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gets a pass, mostly because they're the strongest people in the neighborhood. Afraid to lose their hard earned money or pride.
                  Quinn worked his way up from the bottom of the drug dealing food chain, paying twenty bucks for a gram. Once he got in good with some of the stoners around the building he started buying it from Billy.
                  Jaybird used to stop by Billy's place from time to time, collecting money. Whenever he came around he was always friendly to Quinn, and anyone else that was there. He'd usually spark up a blunt and let it pass around the room before he left. A very generous man, not pushy, he'd just come, get his money and leave.
                  One day, Jaybird pulled Quinn aside and gave him an offer he couldn't refuse; two hundred bucks an ounce.
                  Jaybird grows the majority of his weed and has different pay scales for each. The strain he sells Quinn is his pride and joy, Kobe Kush. No other member of the drug dealing community can get it for less than three, not even Roc or Billy.
                  Quinn keeps his lips sealed tight about the bargain. He just tells everyone it costs four hundred an ounce, well everyone except Rob and Austin.
                  It isn't a mystery Quinn has a shitty life. A junkie for a brother, a drunk for a mother, and a ghost for a father, but he can make it out as long as a few dollars slide into his hands. Jaybird's main buisness is real estate and he says as soon as Quinn can move six pounds he'll get him set up with a home.
                  Not just a trap house, but an honest to goodness home outside of the Bay, with no piss stains on the carpets or bums in the courtyard.
    * * * * *
                  Music pulses through the beige apartment wall. Skaggs sniffs a line off a small square mirror, the last in a four lane drive. He backs away, tilts his head north, and snorts back the drain letting the mixture drip down his throat.
                  His cheeks clench.
                  His teeth grind.
                  His abdominal muscles tighten.
                  After his body begins to let loose, Skaggs dumps bath salts into a mortar and pestle. The white crystals bounce around inside the bowl. He squishes the speed into dust relatively quickly. He adds five Adderall tablets, five Ambien pills, a Xanax bar, and two Percocet twenties in with the store bought Methylone. He crushes the ingredients until they blend into one heavenly powder.
    * * * * *
                  Tina wakes up on her worn out sofa. Music from her idiot son's room pounds in her brain. Skaggs, the boy who broke her heart, the child who doesn't care that she works fourteen hour shifts to pay for his thievery. The son she carried in her womb for nine months and ten days.
                  "Turn that shit down!" Tina rolls off the couch and sort of spins to the bathroom, it's not a walk, but she isn't really falling either. It's the hung-over shimmy.
                  Inside the bathroom, she turns on the shower in preparation for another day.
    * * * * *
                  Skaggs drops and does twenty pushups.
                  He jumps up and shadow boxes, dancing violently with his reflection, to 'Killing in the Name Of' by Rage Against the Machine.
                  "I'm gonna fuck you up, Judd!" he screams.
                  We've all done this move, the angry yell at the fake man in the mirror. Flexing our muscles at ghosts.
                  The heroin is all gone. The Adderall and Percocet mingle like two strangers in a bar before their first drink. The bath salts, a legal substance, have already taken hold. The Xanax makes him lose control of his inhibitions. He can only think of revenge. A sheriff's shield buried below six feet of