Normally, Nessa would’ve waited until her next shift, but she wondered if this was yet another message from John. And if maybe it had some fingerprints on it that she could give to the police to prove it was from him.
She hadn’t been to the radio station during the day since she was hired, so it felt strange to drive out there in the middle of the afternoon. It looked different in the daylight—-smaller and shabbier. Inside, she peeked through the window into the on--air studio and saw a short round middle--aged man wearing her headphones and sitting on her chair, spitting into her microphone.
Possessive much?
Nessa turned to Ella, a girl no more than eighteen, who was typing on her keyboard.
“Hi, Nessa,” she said, and finished what she was doing before reaching under her desk and retrieving a padded envelope. She put it on the desk in front of Nessa, who picked it up.
“No return address,” Nessa said. “Just says ‘A Fan.’ ” She turned it over and saw that there was no postmark either. “Did this come in the mail?”
“Nope,” Ella said. “It was just lying against the door when I got to work this morning.”
Nessa thought about leaving to open it. But then again, a witness might be a good thing to have.
So she sat in the reception chair and felt the envelope, but whatever was inside had plenty of insulation around it. Was it too small to be a bomb?
The envelope was lined with two layers of bubble wrap. She tried to tip whatever was inside out, but it wouldn’t budge, so she started to reach inside. But then she had visions of a poisonous snake. It wasn’t out of the realm of possibility.
“Do you have a pair of scissors I could borrow?” Nessa asked.
Without looking away from her computer, Ella reached into a drawer, withdrew the scissors, and put them on the desk.
Nessa sliced off the three remaining edges, then carefully folded back the front of the envelope.
“What the hell?” Nessa said.
Taped inside of the bubble wrap was a full hypodermic needle.
Nessa gasped, and Ella looked up from her keyboard.
“What is it?”
Before Nessa could do anything, Ella stood and looked.
“Oh, my God,” she said.
Nessa stared at the syringe in horrified fascination. John had taped it with the needle pointing up. Had Nessa reached inside without looking, she would have been punctured. There might have been enough pressure to inject her with the liquid inside the chamber.
Did John really want her dead? She stared at the hypo and wondered.
Ella picked up the phone receiver. “I’m going to call the police.”
Nessa was still staring at the syringe. She could have been killed. She could have died, and Daltrey . . .
Nessa snapped out of her trance. “No,” she said. “You don’t need to do that. I’m going to take it to them right now.”
“I can testify if you need me to,” Ella said.
“Thanks,” Nessa said. “Do you have some Scotch tape?”
Ella handed her a roll and Nessa taped the envelope back together.
She could have been dosed. Germs. Hepatitis. Rabies. HIV. This was starting to remind her of some wack--job conspiracy theory stuff. This was straight--up crazy.
“You should totally post this on Instagram,” Ella said. “It’s not every day you see this kind of thing.”
“Really, Ella?”
“Sorry,” she said, shame--faced.
What was it with this generation wanting to document every single thing they saw, from bloody car accidents to their own reflections? Of course, she was part of that cloud culture now. She was part of the problem. But it would never occur to her to take a picture of a weapon.
Nessa carefully stowed the envelope in her bag. She hadn’t touched the hypo, so she hoped John’s fingerprints could be lifted from it.
Once in her car, she started driving toward the Riley County Sheriff’s Office to get the syringe tested. All of a sudden, she realized that if she walked into the cop shop, they were going to take her fingerprints. There would be no stopping it.
Nessa turned off into an abandoned warehouse parking lot to think it through. Could her doctor’s office do the testing? They probably could.
She removed the envelope from her purse and opened it to examine the hypo.
Since it was still taped to the envelope, it was hard to determine the color of the liquid in the syringe, but it looked very familiar, and she suspected she knew what it was. Heroin.
A scene from Nightmare on Elm Street 3: Dream Warriors came to mind, the one where the ex--junkie girl’s tracks open up like hungry mouths, desperate and dying of thirst.
Nessa actually started salivating, painfully. Her eyes watered. The syringe seemed to have its own gravitational pull. She tried to resist it. She didn’t know for sure that it was heroin. But of course it’s heroin, said the little voice in her head. One little shot won’t hurt. Just one, and then never again.
That voice had spoken to her many times, insistent, seductive, convincing as hell.
Just one more time.
Nessa snatched up her phone and hit the speed dial for Marlon’s number. It rang as she stared, salivating, at the plastic cylinder.
“This is Marlon. I’ll call you as soon as I can.”
Beep.