Spiked by Mark Arsenault Page B

gentleman. I knew right then, he was the one I was looking for.” They shacked up within a month. “We made a home together before we made love.”
    They stayed in Montreal six years together, shooting up as many as six times a day, until an overdose nearly killed Leo. Gabrielle wiped a tear as she remembered. “We made a pact to get cleaned up together and start over in Lowell, because I got a cousin here someplace.”
    They rehabbed in Canada for two months, and then rode a bus here.
    â€œWe got this motel room,” she said. “The guy in the next room was selling heroin. There’s no excuse. It was there. We bought it.”
    Their money soon ran out. Other addicts had taken them here.
    â€œWhat about your cousin?” Eddie asked.
    She shrugged. “That’s the part that didn’t work out.”
    â€œWhat do you do for money?”
    â€œLeo works at a garage sometimes, under the table,” Gabrielle said. She looked to Leo and frowned. “I did some streetwalking, but when he found out it broke his heart so I stopped.”
    Leo pretended not to hear her. He let go of her hand and tossed a stick on the fire, which was burning just fine.
    They were so blunt, so open with their story. Would they tell it to the paper? Eddie couldn’t help himself—despite Danny’s death and his own near miss, he was born to tell stories such as this. He trembled at the possibility. “Does the city know you’re here?” he asked.
    â€œCops do,” Gabrielle said. “They kick us out every few months when they’re looking for somebody on a warrant. We find someplace to bed for the night, just for one night. Mostly they don’t mind us. None of them want to come down here.”
    â€œWhat about rehab?”
    Leo and Gabrielle glanced to each other, sharing past hardships with their eyes. He took her hand again. “Leo’s been to rehab three times,” she said. “I been twice.” She patted Leo’s knee with her other hand. “The last time he did real good. He got a Section-Eight apartment in Centralville for a couple months. But when he couldn’t get me to stop, he started using again.”
    Eddie shook his head. “You guys are not what I would have expected in heroin addicts.”
    â€œWhat is that?” snapped Leo, suddenly annoyed. “You thought we would be gibbering like lunatics and lying in our own piss? Eh? That I could not talk to you like a person? Or love my wife like a man?”
    Eddie said nothing. Leo was right. Eddie had not expected they’d be human.
    Leo took a white candle and the lemon juice from the milk crate.
    â€œLet me tell you about heroin,” he said with no trace of annoyance. “It is the heart of this city’s underground economy. Think of the heroin trade like the
shadow
of regular commerce. It lies just behind it, and touches only at the bottom. This economy works in a circle. I will explain.”
    He twisted the butt end of the candle into a hole in the cement. “Addicts, as you say, people like me, get money for heroin from petty theft—car radios sometimes, smash-and-grab. The pawn brokers and the glass shops get some spin-off business—this is our economics.” He flashed that beige smile.
    He pulled from his coat a tin snuffbox and a fat pinch of tan powder twisted in plastic wrap. He held it up. “The hero of the underworld,” he said. He emptied the powder in the tin and shook his head. “It is crap. Mostly brown. Not the best. Not pure.”
    Eddie nodded.
    Leo stroked Fat Boy as the cat wandered away. Then he continued, “Look at the other economic forces working here. To stop my petty crime, the city hires more policemen. But you cannot fit all of us in the jail, right? So you treat us.” Leo lit the candle with a cigarette lighter. The wick was too long and the flame burned tall and smoky.
    â€œTo treat all of these