Matthew Scudder #17 - A Drop of the Hard Stuff by Lawrence Block

Author:Lawrence Block [Block, Lawrence]
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 9780316132732
Publisher: Little, Brown and Company
Published: 2011-04-20T04:00:00+00:00

At the meeting that night I mentioned that I’d spent an hour or two with a fellow who’d spent the past twenty-plus years quietly stoned on marijuana. “He knew not to offer me any,” I said, “and he didn’t smoke while I was there, but he’d smoked before I got there and I’m sure he fired up a joint the minute I left. The apartment reeked of it.”

A woman named Donna came up to me on the break. She was a semi-regular at St. Paul’s, and had spoken there for her third anniversary a few months ago. Her approach was purposeful, and I assumed she had something to say about marijuana and its effects over time. I didn’t recall a whole lot of pot in her story, but that didn’t mean she couldn’t find something there to identify with.

But it wasn’t that at all. Some months ago she’d moved in with her boyfriend, another sober alcoholic. He was still an alcoholic, but he was no longer a sober one, and she wanted out.

“I’m such an idiot,” she said. She had long auburn hair, and kept pushing it out of her eyes, and it kept falling back across her face. “I’d heard his story, for God’s sake. I knew he went out every time he put a couple of years together. But he was sober when I met him, and he had more sober time than I did, and I thought he’d stay sober.”

But he hadn’t. She’d kept her rent-stabilized apartment—“What is it they say? I may be crazy but I’m not stupid”—and that’s where she was staying now, but she had a whole lot of stuff at his place in Cobble Hill, and she hated to leave it but was afraid to go there by herself.

“I don’t think he’d do anything,” she said, “because he’s a very gentle guy. At least when he’s sober. But he does have a history of spousal abuse. I’m not telling tales, it’s in his qualification, he mentions it every time he tells his story. And he always says it only happened when he was drunk. Well, he’s drunk now, isn’t he?”

“You want me to go with you.”

“Would you?” She put her hand on my wrist. “Not as a favor. I mean it would be a favor, a major one, but I’d want to pay you for it. In fact I’d insist on it.”

“You’re a friend,” I said, “and it’s the sort of thing friends do for each other. I don’t think—”

“No,” she said firmly. “My sponsor was the one who suggested this. And she was very clear that I had to pay you.”

She had the time picked—Saturday afternoon—and had arranged our transportation. Did I know Richard Lassiter? Bald Richard, gay Richard, speed freak Richard? He had a car, and everything of hers in Cobble Hill would fit easily in the trunk and backseat. He was going to pick her up at Eighty-fourth and Amsterdam at three sharp, and they could stop for me on the way to Brooklyn.

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