“I bet you will. For now, it’s time for this.” She removed a little piece of what looked like tape from an envelope with my name on it. “Under your tongue,” she said.
I placed the strip of Suboxone in my mouth and it began to dissolve right away. The stuff didn’t taste good, but that was the least of my problems. Almost twenty-four hours after those first doses I had no cravings at all. I didn’t have the shakes, and I didn’t want to puke.
If I were a religious type, I’d be down on my knees thanking God for a miracle right now. “Can I ask you something?”
“Sure.”
“When can I have a shower?”
The older woman smiled at me. “You must be feeling better. But we don’t want to get your wound wet.”
“Can’t I, like, tape a plastic bag over it or something? I’m desperate here.” The smell of detox lingered on me—sweat and worse.
“I’ll make a deal with you. Eat everything they bring you for lunch, and then afterward I’ll see what I can do.”
“Thank you.”
She walked out, and I looked up at the muted TV, wishing for something to distract me from all the things I couldn’t fix. Now that my cravings were gone, all my other troubles came into sharper focus. Mostly I was worried about Sophie. Next on the list came work—I was probably going to lose the paint job for the guy who ran the solar business. My right arm wasn’t going to be functional enough to hold a paint gun for who knew how long. And yet I’d have a whopping hospital bill by the time I was ready to work again.
Everything was fucked up, but I felt better than I had in months because I didn’t have any drug cravings.
Weird.
*
I’d never stayed in a hospital before now. Overall, I found the experience only slightly less humiliating than prison.
To shower, I had to strip down in front of my nurse. She stuck a big watertight bandage on me. Then I took a quick shower while holding my right arm out of the curtain. Luckily the shampoo was in a dispenser on the wall. I was able to clumsily squirt some onto the edge of my hand and then slop it onto my head.
The hot water felt divine, and I would have liked to stay there a good long time. But the nurse was waiting for me, and my knees felt shaky. So I shampooed and swiped more of their liquid soap all over my body. Then I rinsed and got the heck out of there.
A one-armed guy can’t easily wrap a towel around his body, so she left me alone to dry off, and then she slipped a clean hospital gown over my shoulders. When I emerged from the bathroom, someone had already changed the sheets on my bed.
Things were looking up.
I did the splenectomy-patient shuffle over to the bed and sat down on it. The nurse was just tucking me back in when a uniformed police officer stepped into the doorway. I recognized him from the bakery—he was the same cop that Sophie had sat with over coffee.
Don’t hold it against him, asshole, I coached myself. I’d jump at the chance to linger over coffee with Sophie, too. Who wouldn’t?
“Jude Nickel? I’m Officer Nelligan.”
“Hello, sir.” I was going to be polite if it killed me. “Sorry to drag you over here on Christmas.”
“Yeah? I’m the low man on the totem pole, so I was already workin’. The social worker said you needed to make a report?” He looked down at me as if he smelled something really bad.
No love for the town junkie. Color me surprised. “Yeah, I got jumped. The first time I’d ever seen these guys was a few weeks ago.”
Officer Nelligan could barely contain his derision. “Don’t know the guys, huh? We hear that a lot.”
“I’ll bet you do.” I sighed. “Look. As I’m sure you know, I went to prison for three years, and then I was out of town for six months. About a month after I came back to town, this guy shows up at my garage looking for some drugs that went missing three years ago. But they weren’t my drugs. And I told them that.”
“You know their names?”
“No, but I can describe the guy in charge. Big scar on his cheek.” I drew an imaginary line on my face to demonstrate.
He didn’t reach for his pad of paper. “Okay.”
The dude was not getting the message. “I know you don’t give a rat’s ass if someone kicked the shit out of me. And I really don’t blame you. But I need you to go to your boss and tell him that two dudes are asking a lot of questions about that night three and a half years ago. And they’re not afraid to mention Sophie Haines as someone who they might want to visit next.”
That got his attention. Officer Nelligan pulled the visitors’ chair around to face me and sat down heavily. “You’re not shitting me, are you? You wouldn’t use the chief’s daughter to get us interested in some thugs who beat you up?”
“Fuck no.” Jesus. “I know I’m just another dumbass convict to you, Officer, but I’m not actually so stupid that I’d lie to a police officer just for shits and giggles.”
He frowned. “You’re just worried about Miss Sophie.”