Page 7 of Lone Wolf

“Just look in the bag,” she said angrily. “Take it out.”

“I’ll send a check to the Turtle Anti-Strangulation League.”

“Is that a thing?”

“No.”

She leaned into the fridge, digging in the vegetable drawer and coming up with an IV bag. “Tommy was worried about you, you know.”

“Tommy,” he repeated skeptically.

“Yes, Tommy. You don’t just leave your phone behind like that. Ever. That’s, like, the deal.”

She came over and tossed a saline pouch at him. It hit his chest with slightly less force than the RoamZone had.

He said, “I also need the—”

She flicked her other hand. The infusion kit landed in his lap.

It took some focus but he spiked the IV bag, leaned with a groan, and hooked it on the knob of the halogen floor lamp to his side. He milked the juice down the line, cleared the bubbles, then poked at his arm for a good vein.

“What happened?” Joey said. “Where were you?”

“Texas.”

He found a drained bottle at his feet, raised it at a tilt to see the tiny isosceles of vodka pooling at the base.

“Did you find your dad?”

He poured a few drops over the crook of his elbow to sterilize it, then ripped the top off the sterile catheter bag, uncapped the needle with his front teeth, and slid it into his vein. “Nothing,” he said. “I found nothing.”

“I don’t know what that means.”

He leaned back, stared at the ceiling, waited for the drip to start. “I don’t either, Josephine.”

She hesitated. In the half-light, her irises looked translucent, nearly jade. Her long lashes blinked, eyes flashing. Her thick black-brown hair was shaved on the right side in an undercut, long locks flipped over to cascade down her cheek. An emerald stone punctuated her left nostril. She looked tough and beautiful and suddenly fragile.

She whipped out her phone. “I’m calling Tommy.”

“Put the filters on.”

“I know how to make an encrypted call, X. I’m the one who made your encryption un-shitty.”

He felt the saline solution hitting his blood, the boost immediate. His headache evanesced, his veins swelling, bringing a flush of much-needed energy.

Then Tommy was in his face, peering out from the rectangle of Joey’s phone in extreme close-up, his mustache ballooned to Teddy Roosevelt proportions.

“Jesus,” Tommy’s mustache said. “You look like the back a my balls.”

“I think he’s having some kinda midlife crisis,” Joey informed Tommy. “Which is … unbecoming.” She held the phone at her chest aiming out so they both stared at him.

“Okay,” Tommy said to Evan. “So you caught up to Papa Smurf and now you feel like a can of crushed assholes. Lay it out for us cheap-seaters.”

Evan said, “No.”

Joey rotated the phone briefly for her and Tommy to share a look of aggravation and then swiveled it back.

“I seen you drink more times than I can count without taking off my shoes,” Tommy said. “But I never seen you drunk.”