Chapter 3: The Right Thing

“You’re not pissed, are you?” Delaney strapped herself into her seat.

“What’d I tell you to do?”

“Get all the Narcan I could and get all the help I could round up.” She fell silent.

“You did exactly what I told you to do.” I cranked Sally’s engine up. “If I don’t tell you how to do things, I expect you to do the best you can. We were just minutes from losing some of them when you showed up. If you’d have tried to explain yourself or waited for them to get in touch with the sheriff, we might have lost them.”

She leaned back in her seat. “So I did the right thing.”

“You did ‘a’ right thing. There may have been better options, but you chose one that worked. The sheriff isn’t grumbling about it because he’s damn glad he doesn’t have to call some families to tell them one of their kids died. At least not yet. We’ll see what they find at the park.”

“It was really cool. The cruiser doesn’t handle like Sally, but the lights and sirens made up for it.”

“I’ll bet. Did you have to skim the state trooper’s car? I know that wasn’t an accident.”

She grinned. “I had to get their attention to make sure they’d follow me.” She paused, looking a little disappointed. “I also flipped them off and yelled ‘try and catch me, wankers,’ but they were too busy freaking out over me buzzing them up to even notice.”

“You actually called them ‘wankers’?” I shook my head. “No more British movies for you.”

She snickered, but before she could reply, my cell phone buzzed.

“Sheree?”

“Les, I’m over at the hospital. My cousin ... Shelly...” She took a breath. “She OD’d. She’s recovering, but it was really close.”

“We’re on the way, babe.”

Sheree had been trying to help Shelly out from under her addictions most of her adult life. We’d seen her temporarily “clean up” then relapse over and over. To Sheree it was a family duty, one she couldn’t just quit.

Besides, they’d grown up together, and Sheree would never be able to abandon her. Sheree didn’t give up on people.

It didn’t take that long to reach the hospital, and we found Sheree standing outside the waiting room for the emergency room.

She strode over as soon as she saw us. “There’s no seats in the waiting room.”

“Do you know that happened?”

She shrugged. “It doesn’t make any sense; she just got off work and headed home; the next thing I know, I’m getting a call from the hospital. She’s been clean for a while, and she was due to take a drug test soon.”

“Who found her?”

“That’s the strange part. She was in the hospital already; they said she was in line at the information desk.”

“Didn’t you say she OD’d a couple years ago? Maybe she was there because she thought she was overdosing.”

“Yes, she drove herself to the emergency room.” Sheree paused. “She knows where the emergency room is ... if she thought she was overdosing, she’d have gone there.”

“So why was she in line there?

“I don’t know, and she’s probably not going to wake up for a while. She might have been out of it.”

“Did they say what she overdosed on? We had a bunch of overdoses at the clinic. Probably fentanyl.”

She glanced back at the waiting room. “They haven’t told me anything. Gotta lot of people in there talkin’ about a party goin’ really bad, was that it?”

“Probably, the sheriff thinks it was a rave party at Theodore Martin State Park.”

“Shelly never liked the rave thing much. She went to one and got about three days of migraines from it, never did it again.” I could see Sheree was trying to keep her equilibrium. Shelly had completed her court-directed rehab and seemed to have cleaned up. Sheree closed her eyes for a second, suddenly looking tired. “Dammit, Les. I thought she was done with that ... shit.”

I put an arm around her shoulders, and Delaney moved up on her other side. I could sense Delaney’s annoyance at Shelly over putting Sheree through all this, but she tried to help. “Maybe they made a mistake, and maybe it was something else.”