Marie walked me back to my apartment before she retrieved her car from the lot near the French market. She’d decided to head back to her loft in the Warehouse District instead of hanging around for a nightcap. By logic, I should have been sleepy. I’d been up nearly eighteen hours, and a few glasses of wine should have at least relaxed me. Instead, I felt tense, even wired. The shock of seeing the guy up and walking around had brought enough adrenaline to the forefront of my brain that any tipsiness had been instantly burned away. I went to the phone and found nothing on my home voice mail. That checked, I took my laptop, which was not wired except when I needed to charge the battery, to bed with me. Not nearly as good company as Michael. While warm, it certainly wasn’t cuddly.
I checked my email and found the usual amount of spam. I fired a variation of the latest Nigerian Bank scam to an old friend in Chicago who collected them and kept deleting. I found an email from Dodson, finally, sent only a couple hours ago. From what he could find, there was nobody like my not-so-dead guy reported in any ER or clinics in the area that he could find. If McCoy was feeling well enough to be sitting in a bar tonight, maybe Sam was right and he got patched up elsewhere. But where? And who was he? I felt as if I was owed an explanation.
Maybe, I thought, I wasn’t the only one who was missing him. I replied to the email asking Dodson to see if his cousin—a police detective named Washington who had arrested both me and Feliz at different times--could check Missing Persons for any males named McCoy reported over the past day or two. If I was looking for him, maybe somebody else was. Make that McCoy or something similar. I never was good with names.
This could be a waste of time, I told myself sensibly. I had no idea if McCoy lived in New Orleans or even in the state of Louisiana. I’d heard him utter one sentence. Possibly two, if he’d made the phone call. If Dodson could get a story out of the search, he’d be happy. I’d be happy if I had the facts and my name was kept out of the papers.
Sleep continued to elude me, so I brought up a search engine and typed in, “OTC medications” and “hallucinations,” just so I could prove to Marie and Jerry that none of the cold and flu remedies I had been taking could cause my brain to go haywire and make me see things. I was quite sure I hadn’t combined anything I hadn’t combined before, or that the residual effect of something hadn’t mixed badly with the wine tonight. Just the facts, ma’am. Thank you, Jack Webb. Once I showed them search results, they’d believe me.
I wasn’t used to not being believed. I wasn’t given to what one of my elementary school nuns would call, “flights of fancy.” If anyone was going to imagine things, Marie was the logical choice. She did a little more than experiment with drugs in college, and while we didn’t talk about it, I suspected she occasionally indulged even today. Despite being in a strict Catholic school, I could have tried pot or coke as early as twelve. Still, I hadn’t done anything illegal that was still inside of the statute of limitations in the state of Illinois. And I had tried nothing that would give me flashbacks.
My search came up with a glut of information that surprised me. Sometimes I thought the Information Superhighway was more like a Flea Market. If you knew how to hunt, you could find hidden treasure where nobody else thought to look. Otherwise, it all just looked like junk.
DXM. The acronym sounded more like an undisclosed covert government agency of some kind. What it really meant was Dextromethorphan, a common ingredient in cold medicines that can cause hallucinations in some people, especially at high doses. Or when combined with other drugs. I read on, fascinated, and shortly became appalled.
An article from just over a year ago talked about “Robotripping,” how teens using DXM—often from Robitussin—to get high or to see things in an expanded spectrum of pretty colors. If that wasn’t your preferred way to fry your brain, the article said, enterprising people were also learning to extract the methamphetamine from pseudoephedrine, another common ingredient in cold medication. It was the most common decongestant over the counter, especially since drugs containing PPA—a popular ingredient in both diet pills and cold medication--were pulled off the counter a few years ago. I checked my medicine cabinet. Out of three different kinds of “multi-symptom cold and flu relief” on the shelf, two had DXM and all three had pseudoephedrine. According to this, and a few other similar articles, I could start a lab in my kitchen with ingredients from my bathroom, were I so inclined. I wasn’t. I’d tried pot for the first time when I was sixteen—Gene had gotten hold of some--but didn’t like it. I tried again at a party a year later and decided it was not for me. It would have been a bad idea to keep at it anyway. In high school, it would have thrown off my performance on the basketball court. In college, I had classes and basketball. Later, I traded the basketball in for an internship.
Finally, a yawn snuck up on me and shook me by the shoulders. I took the hint and plugged the laptop back in. Appropriately, it was now wired and I was not. Ten minutes in the bathroom took off the makeup and bathed my face in moisturizer. As I burrowed under the blankets to go to sleep, I realized Michael hadn’t called or emailed as he’d said he was going to. That wasn’t like him, but I’d worry about that tomorrow. Just call me Scarlett, I thought, as sleep overtook me.