Page 8 of Forgotten Path
She barked out a bitter laugh. “Never underestimate the entrepreneurial spirit of the drug-dealing community, Bodhi.”
“Another point taken. Well, if itisSolo, the good news is there’s an antidote. Will you let me know what the drug task force says?”
“Definitely. And if Joel does call you, will you ask him to get in touch? Please?”
“Of course.”
“Thanks. Wait—what’s HABs, another toxin?”
“I have no clue,” he admitted. “But I’ll look into it and get back to you.”
“Yeah, okay,” she said distractedly. He knew her mind had already moved on from their conversation, most likely to the possibility that a new designer street drug was making the rounds.
“I’ll be in touch. You take good care.”
“Mmm-hmm. You, too,” she murmured before ending the call.
He returned the phone to the kitchen counter and stroked Eliza Doolittle’s feathers as he considered Joel’s note. If the medical examinerhadidentified an unexplained death cluster, Bodhi expected he’d hear from Joel sooner rather than later.
“HABs,” he murmured.
“HABs, HABs,” the bird parroted.
He blinked at her. He hadn’t realized he’d spoken the unfamiliar abbreviation aloud.
“What is HABs, Bodhi?”
“I don’t know, Eliza Doolittle. But I’ll find out.”
There was no harm in spending a few hours researching HABs. If Joel did reach out for help, it would be good if Bodhi knew what they were dealing with. And he’d told Felicia he’d look into it. He nodded briskly. Right. He was doing this research to lend a hand to a colleague, not to quiet the whisper of unease of his own intuition.
The parrot harrumphed as if she could read his mind and deemed his rationale utterly unbelievable.
“Okay, that’s enough out of you,” he told her fondly before heading into the study to start his research.
Bodhi stared at the words he’d jotted down in his tiny, precise print while Felicia read Joel’s over the phone:Forensic black swan? Effects of subtox combo multiple toxins, e.g., STX, TTX, CDX. What about other HABs? Possible cluster. Talk to Bodhi.
The note jolted awake the dormant memory of his time in Canada and the discovery of the dangerous cocktail of drugs that tore through Montreal, leaving dead and nearly dead college students in its wake. The combination of two poisons found in fish—saxitoxin (STX) and tetrodotoxin (TTX)—with a snake venom—candotoxin (CDX).
The drug was incredibly powerful and potentially deadly. Tetrodotoxin was a thousand times more potent than cyanide, saxitoxin was a thousand times more toxic than the nerve gas sarin, and candotoxin was known to heighten sensation but also cause respiratory paralysis. The high the users chased was an electrified yet peaceful bliss. The outcome they risked was paralysis and, eventually, death or a prolonged coma. In several atypical cases, the users did not remain comatose but awoke as the living dead—zombies of a sort, shuffling through life until the team working in Canada had been able to reverse the damage to their glia, the so-called glue of the brain.
Bodhi and others risked their lives to get Solo off the streets. The idea that, despite their efforts, the scourge might have reemerged six years later and almost two thousand miles to the south to plague the Florida Keys threatened to overwhelm him. His hands shook, and his heart pounded at the thought. He needed to clear the memories from his mind.
No,he chided himself, placing his pen and small field notebook on his desk.
While emotions and thoughts could cause physical reactions like his racing pulse, trembling hands, and rapid, shallow breathing, it was equally true that physiological changes could result in feelings and emotions. Taking control of his breath would still his mind just as much as stilling his mind would help him control his physical reaction—and more quickly.
And right now, he very much needed a quiet mind. He closed his eyes and breathed. He took a full, deep inhale and visualized a slow, long exhale, as if his lungs were a tire with a nail hole and the air was hissing out so slowly as to be almost imperceptible.
* * *
Bodhi rolled his neck,working out the kinks in his stiff muscles, and considered his notes. Could Joel really have encountered a new neurotoxic cocktail? Not Solo, perhaps, but something like Solo? A combination of poisons that damages the brain by attacking the voltage-gated sodium channels or through some other mechanism? For evidence of a new cluster or, worse yet, an epidemic, the drug would need to cause not just damage, but death.
And death was the most likely way for an issue to have come across Joel’s radar. After all, medical examiners, as a rule, didn’t have living patients. If they did, something had gone dramatically wrong. He exhaled with deliberation. Joel was the only person who could tell him what he’d discovered. And Joel was missing.
He capped his pen and closed his notebook. It wasn’t in his nature to insert himself into situations. Not because he didn’t care to be helpful but because he believed that events unfolded as they were meant to. Interference was an attempt at control. Control, in his view, was an effort to assert the ego. He’d spent a great deal of time and discipline working to release his ego.
Still, acceptance of reality wasn’t a license to be passive, to sit idly by. Joel had wanted Bodhi’s help. If he trusted Felicia’s gut—not to mention his own intuition—Joel hadn’t reached out to him because he couldn’t. Joel was gone.
