Gundown by Ray Rhamey Read Free Book Online Page B

read books.” She loved to run her finger over the words and read aloud.
    Juana smiled on Chloe—they were more like sisters than neighbors. “She was fine, ma’am.”
    Jewel sobered. “Timmy?”
    “Mostly in his bed all day. He’s really hurtin’.”
    “Thanks, Juana.” Jewel listened at the door, then unlocked it. She peered into the hall and found it empty. “Don’t know if I need you tomorrow, got no interviews yet.” She gave Juana two twenties and let her slip out.
    Juana hurried to the next door down the hall, knocked, and whispered her name. Latches clicked and she was admitted. Jewel locked up.
    She tousled Chloe’s hair. “Listen, honey, why don’t you play while I see to Uncle Timmy?”
    “He’s sick again, Mommy.”
    “I know, sugar. I got him some medicine.”
    Going into her bedroom and then to the walk-in closet that served as her brother’s room, she found Timmy shivering on his mattress on the floor, a sheet pulled up to his chin. The air stank of stale sweat and soiled clothes—she needed to do a cleanup.
    Jewel knelt beside him and smoothed his hair. Hard to believe he was twenty-three now. He’d been her “little boy” since he was twelve and she seventeen, when their mother was killed in a mugging. She loved him so much, it ached.
    His jaws clenched and unclenched as he looked up at her. It broke her heart to see how hard he worked not to show his pain. She handed him a packet of pink she’d gotten from Murphy.
    His eyes widened, and he flashed her a grin. “Oh, thank you, Sister, thank you.” Hands quivering, he dug his dope kit out from under a pair of dirty jeans. Jewel couldn’t watch, so she went to the living room and stared out a window.
    Tears clouded her eyes, and she cursed the junkie chemist who had cooked up the designer drug with a hook that couldn’t be removed. She’d looked for help on the Internet and found out that pink was crack cocaine and freebase nicotine combined into a new drug. The nastiest part of pink was the most addictive drug known to science—nicotine in the freebase form. The crack created instant dependence, and pink’s freebase nicotine created instant addiction.
    “You feel like God.” That’s what Timmy had said at the beginning, back when he was stronger and had enough money for pink, and they hadn’t believed the talk they’d heard about how bad it was. He’d do the drug and then go out for a long night, humming and snapping his fingers. He’d told her, “You’re the smartest, the strongest, the sexiest. Anything is possible. And it lasts for hours and hours.”
    Yeah, pink gave addicts a few hours in heaven, but when it wore off, it put them on a bullet train to hell. Because it was so new, nobody’d found anything to treat the suffering and, so far, detoxing killed you. When addicts withdrew, they died in agony.
    It had been just six months since pink had taken over Timmy’s life because some fool at a party had slipped it into his pipe of marijuana. Now he was a condemned man.
    After a dinner of fried Spam, greens, fruit salad, and a treat of Girl Scout Thin Mint cookies, Jewel snuggled Chloe close on the couch and read to her. She stayed away from stories with a father in them, because they sparked questions she didn’t want to answer.
    At eight o’clock, after a flurry of hugs and kisses, she tucked Chloe into bed. Timmy, now smiling and energized by a shower and clean clothes, went out to enjoy his high while it lasted. Jewel tried television, but the shows were either sex, violence, mindless crap, or all three.
    Surfing channels, she caught a news report that said the guy who had tried to shoot Noah Stone was pleading not guilty. That was nuts. There was a herd of witnesses, for Christ’s sake. But his lawyer would probably get him off on a technicality—she’d seen them do that a hundred times at the office.
    Hank Soldado had been a hero twice in the same day. She pictured him with Stone in the hospital room.