A Handsome Devil (The Bent Zealots MC #9)

CHAPTER ONE

Truman

“Holy shit! Don’t jump!”

Accustomed to weird shouts and proclamations, I just kept talking to my medical assistant as he gave a client an injection. “We’ll need to increase our suboxone order this month. Stats just came out. This is worse than during the pandemic.”

Gunning Vaghti spat out the needle’s protective cover as he held the guy’s shaking arm. “How many so far this year?”

We didn’t care if we were talking like that in front of a patient.

This chick had staggered in off the street completely whacked, her cadaverous red face slowly being eaten alive, bleeding where she’d scratched it.

She didn’t give a shit what we said. “Seven hundred fifty-two so far.” That was overdose deaths in the city, “accidental” they always called them.

More shrieking came from the front door area. I recognized voices of a few existing clients and a couple of assistants.

“For God’s sake! Don’t jump!”

“Stay right there! Don’t move!”

“Don’t do it, dude!”

I locked eyes with Gunning. He nodded ever so slightly, suggesting that I go see what the fuck.

Patting him on the shoulder in a fatherly manner, I went to see what the fuck.

Edging my way past the humans clogging the entry doors, clients and my crisis management team, I reached the sidewalk.

Humans with hollow faces and open mouths gazed up into the aquamarine sky, so I did too, shading my eyes with my hand.

Sure enough, a silhouette of a tall man stood on the edge of the sixth floor, yelling stuff.

I strained to hear his words, and even had to “shush” some people around me.

“Addicts are humans just like you! Punishing them just turns them sicker. Only compassion can make them better.”

Wow. It sounded like he just intended to make some great speech, not jump.

He went on in a lush, tonal voice, as though he was accustomed to being an emcee. “This fucking war on drugs forces cops to treat sick people like criminals. Just imagine if the cops chased down people with diabetes, putting taxes on insulin, driving it underground.”

“Yeah!” people around me started yelling, some raising their fists. “Yeah!”

“Right on!”

When the guy strode along the roof’s edge, his lanky, muscular legs reminded me of a man I’d seen earlier. Yes. It was that guy. He’d found something to wrap up his long curly black hair so it didn’t fly around his face.

“What if the government told doctors they couldn’t treat diabetics, then sent them to jail?” He roared now. “Lots of people didn’t have dignity to start with. Being humiliated sends some of them over the edge.”

This guy was really revving up the crowd! He must’ve had an entertainment background, suave and smooth. What a talker! Folks were grabbing each other’s shoulders, jumping up to see the shadowy man.

He yelled as though he held a microphone.

The crowd quieted down, straining to hear him better.

“People forced onto the streets are only deteriorating! Fuck it. There’s all this wondering why overdose deaths are rising, yet only one or two mentions of us chronic pain patients being forced off opioid therapy by fucking illogical, irrational government laws, doctors paranoid of prosecution.

What do you have? A ton of people in severe pain with no help.

I’m jumping off this fucking roof in protest! ”

The crowd exploded. I knew some of them had medical ailments, chronic pain that forced them to turn to drugs.

But all of them were clamoring, absolutely howling for this magnetic guy.

About half, the only half that owned them, held up cellphones to video the man.

It even looked like one guy shouldered a news camera.

He kept orating throughout it all. I even shook some people’s shoulders, trying to get them to shut up so I could hear.

“Of course people turn to the streets, but the drugs are laced with fentanyl and animal tranqs. Totally lethal! And they OD. And people are shocked. How’s about we treat chronic agony like the dangerous crisis that it is?

Give people the medication they need to function and not die? Stop prosecuting doctors!”

Again the crowd went wild, some of them eagerly pointing to me. “Truman Oakley!” some of them yelled at me. “He’s your man!”

Yes. This hypnotic, seductive man sounded just like me.

His last words were, “What do I have to do to get attention around here?” I saw him pass out.

First the hand that held the invisible microphone folded, just drooped like a swan drinking.

Then the other slender, muscular arm. Then this man’s knees collapsed, the last thing holding up his unconscious body.

He was gone, like thread into a needle.

I’d better back up here, to explain my day, which had begun as mundane as any other.

I had gone down the street to the Dollar Store to buy maxi pads.

Yes, this was part of my job. When I got back to The Establishment Club—my witty name for the safe injection site and addiction recovery clinic I’d founded last year—a prison bus lingered, like it couldn’t wait to get out of there.

It vomited paroled convicts, men hauling backpacks and grocery bags, lining up at my door.

This was nothing big. Happened all the time.

My assistant Erin D’Attire was there with her clipboard examining parolee’s expired driver’s licenses, counting the prisoners.

Sunken husks of men, their own worst enemies, their lives a mess.

No one had given them money in God knows how long, each one in a state of nonstop starvation.

One guy with a T-shirt that proclaimed I Am Breaking the Need for Weed was decorated in abscesses like boiled eggs rotting under his skin, arms a pizza of infection.

Survivors of childhood trauma abandoned with a sense of self-hatred.

Another addict looked like a war veteran with a leg that clearly needed amputation, the flesh burned, just seared away. It was a post-apocalyptic doomsday scene—well, for anyone other than me and Erin. For us, it was our day job.

“How’s it going?”

Erin didn’t flinch at the stench of these guys.

A hard, tough chick, I’d seen her ascend from the gutter to making a difference in the lives of junkies.

“Cool. We got forty-three allegedly, but two already made a break for the tent city, the open-air drug market by the Civic Center. Hey, wait! You! Alessio Messina?”

That was how I knew his name, the jumper from the roof.

In a sort of zombie daze, he wandered past Erin.

A look of recognition overcame his glassy obsidian eyes when she called his name.

His flowing, shaggy mane of thick black hair had probably been silken when washed.

His prominent brow and aquiline nose reflected his inner Cro-Magnon man, a brain too big to fit the skull.

Just one look and you knew he was of superior intelligence.

Yet had dulled it with drugs. And it sure seemed like he’d done it recently.

Alessio’s long, lanky arms were sinewy, as though he’d worked out in prison.

Tufts of shiny black chest hair peeking from his T-shirt neck allured me.

I’d never been attracted to a patient before.

I knew better. It was unnerving. When Alessio turned to face Erin, my eyes dropped to his luscious ass, rounded in the faded 501s.

“Driver’s license?”

Sliding long fingers into his back pocket, he cringes with pain twisting lifting out a slender wallet. His Roman silhouette was the perfect reconstruction of a statue, the prominent arching nose lending him a sense of dignity and refinement.

That’s when I had to tear myself away. I’d much rather supervise my crisis management team injecting the addicts safely, like a blood draw site with giant high chairs and trays.

Some folks snoozed in their chairs with relief, arms dangling, knuckles dragging on the tiled floor.

Others would calmly thank the technician and get up.

They’d either stroll or stagger out the front door and on to better things—we couldn’t stop them—or visit one of the community outreach rooms, the recovery room.

They could get medical or social services from my colleagues, or just hang and play pool with their own colleagues, eating sandwiches.

In the fix room, I went behind the scenes with all the refrigerators, Narcan nasal spray, and needles to talk to Gunning Vaghti.

“A bus just came in from the San Quentin halfway house,” I told him.

“Hey!” Gunning barked at a guy about to get up and leave. “Did you put your used needles in there?”

The echoing concrete husk of a man looked from side to side before going into his hoodie pocket and withdrawing a handful of needles. He followed the direction of Gunning’s jutting chin, a plastic dispenser on the booth wall, and clattered his needles in there.

“Thanks, buddy,” said Gunning, cheerful now. He could be a rough customer, but knew he needed to show compassion sometimes too. He whipped off his plastic gloves and toed the lid up on the waste bin to chuck them.

I said, “At least one parolee got some fentanyl on the bus.” Now I’m talking about the guy.

I knew I’d want to see him again “That’s been happening more and more.

” Gunning sighed, hands limply on knees.

He set his jaw, his lush tawny face the picture of the determined recovered addict.

He’d been held captive in Afghanistan for a whole fucking year in some literal hole in the ground he’d been forced to dig with his own hands.

That was about all anyone knew. He’d come out a meth addict, and I facilitated saving his life before he lost any teeth.

Now Gunning gleamed with rich vibrations, utterly alive and engaged with the world.

To a large extent. He’d never get over his experience.

I respected the fuck out of these guys.

Gunning continued, “Someone at the halfway house must hand it to them through the bus windows.”