Bryce got it. He just wasn’t buying it, not yet. “I don’t do needles,” he declared with a wave of his hand.
“Neither do I,” said the guy. “This doesn’t go in your veins. It’s like a B12 shot…only much, much better.”
“So it’s a boost, like coke? Because coke I have.”
“Believe me, you don’t have anything like this. Clean and quick, the ultimate jolt of adrenaline.”
Bryce did a double take on the guy. He knew where B12 shots went. Was this some perv pulling a bait and switch? “You’re not just trying to get me to drop my pants, are you?” he asked.
The guy ignored him. Instead he rolled up the sleeve of his black T-shirt. Clearly the issue was trust. How do dealers flush out narcs?
“Like this,” he said, casually flicking off the needle cap. He jammed the syringe into the meat of his upper arm, pressing hard on the plunger.
Clean and quick, all right. No sooner had the orange liquid disappeared into his skin than he threw his head back against the metal panel of the stall, his face laced with euphoria.
Sold, thought Bryce. “How much?” he asked.
“First one’s free,” said the guy, reaching into his pocket.
He handed over another syringe that looked identical to the first and watched as Bryce mimicked the way he had flicked off the needle cap.
“Pulp,” said Bryce with a confident nod.
“Yeah, Pulp,” the guy echoed. “Enjoy.”
Chapter 14
BRYCE PLUNGED the needle into the meaty flesh of his upper arm, eyeing the bright orange liquid as it quickly drained from the syringe. The roller coaster was climbing that first big hill. The ride was about to begin. Pure anticipation. The rush. The euphoria.
The pain?
Bryce’s knees suddenly buckled as he stumbled backwards, banging his head hard against the stall. Reaching out, arms flailing, he tried to steady himself, but the feeling was nothing short of agony in every muscle, every fiber. There were lightning bolts shooting out from his spine, a fire raging through his insides. His arms, his legs—everything hurt all at once.
His eyes begged. Make it stop! Please, please make it stop!
Then, as quickly as it came, it did exactly that. It stopped. The fire extinguished. The pain gone.
Two seconds later, though, he would’ve done anything to get it back.
Move! yelled Bryce’s brain to the rest of his body. Do something. Say something. React!
Only he couldn’t. He could see and he could blink, but nothing more. From head to toe, he was frozen. Paralyzed.
Michael Caine smiled. He reached into his pocket, removing another needle and syringe. Only this one was bigger. Much bigger.
“Have you read your Bible, Bryce?” he asked, flicking away an air bubble in the cartridge after removing the cap. The liquid was clear, not orange. “No, of course you haven’t, have you?”
Bryce tried desperately again to move as he stared at the long needle. He knows my name. How does he know my name?
Michael Caine shrugged. “To tell you the truth, I’m not much for religion,” he said. “But I do like the Bible. I like what it says about right and wrong and the nature of sin. Are you a sinner, Bryce? You are, aren’t you? I know you are.”
Bryce screamed, if only in his head, as the tip of that long needle edged closer to him. Where is he going with it?
The more he stared at it, the more the answer became clear right before his eyes.
His left eye, to be exact.
Bryce tried desperately to move again. He tried to fight back. Or escape. Or something other than what he was doing, which was nothing. The most his body would give him was a tremble, a sort of low-rumble seizure that did little more than make his heart race even faster. A harbinger of things to come. We all have to die some way, right?
Michael Caine shook his head. “C’mon, hold steady for me, Bryce,” he said, annoyed. “Don’t fight it.”
But cooperation was hardly to be expected, so he jammed the palm of his free hand against Bryce’s forehead, pinning him flat to the stall so he could peel back the eyelid enough to expose the orbital socket. Even the most thorough of coroners wouldn’t think to look there.
“This is going to sting a bit,” he said, aiming the tip of the needle north of the pupil before plunging it into the sclera, otherwise known as the white of the eye.
As he pushed down on the syringe he counted to five.
One one thousand, two one thousand…
Chapter 15
THERE WAS no need to check the caller ID.
I’d love to say that was deductive reasoning of the highest order, but it was really more like a gut feeling as I reached for my phone in the darkness, the ring waking only me and not Tracy, who pretty much could sleep through the apocalypse.
I knew who was calling at three in the morning, and worse, I knew why.
“So much for one and done,” said Elizabeth, letting out a sigh. “Sometimes it sucks to be right, doesn’t it?”
Aaron VonMiller was the first guy I saw when I stepped out of the cab twenty minutes later in front of White Lines in SoHo. I’d never heard of the club.
I recognized VonMiller from the myriad articles written about him, especially the one in New York magazine a year or so back. He was on the cover, a big close-up photo of him with his unruly salt-and-pepper hair, playfully scrunching his face to keep a fork wedged between his upper lip and nose, as though it were a mustache. The guy was a partner in nearly a dozen wildly successful restaurants in Manhattan. A few in Vegas as well.
But there was nothing playful about VonMiller now. He was screaming at a cop who was blocking him from the entrance to the club. “That’s my son! That’s my son in there!” He was living a parent’s absolute worst nightmare in the middle of the night.
I shot a text to Elizabeth as instructed.
I’m here.
Within seconds she was walking out of the neon-purple doors, finding me on the sidewalk among the crowd of onlookers.
“Nice bed head,” she said, motioning for me to follow her.
She led me past the velvet ropes, now strung with yellow police tape, and into the club, which looked like the last days of Studio 54. Totally eighties and—save for the requisite police and EMTs—totally empty.
That changed when we turned a corner toward the bathrooms. Gathered by a cigarette machine that had been reconfigured to dispense condoms was a group of “kids” being interviewed by a detective, or so I assumed that’s what he was, his rumpled Men’s Wearhouse suit being the first clue.
The kids, who looked barely out of their teens, were clearly potential witnesses. Less clear, though, were their outfits, or whatever it was they were wearing. Was this supposed to be a costume party?
“Don’t ask,” said Elizabeth after we walked by them.
Two cops were flanking the entrance to the men’s room, one fidgeting with his phone. The other shot Elizabeth a look: What gives? “How much longer?” he asked her. “We really need to move him.”
“Just one more minute,” she said without breaking stride.