Page 80 of Wingmen

She laughed a very loud, very surprised laugh, and saluted him as she opened the door.

“Godspeed, bro,” she said. And then closed it behind her and was gone.

Elliot found his phone and texted Dustin.

Hey viejo.

CHAPTER TWENTY-TWO

Dustin

The room was nice.

He buzzed into it with a backpack over one shoulder and his passport between his teeth. Maple leaf red, mostly, was what he saw. The bed spread, the curtains, the upholstery on the chair tucked under a sleek wooden desk in the corner. He hadn’t sprung for five stars, but he was only gonna be here one night.

He slung the backpack onto the bed and put the passport on the nightstand and sat to take off his shoes. His heart was going a mile a minute, like it had been all the way from Portland, and he wasn’t sure if that was just nerves or the oxycodone wearing off, but ideally what he was about to do would take care of it.

When the shoes were lined up beside the bed he pulled the backpack into his lap. He zipped it open and took out the paper bag he’d gotten from the pharmacy, and took out the bottle that was inside that. He set the bottle on the nightstand, then threw the paper bag away and pulled out his phone to research the next step.

Steps. It was all just steps.

Ultimately he’d decided not to involve Jordan, so he’d just booked a flight and a hotel, gotten into Vancouver about an hour ago, got an Uber straight to a pharmacy, found it empty because it was almost closing time, explained to the pharmacist that he was a hockey player from Montreal, in town visiting family. Twisted my knee while I was training out here. My team doctor recommended T1?

What’s the injury. Which team doctor. Have you tried ibuprofen or naproxen. Do you have any history of opioid use. Are you currently taking anything else.

He answered all the questions. Showed the pharmacist his Canadian passport.

It was like running a hockey play. He liked running plays. He was good at them.

He’d gone to dinner to kill a few hours, because going immediately back to the hotel and taking these pills at five PM would be drug addict behavior. Dinner was fine. He made sure not to drink any alcohol. He couldn’t remember what he’d eaten.

He tapped the phone to check the time. It was nine PM; his flight out was in twelve hours. He opened the browser and went about figuring out how much of this stuff he was supposed to take.

Steps.

In order to match the single oxycodone he’d been taking nightly for the last three weeks, he’d have to taketenof these.

Which was…more than he’d been expecting.

He picked up the bottle and looked at the label. On the back was a massive sticker with a skull and crossbones on it. This stuff carried a high risk of liver damage; the pharmacist had been very clear about this when she gave him the talk. He’d told her no worries: he was a professional athlete, he drank a gallon of water a day, and he’d been living onsmoothies and vegan takeout all summer. His liver was in excellent shape.

He’d been hoping that might get a laugh, but she’d just looked at him over the top of her glasses, and he’d said, “But obviously this isn’t a joke,” and then stood there with a serious expression and his heart going hell-for-leather while she rang him up.

He opened the bottle and counted ten pills onto the bed spread.

It was a lot. When you looked at it like that.

There were fifty in the bottle. Which meant it would last five days. Was that long enough?

Was the skull and crossbones really necessary? Honestly, calm down, Canada.

He went back to the phone to do math.

Ten of these weren’t going to damage his liver, but it was a fucking lot of pills to take all at once. And if you factored in the glass of wine…

Okay, so maybe he didn’t take ten. Maybe he took five. Maybe he started with two and tapered up from there – no, that made no sense, he was supposed to be taperingdown,fuck, he really should’ve researchedallthe steps before he got on the plane.

He put the phone down and went into the bathroom to splash water on his face. When he got back, a text was waiting. He sat on the edge of the bed and tapped it open.