Free Bear Claw Bodyguard by Jessica Andersen Page B

a long shot. A poison, sure. But the amatia isn’t a ’shroom of the psychedelic variety.” She thought back to a couple of snippets she’d overheard during his nightly base-touch with his boss. “Are you thinking of this Death Stare case?” At his clipped nod, she pressed, “Tell me about it.” When he hesitated, she said, “I learned a long time ago not to discount even the most far-fetched-sounding idea. Occam’s razor doesn’t always apply when it comes to Mother Nature…or humankind.”
    His lips twitched. “The simplest explanation isn’t always the right one?”
    “Not in my experience. So, the Death Stare. Start talking.” It wasn’t just the case she was curious about either. Clearly this one was personal to him.
    After a moment’s hesitation, he said grimly, “Okay, the short version is that there have been fourteen deaths that we know of, probably more since it’s mostly been hitting the kinds of people who don’t check themselves into the ER when they start feeling crummy.” He shrugged, but his expression didn’t match the casual gesture. “Anyway, it’s seriously nasty stuff. It’s highly addictive, easy to OD onand the withdrawal is a killer. Literally. Worse, according to the lab results, it’s not any one thing. It’s this funky blend of a bunch of known drugs plus a couple of components nobody can quite figure out. The analysts are working on it, but meanwhile we’re losing good men out there on the streets.”
    “Cops?” she asked, though she knew the parlance.
    He nodded. “Three were shot the other day, trying to get a bead on the drug traffic. But cops aren’t the only good guys out there. Sometimes a good guy is just a good guy.”
    “I know that,” she said, surprised because she wasn’t used to cops who knew it. In her experience, the protect-and-serve mentality came with a good dose of “us versus them.” Then again, she was starting to get the sense that Jack wasn’t like any of the other cops she’d known before.
    He grimaced. “Yeah. Sorry. Touchy subject.” When he paused, she just waited, having learned that it sometimes took him a moment. Sure enough, he eventually continued, “One of the ODs was a good friend of mine, Ray Prews. We knew each other all through school, hated each other through junior high and then after that glommed as friends, bonding freshman year over the horrors of chem class.” His eyes softened, saddened. “He was the guy who had it all, you know? Honors student, football star, good family, pretty much his pick of colleges.”
    This time when he stopped, she said, “What happened?”
    “It’s an old enough story—he got hurt a little, took some painkillers to play through it and got hurt worse, right around the time the early predictions were being made for the NFL draft that year. More drugs, more playing and he wound up with major surgery, a permanent limp, no contract and a hell of a drug habit.” His lips thinned. “He came home, and things got worse rather than better. He kept using no matter what his family and friends said or did. He lied, stole and sneaked around until finally his parents staged an intervention and shipped him off to a rehab facility they couldn’t really afford. He lasted three days before he checked himself out and came back to the city. Got a job working as muscle for a third-rate party-promoter-slash-drug-dealer, rented a room at a crappy motel, and pretty much cut us all off. Family, friends, nothing. It was like we didn’t exist anymore, when all we wanted to do was help.”
    With another of her friends, acquaintances or coworkers, she might have reached across the table and squeezed his hand in support. With him, because she wanted to too much, she didn’t let herself make the move. Instead, she said cautiously, “You can’t help an addict until he’s ready to make a change.”
    He grimaced. “I know that now. Hell, I knew it back then, we all did. But it’s one thing to hear the