STATE OF BETRAYAL: A Virgil Jones Mystery (Detective Virgil Jones Mystery Series Book 2) Read Free Page A

tension
on the line. It reminded him of those old electric football games Virgil and
his boyhood friend, Murton Wheeler, used to play when they were kids. They’d
line up the little plastic players, then hit the switch and watch the tiny
figurines vibrate their way across the surface of the game board. Virgil could
still hear the buzzing sound the board made when they toggled the power button
and turned it on.
    He had a two-pound monofilament line
tied directly to an eyehook at the end of the cane pole. The pole was twelve
feet in length and stained dark with age and the regular applications of Tung
oil used to maintain its beauty and structural integrity. The pole was one of
Virgil’s most prized possessions. His grandfather had taught him to fish with it
and then had given it to him as a gift just a few years before he died. Virgil
had a shed full of fishing poles, ones made of boron, graphite, fiberglass or
some other space-age composite, and they were all fine poles. Some were so flexible
and tough you could literally tie them into a knot without damaging the rod,
while others were so sensitive you could detect a deer fly if it landed on the
tip. Virgil didn’t know why he continued to buy them. His grandfather’s cane pole
was the only one he ever used. When he held the pole in his hands the way he’d
been taught so long ago he felt a connection to his grandfather, as if the linear
reality of time held no sway in his existence and he was back in control of
himself and his own destiny, his path clear, his choices many.
    Virgil knew, at least on some
level, that he was a sight this Saturday afternoon. He wore a pair of green
cotton gym shorts that hung to his knees, a Jamaican Red Stripe Beer utility
cap angled low across his brow and a pair of brown leather half-top boots with
no socks. He sat at the edge of his pond, cane pole in hand and tried to relax,
mostly without any measure of success. The fish were not biting but he didn’t really
care. He set the pole in the grass next to his chair, reached into the cooler
and took out his supplies. Among them, a plastic syringe with a screw tip on
the end, a glass vial of a drug called Heparin, and an odd looking, round container
made of a stiff rubbery material about the size of a baseball. The
baseball-like container held a drug called Vancomycin, a powerful antibiotic
medication that the doctor had referred to as their ‘drug of last resort.’
    The glass vial of Heparin was fitted
with a threaded female connector that matched the male connector of the syringe
on the table. He scrubbed his hands clean with a disposable alcohol wipe, then
used another to cleanse the top of the Heparin vial and yet another to wipe the
connector that was sutured and taped under his arm. The tube that penetrated
his body was a Peripherally Inserted Central Catheter, or PICC Line for short. Once
he had everything sterilized he filled the syringe from the Heparin bottle with
the required amount of the drug and injected it into the tube.
    Heparin, the doctor had told
Virgil, was an anti-coagulant drug that prevented the formation of blood clots
and helped aid in the healing process of human tissue. In non-technical
language, it greased the skids for the real medicine, the Vancomycin.
    After injecting the Heparin, he
hooked up the Vancomycin container. The delivery process of the Vancomycin
would take about thirty minutes as the medicine flowed from the ball and into a
vein through Virgil’s heart before being distributed throughout his body.
    Five months ago, while working a
case as the lead investigator for the state’s Major Crimes Unit, Virgil had
been kidnapped, tortured and beaten almost to death. In the course of the
beating his right leg was broken and required surgery to repair the damage. The
surgery went well, or so he’d been told and he was up and around in no time at
all. Except one day about eight weeks into the recovery process, he woke in the
morning with a low-grade fever