Linwood Barclay - The Accident

“Hang on,” I said, cutting him off. “It’s the other line.”

I hit the button. “Hello?”

“I want to come home,” Kelly said urgently, her voice nothing more than a whisper. “Come and get me now, Daddy. Please hurry.”

Belinda Morton had told George she had a house to show tonight. “You know, that listing I just got, that couple moving to Vermont?”

George was watching Judge Judy at the time and didn’t pay her any attention. All she needed was an excuse when she walked out the door, and when you were a real estate agent, you expected to have to head out at all hours. But just to be sure he wouldn’t ask questions, she waited until her husband’s favorite show was on. George loved Judge Judy. At first Belinda thought he was fascinated by all the various disputes-fights over unpaid rent, jilted lovers who keyed cars, girlfriends who wanted their men to pay back money they’d spent to bail them out-but she’d come to the conclusion it was the judge herself who kept George transfixed in front of the set. He had a thing for her. He was mesmerized by her stern nature, the way she dominated her court and everyone inside it.

Although, if George had been paying attention, he might have noticed that Belinda hadn’t actually been going out that much lately. The real estate market was in the toilet. No one was buying. And people who needed to sell-like the ones who’d lost their jobs and spent months without success trying to find new ones-were getting downright desperate. The hospital was closing beds, laying off nurses. The Board of Education was talking about laying off dozens of teachers. Dealerships shutting down. Even the police department was letting a couple of officers go due to budget cuts. Belinda never would have guessed she’d see the day when people would just walk away. Let the bank have it, we don’t give a shit, we’re out of here. Just packing up their things and leaving their homes behind. Some houses, you could hardly give them away. Down in Florida, they had condo developments almost entirely empty, buyers from Canada coming down, picking up a $250,000 vacation spot for $30,000.

It was a world gone mad.

And how great it would be, Belinda thought, if a collapsing real estate market were all she had to worry about these days.

A few weeks ago, falling house prices, hardly any buyers, and no fat commissions going into the bank account had her tossing and turning all night. But at least back then, all she was worried about was her financial future. Keeping a roof over their heads, making the lease payments on the Acura.

She wasn’t actually scared for her personal safety. She wasn’t worried that someone might hurt her.

Not like now.

Belinda still needed to find a way to come up with $37,000. But even that was just in the short term. 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.