Jack’s head swiveled trying to keep pace.
Wallace looked like he’d come in to work properly
dressed, hair combed, clothes ironed. But now his graying
hair was askew, glasses crooked on his nose. And the pads
on his elbows looked like they were being worn away.
“Where the hell have you been?” Wallace said.
“Meeting with a cop about the Kaiser investigation,”
I said. “He’s going to find out what he can about the guy
who might be responsible.”
“That’s dandy,” Wallace said. “While you were out
pussyfooting with your boys in blue, did you happen
to see this?”
He walked over to his desk and picked up a copy of
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that morning’s New York Dispatch. Wallace stomped over
to me, holding the paper much as you would a bag of dog
poop. I looked at Jack, wanted to see if he had anything
to say, but the old man sat there, head down.
Wallace handed me the paper. “Read it,” he said.
I looked at the front page. Immediately my stomach
lurched up to my throat, frustration and anger welling
up inside me.
I turned to where the front page article continued, and
read the whole thing. Slowly. Word by word. Then I
closed the paper and threw it across the room, cursing
loud enough that Wallace’s secretary would probably
have to apologize to whoever she was on the phone with.
“How the hell did she…” I said.
“Don’t you dare ask that question,” Wallace said. “It’s
your job to know what goes on in this city. You handle
the crime beat. It is your duty to know every nook and
cranny of this island, from the mayor’s office to the bums
who live beneath the subway. For something like this to
get past you…you must have been asleep at the wheel.”
He looked at Jack, waited for a response. “Either that or
the two of you have become so narrow-minded with this
Kaiser murder and Gaines follow-up that you can’t sniff
what’s under your nose.”
“I didn’t know anything about this,” I said. “Paulina…I
don’t know where she got it. And I don’t know which
cops she spoke to, but if you look at the article they all
spoke on condition of anonymity. I just met with my man
in the NYPD, and he’s as clued in as anyone. He didn’t
mention a word of this, and he doesn’t keep things from
me. Not like this. Something about this piece doesn’t
pass the smell test, Wallace.”
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Wallace picked the newspaper back up. He held the
cover out for us both to see.
On the front page of the Dispatch was an enlarged
picture of what looked like a small stone, possibly a piece
of gravel, pitch-black in color with a rough texture.
The headline next to the photo read The Darkness.
The subtitle said, The Drug That’s About to Take Man-
hattan Back to the Stone Age.
25
Darkness Rising
As a deadly new drug hits the streets,
police and citizens silently fear a return
of chaos a quarter century old
Most New Yorkers did not know Kenneth Tsang.The
son of Chinese immigrants who passed away before
he graduated high school, Tsang received his MBA
from Wharton and spent most of his twenties raking
in the dough while working at two prestigious investment firms. Most New Yorkers did not know that,
despite his income,Tsang owed nearly half a million
dollars in taxes and mortgage payments, and that he
burned through his money nearly as fast as it came in.
Most NewYorkers know thatTsang was found dead
this week, his body pulverized and found floating in
the East River.What they do not know is that a balloon
marker was tied to the buoy that Tsang’s body was
tethered to.They do not know that inside that balloon
were half a dozen small, black rocks, left by Tsang’s
killer. These rocks were no bigger than a piece of
gravel, but each contain enough destructive power to
182
clinch a plastic bag around the head of a city already
gasping for air.
Now, come with me for a moment. I have a brief
history lesson to impart upon you.
For those of us who lived through New York in the
1980s,much of the information within this article will
ring horrifyingly familiar.Let’s backtrack for a minute,
about twenty-five years ago to 1984. George Orwell
would have been proud. Or terrified.
New York as we know it today did not exist.Following the oil shortage of the 1970s, the Son of Sam
murders, and an economy on the verge of chaos, the
plumbing system that was New York was about to get
hit with a cherry bomb that nearly destroyed it totally.
That cherry bomb was a new drug known to scientists as methylbenzoylecgonine. Or as it is more
commonly known, crack.
Crack first appeared on our shores in 1984. Before
that, the drug of choice was cocaine. But as cocaine
became more plentiful, prices dropped and dealers
began to lose much of their profit margin.
Poor them.
So to get back the money they were losing on coke,
they came up with a new way to profit. In a nutshell,
they used baking soda or other bases to cut the cocaine.
This increased the volume of their product while retaining the same toxicity of the drug. It was the equivalent
of taking a dollar bill, mixing it with a few pennies, and
turning it into two dollars.
By 1986, just two years after crack hit the streets,
over fifty-five thousand people were admitted to
emergency rooms around the country with crackrelated injuries (most often this was either from
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183
overdosing, or violence which was a result of the
drug trade).
For those of you who lived in New York during
that time, as I did, the effects of the crack epidemic
were as visible as a streetlamp. Crime in this city hit
highs never before seen. Murder and rape rates rose
dramatically. Cases of aggravated assault skyrocketed
from just over 60,000 in 1980 to over 91,000 by the
end of the decade. Burglaries. Larceny.Vehicle theft.
New York began to resemble less of a modern, cosmopolitan city than an outpost of Beirut.
Thankfully, this trend reversed itself in the 1990s,
and through the new millennium New York has
enjoyed its lowest crime rates per capita since the
1960s. New York was known as one of the safest big
cities in the country, and if you live here or came to
visit, you could walk down the street feeling safe.
After the atrocities of 9/11, New Yorkers banded
together to create a safer city. One that reclaimed its
place among the grandest in the world.The virus that
infected us twenty-five years ago had long been forgotten.
To my horror, though, recent developments have
proven that this virus was not extinguis
hed, but had
rather been lying dormant, in remission, waiting for a
catalyst to revitalize its poisons.
That catalyst has finally found us.And it is not a terrorist,or a crooked financial institution.It exists in the
tiniest form possible: a small black rock.
Though the human eye might not register this tiny
specimen as anything more than a pebble, a piece of
gravel,something that might even pave a driveway,the
properties that exist within it threaten the very
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Jason Pinter
sanctity of the city we have fought so bravely to
protect.
The culprit? A simple black rock that dissolves on
your tongue as fast as a breath strip.
Nobody is quite sure where the Darkness came
from, who manufactures it, or whether this drug has
spread to other states. Crack began in primarily metropolitan cities. New York. Los Angeles. Washington,
D.C.Cities with large urban populations. Cities where
there was enough poverty to turn the need of a cheap
hit into gold for the men and women whose lack of
humanity drove them to produce it.
As of press time, the police had no leads on who
deals the drug. A high-ranking member inside the
NYPD did comment, off the record, stating,“We are
fully preparing for another epidemic similar to the
rise of crack cocaine we saw in the 1980s. Though
privately, we’re worried that this one will be much,
much worse and have a potentially more devastating
impact considering that our infrastructure is already
damaged.”
So what’s the harm in a little black rock, you might
ask? Why should I care about some idiots getting high?
Because increases in drug production and consumption lead to increases in crime.But here’s where
this drug differs: a normal crack user will find successive hits of the drug granting decreasing effects.The
hits, as they are, are not as potent.
With the Darkness,however,some insane chemical
genius has figured out a way around this.
The human brain produces a certain amount of
dopamine, a neurotransmitter often associated with
pleasure.Dopamine is released through many pleasur- The Darkness
185
able experiences, including food, exercise, sex and, of
course, drugs. Simple crack cocaine releases a larger
amount of dopamine than the brain is accustomed to,
so when the user takes a second hit before the brain
can replenish dopamine, a lesser amount is released.
Yet the Darkness circumvents this by causing the
brain to produce more dopamine. This means that
each successive hit will have the exact same impact
as the one preceding it,making it more addictive than
nearly every drug on the market.
It’s no wonder the cops are nervous.They’re facing
streets about to be teeming with a drug that’s cheaper,
more plentiful, and delivers, pardon the expression,
the best hit money can buy.
God help us all.
26
Friday
The call came close to midnight. Morgan wondered
what the hell had taken them so long.
He didn’t recognize the voice on the other line. It wasn’t
Chester, and he didn’t think it was Leonard. Not that it
mattered much. He assumed there had to be more to the
operation than the two guys he’d met. There were twelve
other men in that room—well, eleven after the accident
with Jeremy—and they’d all been recruited like him.
Leonard had said that they’d each been recruited by a
different person, as Leonard had been brought in by this
guy Stephen Gaines. If each new recruit was brought in
by a different guy, a la Chester, that meant at least eleven
people on Chester’s level.
Morgan wondered just how many people were a part
of this organization. Then he wondered how long it might
take before he could be promoted, and how much money
he’d have to bring in. Didn’t matter. He’d do it.
In his mind’s eye, Morgan could see Jeremy’s lifeless
body sliding down the wall, clumps of his blood like egg
yolk on the wallpaper behind him. Morgan wished he felt
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187
remorseful, wished he felt some sort of sympathy for
Jeremy, but as hard as he tried he simply could not.
When Leonard described what the job entailed, it
was a zero sum equation: either you had the sack for it
or you didn’t.
Jeremy didn’t.
It was clear from the moment the mission was explained. Morgan had seen that look before. He found it a
little funny, considering he’d gone so far in business
because of his ability to spot men like Jeremy. Men who
wouldn’t take the extra step, who worried so much about
teetering on the diving board that they couldn’t even see
the riches hidden beneath the water’s surface.
Morgan saw it all. He had a knack for it, could see
deals before they materialized. That was the rule of
thumb: first one in, last one out. See the profits before
everyone else did, and stay longer than everyone else
who got cold feet.
That look in Leonard’s eye said it all. New product.
That’s when Morgan knew he had to jump in.
When you introduced a new product to the marketplace, you didn’t trust it to people who couldn’t sell it,
who couldn’t get the job done. A new product has an extremely narrow window of opportunity to work, and
while that door is cracked open, you needed to wedge everything but the kitchen sink in there because once that
sucker closed up, it wasn’t cracking open again.
Morgan sold to people. Plain and simple. He sold them
investments in their future. He sold them the belief that
if they did not trust him then they were putting their
family’s stability at risk.
Was this any different?
Morgan had done a few lines in his day. A night out at
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Jason Pinter
the strip joint with his buddies, a bump or two in the
bathroom to make those lights flicker just a little faster.
He didn’t quite have the taste for it, though, felt if you
needed an external force to get high you were simply
doing the wrong drugs.
Not that he judged them. Most people were simply not
born with the same drive and instincts Morgan had been.
His parents were blue collar all the way, but had good
enough credit to get him a decent financial aid package.
Morgan knew a lot of kids from his hometown that
weren’t so lucky.
They were the ones who filled up his tank at the gas
station. They were the ones who sprayed perfume on his
mother when she went to the mall. They were the ones
who needed something to take the edge off the real world,
because if they spent too much time with their own life
and their own thoughts eventually it would occur to them
what they had never become.
So this new product, Morgan guessed, was just one
more thing to take the edge off. And that w
as fine. He
trusted these guys. Jeremy was a message. Like no limit
hold ’em, you’re either all in or you fold.
Jeremy folded. Morgan’s stack of chips wasn’t as high
as it used to be, but what was that great line from Rounders?
Kid’s got alligator blood.
Morgan liked the sound of that.
When the caller told him the address, Morgan was a
little surprised at first. He’d actually been there once
before, a few years back when he’d first started dating this
French model named Claudia who was in town for some
photo shoot where she was supposed to pose in a pink tutu
atop the Brooklyn Bridge.
Morgan never really understood art.
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189
She’d insisted that they go to the Kitten Club, the rationale being more along the lines of it being a trendy
hotspot rather than a place where actual enjoyment
could be had.
Morgan remembered that the music was deafening,
the light show transfixing, and the drinks ridiculously
overpriced.
And then that rich diva Athena Paradis got killed there,
and somehow the Kitten Club became even more popular.
Now why Morgan was supposed to be there at seven
o’clock in the morning, a good sixteen hours before the club
even opened its doors, was beyond him. But it was his first
day. And Morgan knew well enough not to ask questions.
He took the subway downtown, then walked to the
meatpacking district where the Kitten Club, and its
brethren, served generous amounts of alcohol to hip,
young New Yorkers seven days a week. At midnight, you
couldn’t walk down the block without having to cut
through any one of a number of long lines dedicated to
keeping impatient drinkers outside until the Lord of the
Velvet Rope decided it was time to allow them entry.
The Kitten Club used to have one of those large neon
signs above the awning, this one depicting a feline in
naughty attire sipping from some sort of pink cocktail.
The lights were arranged so that it looked like the cat
was tipping the drink back. As the glass hit the cat’s
lips, the drink actually appeared to disappear down its
furry throat.
If you had enough money, you could get anyone to
make you anything.
As Morgan approached the entrance, the front door
opened up. He immediately recognized the man who
held it open.
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“Morgan, good to see you,” Chester said. “Feels good