“Got any you can sell me?” Jack said.

“Berzerk? Nothing active. But I’ve got some in the inert state I was working on till it changed. When the preppy guy’s turned, so did mine. I’ll just give you some of that. No damn good to me anymore.” He motioned Jack toward the back room.

“I’ll stay out here,” Abe said. “I want to take notes on your decor so I can maybe duplicate it in my own place.”

The back room was Tom Terrific’s lab. He was known to specialize in speed—ice specifically—and Jack had heard that his product got high marks from folks who were into the stuff.

When he turned on the light, a panicked horde of roaches scuttled for the corners and disappeared.

“Excuse the little guests, man. They weren’t invited, but lemme tell you, they’re a fact of life when you live under a restaurant.”

Manfred the rottweiler had followed Jack and his master to the rear room but didn’t enter. Jack immediately knew why. The place smelled like a high school chemistry lab with the drama club doing the experiments—a mixture of paint thinner and dirty cat litter. Trays of white paste sat on benches with fans blowing over them. An exhaust fan in the corner ran into a shiny new galvanized duct that ran up through the ceiling, but the room still stank.

“Just out of curiosity,” Jack said, “what do you get for an ounce of the stuff you make?”

“Ounce? Hey, I sell it by the gram, man. My stuff is pure, and my tweakers know it’s a long high.” He gave Jack a sidelong look. “Why do you want to know?”

“Well, you’re practically a legend. You’ve got to be able to afford better digs than this.”

“Oh, I can, man, and someday I will. But creature comforts aren’t the important thing now. I’m an artist, you see, and I need to stay close to my work.”

Everybody’s an artist these days, Jack thought.

“And one of the things about my art is that the, um, materials I use, especially the solvents, have got telltale odors that can bring the heat down on you PDQ. So what I’ve done is hooked into the hood over the stove in the restaurant upstairs. My fumes mix with their cooking odors and they all come out together on the roof. Pretty cool, huh.”

“Very,” Jack said. His eyes were burning from the fumes and he wanted to get out of here. “What about the Berzerk?”

“Right over here,” he said and started fumbling through a pile of glassine envelopes. “I only deal to finance my art, you know, and lemme tell you, I’m working on something that’ll make Berzerk last week’s news. I call it Ice-Nine. One hit will give a smooth, utterly bodacious high that’ll last a week. It’s my Holy Grail. When I reach it, I’ll be fulfilled. That’s when I’ll retire, but not a minute before. Ice-Nine or bust, man.”

Right on, Sir Gawain.