Page 20 of Justice for Radar

We were in Tampa, outside this shithole motel, waiting on our boy to show up for a fix. We’d watched a steady stream of desperate individuals walk up to room 126 and knock on the door, a short exchange and they wandered off. All of them were in various states of walking decay… at the stage of so far gone-ness that most of them would end up OD’ed or dead from suicide before they ever got anywhere near the point of clean.

If we caught our guy, he might end up with a fighting chance of some kind. He was looking at serious time for fraud and burglary charges all in the name of getting that next shot of poison into his collapsing veins.

Sometimes jail straightened them out. Sometimes they got out and immediately went buck wild and OD’ed trying to pump the same amount of shit they’d needed just to sustain in a body that was no longer geared to tolerate the same amount.

It was what’d happened to the girl’s mother. She’d been jailed for knowingly passing bad checks and as soon as she’d gotten out after her several months’ stint… well, they’d found her on a dirty mattress in this shithole flophouse with rats chewing on her face. How did I know? I’d had to ID her body. It’d been soul crushing, but at the same time not for the reason you’d think. I mean, I knew she was my baby mama, had looked down into that same face, eyes heavy lidded with passion as I’d made her come, as I’d come deep inside her, but it didn’t matter anymore. It wasn’t the same woman on that slab, cheeks plumper than I’d remembered after putting on weight in the county lockup.

Just as the gaunt visage of her mugshot hadn’t been the same woman either… that woman had already died a slow death and had her soul taken by the demon of addiction. The same addiction our daughter Lucia had been born with, but thankfully our baby girl had been otherwise healthy and had pulled through the detox. We’d gotten lucky with her. So very lucky… but still, I worried for my bright, plucky little girl because I knew it was there inside her somewhere – squatting like a fucking toad. The ability to become addicted, and so easily, too.

I worried for her like any father would worry for his daughter except maybe more because I’d lived through the slow deaths of two women I’d loved already, and I don’t think I could take it if I lost one of my little girls the same way.

“I think that’s our guy,” Atlas grated, and he double-checked the dude’s mugshot on his phone. I let go my train of earlier thought and focused, looking at the mugshot and up to the guy shuffling stoop shouldered and haggard across the parking area headed in the direction of room 126.

“I think you’re right, buddy.”

“Better grab him before he scores. You know he’s got shit on him it just means that much more paperwork.”

“Yeah,” I agreed. We got out of the van, leaving the doors open so as not to clue him in we were coming up on him.

Smooth as silk with the practice of a thousand busts and more just like it, Atlas and I ghosted up from behind the guy and seized his arms, coming up alongside either side of him.

“Sorry, Carlos,” Atlas declared. “No fix for you tonight.”

“Aw, shit! C’mon, man!” He was so skinny, there wasn’t putting up any kind of a fight. Not between Atlas and me. We practically picked the guy up, turned around and walked him back to the van, I had a set of cuffs out and around one of his wrists already before we’d even taken two steps.

“I’m sick!” he cried.

“No, you’re addicted, there’s a difference,” I said.

“But it’s alright,” Atlas declared. “You’ll get clean in lockup.”

Any sympathy for guys in his predicament had been burned out of us a long time ago. I mean, it was a situation of his own making. And yeah, I know how addiction works and I know it’s not a matter of willpower for some people but these fucking guys… the shit they put their families through? No. I had no sympathy. Even with the mother of my children’s face, discolored, swollen with bloat, chewed on by rats, strobing across my memory.

I saw her in every one of these types of captures, and it never got any fucking easier.

When the cuff went around his other wrist behind his back he wailed, and we tossed his ass in the back of the van before he drew too much attention. He was crying and screaming back there as we got into the front driver’s and passenger seats, and I looked at Atlas and he looked at me.

“I’m getting too old for this shit,” I declared, and he nodded.

“Same, bro. Same.”

The winds of change were fucking blowing, as the captain liked to say and just like before any storm, the pressure had dropped, and our shoulders were heavy as shit with it.

“Let’s get him to county, collect our bounty, and fucking be done with this scumbag,” Atlas grated.

“Yeah,” I agreed.

I hated the drug-related cases.

* * *

I pausedoutside Mariposa’s door when I got home that night. It was late, so late it was early, but I didn’t much care about that. The paperwork was done, the money would be coming in, and while it wasn’t a huge amount, it all added up. It’d gone quick and slicker than owl shit and that’s the important part. We hadn’t wasted any time on apprehending Carlos Santiago… I hated the ones that were hard to pin down. All things considered, that’d been easy fucking money.

Still, talking and rehashing my sob story on the beach the day before to Justice had picked at the scabs of some old wounds some and I was feeling some type of way. Not quite nostalgic per se, but something.

I held my breath and twisted the knob carefully to my eldest daughter’s room.

Was I being a creepy fuck? Maybe. Probably. I don’t know. I just know that after seeing Carlos’s gaunt and yellowed appearance, veins all gnarly and tracked with scabs anywhere where he could inject that shit – open sores and shit running with infection. I needed to burn those fucking images out of my brain with something good and peeking in on Justice? There wasn’t honestly anything better than her peacefully sleeping face.

---