Thinner(16)

Houston pulled the drawer open, took out the cocaine, and took some. He offered it to Halleck. Halleck shook his head.

'Then,' Houston resumed, 'about five years ago I had an old lady come into the office with a lot of pain in her gums. She's died since. If I mentioned the old bitch's name, you'd know it. I took a look in there and Christ Almighty, I couldn't believe it. She'd lost the last of her adult teeth almost ten years before - I mean, this babe was pushing ninety - and here was a bunch of new ones coming up ... five of them in all. No wonder she was having gum pain, Billy! She was growing a third set of teeth. She was teething at eighty-eight years of age.'

'What did you do?' Halleck asked. He was hearing all of this with only a very limited part of his mind - it flowed over him, soothing, like white noise, like Muzak floating down from the ceiling in a discount department store. Most of his mind was still dealing with relief - surely Houston's cocaine must be a poor drug indeed compared to the relief he was feeling. Halleck thought briefly of the old Gypsy with the rotten nose, but the image had lost its darkish, oblique power.

'What did I do?' Houston was asking. 'Christ, what could I do? I wrote her a prescription for a drug that's really nothing more than a high-powered form of Num-Zit, that stuff you put on a baby's gums when it starts to teethe. Before she died, she got three more in - two molars and a canine.

'I've seen other stuff, too, a lot of it. Every doctor sees weird shit he can't explain. But enough of Ripley's Believe It Or Not. The fact is, we don't understand very goddamn much about the human metabolism. There are guys like Duncan Hopley ... You know Dunc?'

Halleck nodded. Fairview's chief of police, rouster of Gypsies, who looked like a bush-league Clint Eastwood.

'He eats like every meal was his last one,' Houston said. 'Holy Moses, I never seen such a bear for chow. But his weight sticks right around one-seventy, and because he's six feet tall, that makes him just about right. He's got a souped-up metabolism; he's burning the calories off at twice the pace of, let's say, Yard Stevens.'

Halleck nodded. Yard Stevens owned and operated Heads Up, Fairview's only barber shop. He went maybe three hundred pounds. You looked at him and wondered if his wife tied his shoelaces.

'Yard is roughly the same height as Duncan Hopley,' Houston said, 'but the times I've seen him at lunch, he's just picking at his food. Maybe he's a big closet eater. Could be. But I'd guess not. He's got a hungry face, you know what I mean?'

Billy smiled a little and nodded. He knew. Yard Stevens looked, in his mother's phrase, 'like his food wasn't doing him any good.'

'I'll tell you something else, too - although I s'pose it's tales out of school. Both of those men smoke. Yard Stevens claims a pack of Marlboro Lights a day, which means he probably smokes a pack and a half, maybe two. Duncan claims he smokes two packs of Camels a day, which could mean he's doing three, three and a half. I mean, did you ever see Duncan Hopley without a cigarette in his mouth or in his hand?'

Billy thought about it and shook his head. Meanwhile; Houston had helped himself to another blast. 'Gah, that's enough of that,' he said, and slammed the drawer shut with authority.

'Anyway, there's Yard doing a pack and a half of low-tar cigarettes a day, and there's Duncan doing three packs of black lungers every day - maybe more. But the one who's really inviting lung cancer to come in and eat him up is Yard Stevens. Why? Because his metabolism sucks, and metabolic rate is somehow linked to cancer.

'You have doctors who claim that we can cure cancer when we crack the genetic code. Some kinds of cancer, maybe. But it's never going to be cured completely until we understand metabolism. Which brings us back to Billy Halleck, the Incredible Shrinking Man. Or maybe the Incredible Mass-Reducing Man would be better. Not Mass-Producing; Mass-Reducing.' Houston laughed a strange and rather stupid whinnying laugh, and Billy thought: If that's what coke does to you, maybe I'll stick to Ring-Dings.

'You don't know why I'm losing weight.'

'Nope.' Houston seemed pleased by the fact. 'But my guess is that you may actually be thinking yourself thin. It can be done, you know. We see it fairly often. Someone comes in who really wants to lose weight. Usually they've had some kind of scare -heart palpitations, a fainting spell while playing tennis or badminton or volleyball, something like that. So I give them a nice, soothing diet that should enable them to lose two to five pounds a week for a couple of months. You can lose sixteen to forty pounds with no pain or strain that way. Fine. Except most people lose a lot more than that. They follow the diet, but they lose more weight than the diet alone can explain. It's as if some mental sentry who's been fast asleep for years wakes up and starts hollering the equivalent of "Fire!" The metabolism itself speeds up ... because the sentry told it to evacuate a few pounds before the whole house burned down.'

'Okay,' Halleck said. He was willing to be convinced. He had taken the day off from work, and suddenly what he wanted to do more than anything else was go home and tell Heidi he was okay and take her upstairs and make love to her while the afternoon sunlight shafted in through the windows of their bedroom, 'I'll buy that.'

Houston got up to see him out: Halleck noticed with quiet amusement that there was a dusting of white powder under Houston's nose.