Hero To Zero 2nd edition Read Online Free Page A

done, it all made sense. The details fit into what I already knew.
    Ray had been transferred to the narcotics strike force after his latest success in the department’s specialty units. He had been an instant success, as was usual for Ray. He still had the boundless energy, the attention to detail, the single-minded focus on the job. He immediately started to make an impact. Ray had an intuition for narcotics, a sixth sense that was uncanny.
    Ray loved to run to keep in shape, and his running partner was the sergeant of the unit—another fast-tracked, guaranteed performer who succeeded at every assignment he was given. Sergeant Billy Webster was a force to be reckoned with on the street. (He gets his own story later in this book.) The two cops were partners on and off the streets. They fit. They worked tirelessly and partied hard.
    Billy Webster was the heartbroken girl’s short-lived roommate/romance. She told me that both men bragged to her often about taking narcotics—pain pills, mostly—that were seized in raids while working their cases in the undercover world of the narcotics strike force.
    Both of them admitted this to her as they partied at her apartment, drinking hard liquor and popping the prescription pain pills. Each of them bragged about how they manipulated the paperwork and evidence documents during raids to hide their activities. According to her, they also bragged about how they spent money intended for undercover buys on their personal expenses, and she claimed that she had personally witnessed them popping handfuls of pain pills “like they were candy.” She said that they were both barely affected by the handfuls of pills, and in her opinion they were both hard-core addicts.
    I listened and thought about the suspicions I’d had for years. I have mentioned in my other books the fact that leaks would occur in the department’s databases; information about informants would somehow seep out. The narcotics strike force would be planning to make a raid on a drug dealer, and ten minutes before they arrived, the phone would ring, the house would clear out, and the drugs would disappear. When they got there, there would be nothing. It all suddenly became really clear.
    I listened as she recalled the conversations. It all fit; another piece of the fucked-up puzzle of the streets fell into place. This was the reality of the streets I worked, and the people I worked with.
    Ray kept this demon at bay for some time. He hid in the world of undercover drug buys, fast money, and fast women. Eventually his body’s tolerance for the painkillers rose to such a level that he couldn’t hide the huge amounts he was stealing from the strike force’s drug seizures. He needed thirty to forty pills of hard-core prescription narcotics just to make it through the day. He was a junkie.
    This explained the limitless energy Ray had. He was “jonesin’.” He was in withdrawal. I think that was why his leg bounced, why he kept moving and could not stop. He was in pain.
    Ray’s addiction eventually drove him to make a serious error. One day he was at a local pharmacy, picking up a list of people who used the place to fill their prescriptions. He cross-referenced the list against other pharmacies’ lists of customers. Drug addicts who abuse prescription drugs often “doctor shop,” getting multiple prescriptions and then filling them at different pharmacies. The lists were provided to law enforcement to help battle the problem.
    Ray had worked himself into the prescription drug specialist for the narcotics unit. It fit his needs. He now was a wolf in charge of watching the sheep. He thought he could keep his addiction problem hidden forever. It had worked so far, so why not?
    He fucked up, though.
    While the pharmacist was printing the lists, Ray grabbed a couple of bottles of strong pain pills off of the shelves to feed his increasing addiction. The pharmacist had been suspicious of some earlier losses of pills and had