The crime of “possession” didn’t seem to apply to her. The term should be reserved for somebody with kilos of coke or a truckload of crack, not for the casual user she considered herself and Tanisha to be. It was practically medicinal, she and Tanisha had decided, except that to be legal they’d have needed the approval of a doctor.
“The job make us sick,” Tanisha had said, using her street grammar as she did whenever she was joking. Dana felt a great sense of loss and renewed her resolve to make things right with Tanisha’s mother. She’d visit Marne as soon as she got out of this pit.
Dana couldn’t believe the questions they’d asked her.
“Who’s your dealer?” some guy in a tacky polyester suit had demanded, his face contorted. As if she were connected to some drug lord in East Oakland. Save the loathing for the hardened criminals, Dana wanted to tell him. She was totally sure her friend Sergeant Matt Gennaro wouldn’t use these tactics.
“Do you have a regular pickup and drop for the drugs?” This from a young female detective, probably trying to make a good impression on her senior partner.
Truthfully, Dana didn’t know how the weed got to her hands. She’d told Elaine and Gloria and Matt the truth about that. She assumed it was grown somewhere in South America and was passed through a network in every city that was near a port. Oakland was in an ideal position for that, being an international hub for cargo transportation and distribution.
Kyle, an EMT at another ambulance company, was her current contact. Dana knew Kyle was far from the big-distributor end of things. She’d met him at a training class just in time to fill in the gap when her own college contacts had gone away Kyle was apt to bring the weed to Dana as small branches, which she didn’t like. She’d have to clean off the branches and get rid of the seeds and stalk before she could roll the grass. She kept meaning to investigate further contacts at parties and raves in the neighborhood. Now it was just as well she hadn’t. They might be able to torture the information out of her.
Finally, after what seemed like a month sitting in that gray metal chair, the polyester suit came back.
“You can go,” he said. The smell of garlic reeked from his pores. “Just not too far, okay?”
Dana had a lot of questions about what the cops had been doing since they left her, but she had no intention of hanging around to ask them.
She nearly flipped the chair over backward leaving the room.
At the last minute Dana decided not to call Matt to pick her up with her Jeep. She also refused the cops’ offer of a ride home. Instead she called a cab.
“Pull over here,” she told the cabbie when they got within a block of Elaine’s house. She paid him and walked to her Jeep, thankful it was at the back end of the driveway.
She was glad she’d given Matt just her spare car key and still had her own set. She needed to take care of some business, and she didn’t want to have to explain herself. First, she wanted to visit Marne and Rachel and do whatever it took to assure Marne she had nothing to do with incriminating Tanisha in anything. Tomorrow she’d confront Julia at Valley Med and find out what the fake invoices were all about and why Dana’s and Tanisha’s names were on them.
At the back of her brain always was her dad. She flipped between hating him for being so uncommunicative and worrying that he was dead, like Tanisha and Patel.
Dana felt bad about sneaking into Elaine’s driveway, but she couldn’t see any other way. She’d had enough of being around Elaine and her friends. Elaine was too depressed and, worse, trying to hide it for Dana’s sake, she could tell. Gloria was entirely too reasonable about everything, and Matt … well, she was becoming way too dependent on Matt, who’d be gone in a week and she’d never hear from him again. Might as well break it off now. Dana had to smile at how much it felt like Matt had been her prom date and would soon be going off to college.
Lights were on in the kitchen and dining room, and she figured they were holding dinner for her. It looked so inviting, but … some other time, she thought. She knew if she went inside, they’d all try to talk her into resting, eating, staying overnight again, and she didn’t have the energy to resist.
She rolled back into the street without headlights and pulled away as quietly as possible.
Dana had never been so happy to climb the stairs to her own house. Her plan was to go straight to the shower and then out again to Marne’s house across town. On the way she’d pick up some blueberry marble ice cream, Rachel’s favorite flavor.
She unlocked the door of her house and entered the foyer off the living room. She wouldn’t have been surprised to see her things turned every which way, left a mess by cops with a search warrant.