He glanced at the ceiling, knowing that Ronnie was in the room directly above him, probably already sound asleep. Bitter, he wondered what it said about her feelings for him that she took that bag of dope upstairs with her. The money, too, for that matter. What was he going to do, take off with it and leave her stranded here?

She doesn't want you getting high, the demon said. Bitch probably filled her own snoot with it before passing out on your uncle's Posture-Pedic.

He said, "Slippery bitch," and headed for the stairwell in his socks. He knew every creak in the floorboards and risers and made the trip to the master bedroom without a sound. She'd pulled the door shut but hadn't latched it, and it opened quietly on well-oiled hinges. In the dim, Dale saw her lying on her side with her back to the curtained window, her breathing slow and raspy with sleep.

The gym bag was on the foot of the bed next to the briefcase. He was almost out the door with it when Ronnie said, "Put it back," without moving and Dale said, "Just a taste, Ronnie. That's all. To quiet the voices."

He heard her say, "Asshole," as he pulled the door shut and set the latch.

Back on the couch, he rested the gym bag on his lap and unzipped it, removing one of the kilo bags of heroin. It occurred to him as he hefted it that a few good snorts would get him there, but not like blasting it would—and remembered Uncle Frank was diabetic.

He found the insulin syringes in a kitchen drawer, thirteen of them left in a box of fifty, as seductive as anything he'd ever seen in their crisp, sterile wrappers. He scooped them up, got a teaspoon from the cutlery drawer, a wad of cotton from an aspirin bottle and found a book of matches by the fireplace.

There was a moment of hesitation, a distant voice telling him not to blow his clean time...then he punched a hole in the kilo bag with his pocket knife and measured out a hit with the tip of the blade.

A prickly sweat broke out in his armpits as he cooked the hit then drew it up through the cotton into the slender syringe. His mouth was bone dry now and his breath came hot and fast.

He held the syringe up to the light, teasing out the last few bubbles from the amber fluid, warm and amniotic. That same distant voice bade him reconsider, but he was committed now.

The prick of the needle was glassy, inordinately painful, but the feeling passed quickly and he watched with detached fascination as a tiny eruption of blood rose to meet the falling plunger.