BUM DEAL (Lassiter, Solomon & Lord Legal Thrillers Book 3) by PAUL LEVINE

Author:PAUL LEVINE [LEVINE, PAUL]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Herald Square Publishing
Published: 2019-12-17T23:00:00+00:00

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THE CURVY ETHICAL ROAD

Three months later

Jake Lassiter…

SUMMER TURNED TO well, endless summer. September used to be the soggiest month. The buggiest month. The crappiest month. Now the rain and heat last deep into October. For some reason, the downpour usually catches me in my car, the staccato drumbeats against the canvas top so loud I can barely hear Johnny Cash ruing the day he shot a man in Reno just to watch him die. Me? In October, I get the Miami Blues.

The rain does not relieve the heat, which rises in steamy waves from the pavement. Bugs abound. Mosquitoes breed in every puddle, threatening Zika virus. No-see-um gnats buzz your ears and nose. Cockroaches we euphemistically call palmetto bugs, but these guys are as big as roller skates.

One bright note. When the sea levels rise enough, we can return South Florida to the gators and the birds, the bugs and the rodents.

If the days are broiling, the nights are simply dank and sweaty, with barely a breath of moving air. One consolation: in my Coconut Grove neighborhood, the scent of jasmine is so lush and sweet it will make you woozy. Not that I needed the jasmine. I’d been vertiginous, off and on, for the past few weeks. Usually, it would come at night, my mind clouding, a rug slipping out from under my feet.

I never fell. Never lost consciousness. Just a bit of dizziness. My headaches had increased in number and worsened in degree. Oh, one more irksome matter. A couple of times in the past few weeks, I had trouble forming words. My brain knew what I wanted to say, but my mouth couldn’t spit it out.

“How are you feeling?” Melissa Gold asked me every day.

“Tip-top,” I usually replied. Unless I said, “Never better.” Occasionally, just to break the monotony, I’d say, “Peachy.”

So, yeah, basically I lied.

At Melissa’s urging, I continued to undergo tests. A new MRI seemed to rule out atrophy in my frontal lobes, a cause for some celebration. A different result would have indicated full-blown CTE or Alzheimer’s. Choose your poison.

Melissa and her colleague Dr. Hoch kept poking me with needles and pestering me with questions. Based on their conversations with me and each other, I learned that, should I honestly disclose all my symptoms, they would send me to the hospital for a spinal tap. They’d insert a needle into the spinal canal to steal some fluid and test it for abnormalities.

I didn’t want to do it. Not that I’m not afraid of needles. Back in the day, I had more painkiller injections than I can remember. I’ve had large-gauge needles jolt both knees with cortisone. I’ve had needles punched into my pelvis to withdraw bone marrow that was later injected into both my shoulders in futile attempts to fix my rotator cuffs. But just now, with the Calvert trial looming, I decided to call a halt to all the doctor visits other than house calls—and booty calls—after-hours by the lovely Melissa Gold.

As for the Calvert case, Solomon and Lord had moved for a speedy trial, as I had expected.

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