Read The Black Witch of Mexico for Free Online Page B

was finishing up the paperwork on a three-year-old who had been brought in after a febrile convulsion. The next patient was in 2A, he looked at the chart: “Severe back pain. History of bone cancer.”
    His vital signs were all normal. If he were in severe pain he would at least have an elevated heart rhythm. His personal details listed an address in Sacramento but no photo ID. He pulled the curtain aside and stepped into the room.
    He sat on the edge of the bed in a scruffy t-shirt and jeans, holding a grubby X-ray folder. He wondered how someone with severe back pain could stand to sit like that.
    He asked him what was wrong and the guy handed him the X-ray folder. About a year ago he had been diagnosed with bone cancer and there was a tumour pressing against a nerve in his spine. He was on his way to visit his parents in Canada and had run out of pain medication. He needed enough for about a week, maybe ten days, including the drive back to Sacramento.
    It was pathetic. The dilated pupils, the sweat-smell, the twitching in his limbs; the guy was a junkie. He even had the balls to lay out what he wanted: a shot of Demerol and then a ten-day supply of Oxycontin.
    The X-rays were genuine; whomever they belonged to had a serious problem with a large tumour pressing on the lumbar spine around L5 and L4. But it was impossible to know whose X-rays they were, because the patient’s ID information was missing from the top right hand corner—it had been cut away with scissors. Instead, their patient had scrawled his own name along the side in black Texta. There was no date, no identifying hospital.
    Just how low would someone sink to get another fix? He called down for security. What sad lives some people led.
    He told Jay about it later. “No one ever gets off,” Jay said. “When they start down that road, it’s the end of them. Worst of it happened to an anaesthesiologistI knew once, he got hooked on his own junk. A fancy car and a white coat is not protection, Adam. You just got to feel sorry for guys like that.”
    Yeah, he knew all about that. One of his father’s old friends, Jack Woods, he was an anaesthetist, he got hooked on pethidine, it ruined his life. The old man played golf with him--he had heard hearing him talking about it one day with his mom when he got home from school. He’d said, “He’s going to lose everything.”
    Or there was their neighbour who’d had a house next to theirs in Dover. One day the For Sale sign went up, the guy had lost everything on the tables in Las Vegas, he had told his wife he was at work conferences. Why did people lose sight of everything they had?
    Even his own father; twenty five years married to his mother, then one day she found out he was having an affair with another woman, not even a younger woman.
    It had never made sense to him. He remembered the old man coming to his school when he was eleven—Adam had messed up, pocketed candy at a candy store near the school. “Think about what you do before you do it,” his father had told him. “God gave you a brain. Use it.”
    What was his dad thinking when he’d banged his best friend’s sister? She was a part-time beautician when she’d met the old man, she spent all his money then walked out one day and cleared out his bank account.
    Why didn’t he use his brain? How could a man like his father risk everything on a woman? There he was, just before he died, sixty, divorced, cleaned out and blacklisted from his golf club. Adam couldn’t let that happen to him. He had to get Elena out of his head before it was too late.
     
     
     

Chapter 16
     
    Adam drove out to Newton and found his sister putting out lilies at the local church. He sat in one of the pews and watched her. The two boys ran up and down the aisle chasing each other. “Now, Matt, Jake, you stop that. You do not shout and scream in the Lord’s house!”
    Adam smiled. “The Lord’s house.” That was what the old man used to call it, too.
    “I can