Rocket City Blues

internal requisition network. That sonofabitch hacked into the hospital’s data system!
“Y’know, the nurses on the floor, they used to come around and give ya your medicines, whenever ya needed them. ’Course, with everything being automated now, they just send it through those little tubes that run through the walls from the Main Pharmacy. S’posed to cut down on human error … s’what they say anyway… I reckon it has more to do with cuttin’ down on human jobs. What you think, Mister Frost?”
I think I’m wishin’ you’d return the favor and shoot my ear off … both of them! Just so I don’t have to hear your crazy ass babbling on!
“Unfortunately, in a place like this here … unhhhh!” Tuttle grimaced. A wave of pain ran down the side of his face. The hole that had once been his ear throbbed incessantly. He pulled out a Lunarol lozenge and stuck it under his tongue. He sat back in his chair for a few moments, eyes closed, breathing in deep, calming breaths, waiting for the pain medication to absorb into his system. The doctor had told him not to talk any more than he had to, that working his jaw would only aggravate the wound. He might as well have been asking a hungry dog to walk away from a fresh-cut piece of beef.
When he finally opened his eyes again, he smiled … a cold, hard smile … and in those old, bloodshot, squinty eyes, Frost saw no mirth or even taunting jest. With the man’s craggy skin stretched tight over his cheeks, it was the hollow-eyed grin of a skull.
“Jest another li’l reminder of our first meeting,” he hissed, his voice barely above a whisper, as the last twinges of pain still jabbed at his face. He held the PDC up and started tapping icons on the hologram in the air in front of him. “Now, as I was sayin’ … in a place like this’n … even with all these newfangled gadgets, sometimes accidents do happen. Sometimes, the wrong information just gets entered … human error, y’know. Ya jest can’t take us out of the equation sometimes … know what I’m sayin’?” He looked to Frost and gave him a wink,  “Only this time, weren’t no error to it. Yore poor man just got sent a nasty ass li’l batch of drugs.”
Frost’s jaw began to hurt from being so tightly clenched; he felt as if his teeth would snap off from the pressure. Unfortunately, his jaw muscle was the only muscle he could get to respond to his mental commands. If what this creepy old bastard was saying was true, Lucius was dead because he had underestimated this backwoods hick. He’d left a loose-end untied. He hadn’t taken a credible threat seriously, and it had cost him a good man. Even worse, a long-time friend … and now, unless a miracle occurred, it would cost him his own life.
Yet, somehow, as tragic as it was, it didn’t strike him as odd. This mission had been snakebit from the get-go. Nothing had gone right. At every turn, there’d been difficulty and failure, unwanted attention, outside interference and unexpected casualties. He hadn’t had a mission go this wrong since the Red Rock City debacle back on Mars doing black ops for the Space Authority.
Am I slipping in my old age? Have I lost it? Should I have hung up my spurs and retired years ago like Oksana wanted me to? Has this turned out to be my Little Bighorn?
“They did their best, those nurses did, but y’know how it is … they’re not really trained to perform … procedures anymore … what with those fancy, built-in defibrillators.”
You bastard. Kill me and be done with it! I swear! If you don’t and I survive this …
“I didn’t know yer man,” Tuttle was still jabbering away. “So, it wudn’t never personal with him. He simply died in his sleep, all drugged up.” He maliciously looked up at the transparent, plastic piping protruding from the wall. “You, on tha other hand …”
Frost still couldn’t move his head, but his training as an operative had sharpened his peripheral vision far beyond that of an average person. Cutting his eyes as far left as possible, straining so hard he felt as if his eyeballs were going to pop out of their sockets, he fought to focus. It took him a few moments to calm himself and concentrate, but training took over.
Eventually, he began to make out the tubing attached to a valve, protruding from the wall. This valve tapped into a central distribution system that pumped intravenous drugs from the Central Pharmacy to each room. Doctors simply sent a prescription electronically to the pharmacists and they keyed it in. A computerized system controlled the holding tanks and administered and monitored the doses, dispatching them at the prescribed intervals and the correct dosages. The medicine was added to a transmission fluid of glucose to traverse the plumbing.
Frost could see the first of a dose of medicine of some kind passing through the valve and into the plastic tube that led to his Virtua-Nurse control system, which managed his I.V. pump. As the clear liquid of the glucose filled the pipe, Frost’s eyes also caught the reddish tinge of something else, an actual drug of some kind polluting the clear sugar water.
“Yeah, you see it, don’t ya?” Tuttle’s voice was a jolly wheeze. “You know what that is, Mister Big Bad Bounty Hunter? That’s my revenge a’coming. That’s you suffocatin’ while I watch. … knowin’ you’re helpless to even take a breath while I stand over ya and juuuuust smile.” He cackled madly. “Don’t ya worry. Ya won’t die quick. You’ll have yo’self a long time to think about where ya went wrong when ya shot my boy’s dick off!” His face turned hard and dark, his eyes bloodshot slits. “And you will think about it … Cuz I’ll be reminding ya the whole damned time yore trying