An hour and forty minutes later, having been offered three different shades of heroin, cocaine, crack, meth, Percodan, and marijuana buds, he found himself closing a transaction for thirty Valium tens at five each. He had no idea whether these would prove genuine, or if they even existed, but he had an expert’s conviction that he was being asked, as an obvious tourist, to pay at least twice the going rate. Having separated the hundred and fifty the seller required, he’d managed to slip the other half into the top of his left sock. He did things like this automatically, when buying drugs, and no longer recalled any particular event having led to the adaptation of a given strategy.