Getting Higher Read Online Free PDF Page B

get caught, and the extra money on top of their unemployment checks helped them make it through the week.
    The pushers were a couple of guys who lived across the river, in a run-down neighborhood in the South Side, and ran their operation from a basement in one of the tenements there. They had a quiet, low-profile business, dealing with a small number of customers in a small part of the city. They had never been caught, and tried their best to make sure they never would be.
    Walking over the Franklin Bridge, Joe and Crank crossed the river into the South Side and reached the pushers' ramshackle building around three-thirty. Ignoring a bunch of wild kids wrestling on the front steps, they weaved inside and descended to the basement.
    The basement of that building was hardly ever used, except by the dealers. The place was huge and drafty, stacked with junk that was left there by tenants; most of the stuff was abandoned, just cheap, overused belongings forgotten by poor families scrambling from one dump to the next. The pushers only used one small corner, in fact; they hid their merchandise behind stone blocks they could remove from the walls, and set up a card table from which they did business. There was little chance that they would ever be found, hidden away in that vast, black cellar, tucked in a musty crevice behind mountains of furniture and boxes. Their customers would never turn them in, and the people in the rooms above knew better. That was why they used the place.
    Slowly, Joe and Crank approached the pushers' corner, pushing aside boxes and junk to make a path. As they went, Joe crinkled his nose at the smell of the place, a wet, slimy, mildew odor that was so strong it almost made him sick. The air was damp and stale, hanging in the dark cellar like stagnant fog, never moving, never mixing with fresh air from above. Aside from the pushers and their associates, almost no one opened the door at the top of the stairs, so the stink and chill were trapped forever inside. The air down there was probably the same stuff that had filled the place when it was first built, many decades ago, only now it was old and rotten.
    "Ah, shit!" Crank tripped over a box on the floor and almost fell over. "Somebody oughtta' clean this damn place up!" He turned and kicked the box, bringing a dull rattle from its contents.
    As Crank shambled on, Joe glanced down. The box that had tripped his friend was full of old toys; a big toy dump truck was sticking over the edge, raising its blunt, rusty nose in the putrid air. Beside it was an old, broken hula hoop and a naked doll with one arm.
    After wading through some more junk, Joe and Crank finally found the right corner. Crank flicked away a row of blankets slung over a clothesline, and he and Joe were face-to-face with the pushers.
    "Hey, dudes," he said, wiping his hands on his polyester slacks. "We're here."
    The three men said nothing. They just sat there on rickety old lawn furniture, watching Joe and Crank. The pushers looked threatening in the dense, oily darkness; they sat in a row behind their card table, with a single kerosene lamp glowing dimly on the floor. Their faces were shadowy, their features practically formless in the thick jelly black. Joe and Crank had to squint hard to see them through the basement darkness.
    These three figures were the men Joe and Crank worked for, the men behind the drug business in that part of Brownstown. One was a mechanic in a beat-up garage, a guy they called Monkey; the other was an unemployed steelworker, formerly a lathe operator at Global, called Shack; the last was a bloated human zeppelin named Fart, who used to be a welder at Global. Neither Joe nor Crank knew what the real names of any of the guys were, and only ever heard them called by these nicknames. For all they knew, Monkey, Shack, and Fart might be their real names.
    Shack was the first to speak. "Hello Crank, Joey. We got some stuff for you to do." The man tilted his chair back