Pages 34-49 Summary

Bill's legal case is resolved with a four-month suspended sentence. He gives up robbing drunks and starts to peddle junk. Bill forms a partnership with Bill Gains. They purchase junk and then cut it with milk-sugar and load it into capsules which they resell to other addicts. Bill discusses dosage, partitioning, and cutting techniques, and then comments on Gains' impressive history of drug use.

Bill develops several customers, one of whom is Nick, a hard-time operator who is always broke. He buys drugs for others and takes a portion of the drug from each capsule before passing them along. Nick is hugely addicted and completely unreliable; he introduces Bill to other questionable addicts including Tony and Ray. Bill suspects they are selling information to law enforcement but continues to sell to them anyway to support his own habit. Conversely, Gains has...