Mindy didn’t need him to specify what it was he’d needed. She got it. “You did it for the drugs!” She was so pissed right now she thought she might actually hit him after all. “You blew your entire savings account on prescription drugs that did not do a damned thing for you but get you high!”
“They make me feel good,” he told he softly.”
Mindy had used painkillers a time or two in her life. She wasn’t particularly enamored of them. They made her feel floaty and relaxed, sure, but then it was a struggle to get her brain to work. Everything just sort of wanted to float as though it were in space. There was no thought and emotions were flat. That wasn’t the sort of thing Mindy enjoyed.
“Darren, that feeling isn’t worth losing everything else in your life.”
“How do you know?” He shuddered and nearly came up off the bed. He was swinging at her, but the strokes were wild and they were weak and ineffectual. What had a few prescription pain meds done to her brother? “You don’t know anything about it, Mindy. You’re not me. You don’t know how I feel. So much pain! So much shit I don’t want to think about or remember. I don’t want to remember. I don’t want anyone to look at me and think about who I am and I don’t want to know who they are either.”
His words were starting to make no sense. He was sort of devolving into a mess. Tears and red cheeks and flopping on the bed like a toddler having a fit. And that was exactly how Mindy was tempted to treat him.
“Darren, you will stop that behavior right this moment,” Mindy ordered in a hard tone. She sniffed and made her next order. “Get your ass into the shower and wash with soap. You smell. And that is not going to get you any work.”
“Any work?” he mumbled. “I don’t have a job.”
“I would not believe that if I were you,” Mindy cautioned. When she thought about him being foolish enough to lose his job, it made her blood boil. And it wasn’t like he had a boss who was going to fire him because he didn’t put out. “Your boss is pretty put out with you tonight considering you had to get sent home because of drug withdrawals!”
“I hate my boss.” At least he sounded his usual sullen self for just a moment. “He’s a rich bastard who doesn’t pay us enough.”
“Then prove to him that you’re worth more money,” Mindy suggested. Why was this so hard to understand? Why didn’t Darren see that he was just making his boss feel justified at being pissed at him with his current behavior?
Darren rolled over and grabbed the blankets to pull them around his body. “I don’t got to prove nuthin’.”
Mindy rolled her eyes. She grabbed the blankets and yanked the other way so hard that Darren went tumbling to the floor. He was a thrashing, flailing pile of limbs and dirty clothing and smelly sheets. Mindy didn’t care. She was done with this right now. So. Done.
“Get in the shower!” Mindy snapped. She nudged him with her foot. When he just laid there, she kicked him. “Now! Get in the shower and clean yourself up. I’m going to bed. I’m tired.”
Darren glared at her and pushed himself off the floor. “I’m hungry. You never feed me.”
“You have a job. You can buy your own food just like I do.” Mindy was tired of this argument. “You keep telling me all the time that I’m not your mother. Why are you trying to pretend that I am?”
He stalked out of the bedroom, wobbling as he went, and headed for the tiny galley kitchen. Darren yanked open the refrigerator and that’s when Mindy realized that her leftover pie was in there.
“Don’t you dare eat my leftovers, either,” Mindy shouted. “That’s mine. Have some cereal.”
Darren pulled out the container and opened it. He sent a hateful look in Mindy’s direction and then took a peek into the Styrofoam box. “What the hell? Pie? That’s banana cream! I can smell it.”
“And it’s mine.”
“There are two pieces.” He sounded as though he were accusing her of a heinous crime. “Who did you go out with? Kevin? He’d never take you somewhere for dinner. You’re holding out on me!”
“No. I’m not.” She really didn’t want to discuss it. “It’s just a friend. I saved some pennies and bought a piece of pie. There were leftovers and I got to take them because I’m so pathetic that everyone feels sorry for me.” She shot those last words at him with venom. She could not help but think that this was his fault.
Then he reached for a fork from the dish drainer and dug into her pie. Mindy gave a cry of outrage, but he just stared at her with a baleful look of hatred and ate every single bit of her leftover pieces of pie as though he was glad he was stealing something from her at that moment. It was as if the little bastard did not realize that he had stolen everything already.
Chapter Seventeen
Mindy wasn’t sure what woke her up. It wasn’t her alarm clock, even though the numbers were dangerously close to her usual wake up time. It was something else. A feeling. In her gut maybe. Some kind of emotional backlash from the night before perhaps. That sensation that something was off. Just wrong.
Her little sofa sat in the middle of the living room in a way that was probably supposed to separate the living room from the kitchen. It usually just managed to get in the way since the room was so small. But there was a huge hole in the wood floor that was hidden beneath the sofa, so there was no real way to find a place to move it without exposing a potential tripping hazard.
Mindy blinked away the vestiges of sleep and sat up. She rubbed her face and stretched. Her shortie pajamas were damp with sweat. At some point in the night, the window air conditioner had kicked off. That likely meant it was about to die again. Not good. She could not afford another unit and going without any kind of forced air for the rest of August, all of September, and likely part of October wasn’t going to cut it.
It took a moment for Mindy to feel steady enough to stand. She stretched again and looked around. What had woken her up? It was so annoying. All of it. The being woken up. The feeling that there was something wrong. All of it.
Then she realized the bedroom door was hanging open. That was unusual. Darren liked to sleep with his door closed so he could have “privacy” at all times because that was a big deal when you were seventeen and still in high school.
Mindy started to walk toward the door just to take a peek inside the bedroom when her foot caught on something. She lurched forward and caught herself on the arm of the sofa. Then she looked down and in the early dawn light coming from the window, she realized she had tripped over the dark blue bag where she had stashed her new supply of prescription drugs.
The bag was empty. Her mouth went dry. She dropped to her knees and felt around inside the bag just to make sure she wasn’t wrong. She turned it inside out and shook it. It was stupid. She knew that. But it there was any possibility that she was wrong, she wanted to know it. She really wanted to be wrong right now. Being wrong would have been so much better than being right.
“Darren?” Mindy felt her anger rising. But there was fear too. She was afraid for her brother. Afraid for what he was stupid enough to do. “Darren, where are you?”
No answer.
Mindy leaped into action now that she was jarringly and fully awake. She pushed her way into the bedroom and spotted Darren on the bed. He was face down on the twin-sized mattress with his arms hanging off the sides and one leg hanging off as well. For just a moment, she relaxed. She was pissed. But he was there. He had not taken those drugs to try to sell them on his own.
“Darren?” Mindy tried to calm down. Her heart was racing so quickly that her voice was breathless. “Darren, wake up. Where in the hell is that bag of medication? You weren’t supposed to touch it! You know that, Darren!” She reached out and smacked his leg. “Darren! Don’t ignore me! You’re not supposed to touch those. I’m doing this to help you. You have to quit this prescription drug habit, Darren. We don’t have the money for you to be taking those things!”
But he didn’t respond. Mindy frowned. She smacked his leg again. Nothing. Then
she laid her hand on it. Cold. Not just cold, but clammy. He wasn’t covered with a blanket, but he shouldn’t have felt that way.
Her heart jumped into her throat. “Darren?” She moved to his head and with difficulty, rolled him onto his back. His jaw was slack, his mouth hanging open and his eyes half closed. He looked dead. “Darren! Darren, can you hear me?” She lightly probed his neck. The flutter was there. But it was a flutter. “Oh, God!”
She didn’t think twice after that. There was no time to think about the fact that an ambulance was way out of their price range. Their insurance didn’t even cover it. Mindy just ran for her phone and dialed 911.
“911 what is your emergency?”
“My brother overdosed on prescription meds. I need an ambulance. Now!” Mindy was practically screaming into the phone. She tried to rattle off her address, but she kept forgetting the apartment number.
“Ma’am, calm down.” The woman on the line was soothing. “I’ve got your location from the GPS on your phone. I’ll send the EMS right away. Just stay calm. Can you see him breathing?”
“Yes. Yes. Sort of. I don’t know!” Mindy felt the tears begin. “I don’t know what happened!”
The operator kept talking. She walked Mindy through the whole call, even helping her to answer the door for the paramedics. Mindy didn’t remember hanging up the phone. She didn’t remember putting on her shorts. She just remembered climbing into the ambulance with her brother and watching them try to get his pulse and his respiration back into some realm of normal. He was going to die. She could feel it. He was going to die and the last thing that she’d said to him had been to yell at him and berate him for being weak.
“Ma’am?” The nurse behind the counter was staring at Mindy as though she was talking to an idiot. “I need you to fill out these forms and we’ll need his insurance cards.”
“Right.” Mindy fished her card and her driving license from her wallet. “Here. He’s on my insurance.”
She bit her lip as she realized just how much money this was going to cost her. She would be paying for this hospital visit for the rest of her life. Drug dealing would become her reality. That pile of cash in the bag might not look so bad now. Apparently, Mindy had been wrong. Her morality was cracked. The almighty dollar and the need to have it had destroyed her.
They wouldn’t let her stay with him in the back of the ER. The big square-shaped emergency room facility was crowded that night. Although, to hear the nurses talk, it was like that all the time. Mindy suddenly thought maybe she should have been a nurse.
Mindy was forced to wait near the front counter where the woman had taken her insurance information even though they both knew that Mindy was still going to owe thousands of dollars for this visit. Mindy paced back and forth and tried not to disturb the other people who were sitting down and idly watching the television program on the flat screen or pretending to read a magazine.
She had no idea how long she had been there when Sergeant Caprico showed up with Detective Sellers. The two of them walked straight to Mindy without even bothering to check in at the front desk. They stopped and stared at her for a moment. There was a smirk on the corners of Caprico’s mouth. They were both dressed in suits today. No uniform for Caprico. Maybe he just used that to sell drugs.
Mindy wasn’t stupid. She knew this was an “official” visit from two police officers. They were there because the doctors had discovered her brother had taken huge amounts of painkillers all at once. Enough to kill him. In fact, they weren’t yet sure if Darren was going to make it through this alive.
“Hello, Sergeant Caprico,” Mindy said stiffly. “Imagine meeting you here of all places.”
Detective Sellers frowned. He cast a sideways look at Caprico. Then he turned his glare back to Mindy. “What is that supposed to mean?”
Was it possible that Sellers didn’t know what his sergeant was up to? That seemed really sketchy. In fact, Mindy wasn’t believing it for a minute. “Why don’t you ask the sergeant, sir? I really don’t feel up to much banter right now.”
“Ms. Hall, this is a serious matter,” Sellers said stiffly. “Your brother had more painkillers in his body than anything I’ve heard of in quite some time. I’ve been informed you’re selling them?”
“He was selling them.” Mindy figured her best chance was to bluff as much and long as she could and never confirm or deny anything at all. “Where is Detective Lowell? I’d like to hear what he has to say about this incident.”
“Excuse me?” Sellers’s expression blackened. “I don’t appreciate your tone of voice. “You’re being accused of a very serious crime, Ms. Hall. You had enough prescription medication in your home to warrant an arrest for intention to distribute.”
“I told you. My brother works at Dino Golf,” Mindy said with as much patience as she could muster, which wasn’t much. “He’s been getting them from Dino Golf to sell to make extra cash. Then he started taking them because he’s an idiot. And apparently, he decided to take his whole stash.”
Aha! Suddenly Caprico did not look quite so smug. He could not argue with her. Not here. Not like this. If he were to contradict Mindy and say that her brother hadn’t been given any drugs on this handout, then he would have to admit he had an awful lot of knowledge about the way this ring was run.
“And you say your brother was dealing drugs?” Sellers kept shooting sideways looks at Caprico. “We were under the impression that you were selling drugs, too.”
“I’m just trying to keep my brother put together long enough for him to graduate high school and have a future,” Mindy said tersely. “And so far, the only thing I’ve managed to get for my trouble is that I’m broke as a joke and my brother is now fighting for his life because he took illegal pills to try to make it all better!”
She didn’t bother trying not to yell. In fact, she felt like yelling was probably in her benefit. She needed to garner sympathy from the other people in the room. It was obviously making Sellers uncomfortable.
“We’re going to keep a close eye on this case,” Sellers told Mindy. “You need to make sure you don’t leave town.”
“Leave?” Mindy thought she was going to be ill. “How? I can’t leave on a good day. How am I going to leave when Darren is laying in there about to die from a drug overdose? If I was going to just ditch him, don’t you think I would have done it years ago?”
She stared at the policemen and wondered where they had gotten their sensitivity training. In the school of nowhere, probably. They acted as though they had never been told to be thoughtful or kind with a family in crisis. Mindy could not help but compare and contrast this behavior to the way Ash Forbes had always acted with her. Courteous. Thoughtful. Patient. Sure, the guy had his faults. He could be rude just as easily as the next guy. But the difference was that underneath his rudeness, he cared. Mindy didn’t believe Sellers or Caprico cared about her or Darren at all.
“Ms. Hall,” Sellers said after a moment or two. “You need to calm down. We are just doing our job. Unfortunately, in this case our job involves trying to unravel the person at the bottom of this drug sale. If we have this sort of thing going on in our community, then it’s time we took measures to root out the dealers and get to the bottom of it all.”
Mindy thought her head might burst open. “Doing your job? Are you kidding me right now? I went to the police station days ago to report this activity and nobody would listen! You didn’t care then. Why would you care now? Because my brother is about to die and you’re afraid it will make you look bad if you don’t care?”
Caprico’s eyes glittered. “Watch yourself, Ms. Hall. You need to be aware that right now, you’re our number one suspect.”
“And why are you two suddenly investigating this?” Mindy continued. Her mind began blurting out the warning bells, but she could not stop herself from blurting out the rest. “I thought Detective Lowell was handling this case.”
“Lowell?” Sellers frowned. “Why would Lowell care about thi
s drug case? This isn’t his deal. He’s working on other things.”
It was Mindy’s turn to frown. Why in her mind was there some kind of big message board at the police station where cops wrote down their name and the case they were working on so that nobody stepped on their toes? Evidently, this wasn’t the case. Or, Lowell was trying to keep it quiet that he was working the drug angle. Was this to keep Caprico believing that nobody was onto him?
“Well, whoever is working this stupid case,” Mindy said lamely, “you need to snap your fingers at them or something. I’m not your suspect. Someone else,” she let her gaze drift to Caprico and then looked carefully back at Sellers, “out there is dealing drugs and ruining our town.”
Sellers narrowed his gaze and glared her into silence. “We’ll do our jobs, Ms. Hall. You just need to stay out of the way.”
Chapter Eighteen
Sometimes, Ash Forbes felt as though he was the last to know when something important happened. Today was certainly one of those days.
As he plowed his way through the busy hospital, he tried to get a grip on the feeling that he had completely lost control of this case. It wasn’t his case. He would just keep reminding himself of that over and over again. He would keep thinking about the fact that Detective Lowell was running the show. This was his call and right now, he was the one who should have been there.
“Sir, you can’t be up here without an escort.” A nurse flagged Ash down and tried to usher him back towards the elevators. “This is the Intensive Care Unit. Did you sign in at the main desk downstairs?”
It wouldn’t do any good to snap or be rude. Ash tried to smile instead. “Ma’am, I’m an investigator and someone involved in one of our cases was just admitted up here after an overdose of prescription drugs. His name is Darren Hall. Can you help me find him?”
The young woman pulled her hand back and bit her lip. “So, you’re a cop. Okay. Well, um, Mr. Hall’s room is right down there at the end of the hall on the left. His sister is in there with him. The poor girl has been here since they brought him in by ambulance. I’m sure she could tell you whatever you need to know.”
Rock Wolf Investigations: Boxset Page 84