So up in her room, Petra laid out a very thin and short little line because she wasn’t sure of the ratio of the drugs crushed up into a powder and a pill. She was sure she was being too cautious, but that didn’t matter. There was no one there to call her chicken or say she was scared and weak. No one but herself. She didn’t bother with a chopped straw or a rolled-up bill. She put her left nostril onto the dresser top and inhaled.
On the road out of Paradise, Cole was blasting a hip-hop station from Boston. He was spitting out the rhymes along with the rapper, bobbing his head, moving his shoulders, thinking about how proud his mom would be of him in uniform. He was so into the music, so lost in his thoughts, that he didn’t notice the white van coming up alongside his father’s Explorer.
Sixty-seven
At first, the buzz was incredible. Petra had never felt anything like it, but after the first few seconds of absolute ecstasy, she knew it was all wrong. Her arms ached and her legs felt like they couldn’t hold her. She grabbed onto her dresser. She was dizzy and disoriented. I’m in my room. Am I in my room? Am I standing? And then she wasn’t standing. Her dresser came down on top of her.
In the distance she heard someone calling to her. “Petra, Petra, are you all right? What was that?”
But Petra’s voice didn’t work and the other voice had come from too far away. All Petra wanted to do was sleep. She wanted to sleep forever and never have to worry again about where the next pill would come from. Her eyes fluttered and her last thought before sleep was that her lover hadn’t lied. It was going to be all right.
BANG!
Cole wasn’t quite sure what happened. His first instinct was that the Explorer’s left rear tire had blown, but when he looked in his side-view mirror he noticed a white van had turned its right front fender into his left rear wheel well and was nosing it hard. His heart was pounding, his mouth dry; the hip-hop blasting through the speakers sounded tinny and a million miles away. His vision had never been so acute. He soaked through his shirt. He tried oversteering to the right in the opposite direction to try to fight against the force pushing against that tire. It didn’t work and set the Explorer spinning in circles.
When the big Ford was sent spinning, he switched strategies. Instead of steering against the force, he steered with the spin. The Explorer almost righted itself. However, as it crossed over into the oncoming traffic lane, the SUV’s tires hit something, a curb. The Explorer slid back across the road and flipped over once, then again over the guardrail, down a gully, and into some trees at the side of the road.
The white van stopped, went into reverse, and stopped again at the point where the Explorer had gone over the rail and into the gully. Georgi got out of the van, hopped over the guardrail. The plan was to make certain that if Stone wasn’t killed by the “accident,” to ensure his neck got broken one way or the other. The Explorer was lying on the driver’s side, its front end crumpled by the trees, engine whining. Georgi got about halfway to the SUV when he heard the siren screaming. It was close. He had to get this done quickly. He ran, slipped, slid down, tumbled, and banged into the Ford. He got up, went around to look through the windshield, and froze.
“Luyno!” he said to himself in Bulgarian. Shit!
He began to claw his way up the embankment, but it was too late. A state trooper was working his way down toward him.
Annette North opened the door and saw Petra, her arms flung over her head, underneath her dresser.
“Oh my God. Petra! Petra!”
She knelt down by her daughter, tried to rouse her, but it was as if her daughter was beyond reaching. Then she noticed the vial and the powder, saw the grains of powder on Petra’s nostril. She didn’t panic. People like her didn’t panic. That’s what she told herself even as she was immobile, lost as to what to do next.
The rumble of a passing truck seemed to snap her out of her frenzied stupor, and she ran to the phone.
Jesse drove one of the spare cruisers to the North house. Molly had called the fire department to send an ambulance, but Jesse got there first. He rushed through the door and didn’t bother to wait to hear Annette’s explanation of what had happened.
He shoved the dresser off the girl, tried unsuccessfully to rouse her, but didn’t want to pull her up for fear that the fall and/or the dresser coming down on her might have done spinal damage. He, too, saw the powder and the vial, saw the grains on Petra’s nose. He pulled the naloxone out of his jacket pocket but had a decision to make that might either save the girl or kill her. Naloxone used incorrectly or for the wrong substance could induce severe reactions, including death. He dabbed his finger into the spilled powder, rubbed it between his fingers. Before fentanyl was introduced as a way to boost heroin’s potency, he might have tasted the powder to make sure of what it was. He couldn’t risk that now.
He ripped open the package of naloxone, placed the nozzle deep into the girl’s right nostril, and pressed the plunger. Just as he finished, Tommy and Ralphy, two fire department EMTs, came up the stairs and into the girl’s room.
“I just finished giving her a dose of naloxone,” Jesse said. “Be careful when you move her, the dresser fell on top of her, and try not to disturb the vial on the floor.”
Tommy, a big man, put his hand on Jesse’s shoulder. “We’ll do our best, Chief. Let us take over from here.” Tommy knelt down where Jesse had been.
“Chief,” Ralphy said, “Pete Perkins is downstairs. He says he’s got an urgent message for you.”
“Thanks.”
When Jesse saw the look on Peter Perkins’s face, he knew the message to be delivered wasn’t a good one. “Cole had an accident just outside of town.”
“Bad?”
“They’re bringing him to Paradise General. He’s probably there already.”
“Peter, there’s evidence in the room. Particularly a vial of drugs. Try and bag it before the EMTs do too much damage.” Jesse stopped talking. He didn’t think he could take losing the son he had barely gotten to know.
Sixty-eight
Jesse parked by the ER entrance and ran into the hospital, blind to the world around him. A strong hand grabbed him around his left biceps and stopped Jesse’s unseeing momentum. Jesse came back into the moment, seeing the stocky man in the black leather jacket, gray/blue uniform shirt, yellow-striped dark blue pants, and tall, black boots.
“Chief Stone, I’m Trooper Quinton.”
“What happened?”
“I only witnessed the very end of the incident as the vehicle driven by Mr. Slayton flipped over the guardrail. Lucky thing I got there when I did. There was already a man down in the gully. We got him out of the vehicle.”
“How is he?”
“I understand he is your son. Is that right?”
Jesse was losing patience. “How is he?”
“Sorry, Chief. He’s banged around pretty good. Probable concussion, but unless there’s internal damage or something I didn’t see, he’ll be fine.”
Jesse shook the trooper’s hand and thanked him. “I’m going to check on my son, but will you please wait for me?”