The Bitterest Pill

Fifty-one

She’d driven back home from the motel in a rage. Now she sat in her car, pounding her palms on the steering wheel and screaming. She understood the girl’s panic, and on some intellectual level even empathized with it, but on a visceral level she just didn’t really give a shit. Did Petra care about what would happen to her? Did that stupid little girl consider that the woman she said she ached for had degraded herself? She had risked everything — her career, her dignity, her life — to make sure she would always have that next dose. And now where was she? Nowhere. Worse than nowhere.

While she had been assured of a steady supply, she’d never given much thought to the jail time she was risking. The drugs weren’t even the worst of it. Chris Grimm wasn’t even sixteen when she seduced him and that was statutory rape. And now that Chris had been killed, she was part of a murder conspiracy. She took some deep breaths and looked over her right shoulder at the duffel bag containing the stash she’d taken from Petra’s trunk. She could run.

There were enough pills in the bag to keep her going for a very long time, but not forever. Forever. She laughed an angry laugh at herself. Forever no longer had any meaning to her. For her, forever was the time between hits, and her tolerance was building up so that the duration of her high was shrinking. It took more and more Oxy to get her where she needed to be, never mind where she wanted to be. Simple want was a luxury she could no longer afford. Those days, the days of enjoying the high, were gone as gone could be.

Wasn’t that the trap, the lie of it, the incredible euphoria of the initial high? How it made all the pain go away. Not just the physical pain, though that would have been enough. It was a magical thing, the way it was equally effective in vanquishing the little hurts of the day, the nasty remarks or people’s simple rudeness, and the gaping wounds of a terrible childhood or a broken heart. When you were in as deep as she was, it wasn’t the drug that chased those big and little hurts away. It was the desperation and panic about getting the drug that made everything else insignificant. Junkies don’t need to search for or ponder the meaning of life. Life is about one thing and one thing only — chasing the next hit. But the cruelest irony was that once you were hooked, the physical hurt of not having it was worse than the pain that made you take it in the first place.

She had twice tried breaking free of the hold it had on her, and that had been enough to convince her that doing whatever she needed to do to get high was worth it. The cold sweats, vomiting, constant nausea, cramps, diarrhea, and the muscles that would not stop aching. Nothing was worth going through that again. Nothing!

She turned and looked once again at the stash bag in the backseat, stared at it, and decided to run. But just as she placed the key back in the ignition, her cell phone rang.

“Look across the street.” It was a thickly accented man’s voice. “Make a wave at the white van.”

She waved. The headlights on a van parked across the street and facing her flashed on and off.

“You have something for Mr. Sarkassian?”

“Yes.”

“Leave car doors open when you go.”

“Okay.”

“Do not fuck us around. You have seen the picture of the boy. We are doing this to him. To you, we would do much worse. We would pleasure ourselves with you and it would not be gentle like you do with the girl. Make sure the girl keeps her mouth shut. You understand.”

She was so frightened she couldn’t speak.

“Answer me, bitch.”

“She’ll be fine. I will take care of her.”

“Good. You know the boy was calling your name when we hurt him. You must be good. The girl talks and we will find out just how good.”

She was paralyzed with fear. Unable to speak or to move. When she said nothing, the man on the other end of the line laughed. His laugh was almost as frightening as anything he had said. The phone went dead.

She tried not to completely fall to pieces or to look again at the duffel bag behind her. She had removed some of the stash at the motel while she was hidden behind Petra’s raised trunk lid. She knew she could always blame the girl for not keeping a good check on the inventory — they wouldn’t go after Petra. But what she had taken wasn’t going to keep her going for long. She got out of the car and walked as quickly as she could on legs that were weak from fear. She did not look back. When she turned the corner, she put her back against a wall and noticed she had sweated through her clothing. Fear did have a very particular smell. She stood frozen that way until she heard the van speed past. Even then, when she finally felt safe enough to move, she had to talk herself through the process of walking.