In wolves clothing, p.9
In Wolves' Clothing, page 9
“Yes, I’m okay, officer.”
“No, nothing of real value.”
“Yes, the house was locked.”
“Yes, I’m sure. See how the door is broken?”
“Sorry, I wasn’t aware I was rolling my eyes.”
“No, nobody was home at the time of the break-in.”
“Yes, I’m married. No, no kids.”
“My wife? She’s been visiting family while I’ve been out of town.”
“I don’t know when exactly the break-in occurred. Like I said, I was out of town.”
“Sorry, it’s just sometimes my eyes do that when I’m exhausted.”
“No, I haven’t asked any neighbors if they saw or heard anything suspicious. It’s two in the morning.”
“Yes, I have been drinking.”
“Why was I out of town? Business.”
“What do I do? It’s complicated.”
“No, I’m not trying to make this difficult.”
“Okay, fine. I travel around the world rescuing victims of child sex trafficking.”
“No, I’m not kidding.”
“No, I’m not on drugs.”
“I agree, I really do need some sleep.”
“At a motel, I guess. Until the door gets fixed.”
“Yes, thank you. A ride to the La Quinta later would be greatly appreciated.”
Over Ms. Cop’s walkie-talkie Mr. Cop says all clear. Ms. Cop says roger that and tells me to follow her inside.
Mr. and Ms. Cop do a final sweep of the house while I wait on the living room couch, furious I can’t report the most important thing that was stolen. They finish up and we exit, leaving several inside lights on to, as Mr. Cop explains, deter any additional burglars. Ms. Cop says they’ll do a few drive-bys later just in case, then hands me the card of a police-vetted home repairman and locksmith, and urges me to call first thing in the morning.
Before climbing into the backseat of the patrol car with my valise, I wave to several neighbors peeking through their windows in pajamas at the red and blue lightshow. None of them wave back.
“Buckle up,” says Ms. Cop through the Plexiglass partition and I fumble with the seatbelt as we reverse out of my driveway and head for the motel.
The darkened strip malls and Starbucks roll by and I’m starving. The only thing open is a donut shop. And while I’d love a donut, asking the officers if we can stop for one might be construed as offensive.
I pull out my phone to see if Neda has responded to the text I sent earlier informing her of the break-in and telling her not to go near the house until further notice. But of course she hasn’t answered. She’s dead asleep, it being a school night and all.
While I have my phone out, I check my email.
Two new messages. Both from Alice.
The first one says she’s done some initial research into Cambodian adoption like I asked. She says it’s possible but improbable, and that the process takes some time. She says it would require me to prove I can provide a stable home environment, preferably cohabitated by a spouse or partner to ensure additional support. She says a pet would help. She points out that my profession, with all the travel involved and the dangerous nature of the work itself, would likely reduce the chances of an adoption being approved. Significantly.
In the second email message, she says she forgot to mention one other thing: Both myself and spouse or partner would need to pass a physical examination.
And a drug test.
“Everything okay back there?” the female officer asks through the partition.
It’s a perfectly reasonable question, seeing as how she just heard me mutter “fuck” and turned to catch me biting my own forearm.
***
The silicon earplugs are no match for Room 27. I’ve been waiting for some other schmuck to complain to management or call the police, but I’m probably the only schmuck situated anywhere near the party or the dance-off or the virgin sacrifice next door.
The clock radio says I’ve got only about an hour and a half to sleep. I hop out of the bed and drop to the floor for a set of pushups in my white tank top and navy sweatpants. While pumped pecs and triceps won’t do shit to stop a bullet, the Taylor Swift or Katie Perry song buzzing the walls tells me the party people are unarmed.
A warm, dry Santa Ana breeze greets me on the motel sidewalk. The Taylor or Katie song is now a Kenny Chesney song, causing me to question the gun situation inside.
Three hard knocks on the door. No response. Not even a momentary lull in the shouting and the stomping and the laughing.
I rear back to pound the door again and a male voice on the other side shouts, “Damn it, Eric! I told you not to forget the room card!” The door opens to a guy about a foot shorter and three decades younger than me, wearing a red hoodie with the hood up. He smiles and shouts over the music, “You’re not Eric.”
“And you’re not quiet,” I say, arms flexed across my swollen chest. The smell of nightclub mixed with disinfectant mixed with onions seeps out of the room.
“Aw, my bad, dude,” says the kid, playing tug-of-war with his hoodie string. “We’ll dial it down.”
Hoodie heads back into the room to lower the volume, but leaves the door wide open. I try not to look at two girls in T-shirts and panties bouncing on one of the beds. Black Panties catches me and shouts, “Hi!” then bounces off the bed and blows the landing, nearly cracking her skull against the bottom of TV stand. White Panties continues bouncing, eyes closed, smiling like she just got out of surgery.
Black Panties pops up from the floor and dances over to the doorway. “Wow, you’re big!”
Hoodie joins her near the door, taps her on shoulder and goes, “Shhh! We woke this dude up.”
Keeping her glassy green eyes on me, Black Panties tells Hoodie not to shush her, then tells me it’s her birthday. Hoodie looks at me, shakes his head and mouths, “No it’s not.” I say happy birthday anyway, and they both double over laughing.
“Come party with us!” Black Panties yells despite the music being barely audible.
Hoodie says to her, “The man wants to sleep.”
Black Panties pouts and huffs. “But it’s my—”
“It’s NOT your birthday!” Hoodie shouts, then snorts. And he and Black Panties double over again.
I shake my head and turn to go back to my room, but notice a small table in the corner of theirs. Spread out on it are several fifths of various liquor.
And a ton of pills.
Hoodie stops laughing and says, “Sorry about all this dude. We’ll let you sleep.”
“Actually,” I say, my eyes fixed on the table. “I’d hate to be the guy who ruins a birthday party. Mind if I pop in for a sec?”
Hoodie says, “Sure, dude! But just so you know, it’s not actually anyone’s birth—”
“Of course it is,” I say, and step into the room.
Black Panties shouts, “Yay!” and claps, then announces she has to pee and skips to the bathroom.
White Panties has stopped bouncing. She’s sprawled out supine on the bed and struggles to catch her breath. En route to the small table, I smile and wave at her. She greets me by picking her nose.
“Help yourself, dude,” says Hoodie as he trails me to the table. “We got all types of shit.”
I nod and lick my lips. “You sure do.”
Hoodie points to a dark blue round pill. “MDMA,” he says. “This will help you see all the beauty in everything while also amping you up.” He says, “It’s a sort of psychedelic amphetamine.”
“I’m familiar with it,” I say, and tell him no thanks.
He points to a cream-colored tablet and says, “Ketamine. This will put you in a trance-like state. Really popular on the party scene.” He says, “And when mixed with MDMA, you’ll understand true bliss, but probably won’t remember shit afterward.” Then he points at White Panties, who is now doing snow-angels atop the bedspread, and says, “That’s the combo she’s on right now.”
I go, “Enticing, but I think I’ll pass.”
I go, “You got any painkillers?”
Call me old-fashioned. Call me unadventurous. Call me a creature of habit.
Hoodie laughs, then yells to Black Panties in the bathroom, “Dude here wants to know if we have any painkillers!”
Black Panties shouts back, “Shhh, I’m pooping!”
Hoodie says to me, “Yeah, we got painkillers.”
He points to the three unlabeled vials on the table and says, “Morphine, tramadol and oxycodone. Take your pick.”
I tap the cap of the third vial.
Call me monogamous.
Hoodie twists the cap off the vial and slides two tablets onto a piece of La Quinta stationery that’s lying on a small plate. When I reach for the pills, Eric blocks my hand and says, “Let me crush ‘em for you.”
I tell him I normally just chew them.
Hoodie goes, “Ever snorted?”
I shake my head.
“Oh man, dude,” says Hoodie. “You’ve gotta give railing a try.”
I’m not one to succumb to peer pressure.
“Fine,” I say.
The toilet flushes, and out of the bathroom comes Black Panties. “Miss me?” she shouts, then grabs a bottle of vodka from the table, takes a swig and flops onto the bed next to White Panties, who’s now doing yoga.
Hoodie folds the stationery over the two pills, takes a spoon from the table and presses down hard on the paper, rolling the spoon over it several times. He then carefully unfolds the paper and, with a Target credit card, scrapes the powder onto the small plate, using the edge of the card to create a fine, neat line.
Hoodie picks up the plate and holds it in front of me. “Captain,” he says, “you’re cleared for takeoff.”
I admire the pretty little inch-long line for a moment. Hoodie goes, “It’s easy, man. All you do is—”
“I know what to do, champ,” I say.
And just like the cokehead RA of my dorm taught me in 1980-something, I turn away and exhale, bring my face toward the plate, press my index finger against my nostril and, with my other nostril practically touching the line, sniff short and hard.
Burns more than I remember coke ever burning. Not enough to cry about, but tell that to my tear ducts.
Hoodie grins and goes, “Nice, dude.”
Over on the bed, Black Panties shouts, “Woohoo!”
White Panties says nothing and just moves from bridge pose into happy baby.
I use the front of my tank top to dab my eyes and my nose. Hoodie says, “Fight the sting and keep sniffing it in.” He says, “Don’t blow your nose or you’ll lose some of the high.”
I thank him for the tip and say I need to head back to my room.
Hoodie goes, “You sure, man?” and I nod.
Black Panties shouts, “No! Boo!”
White Panties transitions into corpse pose.
On my way to the door, my nose and eyes stop running and the first wave of wonderful rolls in. I sit down on the edge of the unoccupied bed. Hoodie laughs and goes, “That’s it, dude, there’s no rush.”
Now the bedspread. It’s cool on my shoulders and the ceiling is up there and my skin and my muscles also the inside of my bones are all yes.
The question is, where’d the sun come from and who’s this hovering over me?
CHAPTER TWELVE
Talk about your upgrades.
From a bug-infested mattress to a five thousand dollar fully-adjustable bed. I don’t even have to leave it for nourishment. Just lie here while all the fluids I need continue to be pumped straight into my veins.
Plus all the fancy machines pinging and beeping along with my every breath and movement. I’d enjoy it all a lot more if my every breath and movement didn’t feel like I shouldn’t be breathing or moving.
A nurse peeks into the room, then turns around and calls out, “Dr. Brooks, Mr. Slade is awake now.” She turns back to me and says, “The doctor will be in to speak with you in just a moment. Can I get you anything?”
“Some water would be great,” I say. “And my pride.”
The nurse smirks and says, “I’ll be back with the water.”
For pride, you need a prescription.
The clock on the wall says three fifteen, and since the sun is coming through the blinds, I know it’s p.m. Otherwise it would be a fifty-fifty guess.
Standing in the doorway now is a black woman wearing a white lab coat over a light blue oxford shirt that’s neatly tucked into khaki pants. She pauses to review whatever is clipped to the clipboard she’s holding. If she were smiling, she’d be an award-winning pharmaceutical commercial.
“Good afternoon, Mr. Slade,” she says as she enters the room, stopping a few feet from my high-tech bed. “I’m Dr. Brooks, head of emergency medicine here. I treated you when they brought you in this morning.”
I nod, then shake my head and say, “I don’t remember much since the ambulance ride. Or before it. And the back of my eyes hurt.”
Dr. Brooks purses her lips. “Well, none of that’s surprising, considering what we found in your system.”
I blink twice in slow motion and go, “Would you mind elaborating?”
Dr. Brooks says we’ll get to that in a minute. She says, “First I’d like you to answer some questions for me.”
The nurse from earlier enters holding a lidded Styrofoam cup with a straw sticking out of the top. “Pardon me, doctor,” she says, then places the cup on the bedside tray table and leaves.
Careful not to twist or yank the IV tube stuck in my right arm, I reach for the cup and take a long sip through the straw. Like scalding coffee, the ice-cold water burns my throat and stomach.
Dr. Brooks asks if I’m ready to begin and I give her a thumbs-up while taking a much smaller sip of water.
“Okay,” she says. “Do you know where you are?”
“The hospital,” I say, hoping to at least get partial credit.
“Do you know which hospital?”
Pass.
“That’s okay,” says Dr. Brooks as she jots something down on the clipboard. “Do you know what day it is?”
I say, “Tuesday,” only more in the form of a question than an answer.
Dr. Brooks says, “Good. Tuesday the …”
I scratch my eyelid. “Uh, Tuesday the … fifth— no, the sixteenth.”
“Okay,” says Dr. Brooks. “The sixteenth of …”
“May,” I say, then throw in the year just to show off.
Dr. Brooks nods. “And finally,” she says, “who is the current President of the United States?”
I tell her I never talk politics in the hospital, and she just stands there holding her clipboard, waiting.
I go, “If I don’t say his name, it’s like it never happened.”
Dr. Brooks rolls her eyes and shakes her head while checking off something on the chart. Then she says, “Regarding the one question you missed, you’re in the intensive care unit at Providence St. Joseph Medical Center in Burbank.”
I look around the room and nod. “Seems like a nice place.”
Dr. Brooks asks if I know why I’m here.
I pause to think, then shrug and say, “A reaction to some medication I took?”
Dr. Brooks says that’s one way to put it. “Mr. Slade, we found trace amounts of a powerful opioid in your system.”
I tilt my head and go, “Huh?” then close my eyes and nod. “Ah, I forgot about the oxycodone I took for my stiff—”
“Actually, I’m not talking about oxycodone,” says Dr. Brooks. “We found plenty of that in your system, but we’ll come back to that later.” She says, “The opioid I’m referring to—the one that landed you here and almost killed you—is fentanyl.”
“Fentanyl? I’ve never taken that in my life.”
And Dr. Brooks says, “That’s what most people who take fentanyl think.”
***
Turns out not everyone in the illegal narcotics business is a good person.
While the vast majority of drug cartel members and cartel middlemen and dealers and dealers’ dealers can be trusted to supply a clean product, there are always going to be a few bad apples who spoil the bunch and land your ass in the ICU.
This probably wasn’t Hoodie’s or Black Panties’ or White Panties’ fault. Doubtful they knew the oxy they offered me was laced with fentanyl, at least not based on what Dr. Brooks is telling me.
She says a rapidly growing drug-distribution network is feeding fentanyl to the Americas. She says cartels, particularly in Mexico, get the fentanyl in powder form from China for cheap. “They add it to pills they press and then sell them as regular oxycodone or hydrocodone to dealers, who sell them to unsuspecting consumers.”
Dr. Brooks says fentanyl is fifty times more potent than heroin. So consumers keep going back to their dealer for more of the best “oxy” they’ve ever had.
Until they die.
“Isn’t killing customers generally bad for business?” I ask.
Dr. Brooks says the enterprising folks behind fentanyl view a few hundred overdoses a year as more than acceptable. “For every customer who drops dead, thousands more are just getting hooked. And getting their friends hooked, as well.”
Dr. Brooks says I’m one of the lucky ones. Lucky because I nearly died the first time trying this drug. Most people, she says, the unlucky ones, have wonderful first- and second- and third-time experiences with fentanyl. And then they’re in it for good.
I, on the other hand, got to learn firsthand the devastating nature of fentanyl before I could enjoy all that it has to offer.
Dr. Brooks says I should count my blessings. She says respiratory failure saved my life.
To get over an event as stressful as a near-death experience, I’d typically text my dealer. But a voice is telling me that may not be the best idea.
It’s Dr. Brooks’ voice.
“I can’t emphasize enough how important it is for you to quit using any kind of prescription painkiller that hasn’t been ordered for you by a physician.”
I nod and say I understand. And I’m thinking how Dr. Brooks is a physician.
