“That’s over now,” Boyle replied in the smoky baritone that Clay knew well. “I’ve quit the scene. Deidre too.”
“You said so before. And you came back.”
“I know, believe me. But it’s real this time. I’m clean forever.”
Karney gave the bitterest of grins. “Which leaves me where? Before you, I was risking my life to sell to the dregs of the earth. With you, I’m respectable. I have a condo in Santa Monica. My girlfriend’s a Russian model. You can’t go back to meth skanks after you’ve had classy snatch like that. So how about me? You didn’t even think about me, did you?”
“The clients I’ve gotten you through the years—you couldn’t hang on to any?”
“You know the biz. I lose my star and the whole solar system pushes away.”
“Rooster, wait outside,” Boyle told him, and though he was calm, his body language suggested the hospitality was over. “Let my girl get dressed, then we’ll discuss this.”
“I’m not going anywhere.”
“Yes. You are.” Boyle took an angry step toward the smaller man, meaning to grab his shirt or neck or hair and drag him out the rude way. And that was when Karney lifted his gun—the very same one, Clay noticed, that was being held on him right now.
Deidre gasped and pulled Boyle back. “I’ll shoot you if I have to, Roc,” Rooster said.
“Listen, baby, he’s right.” Deidre gripped Boyle by the shoulders, speaking in that high, fierce voice that Clay still heard in his nightmares. “He deserves something. Some, you know, severance pay.”
“Right,” Rocco said, picking the idea up. “My safe’s in the library, second floor, behind my Mysteries of the Unknown books. Take all the cash you find. While we’re at it, I’ve still got that ’68 Firebird you dig. Why don’t I sign her over? You can go anywhere you want.”
“Where would I go?” Karney wondered. “I’m from motherfucking Bardstown. I came here to live my dreams. The drug slinging was supposed to be temporary, till I got a band going. I want to be a star. I want to be you. But you can’t give that to me.”
“No,” Deidre told him. “Only a lot of talent and luck can do that.”
Karney cocked his head at Boyle. “Really? That how you made it big, Roc? You said your prayers, took your vitamins, and won the rock-n-roll lottery? Or did you never tell this little squeaky-voiced cunt how you got your start?”
Gun or not, Boyle had heard enough. You didn’t need to see his face to know; it was there in the flex of his back muscles, lifting like an angry dog’s hide. “Call her that again, and I’ll make you uglier than you are.”
“You really are so square now,” Karney laughed.
“If you don’t want money, what are you after? The names and numbers of every record exec in town?”
“Oh, it’s not about what I want, Rocco. That will come later.”
From his black hoodie, Karney produced a small leather bag—what looked like a basic shaving kit, but what Mo Marquez, or any junkie past or present, would have recognized in a heartbeat. Deidre’s own buttocks went taut at the sight of it. “Forget it!” she shouted.
“You can tell the world you’ve changed,” Karney went on, “maybe you even believe it yourself. But we’re always the same person inside, no matter how hard we fight.”
He tossed the bag at Boyle.
“I spent the first twenty-six years of my life believing that was true,” Boyle said. “It’s bullshit though. People can change. They do change. None of us are doomed to a fate.”
Karney turned his contemptuous gaze on Deidre. “He’s acting this way for you, you know?” His stare wandered her body. “You’re easy on the eyes, no argument. But this is Rocco-fucking-Boyle. I’ve watched gorgeous women fall to their knees to kiss his feet. He could be with any of them, or all of them. The only reason he’s true to you is because he’s felt everything in life but L-O-V-E.” Karney swung the gun from Boyle’s stomach to Deidre’s head. “But if he doesn’t open my spike-bag, I’m going to change him a lot faster than you ever could.”
Don’t do it! Clay almost shouted at the screen. It’s a fake gun, don’t give in!
Except it would have been as useless as yelling at the teenage girl in the slasher movie, the plot preordained, the scene shot long ago, and there was simply no altering what was about to happen.
Boyle stroked Deidre’s jet-black hair, comforting her, and at the same time, encouraging her to sit. Positioning himself between her and the gun, Boyle sat too. The room was deathly quiet as he unzipped the bag. Everyone had forgotten about the camera running across the room. Or maybe Boyle only hoped Karney wouldn’t see it. Deidre folded her arms over her breasts, shuddering visibly. Her face was miserable at the sight of the two syringes. “Finest China White in the west,” Karney promised them. “I’ve already prepared it. All you gotta do is tie on and poke.”
Boyle wrapped the rubber tourniquet angrily around his bicep, then the other around Deidre’s. “Forcin’ us to do it doesn’t change who we are,” he growled. That was the extent of his protest though. The candlelight was showing something else on his face—another Boyle fighting his way up from the murk, the one who had leered out of photos from the time he was cutting the Watch It Burn! and All Goes Dark albums, the junkie fiend who’d always been there.
Sinking the needle into his unmarked flesh, Boyle pressed down on the plunger to draw the smack into his arm. A burst of blood appeared in the barrel of the syringe, and his fist opened and closed as the drug flowed swiftly through his veins. Then he shut his eyes, loosened
