False Witness Read online

  Because there weren’t enough St. Bernards and Newfoundlands in Lake Point to justify Callie’s maintenance doses, she sold or traded what she could in order to buy methadone. The pandemic had been amazing for drug sales. The cost of your average high had gone through the roof. She considered herself the Robin Hood of drug dealers, because most of the money was returned to the clinic so that Dr. Jerry could keep the doors open. He paid her cash every Friday. He was always astonished by the large number of crumpled, small bills in the lockbox.

  Callie opened Mr. Pete’s chart. She changed the six to an eight, then drew up the buprenorphine syringes for oral use. She didn’t tend to steal from cats because they were relatively small and didn’t give a big bang for the buck like a beefy rottweiler. Knowing cats, they probably kept their weight down for that very reason.

  She stuck the syringes in a plastic bag, then printed out the label. The rest of the booty went into her backpack in the breakroom. Callie’s sister had told her a long time ago that she spent more brainpower doing the wrong thing than she would have to expend doing things right, but fuck her sister; she was one of those bitches who could go on a coke binge to study for the LSAT and never think about coke ever again.

  Callie could look at a beautiful green tablet of Oxy and dream about it for the next month.

  She wiped her mouth, because now she was dreaming about Oxy.

  Callie found Mr. Pete in his carrier. She squirted a syringe of pain meds into his mouth. He sneezed twice, then gave her a very nasty look as she put on a mask and gown so she could take him out to the car.

  She left on the mask while she cleaned the clinic. The floors were concave from years of Dr. Jerry’s Birkenstocks padding from exam room to exam room, then back to his office. The low ceiling was water-stained. The walls were covered in buckled paneling. There were faded photographs of animals plastered everywhere.

  Callie used a duster to knock off the grime. She got on her hands and knees to clean the two exam rooms, then moved on to surgery, then the kennel. They didn’t usually board animals, but there was a kitten named Meowma Cass that Dr. Jerry was taking home to bottle-feed and a calico who’d come in yesterday with a string hanging out of his butt. The emergency surgery had been too costly for the owners, but Dr. Jerry had spent an hour removing the string from the cat’s intestines anyway.

  Callie’s alarm went off on her phone. She checked her Facebook, then scrolled through Twitter. The majority of her follows were animal-specific, like a New Zealand zoo keeper who was obsessed with Tasmanian devils and an eel historian who’d detailed the American government’s disastrous attempt to transfer East Coast eels to California during the nineteenth century.

  The scrolling burned through another fifteen minutes. Callie checked Dr. Jerry’s schedule. He had four more patients this afternoon. She went to the kitchen and made him a sandwich, sprinkling a generous supply of animal crackers on the side.

  Callie knocked on Dr. Jerry’s door before entering. He was laid out on the couch, mouth hanging open. His glasses were askew. A book was flattened on his chest. The Complete Sonnets of William Shakespeare. A gift from his late wife.

  “Dr. Jerry?” She squeezed his foot.

  As always, he was a bit startled and disoriented to find Callie hovering over him. It was like Groundhog Day, except everybody knew that groundhogs were vicious murderers.

  He adjusted his glasses so he could see his watch. “That went by fast.”

  “I made you lunch.”

  “Wonderful.”

  He groaned as he got off the couch. Callie gave him a little help when he started to fall back.

  She asked, “How was your executive time?”

  “Very good, but I had a strange dream about anglerfish. Have you ever met one?”

  “Not to my recollection.”

  “I’m glad to hear that. They live in the darkest, loneliest places, which is a very good thing because they are not the most attractive specimens.” He cupped his hand to his mouth as if to convey a confidence. “Especially the ladies.”

  Callie sat on the edge of his desk. “Tell me.”

  “The male spends all his life sniffing out a female. As I said, it’s very dark where they live, so nature gave him olfactory cells that are attracted to the female’s pheromones.” He held up his hand to stop the story. “Did I mention she has a long, illuminated filament on her head that sticks out like a flashlight finger?”

  “No.”

  “Bioluminescence.” Dr. Jerry looked delighted by the word. “So, once our Romeo finds his Juliet, he bites onto her just below the tail.”

  Callie watched as he illustrated with his hands, fingers clomping down on his fist.

  “Then, the male releases enzymes that dissolve both his mouth and her skin, which effectively fuses them together. Then—this is the miraculous part—his eyes and internal organs dissolve until he’s just a reproductive sac melded onto her for the rest of his miserable existence.”

  Callie laughed. “Damn, Dr. Jerry. That sounds exactly like my first boyfriend.”

  He laughed, too. “I don’t know why I thought about that. Funny how the noggin’ works.”

  Callie could’ve spent the rest of her life worrying that Dr. Jerry was using the anglerfish as a metaphor for how she treated him, but Dr. Jerry wasn’t a metaphor guy. He just really loved talking about fish.

  She helped him slip into his lab coat.

  He asked, “Did I ever tell you about the time I got a house call on a baby bull shark in a twenty-gallon aquarium?”

  “Oh, no.”

  “They’re called pups, by the way, though that doesn’t have the same joie de vivre as baby shark. Naturally, the owner was a dentist. Poor simpleton had no idea what he was dealing with.”

  Callie followed him down the hall, listening to him explain the meaning of viviparous. She steered him into the kitchen where she made sure he cleaned his plate. Cracker crumbs speckled the table as he told her another story about another fish, then moved on to marmosets. Callie had realized long ago that Dr. Jerry was using her more as paid companionship. Considering what other men had paid Callie for, she was grateful for the change in scenery.

  The four remaining appointments made the rest of the day go by fast. Dr. Jerry loved annual check-ups because there was seldom anything seriously wrong. Callie scheduled follow-up visits, teeth cleanings, and, because Dr. Jerry thought it impolite to bring up a lady’s weight, lectured a rotund dachshund’s owners about food restrictions. At the end of the day, Dr. Jerry tried to pay her, but Callie reminded him that she didn’t get paid again until the end of next week.

  She had looked up signs of dementia on her phone. If that was what Dr. Jerry was staring down, then she figured he was still okay to work. He might not know what day it was, but he could calculate fluids with electrolytes and additives like potassium or magnesium without writing down the numbers, which was better than most people could claim.

  Callie scrolled through Twitter as she walked to the MARTA bus stop. The eel historian had gone silent and the Kiwi zoo keeper was asleep tomorrow, so she went to Facebook.

  Drug-seeking canines were not Callie’s only creation. Since 2008, she’d been lurking on the assholes she’d gone to high school with. Her profile photo showed a blue Siamese fighting fish who went by the name Swim Shady.

  Her eyes glazed over as she read the latest shitposting from Lake Point’s illustrious class of 2002. Complaints about schools closing, wild deep-state conspiracies, disbelief in the virus, belief in the virus, pro-vaccine rants, anti-vaccine rants, and the usual racism, sexism and anti-Semitism that plagued social media. Callie would never understand how Bill Gates had been shortsighted enough to give everybody easy access to the internet so that some day, these jackasses could reveal all of his dastardly plans.

  She dropped her phone back into her pocket as she sat on the bench at the bus stop. The dirty Plexiglas enclosure was striped with graffiti. Trash rounded off the corners. Dr. Jerry’
s clinic was in an okay area, but that was a subjective observation. His strip-mall neighbors were a porn shop that was forced to close during the pandemic and a barbershop Callie was pretty sure had only stayed open because it served as a gambling front. Every time she saw a wild-eyed loser stumbling out the back door, she said a small prayer of thanks that gambling was not one of her addictions.

  A garbage truck sputtered black exhaust and rot as it slowly rocked past the bus stop. One of the guys hanging off the back gave Callie a wave. She waved back because it was the polite thing to do. Then his buddy started waving and she turned her head away.

  Her neck rewarded her for the too-quick turn, tightening the muscles like a clamp. Callie reached up, fingers finding the long scar that zippered down from the base of her skull. C1 and C2 were the cervical vertebrae that allowed for one-half of the head’s forward, back, and rotational movements. Callie had two two-inch titanium rods, four screws and a pin that formed a cage around the area. Technically, the surgery was called a cervical laminectomy, but more commonly it was known as a fusion, because that was the end result: the vertebrae fused together into one bony clump.

  Even though two decades had passed since the fusion, the nerve pain could be sudden and debilitating. Her left arm and hand could go completely numb without warning. She had lost nearly half the mobility in her neck. Nodding and shaking her head were do-able, but limited. When she tied her shoes, she had to bring her foot to her hands rather than the other way around. She hadn’t been able to look over her shoulder since the surgery, a devastating loss because Callie could never be the heroine pictured on the cover of a Victorian mystery.

  She tilted back against the Plexiglas so she could look up at the sky. The waning sun warmed her face. The air was cool and crisp. Cars rolled by. Children were laughing on a nearby playground. The steady beat of her own heart gently pulsed in her ears.

  The women she’d gone to high school with were currently driving their kids to football practice or piano lessons. They were watching their sons do homework, holding their breath while their daughters practiced cheerleading routines in the backyard. They were leading meetings, paying bills, going to work and living normal lives where they didn’t steal drugs from a kindly old man. They weren’t shaking inside of their bones because their body was crying out for a drug that they knew would eventually kill them.

  At least a lot of them had gotten fat.

  Callie heard the hiss of air brakes. She turned to look for the bus. She did it correctly this time, angling her shoulders along with her head. Despite the accommodation, pain shot fire up her arm and into her neck.

  “Shit.”

  Not her bus, but she’d paid the price for looking. Her breath stuttered. She pushed back against the Plexiglas, hissed air between clenched teeth. Her left arm and hand were numb, but her neck pulsed like a pus-filled sac. She concentrated on the daggers flaying her muscles and nerves. Pain could be its own addiction. Callie had lived with it for so long that when she thought of her life before, she only saw tiny bursts of light, stars barely penetrating the darkness.

  She knew that there had been a time long ago when all she’d craved was the rush of endorphins that came from running hard or riding her bike too fast or flipping herself diagonally across the gym floor. In cheerleading, she had flown—soared—into the air, doing a hip-over-head rotation, or a back tuck, a front flip, a leg kick, arabesque, the needle, the scorpion, the heel stretch, the bow-and-arrow, a landing spin that was so dizzying all she could do was wait for four sets of strong arms to basket her fall.

  Until they didn’t.

  A lump came into her throat. Her hand reached up again, this time finding one of the four bony bumps that circled her head like points on a compass. The surgeon had drilled pins into her skull to hold the halo ring in place while her neck healed. Callie had worried the spot above her ear so much it felt callused.

  She wiped tears from the corners of her eyes. She dropped her hand into her lap. She massaged the fingers, trying to press some feeling back into the tips.

  Seldom did she let herself think about what she’d lost. As her mother said, the tragedy of Callie’s existence was that she was smart enough to know how stupid she’d been. This weighty knowledge wasn’t limited to Callie. In her experience, most junkies understood addiction as well as, if not better than, a lot of doctors.

  For instance, Callie knew that her brain, like every other brain, had something called mu opioid receptors. The receptors were also scattered along her spine and other places, but, for the most part, they hung out in the brain. The easiest way to describe a mu receptor’s job was to say that they controlled feelings of pain and reward.

  The first sixteen years of her life, Callie’s receptors had functioned at a reasonable level. She’d sprain her back or twist her ankle and an endorphin rush would spread through her blood and latch onto the mu receptors, which in turn would dampen the pain. But only temporarily and not by nearly enough. In elementary school, she’d used NSAIDs like Advil or Motrin to replace the endorphins. Which had worked. Until they didn’t.

  Thanks to Buddy, she’d been introduced to alcohol, but the thing about alcohol was, even in Lake Point, not many stores would sell a handle of tequila to a child, and Buddy had for obvious reasons been unable to supply her past the age of fourteen. And then Callie had broken her neck at sixteen and, before she knew it, she was on her way to a lifelong love affair with opioids.

  Narcotics could blow an endorphin rush out of the water, and they were laughably better than NSAIDs and alcohol, except once they latched onto the mu receptors, they didn’t like to let go. Your body responded by making more mu receptors, but then your brain remembered how great it was to have full mu receptors and told you to fill them back up again. You could watch TV or read a book or try to contemplate the meaning of life, but your mus would always be there tapping their tiny mu feet, waiting for you to feed them. This was called craving.

  Unless you were wired like a magical fairy or had Houdini-level self-control, you would eventually feed that craving. And eventually, you would need stronger and stronger narcotics just to keep all those new mus happy, which was incidentally the science behind tolerance. More narcotics. More mus. More narcotics. And so on.

  The worst part was when you stopped feeding the mus, because they gave you around twelve hours before they took your body hostage. Their ransom demand was conveyed through the only language they understood, which was debilitating pain. This was called withdrawal, and there were autopsy photos that were more pleasant to look at than a junkie going through opioid withdrawal.

  So, Callie’s mother was absolutely right in that Callie knew exactly when she’d taken her first step down the road to a lifetime of stupidity. It wasn’t when she’d slammed headfirst onto the gymnasium floor, cracking two vertebrae in her neck. It was the first time her script for Oxy had run out and she’d asked a stoner in English class if he knew how she could get more.

  A tragedy in one act.

  Callie’s MARTA bus harrumphed to the stop, beaching itself on the curb.

  She groaned worse than Dr. Jerry when she stood up. Bad knee. Bad back. Bad neck. Bad girl. The bus was half-full, some people wearing masks, some figuring their lives were shitty enough so why postpone the inevitable. Callie found a seat in the front with all the other creaky old women. They were housecleaners and waitresses with grandchildren to support, and they gave Callie the same wary look they’d give a family member who had stolen their checkbook one too many times. To save them all the embarrassment, she stared out the window as gas stations and auto parts stores gave way to strip clubs and check-cashing joints.

  When the scenery got too bleak, her phone came out. She started doomscrolling Facebook again. There was no logic to her quest to keep up with these nearly middle-aged twits. Most of them had stayed in the Lake Point area. A few had done well, but well for Lake Point, not well for a normal human being. None of them had been Callie’s friends in school. She
had been the least popular cheerleader in the history of cheerleaders. Even the weirdos at the freak table hadn’t welcomed her into the fold. If any of them remembered her at all, it was as the girl who’d shit herself in front of an entire school assembly. Callie could still remember the sensation of numbness spreading down her arms and legs, the disgusting stench of her bowels releasing as she collapsed onto the hard wooden floor of the gymnasium.

  All for a sport that had about as much prestige as an egg-rolling contest.

  The bus shivered like a whippet as it neared her stop. Callie’s knee locked out when she tried to stand. She had to hit it with her fist to get going. As she limped down the stairs, she considered all the drugs in her backpack. Tramadol, methadone, ketamine, buprenorphine. Mix them all into a pint of tequila and she could get a front-row seat to Kurt Cobain and Amy Winehouse talking about what a douche Jim Morrison could be.

  “Hey Cal!” Crackhead Sammy waved frantically from his perch in a broken lawn chair. “Cal! Cal! Come here!”

  Callie walked across a vacant lot to Sammy’s nesting area—the chair, a leaky tent and a bunch of cardboard that didn’t seem to serve a purpose. “What’s going on?”

  “So, your cat, all right?”

  Callie nodded.

  “There was a pigeon, and he just—” Sammy did a crazy swooping gesture with his arms. “He caught that damn rat-bird in the air and ate it right in front of me. It was fucked up, man. He sat there chewing on pigeon head for half an hour.”

  Callie grinned proudly as she dug around in her backpack. “Did he share?”

  “Hell no, he just looked at me. He looked at me, Callie. And he had this look, like, like I don’t know. Like he wanted to tell me something.” Sammy guffawed. “Ha! Like, ‘Don’t smoke crack.’”