The Finder: A Novel by Harrison Colin

Author:Harrison, Colin [Harrison, Colin]
Language: eng
Format: mobi, epub
Publisher: Farrar, Straus and Giroux
Published: 2010-03-31T16:00:00+00:00

He was exhausted from his drive back to the city and he was anxious, too—unusual for him. Seeing Richie dead like that had shaken him up, loosened up some old stuff he'd thought he'd carefully tied back together a while ago. The old loose fucked-up stuff in his head. The bad stuff. He needed to soften it fast, blur it out. And to do that he wanted something more than getting quietly buzzed on a few beers, something deeper. He'd smoked opium a few times in Pakistan, never got hooked. At midnight, he remembered, Gloria cleaned the Dilaudid machine.

So he waited, sitting next to his father, who was asleep. She went into the kitchen to prepare and, in that moment, Ray quickly pulled out the shunt that was inserted into the intravenous line that went to his father's arm and slipped it into a needle line he'd stolen from the nurse's box of supplies and put into his own wrist. Then he punched the drug delivery button. The machine gave him the last discretionary dose of the twenty-four-hour period. The machine kept track of how many times the patient pushed the button, and if the nurse had been checking, she might notice.

He felt a warm pressure go into his arm, the dose delivered. Then he pulled out the shunt and slipped it back into his father's line. There was no danger of contamination for him or his father because the shunt itself never touched anything other than sterile plastic. He gently pulled the line from his own arm and slipped it into his back pocket. Gloria returned, gave him a second look, unplugged the machine, disconnected it from the line going into Ray's father, and took the machine to the kitchen.

Ray dropped heavily into the deep chair next to the bed. A faraway thought came to him that his father had built up a tolerance over the weeks he'd been taking Dilaudid, whereas Ray had no such preparation . . . but so what? The thing was hitting him now . . . a warm wash that dropped him into collapsing pools of stupefying pleasure . . .

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