Chapter 5
Deneeka loiters on the streets of Vine City for the better part of the afternoon, socializing, setting up copping times, trying to make herself exhausted before sleep. She walks the entirety of the Bluff, part of the sun-dappled South that holds the haunts of the hard living. Someone’s either a user, a lookout, a dealer, a distributor, or a supplier. Except for the grannies and the grandpas, shaking their heads at the funerals, ducking from the drive-by shootings, asking God for a grandson’s welfare to hold out one more day. Junkies are everywhere, copping drugs, fluttering like paper in air, shredded and holed, going with the win, desperate not to hit ground, feel anything.
When she gets down the hill to Ashby and Simpson, Deneeka sees Slick X on the corner. That isn’t his real name. Like Deneeka isn’t hers. She was christened Mark. Imagine that. Mark. Since then she’s been Olivia, Cascade, Angelika, Jezebel. Deneeka fit Atlanta. She’d picked it when she’d hopped off the rig and left the trucker with his orange tighty underwear and his paper bag full of crystal meth and dildos.
X is taking orders through a wireless phone. His sunglasses reflect the burn-out skeleton of the church across the street, where cement crumbles from a fallen altar. Wiry teenagers hang around him, smarmy as alley cats, only a little more than a decade old and running guns, shirking from the social worker’s beige Honda that comes on Tuesdays and Fridays, their doors locked, driving in and out like priests coming for the dying. They arrive on the heels of the cocky high schoolers and frat boys, little rich kids with new sneakers and sullen faces, cruising slowly down the streets of Vine City, looking for a high, thinking they are better than their parents, they got something on them. Mr. And Mrs. Suburban Atlanta would be horrified to know Junior was steering their superpowered SUV through Egan Homes looking for girl, gutter water in his veins, swirling in a fancy suit down the mouth of a toilet.
Deneeka heads toward the sun, raising its white head above the bank building across the tracks and illuminating Atlanta’s skyline, where the world freezes in a silhouette of buildings designed by John Portman. Urban development is the phoenix of the New South. The Georgia Dome has replaced Gone With The Wind. Shadows of those buildings curl around Deneeka, who supplies works for the city that will ram honey-gold magic through her clients’ veins. The crack addicts save her life. She can walk in and be what they need, sucking one while the other watches. A spoon and heated powder act as food for their perversion, the candy the old man offers before he opens his raincoat. 
