Chicago Blood: Detective Shannon Rourke Book 1 by Stewart Matthews

Author:Stewart Matthews [Matthews, Stewart]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Primrose Publishing, LLC
Published: 2016-10-14T23:00:00+00:00

CHAPTER 17

Michael did his best junkie walk.

It wasn’t too hard to remember how. You just had to act like your joints were made out of broken glass, like you hadn’t had an honest meal in three days, and like your underwear was bound up with cold sweat—or hot, depending on your drug of choice.

For him, it was heroin. He loved to feel the pain-melting joy when the drug slithered through his veins, coiled around his gray matter, and sifted through his ganglia.

He wasn’t on it now, of course. He never would be again, for all the damage it did to his relationship to everything outside of himself. Not just his relationship with his sister, per se, or his failed engagement to Elizabeth, or running from the only man who ever really treated him like a son—but his relationship with everything that was not Michael Rourke. His connection to reality. His perceptions of what was true happiness.

Funny. Most people assumed all the damage came from the drug itself, or from what you’d do to scrape together money for another fix, or even the damage of yanking away a chemical that your body had grown dependent on to survive. Withdrawals were bad, stealing an old lady’s toaster for a few bucks was terrible, and having the body of a sixty-year-old at age thirty-five wasn’t fun.

But the hardest thing to suffer was Michael’s ability to ever discern true joy from a quick fix tied to a fishhook.

That was the drug’s damage.

For the first time in nearly three years, he carried that damage in his walk again. Although this time, it was intentional.

And his walk carried him across 44th street. He’d parked his car over on the far side of Davis Square Park, so Afonso and whoever he worked with wouldn’t think he was just another bored white boy from the north side—which was a category he probably fit in, if he were honest with himself.

An old house with sun-bleached blue siding watched over the corner of 44th and Wood. On its big, concrete front porch, a pair of guys in their early twenties sat in folding chairs—one skinny, one fat. They played cards and drank.

Nice and relaxed. Good.

A kid leaned up against the side of the house with his hands in his pockets. He was probably ten or twelve. He’d know exactly where the street stash was. He’d hid it, after all. A few feet away, a teenager in saggy jeans and a long, black t-shirt sat on the front steps of the house. He nodded at Michael. The kid knew that anyone who moved and looked like Michael did right now would be here for one thing.

Michael shambled over the curb and up into the short stretch of dried-out lawn in front of the house.

“Need a taste?” the teenager asked.

“Horse.” Michael nodded. “I got twenty.”

“A’ight, man. Chill here.”

The teenager looked around the corner of the house. He nodded to the little kid and touched his hand to his shoulder. The little kid scurried off around back of the house.

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