He shook his head sadly. “None of us walked away,” he said. “We snorted it and we were glad we did. It was better than anything we’d ever done before. It didn’t make us paranoid like coke, or silly like weed, or out of control like ecstasy. It made everything hazy and beautiful, and when he talked to us through that haze and told us we were in heaven, it wasn’t that hard to believe. He told us in this gravelly sounding voice that we were a legion of angels who’d been called to fight a war.”

White closed his eyes and swallowed hard against the nausea rising in his throat.

“When did you see him again?” Coletti asked.

“We all met at Phillip’s apartment the next two nights in a row, and each time, he gave us a little more dope. By the fourth night, we were hooked, so when he told us to meet him in this old warehouse in North Philly, we did it. That’s when it started getting scary. We snorted the dope and he told us he was the angel of death. He said he’d been sent to help us carry out God’s will, and that eventually, we’d have to let everything go.

“By the time the first month passed, everybody had given up their place, and the guy put us up in an apartment in Kensington. Halfway into that first month, we were shooting dope instead of snorting it. At two months, we couldn’t function without it. At three months, we turned our backs on everyone we knew. We were dressing like him and talking like him and believing everything he told us. I was so deep into it that I got this tattoo, and when he told us there were thousands of angels in the legion who would find us and kill us if we ever turned against him, we all took it as the gospel.”

There was silence as Sandy and Coletti digested the story. A few seconds later, it was clear that Coletti wasn’t sold.

“If you were so afraid you’d die for going against him,” he asked cynically, “why didn’t you go to Sergeant Jackson’s house when he told you to?”

White was quiet for the next few moments, his body continuing to quiver from the withdrawal.

“When he started talking about killing people, I knew I couldn’t do it,” he said solemnly. “So last week, I took some money I’d stashed, and copped like twenty bags of dope. Then I left. I walked a couple miles until I ran across this abandoned house in North Philly and I hid there, waiting for the angels he told us about to find me. When they didn’t, I knew that everything I believed was a lie.