Chapter 14
Cormac
Aweek later, I’m up to my eyeballs in paperwork and lesson planning for a class that starts the following week, when I get a text from my contact at Monroe.
An order for a hit.
I have to wind down this side of my life, because my future as a professor with a wife and J.P. in my life, I can’t just disappear to go murder someone. But I’m climbing the walls and need the adrenalin rush I get from this kind of vengeance. At least it feels as if I’m doing something good.
It’s that thought that has me responding to the text before heading to my closet to prep for the kill. Gloves, Glock, Sig as a backup, knife as a last resort.
Dressed all in black, I leave to meet Dr. Davis Harrow, a medical toxicologist at Monroe Hospital, who supplies me with the fentanyl cocktail.
He’s an attending at the Poison Response & Clinical Toxicology Unit and one of the doctors who calls the time of death on overdose victims. And he does it way more often than he cares to.
In one of the bays behind an ambulance that just came in, I wait for Harrow. Sirens echo off the concrete overhang as a paramedic wheels in a guy who’s bleeding through a pressure bandage.
The stench of disinfectant hits me like a slap. Its sharp, chemical sting sours the humid night air.
I spot the toxicologist, late 50’s, coming to meet me in the corner of one bay.
He looks like he’s aged ten years since I saw him last. In wrinkled scrubs and hair sticking up like he’s been pulling at it, he gives me a weak smile.
He looks like he’s had a rough night. Like every hour has gnawed off a piece of him.
“Dr. O’Rourke,” he mutters, voice thin.
“Dr. Harrow, how have you been?” I say, as we always repeat this dance.
Like we’re just two colleagues catching up out of nowhere.
But Harrow flinches. “Been better.”
The man saved my life in the California rehab facility.
He’d lost his own daughter to drugs and had a touch I trusted and a willingness to listen.
He developed a detox program that worked.
Until I took advantage of his trust and snuck out when I heard the Vegas Cosa Nostra put a bounty on Ana’s head and mercenaries figured out she was in Seattle.
“You look like hell,” I tell him.
He huffs a humorless laugh. “The cases just keep coming. Kids dying on a playground after finding a used syringe of fentanyl. Women taking what they think is Percocet, but it’s laced with the stuff that stops their hearts cold.
We thought the crack epidemic was bad.” He shakes his head, his spirit crushed by senseless deaths.
“Meanwhile, these dealers walk away free because some high-priced lawyer with a smarmy grin and no moral fortitude finds some damn loophole.”
Harrow’s hands shake as he lights a cigarette. I say nothing because he doesn’t need to hear from me how bad smoking is for him. Taking a deep inhale, he reaches into his coat for the supplies I need to facilitate my next kill.
My muscles tighten for the first time since I started this. I’m one week away from staring into the eyes of young minds who dedicated their lives to saving people while I’m out executing them.
Harrow holds out a small, padded brown envelope to me. “Another one that my contact at the justice department said the DA won’t prosecute,” he says, not looking at me. “Three charges dismissed. His lawyer bullied the last witness out of testifying.”
“How many dead?” I ask, taking the envelope.
“Seven. At least those are the ones that investigators were able to link to him.” He covers his mouth and squeezes his eyes closed, clearly sickened.
We both know the body count is likely higher than that. Not to mention the hundreds more hooked on the drugs this piece of shit pedals.
I open the envelope and peek inside. A folded notepaper with a name and the last known location of our target is wrapped around two small glass vials. Something in me wakes up. The vials contain a prepared cocktail of heroin laced with fentanyl plus a paralytic, known on the streets as a hot-shot.
I use my own syringes.
Hot-shots have risen in popularity as dealers have chosen it as a way to eliminate junkies who stop paying but keep showing up, begging for the very drugs that destroyed their lives.
I’ve heard through my family that some cops are using it to silence informants who see something they shouldn’t. According to Harrow, during an autopsy, a hot-shot leaves ambiguous forensic results. And the paralytic ensures the respiratory arrest looks like an overdose, not homicide.
“I hate doing this,” he whispers. “But things have slipped through the cracks for too long. Something needs to be done to right some of the wrongs.”
He doesn’t bring up his daughter. He doesn’t use his pain as an excuse to hurt others. We both know this is his form of quiet justice.
I nod. “We’re doing what we can.”
Harrow’s breath stutters. “How are you doing, Cormac?”
His question lands strangely in my brain because he’s never asked me.
“Do I not look all right?”
“You look stressed.” Harrow knows when people are about to go off the rails.
I don’t dismiss his nudging as intrusive. “I got a new gig starting in a week. I’m teaching at Hamilton.”
His eyes widen.
“Ford hired you even though…” His words die in his throat. “You didn’t tell him about California.”
“I’m not obligated to disclose rehab. HIPAA.”
“Right.” He nods. “Your drug test?”
“Clean.” I brush a hand through my hair, feeling oddly uncomfortable. “I’ve been clean since California. You helped me,” I remind him. “You got me clean and gave me a way back into medicine. That’s something I’ll never forget.”
“It wasn’t charity,” he says. “You worked hard for it. And I wasn’t going to let the Number Three graduate at UCLA waste away. You’re—” His voice breaks. “You’re a good doctor.”
“I was a good doctor.” Funny how that label still feels like it doesn’t belong to me. “Ford seems easy to work for.”
“Be careful of that man. One mistake and Ford will not only fire you, but he’ll also use his connections with the medical review boards to bury your career. I heard even the Langstons stay on his good side.”
My face twitches, hearing the Langston name again.
Behind Harrow, an ambulance pulls in, lights splitting the night. Paramedics haul out a stretcher. Another broken body, another lost soul.
Harrow sees it, too, and his face twists. “It’s endless…”
“We knew that since the first day of med school,” I say, and prepare to leave, or people will get suspicious.
“Cormac,” Harrow calls after me.
I glance back.
“You’re not the same man I met in rehab.” His tone is bolder. “Stop punishing yourself.”
“The only person getting punished is right here.” I pat my jacket and keep walking.
Sirens taper into silence as I disappear into the dark to send another damaged soul to hell.