Tunnel Vision Read online

  Also by Aric Davis

  The Fort

  Breaking Point

  Rough Men

  A Good and Useful Hurt

  Nickel Plated

  This is a work of fiction. Names, characters, organizations, places, events, and incidents are either products of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously.

  Text copyright © 2014 Aric Davis

  All rights reserved.

  No part of this book may be reproduced, or stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording, or otherwise, without express written permission of the publisher.

  Published by Thomas & Mercer, Seattle

  www.apub.com

  Amazon, the Amazon logo, and Thomas & Mercer are trademarks of Amazon.com, Inc., or its affiliates.

  ISBN-13: 9781477824955

  ISBN-10: 1477824952

  Cover design by Cyanotype Book Architects

  Library of Congress Control Number: 2014936467

  Dedicated to the memory of Anne Loveland Low

  CONTENTS

  ONE

  They say the . . .

  TWO

  THREE

  FOUR

  FIVE

  SIX

  SEVEN

  EIGHT

  NINE

  TEN

  ELEVEN

  TWELVE

  THIRTEEN

  FOURTEEN

  FIFTEEN

  I don’t like . . .

  SIXTEEN

  SEVENTEEN

  EIGHTEEN

  NINETEEN

  TWENTY

  TWENTY-ONE

  TWENTY-TWO

  TWENTY-THREE

  TWENTY-FOUR

  TWENTY-FIVE

  TWENTY-SIX

  I talked to . . .

  TWENTY-SEVEN

  TWENTY-EIGHT

  TWENTY-NINE

  THIRTY

  THIRTY-ONE

  THIRTY-TWO

  THIRTY-THREE

  THIRTY-FOUR

  THIRTY-FIVE

  I got beat . . .

  THIRTY-SIX

  THIRTY-SEVEN

  THIRTY-EIGHT

  THIRTY-NINE

  FORTY

  FORTY-ONE

  FORTY-TWO

  FORTY-THREE

  FORTY-FOUR

  FORTY-FIVE

  FORTY-SIX

  FORTY-SEVEN

  FORTY-EIGHT

  FORTY-NINE

  FIFTY

  FIFTY-ONE

  FIFTY-TWO

  FIFTY-THREE

  FIFTY-FOUR

  I know who . . .

  FIFTY-FIVE

  FIFTY-SIX

  FIFTY-SEVEN

  FIFTY-EIGHT

  ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

  ABOUT THE AUTHOR

  ONE

  I have never been so angry in my entire life. I’m traveling south on a bus, with a trail of blood smeared behind me, bodies in my wake, and flashes of violence whenever I close my eyes, but none of it cuts through the rage. There are black marks on my neck, wrists, and ankles, cuts on my face and all over my even-leaner-than-normal body, and a furrow of ruined flesh from a gunshot wound on my left side. Packed gauze and stolen pharmaceuticals aren’t the only things keeping me held together. Rage is why I’m alive, and it’s carrying me south just as sure as this bus is.

  Making your living as a criminal comes with its own list of unique risks, but I never thought that I’d be the one coming down on the wrong side of a setup. Call it naïveté or whatever else you want, but I was sure I had myself in a good place, and the only way I was going to get burned was by someone I trusted. I knew that was possible—there were no illusions for me—but when it happened even my black little soul was caught off guard.

  “Sorry,” Gary said to me, like that mattered when I was staring down the barrel of a shotgun and getting cuffed and being sent in off the books to a crooked juvenile internment camp.

  Gary was my dealer, the loser I’d transformed with money and bags of high-grade marijuana into a kid with confidence. Gary would never betray me—I was sure of it—but I was wrong. The money got bigger and bigger, and that was that. Gary sold me out for a truck full of dope and a connection to move as much as he could harvest in Michigan’s Upper Peninsula.

  I hope for his sake he enjoyed the money, because his luck is about to change.

  In some ways, I should be thanking Gary. Dad always said situations needed to find the right people to emerge as heroes, and I think he’s probably right. Even though being a hero is the last thing I am, maybe I needed to end up at the Morton Correctional Camp more than almost anywhere else in the world. Though what I didn’t need was to be sent in naked and without a plan.

  On the books, Morton functioned as a state-run “camp” to help rehabilitate out-of-control youths. In reality, it was a den of corruption where beatings, rape, and murder were covered up as a matter of routine, and where every day was a savage exercise in squeezing every possible drop of money from the facility and its captive horde of desperate kids.

  Gary never could have put me somewhere like that without help, and the help in question came from a man named Spider, who we’d been brokering a deal with up north.

  The setup took months, both the part I was involved with and the stuff I found out later, but I’m a lot more concerned with how it ended. Gary and I drove up together in a U-Haul stuffed with baled-up marijuana, but he left alone in an empty truck with a duffel bag full of cash. Spider, as it turned out, wasn’t just a white-trash drug dealer. He was also a guard at Morton, and his boss, Reginald Fillmore, was his coconspirator. Getting me out of the way was the plan from the beginning, but I bet they would have put me in the ground if they could do it all over again.

  There were two types of people at Morton: those the guards favored and the rest of us. An average day would see us rented out to dig holes, shovel driveways, or perform other menial, usually backbreaking, local maintenance tasks—basically anything Fillmore and Spider could come up with to turn a dime. None of the prisoners were free of that work, but the ones in Spider’s favor got better bedding, better food, and the effective right to rape or beat whoever they wanted.

  My friend Sam, a shy kid who could draw better than anyone I’ve ever met, was being abused by an older boy named Tim. When I showed Tim the error of his ways with some of the dirty tricks I’d learned over the years from training with Rhino, Sam and I both found ourselves on Spider’s shit list. Things only got worse from there.

  Morton had been teetering on the edge of a full-scale rebellion for what felt like forever, and my beatdown of that bastard Tim sent a groundswell of confidence through the boys imprisoned there. But days later, Spider and Fillmore had put up with enough. Sam and I were brought out to the snow, where we were supposed to die. I didn’t die, but Sam did. The men who killed him died, too, but that doesn’t make up for wasting Sam’s life, for his broken body covered by snow and dirt in some anonymous field in Northern Michigan.

  Thinking about it as I stare out the window brings the rage back full force. Gary doesn’t know I’m coming. He probably thinks I’m dead or locked away forever, but he should know better. Dad taught me to be resourceful and to help others whenever I could, but he also taught me to pay my debts in full. Spider and Fillmore are already dead. I made sure of that as I lay half-naked in the snow over the stock of a stolen M-14, my finger frozen to the trigger guard. But Gary isn’t. I ran while Sam bled out in the snow, bullets flying after me, but I came back. Sam’s grave was still being cut into the frozen earth, and even though two of Spider’s armed flunkies were there, they couldn’t kill me.

  I smile at my reflection in the window, but my eyes tell the truth. I’m coming for you, Gary, and I’m
going to fucking kill you. Just like Spider and Fillmore.

  They say the first time you sell your body is supposed to be the worst, but they were the same people that told me the first time that you chase the dragon is the best. I think they were wrong on both counts, because selling myself never got better, and heroin never lost its luster, even though all either of them makes me feel anymore is dead inside.

  It wasn’t supposed to be like this. None of it was supposed to turn out so broken, so fucked-up. I’ve fucked over literally every person that tried to do right by me. I just didn’t realize how much that was going to hurt, or how much those memories would just drive me back to using in the first place. I swear to God, if I could take it all back, I would. I hated being that broken girl at the record store, hated feeling like I was never going to escape my father’s house. I hated everything. I’d give anything to have those days back.

  There was purity in my life before heroin, but I know that whatever false sense of sobriety I retain from writing this will be gone soon enough. I’ll be willing to do whatever D. says I have to in order for us to score—that’s just how it is. I still see some of my friends on the street sometimes, and I wonder how they’re doing, and I know that if I were clean I’d allow myself to ask them in person. Knowing that I’m a fucking junkie makes that impossible. All I’d do is get excited, and then get embarrassed, and then get high. By the time I finally saw Ben or any of those kids again I’d ask them for money until they gave it to me or I was told to leave, and I’d probably steal anything that wasn’t nailed down. And that’s not even the worst part. The part I hate the most is that I could do all of that and as long as I was high, I’d be happy. That’s all I really want, all any addict really wants.

  So this is what heroin is like. People think it’s some crazy high, like being drunk and stoned, this crazy storm of wastedness, but it’s not. It’s better than that. Heroin is the perfect high, one awesome moment that’s there and then gone. Heroin is like that perfect second before you decide to dance on a table or beer-bong a forty-ounce, only it lasts for hours. Heroin is the best once your body gets over being sick, but it’s never that good again. Not that D. and I don’t try and find that moment. Not that I don’t get on my knees or spread my legs for the chance to get that feeling all over again. And what I get from that spike is just good enough to keep me going.

  I don’t want you to feel bad for me. I don’t even expect anyone else to ever read this. I guess I’m writing this down so that if I ever do get myself out of this hole I dug, I’ll have something to remind me that even at my worst I was still a human, and that there are still good reasons for me to be alive. This isn’t about recovery, not yet, but maybe it can be someday.

  I dream of summertime.

  But when bright rays begin to flounder,

  the ice is on my mind.

  Now all I have is four cold walls,

  some whiskey, and a pen.

  A needle full of broken dreams,

  and nights that never end.

  It’s cold outside,

  snow is raining down.

  But all I have is loneliness,

  and days that never end.

  I’d give everything for some comfort,

  the gift of a sleeping death.

  The fear has left my body, love,

  but I hate the parts he left.

  Tonight I had sex with three different strangers so that D. could get right, but there wasn’t even enough dope for me to do a skin-pop, much less really groove on a spike for a little bit. Normally that would destroy me, but right now I feel good. Even in hell there are sweet spots, apparently. I know I’ll be on my back soon enough, though—that’s how this game works. I feel so bad about being a whore that I want to get high, or I want to get high so bad that I don’t care about being a whore. D. is yelling again and I can hear his boots on the stairs.

  Kiss kiss,

  Mandy

  TWO

  Betty Martinez had officially had enough of high school. It was her junior year, but she felt more grown-up than she ever had in her life, and the new grounding handed down by her mothers all because of some stupid boy was the last straw. Betty didn’t even like Jake Norton that much. He was what she had considered one of the more interesting prospects available to her at Northview High School, but the thrill had worn off quickly, and the grounding over a few erroneous texts just added insult to injury. Now, as she pored over the Internet for research on a paper about the American women’s suffrage movement—a topic that had once seemed so cool, but now seemed as edgy as cotton candy—Betty felt more tired than she ever had in her young life.

  What Betty wanted to be doing was living in the music pouring through her headphones—in this case, an album by the obscure and long-dead band Discount. She wanted to just fade away into the noise. Betty was five feet four and fit from her years in gymnastics, along with Andrea’s insistence that her daughter occasionally tag along for judo classes. She had purple hair that was ready for either a redye or a new color altogether, a ring in her nose and a stud in her lip, and plans for a small tattoo just below her left breast that would make going to the beach this summer a straight-up bitch if she ever got up the nerve to actually get inked.

  Not that the moms were likely to notice, at least not right away. Andrea was always busy in her work as a children’s psychologist, and Ophelia was just as locked down into her gallery and her own art. Betty would much rather have their approval first, but she knew getting her mothers on board with that first of many planned tattoos was about as likely as ever getting a straight answer on who her father was.

  As busy and inflexible on certain points as her moms were, Betty knew they weren’t half as bad as she liked to imagine. It would have been so easy to run away if Ophy and Andy had been anything besides wonderful, but they were wonderful, and it would have destroyed them if Betty had just disappeared into the wind like an ash escaping a fire.

  Betty couldn’t help but wish for some neo-Dickensian upbringing that would allow her to hear the lyrics of her favorite bands with real understanding, instead of a bystander’s empathy. When Alison Mosshart sang to some unknown lover, “We wave sometimes to pretend that nothing is changing, but you’ve gone on and I’ve gone off to get lost and devastated,” Betty sang along, wondering when she would meet someone worth being devastated over.

  Forcing her attention back to the computer, Betty perused the links at the bottom of the Wikipedia page on suffrage and sighed deeply. The subject had seemed perfect for unsettling the seemingly sexist Mr. Evans, but he’d been supportive of it from the start, and Betty knew that her attempt to be subversive had missed the mark yet again. Why is it so damn hard to be an outsider these days?

  It wasn’t the first time that Betty had caught herself enjoying this spoiled, deluded line of thinking, and she felt a pang of guilt over it, like she always did. Still, was craving a little adventure so bad? God, the best she could muster was the half-joking text from Jake that Ophelia had seen and that had set this whole ridiculous grounding machinery in motion.

  “Send pix of bewbs pls.”

  Betty smiled at the memory of it, but it was bittersweet. She felt trapped, just like Alice Paul and Lucy Burns and all of their dowdily dressed, badass suffragette friends had been, but at least those women had done something with their lives. What had Betty done with hers? College was a lifetime away, so far off her radar it wasn’t even funny, even though her mothers kept bringing it up.

  Turning from her homework to the all-but-ignored guitar on its stand in the corner of her room, Betty vowed that she was finally going to play the stupid thing this year. Betty’s heroes lived in a world of guitar, bass, and drums in cities run to the tune of a four-four beat, and she just knew that the one pure chance of escape available to her in the world would come in the form of a hastily recorded demo CD.

  And yet, what was she doing about it?

  Surely there could be some adventure in the two summers left befor
e college, but there seemed to be an impossible amount of bullshit to shovel before she got to enjoy any of it, and Betty’s fear was that somehow she was going to miss out on all of it. She had two wonderful mothers, a best friend named June Derricks that she could confide anything in, and her whole life before her, but right now she was a bored high schooler confined to her room, and nothing felt worse than that.

  When Ophelia called up to her that it was time for dinner, Betty scowled, grabbed her phone, and left her well-furnished cell.

  Dinner was grilled chicken, asparagus, and salads of mixed greens and fruit. The moms had been experimenting on the deck with the new grill after work, and though Betty had found their early work to be a mix of raw and burnt offerings, tonight the food looked like it might be good.

  Andrea walked in just as Ophelia sat down, and Betty watched her mothers exchange a kiss before Andrea set her bag on the floor and sat at the table. As Ophelia ran to fetch another plate of food from the kitchen, Andrea focused on their daughter. “How was your day?” she inquired, her voice wearing just enough ice to let her daughter know that, while she cared, she was still more than a little pissed off.

  Betty’s mothers were as different in appearance and mood as two people in love could possibly be. Andrea was an ass-kicking children’s psychologist with a history of work with the Grand Rapids Police Department. She wore her hair short and dyed the same raven color it had been when she was younger. She was addicted to judo, hated liars, and didn’t trust most people. Andrea was hard from her job, but she could be sweet when she wanted to be, and she occasionally took off her thick skin.

  Ophelia hailed from Greece and was fond of retelling in epic terms the story of the beginning of their love (a story that, to Betty, simply sounded like two people with similar interests had just decided to talk one day). Ophelia was much slighter than Andrea, her hair a natural gray, and her clothes and arms were almost always spattered with paint from one of her projects. Despite the seeming lack of attention to herself—or perhaps bolstered by it—Ophelia was impossibly, depressingly, unattainably beautiful. She was by far the sweeter of the two, always lending a shoulder to cry on or an ear to talk to, but Betty had been growing distrustful of what was starting to feel like the moms’ good cop/bad cop routine.