The Gulf by David Poyer

go in or not. The sense of doom increased till he could hardly breathe.
    At last, he crossed the street, sweating and dizzy, and had a slow drink and a slower smoke, watching from a café. The guy didn’t show again, so he paid and went out. He stood for a moment blinking and mumbling to himself in the sudden heat, waiting for a donkey cart to go by.
    It was like bingo night on the reservation. The fluorescents were nearly all burned out once you got past the entrance, and the interior was thronged with about a million women, all of them yelling at the tops of their voices. He swallowed nausea as he looked down flickering blue corridors roofed with the spinning disks of electric fans. Each booth was lit with a bulb in the back, where the samples hung, more colors and embroidery than he’d ever seen in his life, and women sat in folding chairs drinking coffee out of doll-size cups and picking flies off sticky pastries.
    This wasn’t what he was looking for. He came to a smoky space of air and found himself at a cooked-meat stand. The smell made him suddenly ravenous. He bought a shish kebab. The flesh was unfamiliar, strong, but it was good and he ate it all. Then he rubbed his greasy fingers on his jeans and was back in it again, the noise, the heat, the flies, the musky perfume so thick he wanted to hawk it out like phlegm. On impulse, he asked the meat man, “Hey, you know where I can buy some drugs?”
    The guy didn’t speak English, and Phelan drifted off again.
    Eventually he came to the back. This was lit even worse than the main area, and there were no women. Just stalls, most of them dark, and men sitting in the shadows, smoking or talking in low voices. Phelan saw a brass telescope in one of the stalls. There was other junk, too, old lamps, used radios, that kind of stuff.
    He suddenly felt it again, very strong now, that irrational, doomed fear that grabbed him more and more often the last few months. He stood trembling in front of the stall, looking around again for the guy in the pink shirt, or for cops.
    The light clicked on. Someone was in there. He unslung the camera bag and went in.
    The bearded Pak bought the big Navy binoculars for thirty dollars. Phelan insisted on being paid in American money. The bills were grimy and faded, as if they’d been lying in the cash box since World War II, but they looked spendable.
    Bernard asked him where he could buy drugs. The man examined him for a few seconds, his smile unaltered. Then turned to the shadows and called out.
    The Paks with the dope were kids, fourteen or fifteen. There were two of them. They had drip, hashish, in several forms. They had it in paste, in what they called brown sugar, and in what looked like chewing tobacco. Phelan didn’t like the looks of the tobacco. Or rather, it looked too much like tobacco. He’d been burned on buys before. The paste looked like shoe polish and tasted like marijuana. “You got anything else?” he said. “That rubbed Kashmir, or hash oil?”
    â€œWe have some opium,” said the one who spoke English. “Real qual-i-ty.”
    â€œLet’s see it.”
    The opium came in plugs the size of his little finger. It was wrapped in aluminum foil. Phelan unwrapped one and sniffed. It smelled like it looked, dark brown, sweetish, burnt honey and incense. “How much of this is a hit?” he asked the kid.
    â€œThat’s a hit.”
    â€œWhat do you people do with it? Smoke it?”
    â€œYou can smoke it or eat it. Smoking it is better.”
    â€œHow much is it? For a hit?”
    The kid wanted twenty dollars. Phelan thought that was high, but he wanted some. Now. He said, “You got more of this?”
    â€œYou want a brick,” said the Pak. “Do you want a brick? It’s cheaper. Enough for a long time.”
    The other kid showed him the brick. It was easily the size of three regular Hersheys. There had to be enough for a month at sea.