LITMIR.BIZ

      Dedication

      For Mom and Dad –

      Thanks for the first typewriter.

      Epigraph

      In the end you don’t even know yourself

      only the hill you must climb;

      but not even the hill; a bump on it, one hump of grass

      a flint, a blade thin in the wind as you climb

      each step, each breath taken in a dissimilar time.

      — John Newlove

      Prologue

      He is neither a chemist nor a pharmacist, but he finds that by working slowly, methodically, following the instructions which he has printed out in neat block letters, he makes surprisingly good progress on his first try.

      By the time he is onto the third batch, his hands move with the confidence of experience. It is as easy as he has come to understand from reading the news articles about what is taking place in the sheds and basements and trailers of small towns in the rural United States. It is labour-intensive but simple, and the ingredients are so readily available it is disturbing.

      Easy, yes, but not without risk and danger. The slightest miscalculation or sloppiness in the combining of at least two of the main ingredients required for the cooking — lithium and anhydrous ammonia — can lead to disaster. The ammonia alone is sufficiently caustic to utterly dissolve flesh. He can smell and hear and watch the chemical reactions taking place in the large stainless steel container that is intended for agricultural or industrial purposes. The fizzing, boiling froth, the stench that makes him wrap an old T-shirt around his mouth and nose.

      He feels like a kid conducting a science experiment. And he is, for this is precisely an experiment: to introduce a new element to a town which has carved its survival from the mining of another element. But this new element holds the power to destroy, or conversely offers the chance for redemption. The choice exists between darkness and light, good and evil.

      The baker measures the three batches out into equal portions. He grinds the crystals to a powder as the reports and instructions have set out. He uses a spoon to measure roughly equal portions onto squares of foil, which he wraps and creases tightly. He weighs the packets on a mini scale and marks the gram weight on each in black felt marker.

      When he is finished, he sits back and looks upon his work. The packets are set in rows, three high and eight across. Twenty-four lots. They are each marked in sequence with a number in black felt marker in the bottom right corner. He marvels at the simplicity of the production. There is something straightforward and methodical in the work that appeals to him. Orderly. This is the result of weeks of research, weeks of sourcing the raw materials, three days of production. In the end, he must trust that he has followed the recipe to the letter, for he has no appetite or even curiosity to sample his handiwork. His interest lies in what happens next. What happens when this element is introduced to a town already short on luck — will it be the breath to blow out the final light?

      He gathers the packets into a canvas satchel and swings the bag over his shoulder. Outside the night is cool and smells of composting leaves, the rich and fecund earth of late fall. The ground, the air, everything is readying itself to accept the cold and the dark and the death that winter brings. He gets in the big black vehicle and sets the canvas bag on the passenger seat.

      As he turns the engine, he considers once again the simplicity of the operation from concept to completion. It is no surprise that methamphetamine is destroying rural towns all over the United States, eating them from the inside out like a cancer. At least this is what he has read and come to understand. Now he will see for himself, firsthand. The choices to be had, the choices to be made.

      He puts the black vehicle in motion.

      One

      Ste. Bernadette

      January, 2003

      On this Sunday morning sunshine glints off the hard-packed snow like blinding beams shot from a mirror. The azure sky is clean of clouds, as though swept by a painter’s hand with a trowel. Constable Ed Nolan is parked and idling behind the hockey arena, just starting into his second doughnut of the day when the call about a disturbance at the Lacey household comes over the radio.

      “Eighteen Murray Street. Neighbours called in, something about their son going wild,” says Shirley Murdoch, who works the dispatch from her home. Calls get routed to her via the main line, and for some reason Ed Nolan often wonders what the woman is wearing as she dispatches official police business. It is conceivable that she could be in a nightgown or perhaps even naked, though the thought gives him a shiver. Shirley Murdoch is not the sort of woman you want to picture naked as she talks to you over the two-way police radio.

      “Ten-four. On my way,” Nolan says. “Over and out.”

      He drops the cruller that tastes like cigarette smoke from sitting out at the Coffee Time, and he swings the cruiser around. The Ste. Bernadette force is small, with two full-time cops and a chief; but at least they get to drive nice wheels — Nissan Pathfinders — thanks to the fact the mayor’s brother runs the only dealership within a fifty-kilometre radius. The cruisers are painted midnight black with the Saint B town crest emblazoned in white on each door. When he slides behind the wheel each morning, smells the leather, and looks at the dashboard and the two-way radio controls, Ed Nolan feels that he might be a real cop after all.

      Now Nolan hits the lights, but he doesn’t bother with the siren. In fact, he can’t recall the last time he employed the sirens on his way to a call. The cops of Saint B deal in accidents out on the highway, drunken arguments at the Station Hotel tavern on a Friday night, tussles between lovers the day after the welfare cheques have arrived, teenagers wrecking town property out of boredom. Most of the time the local cops drive around in their cruisers or they sit at the little station on Main, reading magazines and drinking coffee and trying to rationalize the boredom against the fact they draw decent and steady pay with the promise of a municipal pension at the end of the long row of uneventful days.

      Nolan is a local, or what the locals call a “townie,” was raised here but left in his late teens for a decade, a short stint in the armed forces, a failed year living in Edmonton with a wife in a turbulent marriage that was ruled a youthful mistake by both parties. He believes he returned home not because he couldn’t make it in the greater world, but because this is the place where he wants and needs to be. He tries to remind himself that this is his choice — the highway leading south waits out there at the town limits; he can take it any time he wants. He is a rookie himself, but Pete Younger, the other full-time cop on the force, is the greenest

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