Acid Lullaby by Ed O'Connor

These were the bare bones of existence. They were rattling. He was frightened.
    Keep busy.
    He picked up a copy of the New Bolden Gazette and began to flick through the personal ads.
18
    Detective Inspector Alison Dexter covered the scars on her wrist with her shirt cuff and stepped out of her Ford Mondeo into the hospital car park. It was late, long after midnight. But Dexter liked to keep busy. Sleep had become an uncomfortable, intermittent experience. Besides, if she was awake, she wasn’t dreaming.
    DC Jensen was waiting for her at the entrance to Accident & Emergency, her irritating prettiness illuminated by the blue light above the doorway.
    ‘Evening, Guv. Sorry to drag you out.’
    ‘What have we got?’ asked Dexter sharply. She didn’t like Jensen and had to work hard to disguise the fact, usually unsuccessfully.
    ‘An old friend.’ Jensen flipped open her notebook. ‘Ian Stark.’
    Dexter laughed an empty laugh. ‘If I’d known that I’d have stayed in bed.’
    ‘Doctors think he might have taken an overdose.’
    ‘Good,’ snarled Dexter. ‘Poetic bleeding justice.’
    Stark was notorious around New Bolden and well known to Alison Dexter. She had wanted to put Stark away for a long time. She had seen plenty of kids lying in the same A & E ward because of the drugs Ian Stark had sold them. Many of them hadn’t come out again.
    ‘What goes around comes around, I suppose,’ Jensen added with a tired grin. Dexter noticed that Jensen had heels on. She decided to let the indiscretion go.
    For now.
    ‘Let’s hope he doesn’t make it,’ she said.
    They walked through the ward. Dexter looked at the usual collection of bloody noses and beer glass stitch-ups. She could hear some drunk shouting gibberish in one of the recovery rooms. She pitied the doctors and nurses. Nights in provincial towns always depressed her: the lager and piss, blood and vomit. The ‘wannabe’ alpha-males that got absurdly territorial about grotty birds in grotty pubs. It reminded her of tomcats spraying musk to protect their private patch of wasteland.
    ‘So if it’s an open and shut,’ Dexter questioned her junior officer, ‘why am I here?’
    ‘You should probably speak to the doctor,’ Jensen replied. ‘This one might be a little complicated.’
    The shouting was getting louder. It came from the last cubicle, curtained off at the end of the corridor. Dexter looked behind the curtain. Ian Stark lay writhing and screaming in apparent agony on a hospital bed. There were two nurses and a doctor trying to hold him down to prevent injuries. Dexter tried to make sense of Stark’s words. It was nonsense; half-sentences and meaningless phrases. It was the product of a scrambled brain. Dexter also noticed there was blood all over Stark’s t-shirt and a severe wound to his neck.
    An exhausted looking young registrar saw the two police officers and nodded. He turned to the nurses who had finallymanaged to place Stark’s arms in restraints. ‘Take him off the Narcan. It’s not helping. Keep his arms and legs secure. I’ll be back in a second.’ He turned and crossed the short distance to Dexter and Jensen. ‘Thanks for coming. I’m the registrar – Nicholas Wells.’
    ‘DI Alison Dexter. Tough night?’
    Wells nodded. ‘He came in about an hour ago. He seemed to be showing symptoms of heroin overdose. We know Ian Stark here. He was one of our regulars until six months ago. I have treated him on previous occasions when he has OD’d.’
    ‘So what’s the punchline?’ Dexter asked. He was screaming. She no longer found Stark’s plight gratifying – the noise was beginning to disturb her.
    ‘The punchline is that I goofed. I gave him a dose of Naxolone. That’s the standard procedure.’
    ‘And he started freaking out?’ Dexter looked at Stark again. It didn’t look like a heroin overdose to her.
    ‘Yep. It’s made him worse. His heart will give way unless we can figure out what’s going on. I still think