Page 36 of The Harbinger
Sacha
Mia’schestheavedasthe last of the fever ravaged her body.
“Tell me.”
“The girl suffers from more than a cocaine addiction.” Sergei dabbed a wet washcloth across her brow. My fingers curled at my side as he traveled down her neck and across her naked chest.
Disturbing images of her sitting on the streets shooting heroin bombard me, although the skin along her arms was clean from such a habit. “From what else do you think?”
The old physician paused, dipping the washcloth back into the water basin. He’d been my doctor since before I clawed myself out of my mother’s womb, and I trusted him with my life.
“I’m not entirely sure. Hallucinogens, alcohol, and prescription medicines could all contribute to her symptoms.” He placed the folded washrag on her forehead. “Typical cocaine withdrawal isn’t this severe. She shouldn’t have a high fever or hallucinations.”
Mia was homeless and living on the streets, so she says. And in America, prescriptions didn’t come cheap, especially opiates. It was safe to say we could rule that out. Alcohol was the most common drug used on the streets, although I never detected it on her breath. Not that she couldn’t have been on a dry spell when we met. That left one of two possibilities. Alcohol or hallucinogens. “Anything we need to look out for?”
“Just keep her fever down, and watch out for convulsions. She’s young. She should come out of it soon.”
The gulag crawled with drugs, and the prisoners would do anything to get their hands on it.
What had she done to get her fix?
Maybe that was why she climbed into a car with two strange men. The addiction, the craving, it ate at you until nothing was left.
“Have her results come back?”
“Not yet.”
I clenched my teeth against one another, focusing on the pain it brought my molars, then exhaled through my nose.
“I need them as soon as possible.”
I needed to know if the markings on her back were a coincidence or if Ina’s storytelling held some merit.
“I’ll do everything in my power.”
“I know you will.”
The days carried on as I buried myself in work. Her cries for help and of pain filled the halls, but something about her kept drawing me upstairs and watching her from a distance.
Her sweat-soaked hair and damp breasts held a sheen in the dim overhead lights, but I never tried to cover her modesty.
She’d ramble on, muttering incoherent sentences and begging for mercy from thefuego, the Spanish word for fire. I didn’t see her as someone who spoke another language, but it was clear thatfuegowas the only word she uttered that wasn’t English.
I scrolled on my computer, running the middle button ragged as I searched for girls fitting her description as if finding her missing profile were my personal addiction, when Dmitri stepped into my office.
“What is it?” I sat back in my seat, taking my cramping hand off the computer for the first time in hours.
“They found her.”
“Where?”
He moved in closer to my desk but never sat. “In a back-alley 5 miles from the station.”
“Deceased?”
He nodded. “Garroted.”
I let out an exhale and steepled my hands at my lips.