“What the fuck’s that?”

“I’m not positive, but I think it might be a drug that elves can get hooked on.”

“Well, fuck me,” Karl said. “You sure about this stuff?”

“No, I’m not. That’s why I want you to talk to Car about it. You know that’s his name, right?”

“Yeah, he told me. Guess he got tired of me saying, ‘Hey, you’.”

“Later on, I want to compare whatever you get from him with what I already heard from his partner, Thor.”

“Thor, you said? Like that old pixie joke, ‘I’m tho thor, I can hardly pith’?”

“That’s the one. And listen, if you have to use a little vampire mojo to get him talking about Slide, that’s OK.”

“Seriously? I don’t even know if it’ll work, Stan – but if it does, anything I get from him’s gonna be inadmissible in court. You know that.”

“Doesn’t matter. I don’t want this for the DA’s office – I want it for me, so I can maybe figure out what the fuck is going on here.”

“OK, I’ll see what I can do. We’re gonna be here a while, anyway.”

“Good. Besides, if Influence doesn’t get you anywhere, you can always flash your fangs at him.”

“I’ll keep that in reserve, just in case.”

I checked my watch: 4.22. Sunrise would be about ten after seven.

“Listen, if you’re still there an hour from now, give me a call,” I said. “I’ll bring one of the other detectives over, or even a uniform, if I have to. He can take over custody of Car, and I’ll give you a ride back here, so you can head home in time.”

“Thanks, Stan, I appreciate it.”

“No problem. OK, I gotta go back and see Thor. He was yelling about a lawyer when I left him, and I sure wouldn’t want to violate his constitutional rights by denying him timely access to counsel.”

“Heaven forbid. Alright, I’ll talk to you later, dude.”

“Don’t call me dude.”

Thor was as good as his word. Once he was sure I wasn’t going to bring in a doctor to give him a hit of Slide, he clammed up and demanded a lawyer.

I took him back down to Booking, where they’d put him in a holding cell and give him a phone, just like the law requires. I was pretty sure that once his lawyer got here, Thor wasn’t going to be nearly as chatty as he had been upstairs.

If Thor was a human going through withdrawal from heroin, a doctor might actually have do him some good – and we’d provide one. That’s the law, too. Some junkie bouncing off the walls because his dopamine receptor cells were going crazy wasn’t exactly a new phenomenon around here.

A doc wouldn’t give a prisoner any heroin, but a dose of methadone wasn’t out of the question, or maybe a strong sedative. Even if we had a fucking goblin going nuts because he can’t get any of the meth he’s hooked on – the medical community knows how to handle that, too.

But an addicted elf? Hooked on a drug that nobody’s ever heard of? No doctor could be sure that any drug he gave Thor might not interact with the stuff already in his system and kill the little bastard. So Thor was going to have to sweat it out, literally, until a specialist in elf medicine could get a look at him.

I went back to the squad room and got started on the paperwork stemming from the arrest of the two elves at the diner. I was almost done when Karl called around 5.30, saying he was still stuck at Mercy’s ER. Car hadn’t even made it into a treatment room yet.

“OK, I’ll find somebody to take over for you,” I said. “We oughta be there in ten, fifteen minutes.”

“Roger that.” Karl loves that kind of talk.

Sefchik had started his shift by now, and he and Aquilina were out on the street somewhere. But McLane and Pearce were in the squad room, drinking coffee and waiting to handle the next call that came in. Lieutenant McGuire was in his glass-enclosed office at the back, and I told him that Karl was stuck over at the ER with sunrise fast approaching. McGuire said I could run over there and take one of the other detectives with me to relieve Karl.

Ten minutes later, Pearce was at the ER, handcuffed to Car, and Karl was riding shotgun in my Toyota Lycan as I headed back to the station house. I had a lot to tell him. Turned out, he had a few items for me, too.

When I finished telling Karl about my interview with Thor, I said, “If I hadn’t seen it with my own eyes, I’d have said it was bullshit. But there he was, right in front of me – an elf who was obviously strung out on something.”

“I think you’re being too hard on yourself, Stan. You were going on what you’d been taught at the academy, and they taught me the same thing: supes don’t get hooked on drugs, apart from goblins, I mean. Now it looks like some motherfucker has come up with a new kind of drug, and that throws all the old knowledge into the wastebasket.”

“A game changer,” I said.

“Uh-huh – like the old game wasn’t tough enough already.” Karl shook his head. “Well, I got a couple of things from talking to my buddy Car that I can add, and one of them’s gonna blow your mind. I know it did mine.”

“I can hardly wait,” I said.

“I’ll start with the other one. Car told me that there’s another street name for Slide, and he thinks this one came first. He says some of his homies call it HG.”

I didn’t take my eyes off the road to stare at him, but I wanted to. “HG,” I said. “Seriously.”

“That’s what Car said.”

“It sounds like some old-time movie director – Ready when you are, HG!’’

“Turns out, I can give you a better idea of its etymology,” Karl said.

“Etymology.”

“Yeah – it means the study of word origins.”

I looked sideways at him. “You been looking at those copies of Reader’s Digest I keep in my desk?”

I saw his shrug from the corner of my eye. “I sneak one every once in a while.”

“OK,” I said. “So, enlighten me as to the, uh…”

“Etymology.”

“Yeah. The etymology of ‘HG’.’”

“Car says he’s pretty sure it stands for ‘Hemoglobin-Plus’, on account of hemoglobin being the basic ingredient.”

“Hemoglobin plus what?” I asked him.

“Car didn’t know. He says nobody does.”

“With a guy like Car,” I said, “nobody probably consists of him and three other losers like him.”

“Probably. We’re gonna have to start working our street contacts, see if somebody out there knows more about this stuff.”

“OK, so the name is one piece of news,” I said. “What’s the other item – the one that’s gonna blow my mind?”

“Thing is, it could be just bullshit – considering Car was the source and all.”

“Fine – I’ll keep that in mind. It might keep my skull from imploding. So what is it?”

“Car says he knows a vampire who’s hooked on the shit, too.”

With dawn coming soon, Karl had to split as soon as we pulled into the parking lot behind the station house. My shift was over, too, but I still went inside to see McGuire.

I told him what Karl and I had learned from the two junkie elves. He was as disbelieving as I’d been, at first. But he agreed with me that it was something the unit needed to know more about. He said each shift of detectives would be told to ask their snitches about Slide and exactly who might be addicted to it.

When I got home, Christine’s car was parked in the driveway. Since the sun was already well above the horizon, I knew she’d be in her basement bedroom by now, wrapped in a sleeping bag and literally dead to the world until dusk. I’d talk to her then.

I went upstairs and traded my detective outfit for a sweatshirt and jeans. Time was, I’d head off to sleep right after getting home from work, but lately I’ve got into the habit of unwinding for an hour before I go to bed. I have fewer nightmares that way.

I went into the spare bedroom and checked on my hamster, Quincey. His water bottle was mostly full, but the bowl was empty. I filled it with food pellets and put it back in his cage. That woke him up – hamsters are nocturnal, just like vampires and some cops I know. When he came over to the bowl, I rubbed his head with my index finger for a little while. He likes that.