Hemostat

hemostat
noun. An instrument for preventing the flow of blood from an open blood vessel by compression of the vessel.

Cal wasn't surprised by the almost obsessively-tidy kitchen and bathroom in her apartment, but he was aghast when he stepped out onto the small balcony and saw a curved-nose hemostat lying in a hubcap full of what he identified as hand-rolled cigarette butts. His upper lip curled in distaste, he stepped to the little table and picked up the surgical tool.

Squeezing the handles, he examined the inner surfaces of the jaws. His disgust increased when he saw the brown, resinous coating on the steel.

"Ugh!" He dropped the hemostat and stood looking at the makeshift ashtray. He hadn't known that Lily smoked. In fact, she was the last person he would have suspected of indulging in the filthy habit. She was a nurse, after all.

Something wasn't right here. He struggled to identify what was bothering him, then the realization struck him: these might not be cigarette butts. These might be the spent ends of ... marijuana joints. There was a slang term for them. He thought. Roaches! That was it. He continued to stare at them, lying in a handful of ash. He picked up the hemostat again and gingerly picked up one of the butts with it. Bringing it to his nose, he sniffed. Instead of the odor of tobacco smoke, he detected something entirely different--something that evoked a thick jungle and hot weather; something that reminded him of the smell of a rope his grandfather had kept coiled on a nail in his garage.

Definitions adapted from The New Oxford American Dictionary, Oxford University Press, Inc., 2005 (eBook Edition, copyright 2008), and from Webster's Seventh New Collegiate Dictionary, G. & C. Merriam Company, Publishers, Springfield, Massachusetts, USA, 1965, depending on which is more convenient to hand.