The Girl With the Golden Grass : RUSH <i> by Kim Wozencraft (Random House: $18.95; 260 pp.) </i>
“He offered me the bottle and I sat down and took a swallow, enjoying the burn.”
“He brought us to his home in a red ’56 Galaxy, bruising down Highway 10 like it was time to die, and we spilled dopesmoke and vodka all over a Sunday afternoon.”
“I tooted a couple of lines and picked up my pistol.”
“My blouse was sticking to me and I looked down at it. I was covered with blood. My own blood on my blouse, Jim’s blood all over my jeans.”
Mike Hammer in drag? Get real, dude. This is Kristen Cates, undercover narcotics agent and the toughest frail since Minnie the Moocher.
Cates, straight out of Catholic school, has her father’s cleft chin, green eyes, blonde hair and loose ends. “I wanted risk,” she says, “I wanted excitement.” As the Sisters might have told her, “Ask and ye shall receive, baby.”
She receives. More than she can handle. Along with slime, sadists and scuzzballs, both in and out of the law, she finds speed, snow, doobies, brown, meth, quays, crank, dust, preludin, desoxyn and blue Hawaiian.
With partner Jim Raynor, Kristen is righteously hell-bent on meeting the drug-bust quota of an oleaginous, amoral police chief in Beaumont--a Texas town where races don’t mix and “the locals were always sighting UFOs and having personal encounters with aliens out there in the piney woods.”
To make a case, the narcs don’t bend the rules; they powder them down and swallow them whole. To make their buys, they must win the confidence of the dealers. To win confidence, they must do the drugs they’re buying. To make their charges stick, they must perjure themselves in court.
“Everybody in (court) lies,” Kristen is told. “You go in there and you answer and no, it isn’t the whole . . . truth so help you God, but it takes the dealers off the streets.”
Initially, Kristen equivocates. “Somehow,” she says before her maiden perjury, “I feel like I just did six lines of pink Peruvian.”
She gets used to the MO. Fast. For one thing, she’s got to earn her stripes among a cabal of enforcers callous as cobblestones. Cops who call a high-suicide area “Lemmingsville.” Cops whose sole reaction to splattered brains is wonderment at how a .357 can generate enough force to embed a head hair in the ceiling. Cops who ingest drugs they’ve never heard of and then hit the streets bushy-tailed the next morning.
Kristen also comes to love her work. Not the routine (there is no routine). What she loves is the drugs.
The common wisdom--the shared delusion--of the narcs is their immunity to the pharmacopeia of the streets. “All this crap about addiction,” says partner Jim, “it’s only a matter of how strong you are . . . “
And so the Siren sings and so Kristen and her peers are dashed against the rubble of total degradation. And what has been a morbidly fascinating glimpse into the netherworld of drug busts crashes into tragedy.
For Kristen, the con begins to peel away in raw, raging strips when she persuades Jim to go with her to Houston to celebrate Midnight Mass with her proud family. To face the straight world, they “score a quarter-ounce of coke” before the service. “My father sang beautifully from his seat on the aisle,” says Kristen. “I mouthed the words and tried not to sniff too much.”
After Mass, “I didn’t want any more cocaine. I had the shakes . . . We’d gotten a bad batch laced with crystal . . . I didn’t want it.
“Oh yes I did.”
Back in Beaumont, it gets worse. It always does. Kristen crawls on the floor, looking for a single grain, stalking “the pure, clean, smiling smell of cocaine.” And worse: “Some days my brains screamed for it. I put the stuff up my nose to quiet the yelling inside me . . . “
This is really the end of the story, though the book is only half-finished: Chief Nettle insists on the partners’ arresting one Gaines, the baddest dude in Texas. Kristen and Jim fabricate evidence. Jim burns his arm horribly with a hot iron to hide the needle tracks for his day in court.
Someone, possibly Gaines, blasts the pair with a shotgun. Kristen leaves to straighten out her life, but the FBI gets involved, calls her back. There is another trial. Everyone lies, everyone cheats. The bad people go free . . .
But the tale is long since played out, except for the kinds of people who slow down on the freeway to gawk at a particularly grisly accident.
This is the first book by Kim Wozencraft, a former undercover police officer. She has sold the film rights for $1 million. It should be a blockbuster.