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responded, “Eli…Eli Griffith.”
    She glanced at his sheet and saw that he was in for larceny and murder. Nicola shuddered. She had a soft spot in her heart for folks down on their luck. That was why she had volunteered. But murder? That was where she drew the line.
    Drawing his blood was impossible. He had so many old scarred tracks on his arms and legs, he didn’t have a single viable vein in his body. She tried everywhere: arms, feet, hands; even his neck veins.
    “Uh, sir, where do you, uh, shoot up? What veins are you using?”
    He looked at her face for the first time and smiled when he saw how beautiful she was and remarked, “Pretty lady, you don’t even want to know.”
    She tried his foot again. This time she was successful.
    “I’m impressed. The lady is not only beautiful, but extremely talented.”
    Accustomed to inmates’ compliments, and usually ignoring them, for some reason she took exception to this one. Though accused of a heinous crime, Nicola smiled back at Eli. It was a smile that he’d never forget. It was the last one he would seefor many years to come. She placed a Band-Aid on his foot and motioned for the officer to drag him back to a line where other inmates awaited their fate.
    Before she had a chance to catch her breath, they put another inmate in Eli’s spot. She picked up his sheet and saw that he was a notorious bigamist. Nicola had had enough.
    “Hey, that’s it, guys. I’m out of here. I can’t do this one.”
    Overwhelmed with fatigue and a desire to get the hell off of Riker’s Island and back to her new life with Harrison James, she hastily labeled the blood specimens, dropped them off at the laboratory, and said good-bye to her colleagues.
    When the guards let her pass through the steel-gated doors, she ran out with all intentions of never looking back. Never realizing that, all night long, she had mislabeled several blood specimens, including Eli Griffith’s.

CHAPTER TWO
     
    E
li’s body curled up into itself. Images of the son he hadn’t seen in years haunted him. His beloved ex-wife, Ophelia, taunted him as the waves of withdrawal swallowed every cell in his body and regurgitated back in to the belly of the one toilet bowl in the cell. This was the worst withdrawal he’d ever experienced, but then again, that’s what he said every time he couldn’t get a hold of Lady H. It always seemed as if the devil had finally successfully chased his Godless, worthless soul to hell.
    Where was that methadone? He’d been there for over a week and he had missed more than one of his doses because of administrative glitches. Sweat poured out of his pores, creating tiny mud puddles in the cracks and crevices of his skin folds. He was so funky, he couldn’t stand his own damned self. This was nasty. He hadn’t had a shower since he’d arrived there. He was scared of the showers. Terrible things happened to men there.
    For a split second, the waves of pain subsided. He sneaked a look at his arms and legs. They were covered with swollen tracks. He checked out his penis. He had used it more times than a few to bring his beloved heroin closer to home. Thick, musky smelling, rusty-tinged fluid seeped out of the newest injectionsites. Funny, he never had infected tracks before. Seemed like his body was turning against him in his old age. Yeah. Imagine that. Old and he wasn’t even fifty yet.
    The last time he had picked up his methadone, the nurse had counseled him about HIV and prevention strategies. She’d also told him that he didn’t have it in his blood. He had been so relieved. It was the one thing he was afraid of. The last couple of years, he’d gotten a little sloppy and had started sharing needles with his buddies. He realized that he should’ve taken the free city needles, but sometimes they weren’t always where he needed them.
    Times were getting hard on the streets for him. He wasn’t as young or as resourceful as he had been. He remembered the days when crowds