Dope Sick Read Online Free

talked fast. “If my money don’t come back correct, everybody is going to be sorry. Anything I’m saying is confusing you?”
    â€œNo, man,” Rico said. “I’m hip.”
    We got the dope from Dusty, all wrapped up in a plastic sandwich Baggie, and took it to Rico’s pad on 135th Street across from the House of Prayer for All People. As soon as we were inside and had locked the doors, Rico took out the bags of heroin and counted the glassine envelopes in each one. Then he opened a bag, sniffed it, and passed it to me.
    â€œWe can tap this nice,” Rico said.
    â€œYou don’t be tapping Dusty’s stuff,” I said. “You ain’t stupid. If the white boy don’t buy it, what we going to do, take it back to Dusty all tapped out?”
    â€œYeah, you’re right,” Rico said. “But we can tap a buzz, right?”
    I thought that Dusty knew that Rico would tap the loads, taking just a little bit from each bag for himself. But if the dope was as good as everybody said Dusty’s stuff was, it would probably be all right. What I didn’t want was Rico getting high and blowing the whole deal. And what I definitely didn’t want was to mess up completely and get Dusty on our case.
    I watched while Rico tapped a few bags from each load, enough to make a half bag for himself. We had an hour to go before the drop, and I figured that a half bag wouldn’t mess with Rico’s head too much, seeing that it was a long way from his regular eight-to-ten-bag jones.
    â€œYou need a hit?” Rico asked as he cooked up the dope.
    â€œNah,” I said. “I’m good.”
    What I didn’t say was that I wasn’t into no dealing. The Man catch you with a taste and you get a slap on the wrist. You get caught with enough to deal and you catching calendars. I’d rather die than face fifteen to twenty years in jail.
    Still, I copped a bag when Rico started his nod, figuring I could bring it up if I needed to.

3
    I’M SITTING THERE WATCHING the whole thing on television, watching my life like it was happening outside my body. The whole thing was fascinating and scary at the same time. I could even feel my body moving when I saw myself on the screen. It was like I was in two places at the same time, being two people, with one of them looking inside the other, checking out his own mind.
    â€œThen what happened?” Kelly had a way of kind of hunching his shoulders when he talked, like he was pushing the words up.
    â€œYou think people in the street can see thelights from the television?” I asked.
    Kelly clicked the remote and we were looking at the street again. There were three police cars, and some of the officers were looking up at a building, but it wasn’t the one we were in.
    â€œThen what happened?” Kelly asked again.
    â€œWe waited around for a while and Rico tapped the lid again. He got another half bag, cooked that up, and hit the line. That kind of freaked me out, because I figured he might just go on tapping and cooking up the stuff until he blew the whole gig.”
    â€œThen he wouldn’t be able to go with the sale?”
    â€œYeah. So I called him on it,” I said. “If the deal didn’t go down, we could say the white boy didn’t show correct or we saw some wrong-looking dudes hanging around. But if the dope was light when we took it back to Dusty, we were going to have to take the heat, you know what I mean?”
    â€œYeah. You scared of Dusty.”
    â€œSo then it was time to go do the thing and Rico had said we should carry a piece in case somebody tried to rip us off,” I said. “I didn’t think no whiteboy trying to cop in the middle of Harlem was looking to rip nobody off, so it wasn’t a big thing. Rico was feeling nice, but he wasn’t really high yet, so it looked like a bet.”
    â€œYou wasn’t using nothing?” Kelly asked.
    â€œNo, I