Earthbound : A gripping crime thriller full of twists and supernatural suspense by Fynn Perry (popular romance novels TXT) 📗

Lazlo tried to get up, but heavy, burning chest pain stopped him. Fearing for the life of the other youth, he un-holstered his weapon and let off a round above the attacker’s head. At this, the aggressor turned to look at him with a stare that mingled rage and surprise, then turned and ran. Lazlo staggered over to the youth lying on the ground and tried to revive him, but he remained unconscious.

Five minutes passed before a squad car and a paramedic’s truck arrived in a blaze of pulsating lights. Lazlo was pulled off the youth while still trying to perform CPR. One paramedic checked the victim’s vitals. He re-started resuscitation attempts.

“We have a pulse but it’s weak. We have to take him now!” shouted one paramedic to the other. He looked up at Lazlo, shaking his head. “Less than a fifty percent chance he’ll make the journey.”

As Lazlo watched the body being taken away, he noticed a small piece of carefully folded foil lying on the ground nearby. At first, he suspected it was a small amount of crystal meth, heroin, or crack, but the small parcel was too flat. He took out the latex glove he carried in his pocket for evidence-handling, and used it to pick up the object. Inside the foil were two pills, each in a separate plastic wrapper. He studied them. They were white with a red spider embossed on one face. Lazlo had never seen this logo before. He wrapped them back in the foil, then in his glove, before pocketing them.

It was late, and he had taken quite a hit to the chest, but sleep would have to wait. Lazlo couldn’t get the strange pills out of his mind. He followed the paramedics to Brookfield Hospital and, inside the ER, saw them talking with a doctor next to a stretcher carrying the body of the young man. As Lazlo approached the doctor, he heard him confirm the cause of death as severe trauma inflicted by multiple blows to the head and body. In short, the youth had been beaten to death.

Lazlo flashed his badge and asked the doctor if they could speak privately. The medic nodded and took him into a side room. Lazlo immediately showed him the pills and the doctor examined them carefully. He said he thought he had seen something like them before, but couldn’t be sure, as most designer drugs carried a variety of strange logos. In any case, as part of normal procedure, the coroner would do a tox screen. When Lazlo asked a few more probing questions about drug-induced casualties, he confirmed that he had seen the number more than double over the last month and that more of them involved strongly violent behavior.

“Come across anything unusual in anyone’s system?” asked Lazlo.

He shook his head. “Just the usual, you know: pharmaceutical opiates, heroin, coke, fentanyl. But a lot more heroin and crack than in previous months…Wait, you should speak to Nurse Roberts—I think she said something about some strange new pills earlier in the week. They could have been the same as these.” He picked up the phone on his desk and made a call, asking someone on the other end of the line to see if the nurse was free to come to his consulting room.

While they waited for the nurse, the doctor insisted he investigate Lazlo’s erratic breathing and the obvious pain he was displaying when walking.

Examining Lazlo’s chest, he noticed severe bruising to the right of the solar plexus. “We’ll bandage up your chest, but I suspect you have a fractured rib,” he warned. “You need to get a chest x-ray now.”

A nurse walked in with a warm and infectious smile.

“Nurse Roberts here will answer your questions—on condition you go with her for an x-ray,” the doctor said sternly, knowing that Lazlo was keen to get away now his shift was over.

Lazlo reluctantly agreed, and since Nurse Roberts had turned out be full of vitality and goodwill, it didn’t seem likely to be an entirely unpleasant ordeal.

On the way to the x-ray room, Lazlo showed her the pills. She recognized the logo immediately and said she’d come across them in the possession of a man in his twenties who’d been brought into the ER along with his girlfriend, who’d been in a critical condition. A witness said he’d beaten her savagely and she then suddenly collapsed. She survived the ordeal with two broken arms, but her attacker was diagnosed as brain-dead on arrival. The girlfriend had described some pills that her boyfriend had taken earlier as having had a red spider logo. She remembered this because it struck her as odd.

Lazlo made a mental note to find out what was in the pills as his chest was tightly bandaged following the scan. He was then left a while to wait for the results. Just as the doctor had foreseen, he had a fractured rib, and he was instructed to take painkillers and get plenty of rest. He could manage the first, he thought to himself as he left for home.

Jennifer had been waiting, nervously, all night for John. Finally, at 2 a.m. and in a panicked state, she decided that however hopeless a search of a whole Manhattan district might turn out to be, she would go look for him. She would drive along the bus route to DNA, searching for him along the way and in the immediate surroundings of the club. But sneaking out of the house without her father, David, noticing would demand a mixture of skill and luck. Her car was noisy at the best of times, but in the quiet of the night, it would sound like a Sherman tank starting up. David had always slept well; his work usually exhausted him. But now, with everything that was going on, he had every reason to be sleeping more lightly.

As she walked out onto the landing, she was relieved to hear his snoring. This just might