The Deegan Pt. I

by Monk, New York City, NY, USA

Inside the cockroach-shaped van, Anton Choudry brushes coconut burfi crumbs off his chest, licks his fingertips, and swishes cold tea between his cheeks to wash away the copper taste of bile. He’s six hours without a hit, and the DTs are crashing hard. His upper lip smells like ghee and stale sweat, thinning hair feels greasy and brittle, and his wrinkled white suit is a roadmap of New York marked with food and sweat stains, Albany starred by a hole in his lapel, where he nodded off and let a cigarette eat through the cheap linen. Thirty pounds ago, the outfit wrapped his athletic build perfectly. Now, it resembles a circus tent, pants held up by suspenders, untucked shirt reaching to his knees. His pant cuffs are tattered and black from dragging the streets. The roof of his mouth feels like sandpaper. He moistens it with the rest of his tea, slug of condensed milk looking up at him like dead larva from the bottom of the paper cup. Absently, he takes the soundbox from his breast pocket, rolls the little powder blue cube around in his palm, and marvels at its chipped, dirty surface. Earbuds and a tattered lanyard dangle, meant to hang the thing around his neck. 'Like a noose,' he thinks, not completely inaccurate. One side is devoted to a touch-sensitive screen big enough for his boney thumb to cycle through highs and check the device’s settings. There's a moment of panic when he sees the battery's almost flat, but remembers his shift is nearly up, and there’s a charger in his car.

This particular soundbox is not cheap, made in a San Jose sweatshop, surgically embedded in some poor bastard's musculature, and muled across the continent to the Rotten Apple, where it is prohibited by no less than fourteen different agencies. Anton’s favorite setting, rock3rblue, rewires his brain for nothing but endorphin production. It’s an ultra-caffeinated non-stop brainless rush. He can go three days without sleep, run a thirty-mile marathon, rescue a busload of children from a burning orphanage, leap tall buildings in a single bound...and crash for a solid thirty-six hours after each hit. NASA is less volatile, but he couldn’t feel his fingertips for two days after the last hit, and didn’t find the sensation of weightlessness particularly appealing. There’s beepboxxx, which some people on the street call sexk1tten, but he’s too embarrassed by cum stains on the front of his pants to experiment while on duty. That leaves Aiaia, the one high he hasn’t tried. The little blue and green icon beckons from the soundbox, but he’s heard nothing of it on the street. It’s a mystery high, and Anton’s just not desperate enough to leave the safety of rock3rblue, just yet. He could download new, recognizable highs from that one Latvian site, but it would leave fingerprints on his financial records.
It would also be admitting he is an addict.

And cops are not addicts.

Cops are hardworking civil servants who put their lives on the line every day. They may occasionally overindulge, but they are not addicts.

Not when they are on duty, and especially not when they are staking out the archeological curiosity that is the Deegan Motel, gone through many incarnations, but clinging today to its essence as a cheap two-story whorehouse. Choudry’s undercover police van is stuffed mostly with surveillance equipment, but there is a bunk for late nights like this, moon rising above the ragged Bronx skyline. No sleep for Choudry, though. No rock3rblue, either, as Captain Mammoud has called down Internal Affairs on his least favorite detective. There has long been an unspoken acknowledgment of Choudry’s condition, and for a time the Captain was tolerant. But with his partner dead, the 50th Precinct's Vice Squad has whittled down to Choudry, Vincent Scutieri, Jean-Pierre Ngekwe, Philip Proudhawk, Tiny Schwarzbaum, and the ghost of Peter Singh. The Captain needs every officer he can get, but isn’t stupid or frenzied enough to keep a quasi-functional flophead walking the streets with a paingun. He’s tired of Choudry’s antics. Old Pete’s death is the last straw.

Internal Affairs tossed Choudry’s locker twice this week, and have an appointment to interview him in the morning. Altered soundbox neurology may not show up on urinalysis, but Choudry is pretty sure a two-day hangover qualifies him for the court-ordered EKG where it does. They pinched Tony Vasili over in Robbery/Homicide for that. Before him, O’Brien in Anti-Terror. Too many times, Choudry has witnessed people go to jail or die for being stupid. Not him. So for now, he bombs the DTs with forty cups of intensely sugared tea, fluorescent orange power drinks that taste like boiled styrofoam, and a weird vitamin concoction bought off a mad Nigerian on 217th Street.

Anton Choudry is vibrating.

He praises himself shamelessly for once again dodging Internal Affairs’ traps, tucking his precious soundbox back into the nest of his breast pocket, fumbling at his paingun, and waiting for his partner's killer to step out of the Deegan into the cold Bronx night.