Ultimately, she’d have to get her hands on the whole $62,000. She’d maxed out her credit cards with cash advances totaling ten grand, put another five on her line of credit. And she was going to have to pay back her friends the eight thousand they’d kicked in. If they could get another fifteen or twenty for their truck, put that toward the debt, that’d be great, but Belinda would still have to reimburse them. She’d rather be in debt to them than their suppliers.
The suppliers wanted the money that was owed them. They’d made that very clear to her friends. And they didn’t care whose fault it was.
But Belinda had been the one taking the blame. “This is your fault,” they told her. “You don’t fuck with these people. They want that money from us, and we want it from you.”
Belinda had pleaded that it really wasn’t her fault. “It was an accident,” she kept telling them. “It was just one of those things.”
Hardly an accident, they told her. Two cars hitting each other for no reason, that’s an accident. But when one of those drivers makes a decision to do something very, very stupid, well, that’s a bit of a gray area, isn’t it?
The car burned up, Belinda said. “What the hell do you want from me?”
No one was interested in excuses.
One way or another, she had to come up with the money. All the more reason to unload the stuff she still had. A few hundred here, a few hundred there-it all helped. If only these assholes would just take the product back. That would help wipe out a good chunk of the debt. But they weren’t Sears. They had a “no return” policy. They just wanted their money.
She had a few deliveries she could make tonight. One guy in Derby who needed Avandia for his type 2 diabetes, and another customer only a couple of blocks over who was taking Propecia for baldness. Belinda wondered about pocketing a few of those herself, mashing them up and putting them in George’s cream of wheat in the morning. The comb-over thing he’d been trying for several years wasn’t fooling anybody. The other side of town there was a woman she delivered Viagra to, and Belinda wondered whether she was doing just that. Pulverizing the pill and hiding it in her husband’s Heavenly Hash ice cream. Getting him ready for bedtime. And she thought she should place a call to that man in Orange, see if he was getting low on lisinopril for his heart.
She was going to set up a website, but she’d found word of mouth had been working pretty well for her. Everyone needed a prescription of one kind or another, and these days everyone was looking for a way to save on drugstore prices. Considering hardly anyone had a drug plan, and those who did were wondering how much longer they’d get to keep it, there was a demand for what Belinda had to offer. Her prescription drugs-which, by the way, were available without a prescription-were made God knows where, somewhere in China, maybe in the same factories that cranked out those fake Fendi bags Ann Slocum hawked. And just like those purses, they could be had for a fraction of the cost of the real deal.
Belinda told herself she was doing a public service. Helping people, and helping them save money.
Not that she felt good enough about this sideline to tell George about it. He could be a real tight-ass about the sanctity of trademarks and copyright protections. He’d just about had a fit one time when they were in Manhattan, about five years ago, and Belinda tried to buy a counterfeit Kate Spade bag from a guy selling them out of a blanket around the corner from Ground Zero.
So she didn’t keep the drugs around the house.
Belinda kept them at the Torkin house.
Bernard and Barbara Torkin had put their house on the market thirteen months ago when they decided to move across the country to live with her parents in Arizona. He’d accepted a sales job at his father-in-law’s Toyota dealership when GM killed its Saturn division and the dealership he’d worked at for sixteen years shut down.
The Torkins had a small two-story that backed onto a school playground. The house on one side was owned by a man who kept three dogs that never stopped barking. On the other, a guy who repaired motorcycles and listened to Black Sabbath 24/7.
Belinda could not unload the place. She’d advised the Torkins to drop their price, but they wouldn’t budge. Damned if they were going to sell for forty percent less than they paid. They’d wait for the market to rebound, and then sell.
Don’t hold your breath, Belinda thought.
The good news was the Torkin house made a great place for Belinda Morton to hide her product. And tonight, she would head over to her “pharmacy,” as she liked to think of it, and fill some orders.
She was careful going down the cellar steps in her heels. It was cool down here, and she was losing the light as the door from the kitchen slowly started to swing shut. She reached, in time, the pull chain in the middle of the room that turned on the bare overhead bulb, but the corners of the room remained cast in shadow.
The basement wasn’t much of a selling point for prospective buyers. Cinder-block walls, open stud ceiling. At least the floor was concrete and not dirt. A washer and dryer and a workbench were down here but not much else, except the furnace. It was behind there that Belinda headed.
She lowered her head to clear a heating duct, then squeezed into the three-foot space between the furnace and the wall. There was a gap at the top of the cinder blocks where the wooden beams rested. She stuck her hand up and reached in. She kept the jars just out of sight. There were fifteen of them in here, just the most popular stuff. Heart medications, drugs for acid reflux, diabetes, hard-ons. There was so little light back here she had to bring out the jars and set them on the worktable to sort out just what she needed.
She realized she was shaking. She knew that, even with a few sales tonight, she’d probably only make five hundred or so. She was going to have to come up with a better plan.
Maybe, she thought, she could talk the Torkins into some repairs. Send them an email in Arizona, tell them she thought she could sell their house if they did a few minor upgrades. A bit of paint, replace the rotten boards on the front porch, get someone in to clear out the junk in the far corner of the property.
Tell them she could get it all done for a couple of thousand. Keep the money herself. What were they going to do? Hop a plane and come back to Milford to see if the work got done? Not likely.
She had two other out-of-town clients she might be able to talk into some repairs. Once she got out from under her debt, if she had to, she’d find a way to get the actual work done. If she got wind the owners were going to be back in the neighborhood, she’d have to move on it. Truth was, Belinda would rather explain to those people why the work wasn’t done than have to explain to those other people why she didn’t have their money.
She held the first jar up to the light so she could read the label. Those magical blue pills. George had tried them, once. Not these ones, not the knockoff variety. He’d gotten a prescription from his doctor, wanted to see what they’d do. What they did was give him one hell of a headache. The whole time he was on her he griped that he needed some Tylenols before his head exploded.
Belinda was unscrewing the lid when she heard the floor creak above her head.
She froze. There was nothing for a moment. She told herself she’d imagined it.
But then it happened again.
Someone was walking around in the kitchen.
She was sure she’d locked the front door when she’d come in. She didn’t want anyone walking in on her while she conducted her dispensing duties. But maybe, somehow, she’d forgotten. Someone had seen the For Sale sign out front, her Acura parked at the curb, noticed the business card she kept on the dash, and decided this was an open house.
“Hello?” she called out tentatively. “Is there someone there?”
No one answered.
Belinda called out again. “Did you see the sign? Are you here about the house?”
If whoever it was upstairs was here for some other reason, like looking for a place to crash, or make out, or vandalize, they’d know now that someone was already here. And if they had half a brain in their head, they’d take off.
But Belinda hadn’t heard anyone running for the front door.
Her mouth was dry and she tried to swallow. She needed to get out of here. But there was only one way out, and it was up those stairs, and the kitchen was at the top of those stairs.
She decided to call the police. She’d whisper into her cell phone, tell them to get here fast, that someone was in the house, someone was-
Her cell phone was in her purse. A fake Chanel bag she’d bought at one of Ann’s purse parties. And it was sitting upstairs, on the kitchen counter.
