Angel strides stiffly toward the trash container that serves as her bedroom. Even after 9 p.m., the record-breaking summer heat bounces into her face from the asphalt. She has been walking for miles, morning and evening. Thirteen hours this day at Santa Fe and Mississippi, flying her sign of hopeful lies. “Need help to get a bus ticket to Wisconsin.” The sign netted one hundred and three dollars. People give money hoping against their better judgment that Angel will use it well. She is about to prove them wrong.

From her pile at the edge of a warehouse loading dock, Angel pulls a filthy bedroll and lays it out. She digs in the carefully managed drug compartment of her ever-present backpack, intent on the ritual. She twists open a scrap of tinfoil to uncover a pea-sized brown lump of heroin.

The lump drops into an empty tin meant to hold a votive candle. She sprinkles in a couple tablespoons of water, ties a string around her forearm to pop the veins, then begins the meticulous search for an unsullied path between her knuckles. Her movements are quick but sure — she could mix and inject with her eyes closed, but she stares intently at the dissolving dope.

All is quiet. The Yuppie softball players under the lights at Lincoln Park have gone home. There’s a pause between light rail trains, 30 feet from Angel’s trash bin.

The heroin plunges in, and Angel’s eyes close. Now she is back to “normal.” Tonight she won’t sleep right away. This hit is merely an energy snack.

Angel Gamboeck’s life as a young opiate addict in Denver is sad but increasingly common. As law enforcement officials across the country worry about a new generation of pill poppers moving into cheap heroin, Angel reflects all their fears.

She is a panhandler whose community of hundreds is ignored once commuters reach home. She is a perpetrator and a victim without the money or willpower to get help, searching for a safe place to score and sleep, headed for destruction.

During six months in the spring and summer, The Denver Post walked the streets with 23-year-old Angel, documenting a dangerous increase in heroin use.

One of the few things that can make Angel cry is thinking of her father, who Angel says has tamped down his own substance problems with a workaholic’s demeanor. She remembers a letter her father wrote when she was 17. A friend of the family had taught her to smoke meth, and Angel had been up for a week straight. It was Mother’s Day. Her father tried to wake her up for a family party.

The letter said, “I’m worried about you, I don’t want you to fall into a bigger trap of drugs than we already are.”

Joe Amon, The Denver Post Her lips bright red, Angel Gamboeck, 23, stops licking the wounds and lets the blood flow from so many missed attempts at finding a vein in her hand. Angel was shooting up two full bags of heroin and cocaine mixed together under a bridge in Denver. Angel, a homeless heroin addict, flies a sign on the streets in order to support her habit.

Joe Amon, The Denver Post Angel awakes to a blast of sunshine in the trash bin where she sleeps. "I never thought I'd end up being homeless. Back home you don't see homeless people, you don't think about homeless people. If you have nowhere to live, you always know somebody who will let you live there," she says.

Joe Amon, The Denver Post Angel and Amanda stop in a public park to shoot up after buying heroin from their dealer on Tuesday, May, 01, 2012.



Joe Amon, The Denver Post Amanda Rose Landry shoots up in a public park in Denver with Angel. Amanda was adopted at 8 months old by her aunt and uncle because her mother was an addict and couldn't care for her or her siblings. She grew up in a loving home but fell in with a bad crowd in middle school and began abusing drugs. Her parents learned she was shooting up when she was arrested for heroin possession. She met Angel on the streets. The two often score and do heroin together. "I like getting high," she said. "I still want that feeling."

Joe Amon, The Denver Post Angel and Tim shoot up under the bridge where they were flying signs to get enough money for another bag of heroin on April, 25, 2012.

Joe Amon, The Denver Post Angel and Tim shoot up at a place called "the wells" alongside the Platte River in Denver. A popular running and biking trail runs next to the site. "It was a big shock that you can just go to a river and just get heroin or cocaine. Back home you have to know somebody who knows somebody to get it," Angel says.



Joe Amon, The Denver Post Homeless addict Tim wakes at his camp and prepares the to shoot up after waking to get ÒwellÓ on Thursday, March, 22, 2012. He camps in Denver and flies a sign on the side of the road, earning money to buy heroin. Tim had trouble finding a viable vein and had to make two tries. ÒI didn't saved enough, I have that cold feeling in my bones. I'll have to get more soon,Ó he said.

Joe Amon, The Denver Post After getting money from her boyfriend's monthly social security account, Angel buys her dope for the day so she doesn't have to fly her sign. She rents a cheap motel room for the night to shower and sleep in a bed. She cleans out her backpack on the bathroom floor, separating clean needles from dirty and throwing away the cottons that aren't worth a wash.

Joe Amon, The Denver Post Angel struggles to style the short, wispy hair framing her face after showering in a rented motel room in Denver. She worries about her appearance after living on the streets for so long and sometimes going weeks without a shower. Angel's friend Tim rented the motel room with his monthly SSI money. When Tim was introduced to his own pager connection, he no longer needed to use Angel's. "Her services were no longer required," he says. After her shower, Angel returned to the dumpster to sleep because Tim invited another friend to stay the night.



Joe Amon, The Denver Post After getting a cheap motel room for a chance to take a shower and sleep indoors, Angel retreats to the bathroom to shoot up.

Joe Amon, The Denver Post Amanda and Angel take cover under the overhang near the dumpster where Angel sleeps to do a shot on May, 04, 2012.

Joe Amon, The Denver Post Amanda takes a break from flying her sign to sneak under the bridge and shoot up.



Joe Amon, The Denver Post On a cold and rainy Saturday morning, Angel lost control of a dollar from a driver and it fell into a storm drain. She dove straight for the drain and spent a good 20 minutes trying to get it out.

Joe Amon, The Denver Post Angel shoots up under the bridge on a particularly cold day in Denver. She winces in pain after having to use the veins in her wrists to inject the drug. "Now, I have to use my hands and wrists," she says, "because all my other veins are collapsed."

Joe Amon, The Denver Post Angel flies her sign late into the night on a busy commuter road in Denver. She has not made enough money to buy a "wake-up" shot of heroin. If she is can't shoot up immediately after sleeping, she will begin to feel withdrawal effects. Angel must shoot up four or five times a day. She spends around $30,000 a year trying to stay well.



Joe Amon, The Denver Post The black tar heroin Angel buys is cheap and plentiful. As long as she keeps a connection to a dealer, the heroin is a phone call away. The dealer will send a driver to complete the deal - $15 to $20 for one balloon.

Joe Amon, The Denver Post As night sets in, Angel moves her sleeping bag to the trash bin in the darkness. She sleeps alone and leaves in the morning before employees arrive for work. "I never thought I'd end up being homeless. It's not something I thought would ever happen but when it happened, the first day that we were out on the street, it actually poured and I was bawling my eyes out. After that, I just kind of got used to it," she said.

Joe Amon, The Denver Post Angel licks the blood off her arm from missing her vein too many times. She has trouble finding a place to shoot up on this cold day, May, 11 2012.



Joe Amon, The Denver Post A man arrives for work and Angel reaches for her things as she lies beside the trash bin on the loading dock. Angel overslept and is late leaving the area. Angel often thinks about leaving Denver and going home to her family in Wisconsin. "Everybody always asks me that - why are you still there? I don't know. Maybe I'm not ready to give up. I don't know. They all still drink," she says talking about her family and friends. "I think it will be easy there to fall back into doing pills."

Joe Amon, The Denver Post Angel stands in her bed on a loading dock as workers arrive in the morning. She overslept after having a rough previous day. "I'm history," she says. "I would go home if I had enough money to make sure I could get home with out being sick." Angel misses being normal - being able to put on regular clothes and makeup.

Joe Amon, The Denver Post Angel washes her hair in the bathroom of the Harm Reduction Action Center. The center is open a couple days a week for needle exchanges. Angels says she never shares her drug paraphernalia. She thinks people who share needles are fools.



Joe Amon, The Denver Post Angel spends most of her time at the intersection of Santa Fe and Mississippi looking for money to buy drugs. "The first time I held a sign was at Colfax and Sheridan because the motel I was staying in, the guy said we had to come up with some money by the end of the night or else we had to go. I ended up making 25 bucks in like an hour. It took a long time to get used to. I was real shy, I didn't talk to anybody, didn't look at anybody. After people started talking to me, I didn't feel so bad about it I guess," Angel says.

Joe Amon, The Denver Post Angel holds a sign as Denver commuters pass by her corner. "I would say I make at least $80 a day, sometimes more," she says. "Sometimes people give me $100 or $200 was the most I ever got."

Joe Amon, The Denver Post Angel cries on the side of the road while waiting for her driver to show up. She and Tim, Angel's friend and fellow addict, are both dope sick and desperate for drugs. Tim says none of his drivers will serve him anymore.



Joe Amon, The Denver Post In order to buy heroin, Angel calls her dealer and a car is sent to meet her. She gets in the car, buys heroin from the driver and is let out near the same spot. Angel estimates she spends between $80 and $100 a day on drugs. After the deal is done, Angel's pager car drives away. She will never meet the person she calls on the phone.

Joe Amon, The Denver Post Alice's sign says she's pregnant even though she isn't, so she pushes out her belly while panhandling on a highway exit leading to downtown. She said sheÕs sorry for lying but, ÒIÕm a good liar. I feel bad but, this is survival.Ó She flies her sign day and night, rain or shine, in a constant quest to earn enough money to buy heroin.

Joe Amon, The Denver Post Alice, 21, and her boyfriend, Iris, have been shooting up heroin while living on the streets of Denver for the past three years. She prefers shooting up in places where you can close and lock a door like this Taco Bell bathroom near downtown Denver. Alice forgot her belt and uses her tank top to tie off her arm. She and Iris made enough quick money for a bag each and after getting high will fly their signs again to make money for their afternoon and morning shots.



Joe Amon, The Denver Post The sign Alice flies on the street says she is pregnant and in need of some help. She fools passing motorists by pushing out her belly. While she was flying a sign on the corner of West Seventh Avenue and Kalamath Street, a woman pulled over and to offer some help. Alice lied as they talked about prenatal care and getting off the streets. The woman bought them food, rented them a room for a week and gave them some money. They hug on the balcony of the motel and then use the money to buy heroin.

Joe Amon, The Denver Post Alice smokes a cigarette on the balcony of a hotel room provided by a stranger on Monday, July 30, 2012.

Joe Amon, The Denver Post An addict cooks heroin in Denver in 2012.



Joe Amon, The Denver Post Alice and Iris got a room for the week from a stranger who saw Alice on the corner of 7th and Kalamath flying her pregnant sign in Denver, Colorado on Thursday, August 2, 2012. They also found their neighbor for the last 2 days sleeping in the hallway by their room. J.T., 19, from Florida, only had money for 2 days at the hotel so they let him stay with them until their rent runs out. The boy goes by Pi.

Joe Amon, The Denver Post Derek, a heroin addict who has been in Denver for a few months, nods in and out in the shade as Angel flies her sign at a new spot trying to make more money. "I get asked that a lot, why I'm out here, and there's no explanation for it. If I was a normal person, and I saw me on the side of the road, holding a sign. I would be disgusted. Like, what is this young pretty girl doing on the side of the road," she says.

Joe Amon, The Denver Post Angel takes a rare moment to swing in a public park in Denver on Thursday, May, 31, 2012. Doing heroin, buying heroin and looking for money to buy heroin take up every hour of Angel's day.



Joe Amon, The Denver Post Angel counts the money she has made from panhandling, hoping she made enough to call her dealer, while Amanda hunches over from the effects of a heroin shot she did under the bridge. Amanda was released from jail earlier in the day after being arrested for drug possession. She hasn't made any money and will not be able to buy enough heroin to get her through the night.

Joe Amon, The Denver Post Amanda nods out on the side of the road after doing too much heroin. She had just been released from jail and her tolerance for the drug was low. She and Angel were flying their signs and shooting up on Tuesday, June, 12, 2012.

Joe Amon, The Denver Post Angel met Derek, another homeless addict, while flying her sign. After losing the connection to her dealer after getting busted, Angel started hanging out with Derek and using his dealer. She complained that the heroin she was buying from street dealers wasn't good and was more expensive. Here, Derek contacts his dealer and asks him to send a driver in order to buy heroin.



Joe Amon, The Denver Post Angel and her runner meet with a downtown street dealer to buy dope on the Cherry Creek bike path under the intersection of Speer Blvd and Colfax Ave in Denver. "You can go down to the river and there are Hondurans that sell it...All you gotta do is find a Honduran down by the river and you can get dope," says Angel.

Joe Amon, The Denver Post After losing her connection to her dealer, being forced to rely on the watered down heroin from the street dealers, being forced from her normal sleeping space, Angel considers returning home. She rides the light rail downtown, planning to meet the street dealers. She is experiencing withdrawal symptoms because the heroin she has been buying is less potent. After shooting up for so long, she is now forced to find veins in feet.

Joe Amon, The Denver Post Angel carries everything she owns to her new spot in an empty RTD lot. She was moving from the dock where she has lived since her fiance Joe was arrested. The owners of the loading dock left a sign requesting that she move all her things and find a new place to sleep.



Joe Amon, The Denver Post Alice and Iris set up their beds in an empty Church stairwell. They usually make enough money flying a sign to stay in a hotel room or they have someone offer them a room because they think Alice is pregnant but, when they have no place to stay, they'll sleep wherever they can find that feels safe.

Joe Amon, The Denver Post Alice cooks her dose of heroin in the public bathroom at Taco Bell hoping that no one tries to come in while she's shooting. Finding a safe place to shoot can be hard. Losing a shot after all the hours of flying can be devastating. "The first time I went to jail was the worst experience of my entire life," she says. "I told myself, IÕm never going to be this sick again ever, I swear to it. ItÕs such a terrible, awful way to feel. I donÕt wish that on my worst enemy."

Joe Amon, The Denver Post After calling their dealer, a car showed up to sell Alice dope. She got in the car to do the deal with the driver and they were pulled over by the police at Albertsons on Broadway. The police let Alice go and took the driver into custody. Denver police often let addicts go because they know they will always lead them to the dealers.



Joe Amon, The Denver Post After Alice returned to the place they were renting, she tells Iris about the bust. "When she got busted with the driver, I was waiting for her," Iris says. "She just didn't come back in time. I seen her drive by and waved and she waved back. Twenty minutes go by and she wasn't back and she should've been back in like two minutes. So I started freaking out. I was scared something bad had to have happened."

Joe Amon, The Denver Post Alice cries after getting busted in her dealer's car. "I was really afraid. I was afraid of going to jail, of being sick, of losing Iris and not being able to see him, of catching another drug charge," she says. "The reason I was so upset this time is that I was losing the only connection I had."

Joe Amon, The Denver Post After losing her connection to her dealer, Alice grips the phone in frustration on Monday, July 30, 2012. After giving up the driver's secret stash, Alice was cut off and dealer would not answer her calls.



Joe Amon, The Denver Post Alice and Iris shoot up in a bathroom. Iris has resorted to shooting up in the veins in his hands because most of the others are collapsed. He must hold his hands under hot water to help find a vein.

Joe Amon, The Denver Post Alice and Iris nod off after doing a shot of heroin. They have been renting a room from a friend in exchange for a bag of heroin a day. "It would help me get off it if someone told me right now you can have a place to live and have a job if you quit heroin. I would take that opportunity, but it's just not like that. That's not going to happen," Iris says.

Joe Amon, The Denver Post Angel finally gets a package of letters from her boyfriend, Joe, who is in prison in Wisconsin. "I Love You" is scrawled on the back of one. The tears start before she even opens them. He told her that he got a longer prison sentence than they had hoped for but that he loved her and it was all right. The second letter told her he wasn't happy that she was still in Denver and he wanted her home in Wisconsin. Joe writes that if she won't call her father to buy her a bus ticket home, he would break up with her.



Joe Amon, The Denver Post On her last night in Denver, while washing clothes at a downtown laundromat, Angel is overcome with cotton fever after shooting up. Cotton fever seems to come from shooting up without cleaning the area of skin or using dirty needles.

Joe Amon, The Denver Post Angel sits outside the Denver bus station after buying her ticket and waits to board a bus back home to Wisconsin. After saving money to buy enough heroin to last the 36-hour trip home, Angel thin out her supply and planned out her doses. Before boarding the bus, she retreated to the station bathroom to shoot up.

Joe Amon, The Denver Post As the bus rolls through downtown Denver on its way to Wisconsin, Angel sleeps, trying to ignore the sickness setting in from weakened doses of heroin. Near Eau Claire, Angel's stomach hurt, she was too irritable to talk, and her nose was running. Her decaying teeth ached as she began feeling the pain previously blocked by her constant drug use.



Joe Amon, The Denver Post Angel's grandmother Marianne Stephens welcomes her home with hugs and tears. Stephens has not seen Angel for more than a year. After getting an ultimatum from Joe in a letter, Angel finally got on a bus and made the trip home to be with her family. Determined to get clean, Angel plans to stay with her grandmother in Madison so she can see a doctor and begin a detox program. Many challenges await Angel even though she has escaped the streets of Denver and is back with her family Ñ she began abusing drugs at 14, doing cocaine with her mother.

Joe Amon, The Denver Post Angel puts on her makeup as her nephew, Owen, hides behind the door. Since returning to Wisconsin, Angel has been using whatever she can find to stop the withdrawal symptoms plaguing her - methadone bought on the street or begged from others and pills - anything to help until she can get an appointment with a clinic. She had spent the previous four days at her grandmother's house or with her fiancee's sister before moving into her father's house, where she will be living with him, her sister and her sister's children in Marshall, Wisconsin.

Joe Amon, The Denver Post Four days after using the last of her heroin, Angel is on the phone trying to find help from her father's porch in Wisconsin. She has been searching for clinics, addiction doctors, anyone to help hold off the withdrawal symptoms that are getting stronger.



Joe Amon, The Denver Post As the heroin wears off, Angel is sick with nausea, hot flashes, cramps and all-over pain. She has run out of money and anything that will stop the withdrawal symptoms. She crawls into her father's bed after he left for work and considers asking him for one of his pain pills to give her some relief. She spent most of the day calling everyone that has anything to do with drug treatment in the area.

Joe Amon, The Denver Post Angel cuddles with her nephew Owen on a neighbor's porch after playing ball in the yard. Owen is happy to have his aunt back, and Angel has missed the boy she hasn't seen in many months. After beginning a treatment program with a doctor, Angel has replaced heroin, for now, with suboxone. "At the moment, I can only live one day at a time. If I make it through one day, then I think that's another small accomplishment, if that makes any sense," she says.

Joe Amon, The Denver Post Alice injects Iris in the neck. He has abused his veins to the point that he can no longer get the heroin into his system. "Having a needle stuck in my neck to get high is incredibly scary. I know the dangers of it," says Iris. "I know a lot of things can go wrong, but I don't want to be sick."



Joe Amon, The Denver Post Danny Leslie, 31, comforts his younger sister, Sara Landry, 24, as she is overwhelmed at the sight of their baby sister, Amanda Landry, in a casket during her final viewing at the Advantage Runyan Stevenson Chapel in Lakewood, Colo. After completing all her drug court requirements and probation, Amanda was released from jail Oct 24. She overdosed and died two days later. She was 22 years old.

“I always wish I would have listened to him then,” she says. “I guess I wouldn’t have ended up here if I just never would have done drugs after that.”

But she didn’t listen. And an addict’s progression has led her to Denver, living in a trash bin and about to lose even that.

The owners of the book warehouse have posted signs: all her possessions will be thrown out tomorrow morning. Clean, quiet Angel is not the problem, they say. It’s the junkies around her, who defecate on their walls when they are trying to show leasing clients the nice views west.

Tonight she must move her bedroll off the sheltered loading dock where she has slept most of the last year to a barely concealed grove of weeds a mile south in an abandoned parking lot.

The lot is on the corner of a government-owned trespasser’s haunt, every bedding place ruined by broken glass and crumbling concrete. The squalor is offset by a few good memories, though. Months and many homeless camping spots ago, she slept here with Josiah, her soulmate in love and drugs.

Joe’s not available today. Angel knew he was behind bars but has just learned the length of his sentence for armed robbery in Wisconsin.

He’ll have to write her from prison for the next eight years. She is used to writing him letters that can run eight pages long, on paper torn from a black composition notebook.

Angel crawls through fences and drops bags of clothes at her new spot, thinking she’s finished one task. But a day in the life of an addict can almost always get worse. And it does. Crossing the railroad tracks to return for one more load, she is stopped by three RTD cops.

Did she know walking across tracks is a federal felony? She will not say. Does she have ID? She says she does not. Will she give her name? For some reason, she gives her real one.

A radio check shows she has been caught before, riding without a ticket, on top of panhandling and other offenses. They issue her a 30-day ban from riding public transit and so her day ends in walking, the crumpled triplicate copy of the ban skittering behind her on the hot pavement.

By her own account, Angel has been on drugs more than half her life.

Weed at 12. Cocaine at 14, the first white line set out for her by her family. When Angel was 15, she said, her mom started smoking crack and shared it with Angel and her sister. Opium-based pain pills appeared the same year. She ingested them in a succession of forms: Swallowing, snorting and finally, shooting up her arm.

“I was totally against it for a long time,” Angel said, of her family’s wide and deep descent into any substance they could find. “I just caved into the peer pressure around me.”

As an abuser of deadly prescription narcotics, she joined 12 million Americans and growing who abuse the pills every year. It’s “hillbilly heroin,” arriving legally through the mail, drugstores and clinics.

She did all this while graduating near the top of her class in a southern Wisconsin high school, with a 3.7 GPA, scholarship offers and a head for math.

What worries law enforcement, from Wisconsin to Denver to D.C., is the kind of simple math Angel did a couple of years ago.

Pain pills may be everywhere, but heroin as an opium delivery vehicle is far cheaper. Addicts discover this when they’ve finally burned through all the pills their friends give them, or the ones they steal from their parents’ medicine cabinets: one Percocet pill on the street costs $80.

For the same price, in a big city, a shooter can buy four or five doses of potent heroin. Enough to keep an opiate addict in a stupor for days.

Angel’s fiance, in prison scrubs in the visiting room of the Kettle Moraine Correctional Institution in central Wisconsin, starts to cry when he tells of the day Angel first injected heroin.

She was 21, living with Joe in an apartment near Madison, and doing janitorial work at a local John Deere plant that fit with her solitary nature. A friend of Joe’s asked him for a heroin connection, and Joe asked his pill sources. When the heroin arrived, Joe, already addicted to pills after a cement accident burned his skin, joined in.

Angel is 10 years younger than Joe. To her family’s lament, she did what Joe did. She’s been using the needle for all forms of her drugs ever since.

Both of Angel’s parents have fought their own addictions. They saw the same streak in Joe, and hounded Angel to break it off.

Angel and Joe struck out West to get clean at an uncle’s house in Wyoming. For them, clean meant using only Vicodin and Percocet, but they did manage 15 days without heroin.

They snuck to buy meth in Cheyenne, and the uncle kicked them out.

Without the money for tickets all the way to Wisconsin, the two ended up at a bus station in Denver.

The first person they met was a homeless junkie who hooked them up with some heroin, and Angel’s spring of 2011 was a blur of scoring, sleeping outside, and sweet, doped-up reveries by the Platte River with Joe.

Angel and Joe did get back to Wisconsin together once, in the summer of 2011. Joe tells it this way, the kind of street-luck tale that is fantastic even if only half true. Angel got up from their Platte River squatter’s tent on his birthday, and came back to wake Joe up. She’d found an abandoned bike, and in the saddlebags was $9,500 in cash. She used much of it to buy him a Cadillac.

They bought a seemingly bottomless bag of dope and drove carefree across country, eating better and partying more than they had in a long time. They arrived in their home state with no cash left at all. They knew they and their bad habit were not wanted.

Joe was too embarrassed to ask his family for help. So he robbed a convenience store in a tiny town called Beaver Dam. The one-minute, life-altering event was recorded on store cameras.

Joe and Angel fled back to Denver’s easier streets, but Joe said he “knew what time it was,” and that he’d get caught. He’d dropped a sweatshirt while fleeing the robbery. When he was picked up on a drug offense back in Denver months later, they matched his DNA, and Wisconsin extradited him on a warrant.

That was in January. Since then, Angel’s most frequent male company is a troubled addict named Tim, who sometimes offers a motel room bought with his disability check. But the room comes with Tim’s temper and demands for drugs.

When she stays at her loading dock shelter, Angel unpacks and repacks plastic shopping bags filled with dirty snow pants, worn ski caps, half-empty bottles of lotion, food wrappers.

Angel’s hands are gritty with street dust. Her feet are constantly peeling with eczema and blisters — one misstep into a puddle keeps her skin wet and rotting all day. She cleans up occasionally with a bath of wet wipes, or washes her hair in the sink at the needle exchange.

The panhandlers keep a plastic tray stack at their Santa Fe and Mississippi corner, the kind you’d buy a college kid to organize a dorm. In it are used bottles of sunscreen, napkins, a baseball cap. The napkins help when unexpected things fly through a passing car’s window. Angel had an ongoing feud with a female commuter who resented her presence. She drove by every week and told Angel to get a job. Once, the woman called Angel over to her window, then tried to pour a soda on her.

It’s just a fact of life for a panhandler who depends on the charity of passing motorists. Angel divides her life into $15 increments.

Twelve hours of flying a sign is usually close to $90 for Angel; $90 is four doses, dinner and maybe laundry tokens. Skip dinner and buy a “wakeup’ dose for the morning, and the day begins again. Fifteen dollars again by noon. Thousands of dollars in a month, all handed through a car window.

“I know, if I go out there every day, I can get what I need,” she said. She comes as close as she ever does to bragging. Someone else who lost their job, she says, “you wouldn’t know if you could pay your bills, or whatever.”

On the days Angel is still too short to buy a dose by nightfall, she lurks between the door and the pumps of a Circle K on Colfax, confronting people directly for change. Maybe nothing seems worse than sucking exhaust in silence for 12 hours on a hot highway median. Yet this is a step down, hassling strangers, the store manager furious, her body calling louder and louder for the next hit.

“When I get sick, the first thing I notice is my teeth start to hurt, cause I got two bad teeth, and then I get really bad hot flashes, and my stomach is what hurts the worst,” Angel said.

Her habit costs her at least $20,000 a year.

Angel’s father has a standing offer to wire her a bus ticket home. The $200 is not the issue. She can raise that in two days. Saving $200 is the issue. That, and a looming chasm of utter embarrassment.

And then there’s the fear of boredom, almost as strong as the fear of skin-clawing withdrawal. It is a joke and still the truth: 12 hours a day of begging does get you out of the house.

“I’ve always searched for drugs and done drugs and partied,” Angel said. “How am I going to spend my time afterwards?”

She had bigger issues to worry about.

In late spring when the city’s needle exchange program provided free hepatitis C tests, her preliminary results were positive.

Three out of four injection drug users get the liver-wasting disease, through shared needles and equipment stained by blood. Angel would usually take care of the worry by shooting up again. But on the day she found out, she had paid her dealer for what turned out to be an empty piece of crumpled foil.

She lay on the concrete dock at 10 p.m., with no last call and no wake up. Another junkie had stolen the bike she had stashed near the trash bin to spell her ceaseless walking. Without a bedtime dose there was nothing to obliterate the future.

As the rain fell and Angel sat on her soiled sleeping bag, a tear leaked from the corner of one eye. She asked out loud, “Does hepatitis C mean you can’t have kids? Does it mean you shouldn’t have kids?”

Seventeen months since finding easy heroin at the Denver bus station, the morning sun brings only the promise of another 12-hour grind.

“I’m so sick of doing this. But it’s the heroin that just keeps me here,” Angel said.

“I get asked a lot why I’m out here. There’s no real explanation for it. I think if I left here, there’s a lot of hope. So I need to leave. But I don’t know why I haven’t yet.”

Michael Booth: 303-954-1686, mbooth@denverpost.com or twitter.com/mboothdp

BY THE NUMBERS

$80: The cost of Percocet on the street

12 million: The number of Americans who abuse prescription painkillers every year, and the number is growing

15: Angel’s age when she started taking opium-based painkillers

$90: The average amount of money Angel makes in 12 hours of flying her sign on street corners

4: The number of doses of heroin that $90 will buy Angel, plus dinner. If she skips dinner, she can afford 5 doses.

$20,000: The annual cost of Angel’s heroin habit