“You check the wall sockets,” Luckman said. “I’ll take the phone apart.”
“Wait,” Barris said, holding up his hand. “If they see us scrambling around just before the raid–”
“What raid?” Arctor said.
“If we’re running frantically around flushing dope,” Barris said, “then we can’t allege, even though it’s true, that we didn’t know the dope was there. They’ll catch us actually holding it. And maybe that, too, is part of their plan.”
“Aw shit,” Luckman said in disgust. He threw himself down on the couch. “Shit shit shit. We can’t do anything. There’s probably dope hidden in a thousand places we’ll never find. We’ve had it.” He glared up at Arctor in baffled fury. “_We’ve had it!_”
Arctor said to Barris, “What about your electronic cassette thing rigged to the front door?” He had forgotten about it. So had Barris, evidently. Luckman, too.
“Yes, this should be extremely informational at this point,” Barris said. He knelt down by the couch, reached underneath, grunted, then hauled forth a small plastic cassette tape recorder. “This should tell us a great deal,” he began, and then his face sank. “Well, it probably wouldn’t ultimately have proven that important.” He pulled out the power plug from the back and set the cassette down on the coffee table. “We know the main fact–that they did enter during our absence. That was its main task.”
Silence.
“I’ll bet I can guess,” Arctor said.
Barris said, “The first thing they did when they entered was switch it to the off position. I left it set to _on_, but look– now it’s turned to _off_. So although I–”
“It didn’t record?” Luckman said, disappointed.
“They made their move swiftly,” Barris said. “Before so much as an inch of tape passed through the recording head. This, by the way, is a neat little job, a Sony. It has a separate head for playback, erase and record and the Dolby noisereduction system. I got it cheap. At a swap meet. And it’s never given me any trouble.”
Arctor said, “Mandatory soul time.”
“Absolutely,” Barris agreed as he seated himself in a chair and leaned back, removing his shades. “At this point we have no other recourse in view of their evasive tactics. You know, Bob, there is one thing you could do, although it would take time.”
“Sell the house and move out,” Arctor said.
Barris nodded.
“But hell,” Luckman protested. “This is our _home_.”
“What are houses like this in this area worth now?” Barris asked, hands behind his head. “On the market? I wonder, too, what interest rates are up to. Maybe you could make a considerable profit, Bob. On the other hand, you might have to take a loss on a quick sale. But, Bob, my God, you’re up against professionals.”
“Do you know a good realtor?” Luckman asked both of them.
Arctor said, “What reason should we give for selling? They always ask.”
“Yeah, we can’t tell the realtor the truth,” Luckman agreed. “We could say . . .” He pondered as he moodily drank his beer. “I can’t think of a reason. Barris, what’s a reason, a shuck we could give?”
Arctor said, “We’ll just say flat-out there’s narcotics planted all over the house and since we don’t know where it is we decided to move out and let the new owner get busted instead of us.”
“No,” Barris disagreed, “I don’t think we can afford to be up front like that. I’d suggest you say, Bob, you say that you got a job transfer.”
“Where to?” Luckman said.
“Cleveland,” Barris said.
“I think we should tell them the truth,” Arctor said. “In fact, we could put an ad in the L.A. _Times_: ‘Modern threebedroom tract house with two bathrooms for easy and fast flushing, high-grade dope stashed throughout all rooms; dope included in sale price.’
“But they’d be calling asking what kind of dope,” Luckman said. “And we don’t know; it could be anything.”
“And how much there is,” Barris murmured. “Prospective buyers might inquire about the quantity.”
“Like,” Luckman said, “it could be an ounce of roachweed, just shit like that, on it could be pounds of heroin.”
“What I suggest,” Barris said, “is that we phone county drug abuse and inform them of the situation and ask them to come in and remove the dope. Search the house, find it, dispose of it. Because, to be realistic, there really isn’t time to sell the house. I researched the legal situation once for this type of bind, and most lawbooks agree–”
“You’re crazy,” Luckman said, staring at him as if he were one of Jerry’s aphids. “Phone _drug abuse?_ There’ll be narks in here within less time than–”
“That’s the best hope,” Barris continued smoothly, “and we can all take lie-detector tests to prove we didn’t know where it was or what it was on even put it there. It is there without our knowledge or permission. If you tell them that, Bob, they’ll exonerate you.” After a pause he admitted, “Eventually. When all the facts are known in open court.”
“But on the other hand,” Luckman said, “we’ve got our own stashes. We _do_ know where they are and like that. Does this mean we’ve got to flush all our stashes? And suppose we miss some? Even one? Christ, this is awful!”
“There is no way out,” Arctor said. “They appear to have us.”
From one of the bedrooms Donna Hawthorne appeared, weaning a funny little knee-pants outfit, hair tumbled in disarray, her face puffy with sleep.
“I came on in,” she said, “like the note said. And I sat around for a while and then crashed. The note didn’t say when you’d be back. Why were you yelling? God, you’re uptight. You woke me.”
“You smoked a joint just now?” Arctor asked her. “Before you crashed?”
“Sure,” she said. “Otherwise I can’t ever sleep.”
“It’s Donna’s roach,” Luckman said. “Give it to her.”
My God, Bob Arctor thought. I was into that trip as much as they were. We all got into it together that deep. He shook himself, shuddered, and blinked. Knowing what I know, I still stepped across into that freaked-out paranoid space with them, viewed it as they viewed it–muddled, he thought. Murky again; the same murk that covers them covers me; the murk of this dreary dream world we float around in.
“You got us out of it,” he said to Donna.
“Out of what?” Donna said, puzzled and sleepy.
Not what I am, he thought, or what I know was supposed to take place here today, but this chick–she put my head back together, got all three of us out. A little black-haired chick wearing a funky outfit who I report on and am shucking and hopefully will be fucking. . . another shuck-and-fuck reality world, he thought, with this foxy girl the center of it: a national point that unwired us abruptly. Otherwise where would our heads finally have gone? We, all three of us, had gotten out of it entirely.
But not for the first time, he thought. Not even today.
“You shouldn’t leave your place unlocked like that,” Donna said. “You could get ripped off and it’d be your own fault. Even the giant capitalist insurance companies say that if you leave a door on window unlocked they won’t pay. That’s the main reason I came in when I saw the note. Somebody ought to be here if it’s unlocked like that.”
“How long have you been here?” Arctor asked her. Maybe she had aborted the bugging; maybe not. Probably not.
Donna consulted her twenty-dollar electric Timex wristwatch, which he had given her. “About thirty-eight minutes. Hey.” Her face brightened. “Bob, I got the wolf book with me–you want to look at it now? It’s got a lot of heavy shit in it, if you can dig it.”
“Life,” Barris said, as if to himself, “is only heavy and none else; there is only the one trip, all heavy. Heavy that leads to the grave. For everyone and everything.”
“Did I hear you say you’re going to sell your house?” Donna asked him. “On was that–you know, me dreaming? I couldn’t tell; what I heard sounded spaced out and weird.”
“We’re all dreaming,” Arctor said. If the last to know he’s an addict is the addict, then maybe the last to know when a man means what he says is the man himself, he reflected. He wondered how much of the garbage that Donna had overheard he had seriously meant. He wondered how much of the insanity of the day–his insanity–had been real, or just induced as a contact lunacy, by the situation. Donna, always, was a pivot point of reality for him; for her this was the basic, natural question. He wished he could answer.
7
The next day Fred showed up in his scramble suit to hear about the bugging installation.
“The six holo-scanners now operating within the premises–six should be sufficient for now, we feel–transmit to a safe apartment down the street in the same block as Arctor’s house,” Hank explained, laying out a floor plan of Bob Arctor’s house on the metal table between them. It chilled Fred to see this, but not overly much. He picked the sheet up and studied the locations of the various scanners, in the various rooms, here and there so that everything fell under constant video scrutiny, as well as audio.