DRASTIC (Book 4 of the Soundcrush Series)

Chapter 20: Drummer Boys Take Too Much

The song --The Old Apartment by Barenaked Ladies. So good, and so appropriate....

Bodie

After leaving Darius, it doesn't take me long to track down Daemon.

It takes longer to walk to the trap than it does to ferret out his whereabouts from an OG who isn't all that swift upstairs.

The business that called Daemon away from his very first occurrence (according to Pat) of being responsible for Darius?

A single mom in the neighborhood came home to find her house robbed, so he went over to assess the situation.

Prez gives me a ride over there, and I abandon all pride and shoot up on the way. It's just a quarter dose. It doesn't give me the rush, or the haze after. It's just to steady me.

But the problem?

It's an extra dose to my normal clockwork addiction.

It's just a one time thing, I swear.

It's been a fucking night, ya know?

I tell Prez to drop me off and go. I ring the bell at this girl's place—I've been told her name is Delilah.

Daemon comes to the door, shirtless, in barely zipped jeans.

I can't tell you how fucking happy that makes me.

If Delilah is his new Dime, maybe he's not really trying to get back with Marley.

He crosses his muscled arms and looks me up and down, grimacing at me.

"Damn, you forgot the rules, Bodie. Green means go. X for sex. Pills for chills. Speed for need. But Horse? Makes a corpse."

I smile bitterly. Daemon was always big on his dealers not becoming junkies. Unfortunately, I have never been able to muster the self-discipline he always showed.

Until now. I may be a junkie, but I'm a junkie with a plan, and I'm gonna execute it. I've decided to channel Varrick. The best way to manage this situation?  From the inside. Yeah, I'm gonna be a gangster turned rockstar turned gangster.

I don't really have much choice. Daemon's got all the leverage. To get it back, I have to go double agent.

"Speaking of corpses, I nearly was one, tonight." I pull my arm across my chest, so he can see the bullet grazing.

"That's what you get, coming down to the hood to buy smack," he grins. "You come to make a complaint about neighborhood security? Cause that looks like a warning shot to me.You just pulled me out of the best pussy I've had since Jasmine. For nothin'."

It's a good thing smack has me incapable of overreacting right now. I want to punch him-repeatedly-for even saying Marley's name like that.

He has no right to call her that. He took the innocent girl who wore jasmine body lotion and twisted her until she didn't even know herself. He mind-fucked her. He abused her. He got her sent to prison—pregnant and alone and scared.

She doesn't wear jasmine scent anymore, because he burned that sweet girl down.

Marley rose from her ashes. Marley is a strong woman, a good mother, maybe the smartest and most sensible person I know, but there's not a lot of the girl I knew and loved left there. Except the jasmine tattoo he branded on her.

Yet, there's not much I can do about that, right now. I'm too high to beat the shit out of him for what he did. I take one swing, and I'll be the one laying on the floor.