by Jon McGoran
“I’m all right,” I told him with a smile. “I’m just very tired, and I’m enjoying my coffee and looking forward to my breakfast.”
My voice sounded muffled in my ears, and I realized as I said it that I no longer wanted my big breakfast. That was a shame, because I’d been looking forward to it.
Pruitt’s eyes narrowed. “You look sort of weird.”
I was starting to feel sleepy, and I felt my stomach gurgle. “Actually, I am feeling a little … something.” I got up, feeling slightly unsteady on my feet. “I’ll be back in a second.”
Pruitt nodded, his head turning to follow me as I walked.
The bathroom seemed far away. When I finally got there, I splashed water on my face and rubbed my face with paper towels.
When I looked in the mirror, I noticed my eyes.
My pupils were two tiny little black dots.
Someone had slipped me something.
My first thought was Pruitt. I’d been sitting there with my eyes closed when he sat down with me. But I couldn’t see him slipping something into my coffee in a room full of people.
Whoever it was, I needed to get home.
My limbs felt heavy and clumsy as I made my way back to the table. My food was on the table. It looked heavy and greasy, and the sight of it made me feel sick. Pruitt looked up at me as I came nearer, sizing me up.
I put a twenty on the table. “I’m not feeling so good. I got to get going.”
“Sure,” he said, standing up.
I walked unsteadily out to my car. As I fumbled with my keys and started the engine, Pruitt came out onto the street, his eyebrow cocked like he was getting a better look.
* * *
I drove away with one eye on the rearview, making sure Pruitt didn’t come roaring up behind me with his lights flashing, pull me over for driving under the influence.
That would be a mess, I thought; get a DUI while on suspension. I had a little laugh, then realized the car was drifting. I jerked the wheel back a little too hard but got it under control.
My phone started to vibrate. Sydney Bricker calling again. No way was I in any state to talk to her.
The situation seemed funny, but I knew it wasn’t. Even less funny was the siren suddenly screaming behind me. At first I thought it was Pruitt, but I recognized the sound even before I saw it in my rearview—an ambulance, driving fast, the way they used to before they realized they were killing more people than they were saving on the way to the hospital. Whatever I was on was still hitting me, and my slow-motion reflexes barely had a chance to pull over before the ambulance had screamed past me. When I saw it turn into St. Mark’s Hospital, a quarter mile ahead, I knew that was where I was heading as well.
I pulled into the entrance for the ER and let the car coast to a halt. I couldn’t keep driving, but I couldn’t check in. That would get back. Even on the remote chance that I could convince anybody that someone had slipped me something, it would still be entirely too embarrassing.
In the seconds that passed while I tried to decide what to do, my lids grew even heavier, and I realized it would be even more embarrassing to be found dead in my car.
54
Wearing shades to hide my pupils, I did my best to walk straight and look straight while I strode through the door to the ER, but once inside, I stopped. It was packed. The seats were full, and people were leaning against the walls, shuffling up and down the aisles between the chairs, all of them coughing and wheezing.
“Jesus,” I whispered, momentarily sobered, my addled brain trying to make sense of it.
I squeezed my way through to the admissions desk, where a different woman was working. She looked up at me without batting an eye. I imagine it would take a lot to make someone bat an eye on a day like this in the ER.
“How may I help you?” she asked, in a tone that almost dared me to make her bat an eye. Her nametag said, “Wanda.”
“Hi,” I said, with what was probably a horribly twisted version of my already dubious charming smile. I thought about calling her by name, but decided against it. “I need to talk to Dr. Walters, please.”
“About what?”
“It’s urgent.”
She still didn’t bat an eye, but the left one did twitch a bit.
“Wait here,” she said, not hiding the effort it took to heave herself out of her chair and shuffle through the double swinging doors into the patient area.
A couple of minutes later, Janie emerged, annoyance followed by a brief smile, then confusion as she looked closer at me. “Doyle? Is Bruce okay?”
“Hi,” I said. I had enough sense to leave out the charming smile. “Yeah, he’s fine. I just need to talk to you for a second.”
“Doyle, that’s great, but we’re crazy busy today.”
Leaning close to her, I said quietly, “I need to see you alone. It’s urgent.”
She pulled back and looked at me, her large eyes a little larger.
I gave her a little nod. “Please.”
She scanned the room, then grabbed me by the elbow and backed through the swinging doors. She kept going, leading me to a little nook filled with equipment between two patient bays. She pulled a curtain panel around to hide us. “Best I can do,” she said. “So what’s this all about?”
“Someone slipped me something. I’m stoned out of my mind.”
“What are you talking about?”
I took off my shades. “Somebody slipped me something. Some kind of narcotic, I think. Look at my pupils. They’re practically gone.”
“When?”
“I don’t know when. I started feeling it about ten minutes ago.”
She frowned. “Is it still coming on?”
I nodded and blinked my eyes, trying to focus. “Definitely.”
She paused to look at my eyes. “Yeah, okay, come on. If you ate it or drank it, it can take thirty or forty minutes to take full effect. We need to get you admitted.”
“No.” I put my hand on her arm.
She looked at me questioningly.
“Not everyone is going to believe me that someone slipped me something. If I check in, that goes on my record, and I can’t let that happen right now. I just need some Narcan. If you can’t do that, I understand, but I’m just going to have to take my chances and sleep it off.”
She stared at me for a second. “Wait here.”
She slipped through the curtain, and I closed my eyes. Now that I was about to counteract the high, part of me was sad I hadn’t taken the time to enjoy it. But mostly I didn’t care, because I was really high.
A minute later, she was back with a sealed plastic bag that she tore open. “This is an overdose kit that we are allowed to give out. It has a Narcan nasal spray, but it takes a few minutes to work, and since we don’t know how much you got, I’m going to go ahead and give you an injection.” She told me to roll up my sleeve as she stripped the plastic off a syringe and filled it from a vial. “Technically, I am not supposed to treat you without checking you in, but I’m going to cut you a break since I liked your folks. It sounds like you’ve got enough on your plate, and I know there’s enough on mine.” She looked me in the eye. “You’re not telling me stories, right?”
I held up two fingers, like a boy scout. “Cop’s honor.”
“Good. We’re too busy to check anybody in we don’t have to anyway.” She smiled as she jabbed the needle into my arm. “You should feel it almost immediately.”
As she said the word “immediately,” I felt a sudden, lurching, plummeting sensation. Like falling back to Earth. I realized how much better the drug had been making me feel.
She stepped back and observed me for a moment.
The aches and pains I’d forgotten about washed across me.
“Yeah,” she said with a wry smile. “I’d say that probably did the trick, huh?”
“Yes,” I said sarcastically. “I feel much ‘better.’”
She put her hand on my shoulder and gave it a little squeeze, then ha
nded me a tiny pill envelope. “The Narcan only lasts a few hours. Depending on what you were given and how much, the opioids might last longer. If you start to feel a buzz coming on, you need to take two of these. That should tide you over until whatever it is wears off.”
“Thanks.”
“Just wait a few minutes, let the Narcan really take effect. Then you can get going.”
I nodded.
“Okay,” she said. “I need to get back out there.”
“Thanks.”
“Glad to help. But Doyle?”
“Yeah?”
“Try to stay out of trouble, okay?”
* * *
We stepped out of the exam bay, and Janie made a left, disappearing into the bustling activity of the ER department. I made a right and pushed open the swinging door back out into the admissions area. When I did, I saw Chief Pruitt leaning on the admission desk, talking to Wanda.
They seemed to have established a rhythm: He’d speak for a few seconds and she’d listen, then shake her head. Then he would speak again, and she would listen and shake her head again.
Eventually, he hooked a thumb over his shoulder, in the direction of where I was standing, by the swinging doors. This time, she sighed and shrugged and nodded.
I ducked back into the equipment nook and told myself that there was no way he would just start searching the exam bays. But sure enough, a couple of seconds later he pushed through the doors and started pulling back curtains, one by one. I ducked behind a big crash cart and a moment later a pair of big, ugly black Oxfords appeared on the other side of it. They stayed there for a moment; then I heard Wanda’s voice and they disappeared.
I waited a couple of seconds, then poked my head out. Pruitt was halfway down the ward, talking to Wanda and one of the doctors. He looked like he was trying hard to explain his presence there.
Slipping out from behind the crash cart and through the swinging doors, I pushed through the crowded waiting room and out into the parking lot. Pruitt’s car was next to mine. I grinned to myself as I pulled out of the parking lot and disappeared around the corner, but the grin faded as my thoughts turned back to figuring out what the hell was going on.
Anybody in the kitchen could have spiked my coffee, or the waitress, or Pruitt. And that would explain why he had been pretending to be a decent human being, and why he had followed me to the hospital to try to bust me while I was still intoxicated.
I had a box of narcotics field test kits in the trunk, but by now my coffee was long gone. Of course, it might not have been the coffee at all. But if not, then what? The only other thing I’d had to eat was an apple.
I tapped the brakes, slowing down as I considered that possibility. Thinking back, maybe I’d started feeling a buzz before I even got my coffee. I couldn’t remember.
But apples? And how would someone know I would even take one, much less which one?
Unless they didn’t. Maybe it had nothing to do with me. Maybe it was a coincidence. Maybe it was just dumb luck.
The theory seemed extremely unlikely, but then again, the apples would be easier to test than the coffee. I turned the car around and headed back to Crooked Creek Farm.
55
I parked in the driveway across the street and brought the narco-tests with me. This time, as I approached the cinder block building and the farmhouse, I felt no sense of melancholy. I was focused solely on the apple shed. But when I pulled open the aluminum door, the shed was empty.
I stepped back and looked around me, getting my bearings and making sure I was at the right place. Then I checked to see if I had company.
Barely an hour had passed since I had left there. That wasn’t much time to get in, load ninety cases of apples, and get out. Even if more than one person was working, they would have had to arrive right after I left, and leave right before I came back. They had probably been watching, waiting for the patrol car to leave.
With the apples gone, I was in the same boat as with the coffee from the diner—plenty of unlikely suspicions and nothing to test. I walked around the silo, looking for some apple fragments from the core I had hurled at it, but all I could find was a sticky spot with a few tiny bits of apple. There wasn’t much, but the tests were pretty sensitive.
I opened the plastic pouch and scraped some of the apple residue into it. Once the sample was in the pouch, the test was self-contained. There were three ampoules inside the pouch, each containing a different reagent. You break them in the right order to find out what you have.
I broke the first ampoule, and as the reagent came into contact with the apple residue, it immediately turned a distinct purple color. Bingo: narcotics were present. When I broke the next ampoule, the reagents mixed and immediately turned lavender. Opioids. The third reagent was inconclusive. I couldn’t tell specifically which opioid was present, but it was definitely something.
With my back against the side of the silo, I slid to the ground, staring at the reagent. Son of a bitch. Apples. What was that about?
I sat there for a few minutes, watching the reagent, waiting for it to say, “Sorry, just kidding,” and change back.
Looking around at the scene of so much carnage, I knew I shouldn’t be hanging out here. If the bad guys came back, it would be bad. If the good guys came back, that would arguably be worse. But I couldn’t figure out where to go or what to do.
Why would someone spike apples with heroin? Maybe someone was smuggling heroin into the county in apples that were spiked, like watermelons with vodka. But although apples were pretty hardy, they were still perishable. It was a crazy idea.
Was it a sinister plot to poison school kids? Janie had said the hospital had admitted school kids ODing. The thought gave me chills.
When I was trespassing in the fields behind Nola’s property, the apple trees were corralled behind a security fence. That suddenly made sense if the apples were full of heroin.
But the fence wasn’t around boxes of apples, it was around apple trees. Maybe the heroin was in the apples already.
Moose and Nola had talked about crops that were genetically engineered to create pharmaceuticals. Maybe these were, too. That would explain the fences and the guns.
But I didn’t know if that was even possible. There was only one person I could think of who knew enough about it to tell me. Jason Rupp.
* * *
The fancy black Mustang was parked in front of Rupp’s house, just as before. I parked behind it and knocked on his door.
He answered almost immediately, and when he saw it was me, a half smile formed on his face. He looked left and right, maybe for Nola, then said, “You? Look, I’m sorry, but I don’t have any info on your friends’, corn.”
“That’s okay, I have a couple of other questions. Mind if I bounce them off you real quick?”
“I’m kind of in the middle of something.”
I think he was waiting for me to apologize and go away. I didn’t.
He let the silence hang there a good long while before he sighed and stepped back into the house. “Okay. Real quick.”
“Thanks.”
The place looked barren on the inside, even compared to before. The bookcases were empty, and boxes were stacked in the corner.
“You moving?” I asked.
“What?” He seemed annoyed at the question.
“I saw the boxes. You moving?”
“No. Well, kind of.”
“Kind of?”
“I’m teaching abroad for a little while.”
“Oh, yeah? Where’s that?”
“France,” he said, his vague accent suddenly stronger. “University of Paris.”
“You speak French?”
“Doyle, that’s your name, right?”
I nodded.
“Well, I’m busy here, Doyle. If I had time for chitchat, I’d call my mom or something.”
“Okay, sure. So, you’re a geneticist, right?”
“That’s right.”
“So, I’ve heard
that it’s possible to genetically engineer plants to produce medicines.”
“Yes, that’s right.”
“Okay, would it be possible to make apples that could create heroin?”
He laughed. “Apples that create heroin…” He laughed again. “That’s pretty crazy. What are you, writing a science fiction movie?”
“So is that a no?”
“You must admit, it does sound like something a room full of stoners would come up with.”
“So that’s a no?”
He sighed and scratched at one of his sideburns, like he was trying to think of a way to dumb it down for me. “Production of a compound isn’t attached to a single group of cells or a single gene, it’s systemic. People think plant metabolism is this simple thing—‘this’ produces ‘that’—but it’s unimaginably complex, with different pathways and molecules interacting in different ways. It is flexible and dynamic and can be as dependent on environmental or developmental factors as genetics.”
I was quiet for a moment, and had almost caught up with what he had just said when he continued. “So, the short answer would be no. The longer answer, well, I’m not saying it could never be done. I’m just saying it hasn’t, and it would take an astonishing intellect to pull off something like that.”
I was pretty sure I had more questions, but standing there with him looking at me impatiently, I couldn’t think of any. When my phone chimed, he clapped his hands and rubbed them together, like we both knew that was my cue to leave.
It was Rothe, the developer.
Rupp nodded indulgently as I thanked him and moved for the door. He closed it firmly behind me, and I heard him lock it. It’s an effect I tend to have on people.
Out on the front step, I answered the phone.
“Doyle, here.”
“Hi, detective, it’s Jordan Rothe. I got your message. Sorry I didn’t call you back earlier. We’re a little shorthanded, and it’s been a hectic few days. What can I do for you?”
“Shorthanded? You mean people out sick?”
“That’s right.”
“What do they have?”
“What do…? I don’t know. The sniffles. There’s something going around.”
