Chapter 53 - Forty Percent

Chapter 53: Chapter 53 - Forty Percent

Jesse drove like the road belonged to him.

He cut across three lanes of Astoria Boulevard without touching the brakes, threaded the Porsche between a city bus and a delivery truck with inches to spare and took the turn onto Carrie’s street so smoothly that the tires barely whispered. Driving Mastery had never felt less like a party trick.

In the passenger seat, Carrie clutched her phone in both hands and stared at it. She’d called Aileen four times since they left his apartment. Every call rang out to voicemail.

"Please pick up," she whispered. "Please, please, please."

Jesse pulled up in front of her building and was out of the car before the engine had finished winding down.

The security door was propped open with a brick. Carrie took the stairs two at a time, and Jesse stayed right behind her. By the third floor she was sobbing for breath. By the fourth, she’d stopped making any sound at all.

Her apartment door stood half open.

Carrie froze in the hallway with her hand flat against the frame. Jesse stepped past her, pushed the door the rest of the way open and listened. He heard the drip of a tap and the hum of the refrigerator, and nothing else. Whoever had been here was gone.

"Stay behind me," he said quietly, and went in.

The living room looked like it had been turned upside down. The coffee table was knocked onto its side. Shopping bags from Maison Valère lay torn open across the floor, tissue paper scattered everywhere, garment bags unzipped and tossed aside. The tall orange Hermès box sat empty in the corner with its lid thrown off.

And on the couch, half buried under a heap of tissue paper, lay Aileen.

She was on her back with one arm hanging off the edge, her bleached pixie cut damp with sweat against her forehead. Her face had gone a dull grayish white. Her lips had a blue tinge to them.

Carrie screamed her sister’s name and flew across the room.

She dropped to her knees beside the couch and grabbed Aileen’s face in both hands. "Aileen. Aileen, wake up. Look at me. Aileen!"

Aileen’s head lolled to one side.

Jesse knelt on the other side of the couch and pressed two fingers against the side of her throat. Her pulse was there, but faint and slow. He leaned close to her mouth. Her breathing came in long, shallow gaps, with too much time between each one.

On the carpet beside the couch lay an orange prescription bottle with no label. It was empty.

"She’s breathing," Jesse said. "Barely."

"The Narcan." Carrie lurched to her feet and stumbled toward the kitchen. "We have Narcan, I kept a kit after last time, it’s in the drawer..."

She yanked open a kitchen drawer and pulled out a small white box. She tore it open.

The box was empty. The foil packet inside had already been opened, and the nasal spray was gone.

Carrie stared at it.

"I used it," she whispered. "Last year. I used it and I never... I meant to get another one, I kept meaning to..."

The box slipped out of her fingers.

"Call 911," Jesse said, already sliding his arms under Aileen’s shoulders and knees.

"No." Carrie spun around. "No, Jesse, we can’t. If an ambulance comes, the police come with it. Aileen’s got a possession charge from two years ago. She’s still on probation. If they find her like this, with pills, after what happened last time, they’ll lock her up." Her voice broke. "Or they’ll start asking questions, and they’ll find out about Angus, and Angus will find out we talked."

Jesse looked at her.

"Then where?"

"There’s a clinic," Carrie said. "In Woodside. Dr. Varga. He took her last time. He doesn’t call anyone, and he doesn’t ask questions."

Jesse lifted Aileen off the couch. She weighed almost nothing. Her head fell against his shoulder, and her arm swung limply.

"Show me the way."

******

The clinic sat at the back of a run-down strip mall on Roosevelt Avenue, between a check-cashing place and a nail salon with half its sign burned out. There was no name on the door, just a small printed card in the window that read FAMILY MEDICAL – BY APPOINTMENT and a buzzer beside the frame.

Jesse parked the Porsche across three spots and carried Aileen to the door while Carrie leaned on the buzzer.

A tired-looking nurse in pink scrubs opened it, took one look at Aileen and stepped aside. "Back room. Go."

The back room was small and harshly lit, with a single exam table, a rolling IV stand and a crash cart that looked older than Carrie. Jesse laid Aileen down on the table as gently as he could.

A man came in from a side door, drying his hands on a paper towel.

Dr. Leon Varga was in his fifties, short and thick-bodied, with a gray buzz cut, a silver chain around his neck and a gold watch that didn’t match anything else in the building. His white coat was rumpled and had a coffee stain on the cuff. He took one look at Aileen on the table, then at Carrie, and sighed heavily through his nose.

"Again, Carrie?"

"Please, Dr. Varga." Carrie grabbed his arm. "She took Oxy. I don’t know how much. Someone forced her. Her lips are going blue. Please help her."

Varga pulled a penlight from his breast pocket and shone it into Aileen’s eyes. He frowned at whatever he saw. Then he clicked it off and turned to face Carrie with his arms folded.

"I can help her," he said. "But we need to talk about money first."

Carrie stared at him. "What?"

"You still owe me for last time. Forty-five hundred dollars, Carrie. It’s been a year. I’ve called you, and I’ve been patient." He shook his head. "I’m running a business here, not a charity. I can’t keep treating people for free."

"I’ll pay you. I’ll pay you everything, I swear, just help her first—"

"Half up front," Varga said flatly. "That’s the policy. Tonight’s going to be thirty thousand by the time I’ve stabilized her, flushed her system and kept her overnight. That’s fifteen now. Plus the forty-five hundred you already owe." He spread his hands. "Nineteen-five, and then I start."

Carrie’s face went white.

"I don’t have that," she whispered. "I don’t have that right now, I have some money, I have twenty thousand in the bank, but I’d have to go to the bank tomorrow, I can’t move that much on my phone—"

"Then I’m sorry, Carrie."

"She’s dying!"

"Then you’d better find a way to pay me, fast."

On the table behind them, Aileen’s chest rose, held for far too long and fell.

Jesse stepped forward.

He’d stood quietly by the door the whole time, and Varga seemed to notice him properly for the first time. The doctor’s eyes ran over him: the tall frame, the clean, sharp face, the expensive watch on his wrist. He had the look of a man doing a quick calculation.

"Start the treatment," Jesse said.

Varga raised an eyebrow. "And you are?"

"The person paying." Jesse pulled out his phone. "All of it. Tonight’s bill in full, the forty-five hundred she owes you and whatever else you need to make sure Aileen walks out of here. Give me an account number. You’ll have it before your nurse finishes hooking up the IV."

Varga studied him for one more second.

Then he turned to the nurse in pink scrubs.

"Naloxone. Four milligrams, intranasal, now. Get a line in her arm and start fluids. And get the charcoal ready."

The nurse was already moving.

She pulled a nasal spray from the crash cart, tilted Aileen’s head back and pushed the nozzle into her nostril. A second nurse appeared from the side door with an IV kit, tied a tourniquet around Aileen’s thin arm and slid a needle into the crook of her elbow.

Varga scribbled an account number on a prescription pad, tore off the sheet and handed it to Jesse without a word.

Jesse sent thirty-four thousand, five hundred dollars and showed him the confirmation screen.

Varga looked at it, and something shifted in his expression. Then he turned back to his patient.

For nearly a minute, nothing happened.

Carrie stood at the foot of the exam table with both hands clamped over her mouth, staring at her sister’s gray face.

Then Aileen gasped.

It was a huge, ragged, desperate breath, like someone surfacing from the bottom of a pool. Her back arched off the table. Her eyes flew open, glassy and unfocused, and she started coughing and shaking.

"There she is," Varga said. "Hold her on her side. She may vomit."

The nurses rolled Aileen onto her side. She retched weakly over the edge of the table, gasping and trembling, and her lips began to lose their blue tint.

Carrie burst into tears.

She pushed past the nurses and grabbed her sister’s hand in both of hers, pressing it to her wet cheek.

"Car?" Aileen’s voice was a scraped-out whisper. "Car, I’m sorry. I’m so sorry. He made me. He held my nose until I swallowed. He and his guys. I didn’t want to..."

"I know, baby. I know." Carrie kissed her knuckles over and over. "It’s okay. You’re okay. I’m here."

"Naloxone wears off faster than oxycodone does," Varga said, hanging a bag of fluids on the IV stand. "She’s going to need more doses over the next few hours, and we’ll need to get the charcoal into her to soak up whatever’s still in her stomach. She’s staying here tonight, and I’m watching her the whole time." He glanced at Carrie. "She’ll be all right."

Carrie nodded, too choked up to speak.

Jesse stepped back to the doorway to give them room.

He watched Carrie bent over the exam table, stroking her sister’s damp hair off her forehead and murmuring to her, while the nurses checked Aileen’s vitals and Varga adjusted the drip.

Then Carrie looked up and found him over her sister’s shoulder.

Her face was blotchy and swollen from crying, and her mascara had run in dark streaks down her cheeks. She didn’t say anything. She simply looked at him with an expression Jesse had never seen on anyone’s face when they looked at him. It held gratitude and disbelief, and underneath them something softer that she didn’t seem to have words for yet.

[Ding!]

[Harem Member Update: Carrie Morton]

[Affection: 40%]

Jesse held her gaze across the small, harshly lit room.

No cashback came with it, and no lucky draw. There was only the number, and the woman who’d stopped asking him questions, looking at him like he’d just pulled her sister back from the edge of the world.

He found he didn’t mind that at all.