Shards Read online

  And so I would take these needles to my sister’s house, where my nieces were two and three years old and into everything. I wasn’t careful—they easily could have found the needles. One time I washed a pair of jeans that had a packet of dope in the pocket. I didn’t care that my sister could have found it or that Ella could have chewed on it. I was just pissed that I might have lost the dope.

  Paranoid that Carol would see the needle marks on my arms, I began wearing long-sleeved blouses over long underwear shirts. I wore rubber bands at the wrists of the long underwear so that the shirts would not ride up. Going shopping was now out of the question, so I made sure that my stomachaches persisted. Soon Carol was driving to all the Walgreens and CVSs all over town looking for the right antacids for me. I know she was worried about me, but to this day she swears that drugs did not enter her mind.

  All during this time I was leading a double life with my sister and her family—sneaking into my room to smoke meth during my niece’s third birthday party, using fifty dollars to buy her a present and then resenting her because I would rather have spent that money on dope.

  Not just a double life, but a triple life, on the phone with the department and with Keawe, telling them I was doing better, getting stronger, that the cancer wasn’t that bad.

  “When are you coming home?” Keawe would ask eagerly.

  “Soon,” I would say. “Soon.”

  “Do you want me to come to Washington?” he would ask. “Do you need me there?”

  We both knew I couldn’t say yes because there was no way he could come. But it made me feel better that he asked.

  And with MPD. Bryant called me and told me they had to move on the warrant, and I was so high I didn’t care that I wasn’t there. I had been convincing Kal via long-distance phone calls to trust Bryant and work with him, and he finally agreed he would.

  The warrant resulted in the recovery of a couple of pounds of cocaine from the dealer’s house, nothing major. Then, in a twist, Bryant was able flip the dealer, resulting in the seizure of a storage container holding over ten pounds each of cocaine and meth. A huge seizure, and then the DEA took over.

  I received all sorts of praise and respect from my guys in vice and became the division’s newest hotshot. Too bad I was so strung out I didn’t care.

  So Keawe and all of Maui thought I was dying of cancer, my sister thought I had stomach problems, and the only person who knew anything resembling the truth was a cross-dressing fundamentalist Christian tweaker I had known all of a week.

  I probably would have shot up with Evan until it killed him or me or both of us, but I started running out of money for dope and Evan didn’t have any. His parents paid him to volunteer at their church, and that’s where he got the little dope money he had. He would also rob people, dealers especially. He prostituted himself out, not really caring whether he got paid or not. He just wanted some man to love him. It’s rare that anyone who uses meth, homo- or heterosexual, doesn’t turn to prostitution. You reach the point of desperation and you don’t feel the emotions that you would usually feel in that situation. If you’re doing heroin or cocaine, you’re still feeling something. You’ll feel fear or shame. Not with meth. Also, meth hits the same part of the brain that gets hit with an orgasm, only times a thousand. You’re so sexual. Taking that next step to prostitute yourself really isn’t hard and most people in the meth world don’t condemn you for it. Everybody does it.

  The last night I saw Evan, I stole eighty dollars from my sister’s ATM and we went to pick up some new dope. Back at his place, he shot me up. Right away I knew something was wrong. I felt a gurgling in my throat that reminded me of critically injured people I had seen on patrol who would aspirate. Evan’s eyes widened in panic. I knew I had overdosed.

  “Oh God, Alli, are you all right?” Evan took me in his arms and lay me down on the bed.

  I couldn’t speak. I couldn’t move. Obviously he wasn’t going to take me to the ER. Instead, I lay on his bed, terrified that I was about to die. For six hours I tried to stop my heart from exploding. Evan lay with me, stroking my hair and holding me.

  “I love you,” he said over and over again. “I love you so much, you’re going to be all right. I’m going to stay with you. I’m going to take care of you.” He stayed with me all night and never used the meth himself. I was sure I was going to die, but by dawn it was over.

  Evan took me downstairs and helped me into the car.

  “I’m glad you’re all right, Alli,” he said, hugging me.

  Later I thought about his parents, sleeping downstairs while a girl was overdosing on their second floor.

  I never saw Evan again after that night. Though I would like to say it was because of what happened, that I was horrified or ashamed or something, it was really because of money. I had run out, and he didn’t have any. Now that I couldn’t use him for dope, I didn’t need him. He called and called my cell phone that day, leaving messages, asking me if I was all right, and I ignored them all. Finally he called my sister’s house so I had to talk to him. I essentially broke up with him over the phone and that was the end of our beautiful tweaker bullshit love story.

  I’m sure Evan’s dead by now. He had already surrendered to the drug.

  And I was about to.

  All it took was meeting my last dealer.

  15

  After the overdose, I swore I would never pick up again, but later that night I was back on Craigslist.

  I found a guy who would be willing to give me dope if I had sex with him, and I went down to the Seattle airport area to meet him at a seedy hotel. He looked like a normal family man—forties, glasses, thinning hair. He actually looked kind of tired—and that comforted me somehow. I also worried that he might be a cop.

  We smoked meth together and had sex. It was easy and fast. It didn’t make me feel like a prostitute. I didn’t cry after. I didn’t even think about it. Later, yes, but right then meth was suppressing all my normal human responses. All I cared about was getting dope.

  He gave me a very tiny amount so that I would have to meet with him again right away. After that first night, he wouldn’t pay for a hotel. He lived an hour south of the airport, and my sister’s house was an hour north of the airport, so we would meet in a warehouse parking lot and have sex in his car. I preferred it that way anyway. In vice, we liked to arrange stings or drug buys out in the open, where you could run. Once you were in a residence, there was too much opportunity for trouble.

  This man was pretty nice, but he was hard to get ahold of, and he never gave me very much dope.

  The next man I met with, same thing: he looked like a normal family man, not a tweaker or a drug addict. He was kind of pudgy, midforties, really nice car. I gave that guy a blowjob and then he gave me a baggie. Meth has all these nicknames. It’s called crystal, Tina, glass, or shards, and when I was chatting with him online we were using the code word glass. So afterward, when he gave me this baggie, he said, “Here’s your glass,” and I saw that it was a bag of actual glass shards.

  “Get the hell out of my car, you cunt,” he said.

  That time I did break down, but I can’t tell you if it was because I felt like a real prostitute or because I didn’t get the dope.

  I met with a couple of other different guys, always in parking lots, did the same thing, and was able to get a tiny bit of dope. I had unprotected sex with these men, every single one of them. I didn’t think about AIDS or STDs or Keawe. I had gone from being a cop who wiped down her police belt with sanitizer every night to an ice whore.

  Then I began to have trouble finding guys with dope, but I met a guy who was willing to pay me for sex. I met with him in a parking lot and gave him a blowjob. The deal was for sex, $250 for sex, but we stopped after a blowjob. He paid me anyway and after that he called me constantly, wanting to meet again for sex. But I had already gotten my money and was looking for dope, so I never called that guy back or saw him again.

  I had been gone from Mau
i for two weeks when Wilkes called. I had run out of vacation time and was eating into my sick days. He asked me for a doctor’s note.

  “Sure,” I said.

  “We should have gotten this from your doctor here, but if you’re seeing someone in Seattle now that’s good.”

  “I’ll get it right away,” I said, “and bring it back with me.”

  “Can you fax it?” Wilkes asked. “We need it right away. I’m sure it’s the last thing you have time for now, but—” He sounded uncomfortable and I let him talk for a bit before I said, “Okay, no problem. I’ll fax it to you.”

  The whole time we were talking I was on the computer looking up random Washington doctors online. When I found an oncologist with a good website, I cut and pasted his logo onto a Microsoft Word document to create the doctor’s note. I printed it out and forged the doctor’s signature before faxing it to Wilkes.

  • • •

  Money for sex was easy to get, but dope was harder. I was always on the Internet, trawling, hoping to find one steady supplier.

  Finally, I found him.

  I met him on Craigslist after all the other men.

  Earlier that particular night I had gone to meet a different guy, but he didn’t have any dope so I was headed back to my sister’s house with the money I got for a blowjob. A man called and I agreed to meet him. He said his name was Craig. I had been emailing with so many guys, I had no idea which one he was, what he looked like, if he was a cop, a murderer, anything. And I didn’t care. All I wanted was dope, he said he had it, and I knew what I had to do to get it.

  We met for the first time in his red truck in a valley near my sister’s house. The truck reeked of nicotine but was otherwise clean and well cared for. He looked about the same as the other guys—white, bald, about forty, nondescript. But big. And strong. He wasn’t thin and weak like most meth addicts. He told me he worked as a specialist carpenter, and that’s how he kept his muscles. At first I thought he might be a cop or a fed, but when he smoked meth with me I knew he was neither.

  We had fast sex in his truck. I spent maybe twenty minutes with him.

  “I don’t have much dope on me,” he said, “but if you come back to the house we can fix that.”

  “Thanks,” I said. “I’m good.” I knew better than to go to his house.

  He had great dope, and back at my sister’s house I was craving more of it. I emailed him, setting it up to meet him at his house that night. I knew by his mannerisms, the quality of meth, and how he had it packaged that he was a dealer. And a dealer was what I wanted.

  That night, I drove to the address he gave me in Everett. I knew it was stupid going to a dealer’s house, but at that point I didn’t care. Or mostly didn’t care. I cared enough to write his name and address on a small piece of paper and leave it in my sister’s house. I guess I thought if something really bad happened, if she didn’t hear from me right away, she would search my room and find the address and know where to find me.

  Outwardly, the dealer’s house was just another suburban split-level. Well kept, with good landscaping, on a quiet cul-de-sac in a nice neighborhood. I surveyed the neighborhood before I went in. It was the perfect location for a drug dealer. Around the back of the house were some woods and a lake as opposed to another house or street—any kind of surveillance would have been very, very difficult for law enforcement. For him, monitoring the street traffic would be easy, and if he ever had to run, he could go on foot through the wooded area behind the house.

  I was already sensing that he was highly intelligent for a dealer, especially for one who used meth. Usually dealers don’t touch the stuff because it interferes too much with running the business.

  He opened the door as I came up the walk.

  “Hi, Alli,” he said, as if I were an old friend coming for a visit. “You found the house okay?”

  “Sure.” I nodded. “Good directions.”

  He led me inside. The place was clean and well decorated and definitely didn’t look like any drug house I had ever busted. Little did I know the horror of that house.

  In the living room there was a leather couch and two easy chairs. A guy about the dealer’s age sat in one of the chairs. On the couch was a girl, maybe a year or two younger than I was.

  “Joe and Tiffany,” he said. “This is Alli.” It sounded like he was introducing me as his girlfriend.

  “Hi,” I said, starting to sit down in the second easy chair. Everything felt so weird, like a goddamn party.

  “Why don’t you sit next to Tiffany,” the dealer said.

  Tiffany moved her feet so that there was room for me.

  Okay, I thought, he’s a CI and these are cops. But that couldn’t be right. We never arranged a sting in someone’s house.

  Then a pipe was produced, and I started to relax. The dealer let me have one hit, then motioned for me to follow him upstairs.

  I counted four bedrooms upstairs, and he led me to his at the end of the hallway. A tabby cat wafted by us. I love animals, but I prefer dogs to cats. Still, I bent to pet the cat.

  “What’s her name?” I asked, but he didn’t answer.

  I figured he was either a married man whose family was out of town or a pretty decent-size dealer. What man needs a four-bedroom home? It definitely didn’t seem like a bachelor pad.

  I fucked him to get the dope and then we smoked together. He gave me as much as I wanted, which I loved.

  Toward dawn, I said, “I’ve got to get going.”

  “I don’t want you to leave,” he said. “Stay here with me.”

  “I’d like to, but I can’t. I have to get back to my sister’s before she wakes up.”

  “Stay.”

  I shook my head. “I’ll come back, though,” I promised. “I’ll come back tonight.”

  He gave me enough dope to smoke during the day, and I made it home before anyone was up. My phone rang as soon as I walked into the house.

  “Shit,” I said, trying to silence it. It was him.

  “I miss you,” he said. “I want to make sure you’re coming back.”

  “I said I’d be there tonight,” I said, annoyed. He was starting to remind me of one of the other guys I had met online. I didn’t need somebody who wanted companionship, a girlfriend. I needed dope.

  “What time?”

  “I don’t know. Late. Eleven or twelve.”

  “Alli?” my sister said, flipping on a light in the dark kitchen where I stood. “Who is that? Why are you on the phone so early?”

  “I gotta go,” I told the dealer, and then turned to Carol. “It’s the Everett PD,” I told her. “There’s a big vice case they’ve got going down this week. It’s going to be most nights, I’m sorry to say.”

  “Do you have to?” Carol asked. “We barely get to visit with you.”

  “It’s an awesome opportunity,” I said. “The chief has me in line for sergeant, you know. This is exactly the kind of stuff I need to do to show him that I can make it.” Carol was looking at me oddly, and for about the thousandth time I thought, She knows; she’s about to tell me she knows. “Of course if it’s inconvenient,” I said, “they’d be happy to put me up in a motel.”

  It worked. She bought it. “No, don’t do that,” she said. “You know you’re always welcome here. I just—miss you, that’s all. It’s like you’re here and you’re not here.” She moved to hug me, something I tried to avoid. She could see how thin I was. I didn’t need her to feel it too.

  I smoked all day at Carol’s, and when I got to the dealer’s that night, it was wonderful. I liked his dope, and unlike the other guys, he gave me all I wanted.

  He seemed to want me to be his girlfriend, so I acted the part. It was easy enough to do, and if it got me more dope, great.

  I carried on for four or five nights like this. Sometimes Joe and Tiffany were at his house when I went over, sometimes just Tiffany, sometimes different people. They all seemed to be drug friends, nothing more. Tiffany was about my age but liv
ed with her parents, on probation after failing a drug test. She was always asking me for money.

  As the nights went on, I learned a little about his business. He didn’t own the house, so nothing of his could be seized if he ever got busted. He was a long-term renter, and he had the owners over now and again to show them the renovations he did. He kept them happy, and they didn’t suspect a thing. He never sold from the house, though sometimes he had people over to negotiate. He would leave at odd times to “do a deal.” He only had one bank account and kept very little money in it. I didn’t know where he kept the cash. I couldn’t figure out where he kept all the dope, but he was very careful to never keep more than an ounce in the house. He kept all the paraphernalia separated and in different areas of the house where it would blend in. He stored the dollar baggies in the shop where he had little parts and screws that the baggies could be used for. He was even smart enough to have Joe keep his scales for him. He didn’t have a large number of lighters or anything that could be used against him legally. He did keep pipes in the house, but only two, and they were hidden in the best hidden-compartment drawer I have ever seen. That drawer impressed me, and that was hard to do. No one walking into his house would know it was a drug house.

  All the time I was in Washington, I was on the phone with Bryant constantly. Soon it became clear I was going to have to get back to Maui. I had been gone almost a month. I had to send Wilkes another doctor’s note, and when I set out to forge it, I couldn’t remember the name of the doctor I had used before. I also couldn’t remember what type of cancer I had told everyone I had, cervical or ovarian, so I made up a new one to add to the mix. Lymphoma.

  I knew it was only a matter of time before they figured it all out.

  My last night with the dealer, I told him I was leaving in the morning. He was acting so possessive that I had no intention of getting back in touch with him. I was going to have to dump him and find a new supplier.

  He barely let me go that night, and I was glad to get back to Carol’s.