Irish Throwdown (What Happens In Vegas Book 4) by Matt Lincoln (short books for teens .TXT) 📕

“Ma’am, are you feeling alright?” I asked as I holstered my gun and pulled my phone out of my pocket to call for help. This woman clearly needed some kind of medical attention.

“Oh, I’m just a little under the weather,” she coughed. “Seasonal bug, I think. I was just looking for something to eat. Oh, dear, who made this mess? Was it you?”

Before I could respond, Charlie called out from somewhere else in the house.

“It’s all clear on my end!” he called. “Everything okay?”

“Oh my word,” the woman began to shake. “What is that?”

“It’s just my partner,” I assured her before calling out to Charlie. “I’m over here! There’s someone in the kitchen.”

“No!” the woman suddenly screeched as she pulled a long kitchen knife out of the knife block. “You’re trying to trick me. You made this mess, didn’t you?”

“Ma’am, calm down,” I responded as I reached for my gun again.

Before I could get to it, she lunged toward me. I used both hands to grip her arms and push her away. Despite being smaller and thinner than me, she was surprisingly strong and started biting at me when she couldn’t get her arms free.

I pushed her away as hard as I could, and she fell to the ground, directly on top of one of the various containers she’d pulled out of the refrigerator just a moment before. I winced as I heard something shatter beneath her and was shocked when she immediately shot back up and ran toward me again. She’d only taken two steps before Charlie burst into the kitchen and tackled her from behind.

“Help!” the woman screamed as Charlie forced her to the ground and pulled her hands behind her back. “It’s killing me! The monster’s killing me!”

“I think she’s hallucinating,” I said as I leaned down to help Charlie apprehend her. She was still thrashing around, and I was worried she might hurt herself with how forcefully she was fighting against Charlie’s grip.

“Call for backup,” Charlie gritted out as he struggled to maintain his hold. I did as he instructed and called for police units as well as an ambulance.

“There are no monsters,” I said soothingly to the woman once I finished calling for help. “No one is trying to hurt you.”

The woman lifted her head off the ground and looked around the room to confirm what I was saying.

“No monsters,” she repeated sluggishly. She finally seemed to be calming down, and I breathed a sigh of relief.

“You’re bleeding,” Charlie said once the woman finally fell silent and still and he could lessen his grip on her arms. I looked down and was surprised to discover that he was right. There was a spot of blood on my sleeve near my wrist.

“She must have gotten me with the knife,” I grimaced. The adrenaline of restraining her must have kept the pain at bay, but now that I was cooling down, I could feel a distinct sting where she’d cut me. “It’s not too bad.”

Backup arrived shortly after that, and Charlie handed the woman over to the paramedics while I got my wrist patched up. As soon as I was done, I walked over to join him. She was still mumbling about monsters when the paramedics started strapping her into a gurney.

“She looks like she’s under the influence of something,” one of the paramedics noted as she was being loaded into the back of the ambulance. “Do you know if she took anything?”

“No,” I replied. “She was acting kind of weird, though. She was knocking things out of the fridge and onto the floor when I found her.”

“Did she say anything?” the man asked.

“Not really,” I muttered as I tried to recall exactly what had happened. It had all gone down so fast. “She was talking about someone named Dom. She probably meant Dominick Evans. He’s the owner of the house. She was speaking normally at first if a bit fidgety. Then suddenly she just started screaming about monsters and came at me with the knife.”

“Monsters?” the paramedic repeated with a frown. “Might be some kind of hallucinogenic. Okay, thank you.”

He moved away from me to climb into the ambulance.

“That was weird,” Charlie remarked once the man had closed the ambulance doors.

“That’s an understatement,” I scoffed as I lifted my wrist to examine the bandage there. The paramedic had assured me that it wasn’t serious when he patched me up. I could still feel a dull throb, but the worst of the pain had ebbed away.

“I’m gonna call Wallace and let him know what happened,” Charlie informed me as he pulled his phone from his pocket.

“Okay,” I called over my shoulder as I stepped back into the house.

I decided to have a look around the house while Charlie called Wallace to report what had happened. The home was just as lavish on the inside as it was on the outside, tastefully decorated with expensive furniture and unique art pieces. It wasn’t unheard of for wealthy people to indulge in drugs, but typically people with money tended to stick to familiar classics like cocaine or MDMA. It was unusual for a wealthy couple to overdose on a little-known designer drug like this.

I wandered into the living room. The coffee table in there was laden down with bottles of cough syrup, painkillers, and two half-eaten bowls of soup. Used tissues were scattered around the table and on the floor, and a movie was playing on the television.

I remembered what Mrs. Evans had said about feeling under the weather and was struck with a dreadful thought. Wallace had said that none of the perpetrators had anything in common aside from the intense violence in their actions. What if the drugs found in Dominick Evans’s system were just a coincidence, and this was actually a viral issue? A sickness would explain how so many seemingly unrelated people could suddenly display the same symptoms. The idea of a disease that could cause people to become violent was too fantastic and too