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turned right, toward downtown.
    I’d gone exactly three blocks when I saw her. She was standing on the corner of 13th and M Streets Northwest, near a liquor store. Her brown eyes followed each passing car. She was trying to make eye contact with motorists.
    The woman was petite, with curly, dark brown hair and fair, freckled skin. She wore a calf-length black skirt, a short-sleeve blouse, and flats. She held a small black handbag. I guessed her to be about my age, in her late twenties.
    She was working the street, trying to be subtle, and mostly pulling it off. The woman was pretty, but not TV-ingenue gorgeous, like Raven. She looked like someone I’d feel comfortable approaching at a party after one or three drinks.
    If I’d been sober, I might have kept driving, but the beer and gin had drowned my better judgment. There’d be no harm in talking to her, I figured. I pulled over to the curb, leaned over, and rolled down my passenger-side window.
    “Hi!” she chirped. “You want some company?”
    Her invitation unleashed a little jolt of adrenaline, the kind I’d felt whenever I’d pulled up to the curb on Raven’s street. The rush of getting high began with making the buy, and making the buy usually started with finding the girl to cop the rock.
    I glanced at the street in front of me and checked the rearview mirror. Traffic was light. There were no cops in sight. The thought just popped into my head: Why not?
    “Sure,” I replied as I reached over and opened the passenger door.
    The woman swiveled her head, taking a quick look down both ends of the street, then settled into my car.
    “What’s your name?” I said.
    “Champagne.”
    Maybe it was her obvious street name. It could have been junkie intuition. Real estate certainly had something to do with it. Though we were only two blocks from the shiny office buildings and upscale hotels of downtown, we were in a neighborhood full of liquor stores and run-down apartment buildings, its streets populated by junkies, winos, and strawberries. I’d chosen my apartment because it was just five blocks from the main offices of the Post , but I think part of me was drawn to the inherent drama of the whole area.
    Whatever the reason, as soon as Champagne was in my car, I just knew . It had been eleven long days since my last hit, and in that moment, some internal switch was flipped.
    “So,” I said. “Do you party?”
    Champagne knew exactly what I meant. She opened her handbag and held it over the gearshift so I could see inside. The bag contained a nail file, a handful of condoms, a small mirror, a lighter, a six-inch strand of hanger wire, and a crack pipe.
    Aces. I checked the rearview again. All clear.
    “If I buy a rock for you, and one for me, would you do me while I’m hitting the pipe?”
    “Sure.”
    “Are you holding?”
    “No, but I know where to go. It’s close by. I can get us two for thirty-five.”
    One more party wouldn’t hurt. “You navigate.”
    Champagne directed me two blocks north, to Logan Circle. She had me bear right, onto Rhode Island Avenue, toward the east. We passed people engaged in ordinary Saturday-afternoon activities: a group of kids playing basketball on the outdoor court of a middle school, a handful of old people passing the time in chairs outside their building, a woman carrying a bag of groceries. They hardly looked like the residents of a city under siege from crack violence.
    At 7th Street Northwest, Champagne had me turn left. Two blocks later, we hit the corner of 7th and S.
    “Turn right here and park,” she said.
    I pulled up directly in front of a squat concrete building with a small sign that read JOHN ’S PLACE . A nightclub. I killed the engine and gaped.
    In front of us, a half-dozen or so sullen young men and teenagers in wifebeaters or tees and sagging shorts or blue jeans loitered in the shade of a tree in front of a row house. Across the street, an equal number of slingers leaned against a rusty railing