His dealer was able to secure the pills—prescription meds, opiates, not that Derek much cared what the damned things were called—and for awhile he found himself swallowing them every day, more and more of them.
But the problem with scoring prescription drugs was the price tag. They were almost prohibitively expensive. Derek compensated for the spiraling cost of his highs by stealing things, making the rounds of local superstores, finding items small enough to smuggle past security cameras while also retaining enough value to be resold for a decent return.
It was a vicious circle, and a shitty way to make money. It was also, he knew, only a matter of time before he was caught leaving Walmart with a stack of Tshirts stuffed under his hoodie.
And the guilt? It was constant and nearly overwhelming. He wasn’t raised to be a thief, and no matter how much he tried to tell himself he was taking stuff from a multi-billion-dollar corporation, that they had insurance to protect themselves from this sort of thing, that it was a victimless crime and it was okay because he really needed the money, no matter how much he tried to justify his actions, he knew it was all bullshit.
Somebody was losing money on the things he stole, and his actions were wrong, and he knew it. But still, he needed that goddamn high.
Everything changed, and not in a good way, the afternoon he offhandedly mentioned to his dealer how much trouble he was having consistently finding the cash to pay for his pills.
“There’s an alternative, you know.”
“What are you talking about?”
“Prescription pills cost an arm and a leg. Heroin is cheaper. Much cheaper, in fact. You can get a better high for a fraction of the cost.”
“Yeah, but, dude. Heroin.”
“It’s no big deal. It’s the same stuff you swallow in pill form every day, and you’ll be saving a ton of money. Up to you, though. I’m happy to keep taking your scratch.”
He’d shot up for the first time that night and never looked back.
Derek had never stolen a car before.
It was probably a ridiculous notion to say he was a rule-follower rather than a rule-breaker, given that as a teen he’d been a serial shoplifter and had been committing drug felonies for years, but that was how Derek saw himself. A rebel he was not.
He had never run a red light back when he’d still had enough money to drive.
He’d always paid his taxes, back when he had a legit job.
He didn’t jaywalk in the city, and as a homeless junkie only stole what he needed to survive and get high.
So the notion of stealing a car was anathema. It was as foreign to Derek as…well, as murdering two people in a botched home invasion. But there was no way he’d be able to walk the distance he needed to travel. It would have been impossible even if he weren’t feeling like warmed-over shit, craving heroin and shaking like a man who’d just touched a live electrical wire.
After escaping Crowder and his goon, Derek had trudged through the city until getting his bearings. He’d spent plenty of time on the streets of Boston and had known he would eventually come to an area he recognized.
Meanwhile, he desperately needed the time to develop some kind of plan. His thoughts were racing and muddled. Between the adrenaline crash and the dopesickness and the knowledge that over the course of a single day his life had spiraled out of control, going from shitty to, well, whatever was worse than shitty, it was hard to focus on anything besides the one fact he could not ignore: you’re fucked.
He walked the streets, keeping one eye open for Crowder, knowing that to go back to the abandoned car he’d been using as a home base up until his beating would be signing his own death warrant. If he were going to make that move, he might as well have used one of the remaining bullets in Crowder’s pistol to shoot himself in the head the minute he left the McHugh home.
And he really wished he could return to the abandoned minivan. Even a homeless drug addict has a few possessions, and Derek’s were all inside that goddamned car. They now might as well be a million miles away, even though in reality they were only a couple of miles across town.
As the hours passed and the normal people disappeared into the comfort of their homes, the denizens of the night took over the streets. Hookers roamed the sidewalks, junkies and dealers conducted business transactions, and the vagrants searched for private corners in which to bed down and hopefully avoid becoming victims of overnight violence.
Eventually Derek did the same. He’d decided on a plan. It was a lousy plan, but it was all he could come up with. To put his plan in motion would require boosting a car, but that would have to wait until morning, so he walked the streets until finding a secluded alley with a covered doorway that seemed uninhabited.
He hunkered down and tried to sleep, knowing the best he could probably hope for was to drop into the occasional troubled doze.
The night simultaneously dragged and flew by. The cravings were increasing, as Derek had known they would, and between that and his fear that if he fell into a deep sleep he would be awakened by Crowder shoving a gun into his mouth, he doubted he got more than an hour’s real rest all night.
It was almost a relief when sunrise came, even though Derek knew this day would consist of a level of hell unimagined even by Dante.
He struggled to his feet and staggered maybe six feet from the doorway and then pissed against the brick wall. He had no belongings to gather, so he simply zipped up
