The Tattooed Heart (Messenger of Fear 2)

“Is that the stuff she got off Jenks?”

“Same stuff we’ve got, Mouse. Jesus.”

The two of them looked at each other and slowly the boy named Mouse pulled a small, rectangular packet of white powder from his pocket. A logo had been stamped on it. A pink pony.

“We have to call 911,” Mouse said.

“I have to boot up first,” the girl said.

“Are you crazy? You want to end up like her? That stuff is cut with something bad.”

“Maybe not, maybe it’s just real high-test, you know? Too pure will kill you. So I could just shoot half a spoon. Three-quarters, you know?”

Mouse stood up. “I’m calling 911.” He pulled out a cell phone and, shaking his head at the girl’s plaintive look, called in an overdose.

The girl began slapping Graciella’s face, saying, “Wake up, Candy, come on. Wake up.”

Graciella managed a low moan, but only one, and then she slid back into coma.

“Okay, come on Sue Lynn, we gotta get out of here before the EMTs show up,” Mouse said.

“This neighborhood, it’ll take them twenty minutes,” the girl said. “And don’t call me Sue Lynn. I’m Jessica now. And I have got to fix. It’s nighttime, Mouse, I’m getting sick.”

All the while I watched Graciella. Her breathing was shallow. Her skin was gray and covered in sweat. Gray even by the gentle amber light of the candle. It was all I could do to stop myself asking Messenger the question: Can’t we help her?

I knew the answer to that. The answer is always the same. We may not interfere. We are not there for the victims. We are there for the people who create victims.

Yet first we must understand what has been done, that is the rule, that is the way of the Messengers of Fear.

The EMTs arrived, as Jessica had predicted, after about twenty minutes. By then Mouse and Jessica were gone. Did they go to shoot up? Almost certainly. Would their lives end in tragedy? Probably.

Would I find myself someday looking down at the dead body of one or the other or both, wondering what wickedness I was there to punish? That was a grim thought that would bring feelings of hopelessness in its wake. I pushed the thought away.

The arrival of the EMTs gave me my first inkling of where we were. The patch on their shoulders indicated Nashville, Tennessee.

The EMTs, a man and a woman, moved with practiced efficiency, barely speaking because they had seen OD’d junkies before, many times. They hung a transparent bag of fluid and pushed a needle into Graciella’s arm. But the veins had been weakened to near collapse and the needle did not work. The EMT pulled it out, tried again. Again nothing. It took her six tries to find a vein that could handle the flow of fluids. The other EMT took her pulse, blood pressure, checked her eyes, and said, “Pinpoint. BP is seventy over thirty-five. Breathing shallow and irregular.”

“Naloxone?”

“Yep.”

A shot into the muscle of her thigh this time. They radioed in to the emergency room at Vanderbilt University Hospital.

“BP’s rising, ninety over forty.”

“She’ll live,” I said, as though I were part of their conversation and not invisible and inaudible.

We watched as they brought in a gurney, kicking trash aside to allow them to roll it. A third EMT arrived and helped them lift Graciella onto it and pass a strap over her waist.

Then, without warning, Messenger and I were outside the red brick hospital. Ambulances pulled up but none were carrying Graciella; she was already inside. We walked through the doors, slid past nurses, technicians, doctors, and patients, and came upon Graciella in one of the beds. A young foreign doctor stood at the foot of her bed addressing half a dozen medical students.

“Heroin overdose. EMTs reported low BP, low pulse, nonresponsive, breathing shallow. They administered fluids and Naloxone. The workup indicated what we already knew: OD. When results come in I expect we’ll find she’s positive for at least one STD, and almost certainly positive for hepatitis. Malnourished, of course.”

“She looks young,” one medical student offered.

“I’d say fifteen, sixteen, give or take, younger than she looks,” the doctor said wearily. “She’s most likely a runaway turning tricks. She is still in a coma, but brain function appears normal.”

I turned away. She looked too vulnerable lying there being discussed by strangers as though she wasn’t even present. Of course in a way she wasn’t present.