Fire in the Blood by Perry O'Brien

Author:Perry O'Brien [O'Brien, Perry]
Language: eng
Format: epub, mobi
Publisher: Random House Publishing Group
Published: 2020-08-11T00:00:00+00:00

CHAPTER EIGHTEEN

Coop tracked the progress of a black squirrel as it dashed across a telephone wire. Everything was gray and quiet outside the hotel, a silent film except for the acrobatics of this weird scrabbling creature. Coop hadn’t realized squirrels came in black, and he wondered if they might be bad luck.

A hiss came from the coffee pot. Instead of pouring himself a cup, Coop emptied the urn back into the feed tank, reloaded the filter, and set the pot to run a second time, using the fresh coffee in place of water. Battery acid, Anaya called this concentrated brew. The coffeemaker chugged through its second cycle, occasionally spitting drops of black sludge against the pot.

All night Coop had scoured the files, going without sleep and still only making it halfway through the stack. Each file contained pages and pages of personal histories, medical evaluations, treatment plans, notes from counselors and transcripts from support groups, most of it rendered in a cryptographic salad of medical jargon: acculturation, cross-tolerance, enmeshment, psychopharmacological intervention, ACT and PAWS and CBT. But some words Coop knew: hallucination, relapse, remission, and, of course, heroin.

Heroin, heroin, heroin.

With his coffee, Coop came back to the window. Cold air was breathing through the glass but Coop hardly noticed. In the last few hours his adrenaline had sputtered out, replaced by an intestinal anxiety, something releasing drops of molten worry into the cavities of his body.

He thought about Dr. Presser again, bloody on the floor.

Coop didn’t believe himself to be a man who enjoyed hurting people. It was true that he was proud of his earned proficiency with violence, but in his mind there was a vast and crucial distance separating those who were capable of fighting, should the need arise, and the crazy folks always looking for the next throw-down.

The squirrel was still balanced on the frozen wire. In the wobble Coop felt a haunted kind of unease, an itchiness of ghost-fire and hissing snakes, a nauseous tug in the direction of October.

He wouldn’t think about that, he decided.

There was something in front of him. Some mystery in the interplay between Presser, Theo, the stranger at the funeral. It reminded him of his time downrange, where through the sandstorm of mission briefings, news reports, and ancient tribal rivalries he would intermittently perceive the barest outline of coherence, a sense there was some structure of meaning hidden just beyond his sight.

Coop went back to the files. He lifted one of the patient records, Nolan Hernandez—gaunt, dark-skinned, his lips drawn back like a wolf—and skimmed the notes. “Client has become agitated and hostile following surgical amputation of left leg; describes violent sexual fantasies, often involving staff.” Keeping his eyes on the photo, Coop transferred Nolan to a stack on the nightstand. Next came Diamond, a twenty-eight-year-old mother of three. “Client brags about hitting elderly grandfather with a phonebook.” Stack. A growing pile, the violent and possibly guilty. Eva had shared her theory that Kay was killed by one of the addicts she was treating.

Download

Copyright Disclaimer:
This site does not store any files on its server. We only index and link to content provided by other sites. Please contact the content providers to delete copyright contents if any and email us, we'll remove relevant links or contents immediately.