^{CHAPTER 17}

 

 

 

^{Personal Demons}

 

 

 

 

 

^{Being so sick made it rough going for Jewelz, and she tossed and turned all night. When she wasn’t crawling into the bathroom to heave the contents of her stomach into the toilet, she was huddled under her blanket shivering and shaking like a leaf.}

^{By the time the sun came up her pain was getting crucial and she was ready to give up on life. Despite the medication the doctor had prescribed she was feeling much, much worse. She wasn’t surprised because she knew what time it was. Her body just couldn’t take it no more and she was losing her fight against the deadly disease that had invaded her blood cells.}

^{“Okay,” she relented and told Nurse Shelly when the phone rang a few hours later. The nurse’s weekly call had found Jewelz huddled under her blankets sipping from a warm can of Ensure. Her will was still strong, but the bone-tiring weakness was too much for her to bear, so she had finally agreed to restart her chemotherapy treatments.}

^{“Okay, I’ll come back to the clinic,” Jewelz told the nurse, “but it’ll have to be tomorrow because I can’t come in today.”}

^{“Now, Diamond,” the nurse said gently. “A person with your prognosis should know that every single day counts. C’mon, baby. You’re already so far behind in your treatment plan that even hours matter at this point. Minutes too. What’s so important that you’re willing to d—that you can’t come in today? Why can’t you just come in right now?”}

^{Nurse Shelly had caught herself before she said the d-word, but Jewelz had heard her anyway. The cancer nurse had started to ask Jewelz what was so important that she was willing to die for it, and the answer was something that Jewelz really didn’t expect anyone to understand.}

^{Because she had already made up her mind that today was going to be the day. Today was the day that she was going to kill Chimp Charlie. It was now or never and she was gonna kill that ugly-ass predator dead.}

^{She didn’t care if it took her to her last dying breath, she was gonna murder that old nasty bastard. All the filthy shit he had forced her to do with her young mouth and pussy was unspeakable and unpardonable, and with the last drop of strength in her body she was gonna make him pay.}

^Today.

^{“Nope,” Jewelz told Nurse Shelly firmly as she got up slowly and headed toward the bathroom to pull herself together. “I can’t come in right now. Not today.”}

^{Jewelz knew she had a long hard day ahead of her. She could only pray that God would bless her so that her strength would hold up long enough to satisfy her thirst for revenge.}

^{“Tomorrow,” she promised the disappointed nurse. “Like I said, I’ve got something real important I gotta do today, but I swear to God I’ll check myself into the hospital the first thing tomorrow.”}