His last moments had been terror and pain.
Her stomach cramped. Her body and soulhurt.
She asked, “Dree, what was he mixed up in? Are you mixed up in it, too?”
Dree sucked a tiny bit of air, enough to wheeze, “I’m not, or I never wanted to be. I think he was stealing narcotics from that hospice he worked for and selling them.”
Caridad’s sharp intake of breath sounded exactly like the punches to the chest that had been hammering Dree ever since she got off the bus to buy milk a few days before. Caridad asked, “Francis was a drug dealer?”
“It’s the only thing that makes sense. I just figured out that Peaceful Transitions Hospice isn’t an enormous organization like we thought it was, like their regulatory documentssaythey are. They’re just a tiny little facility with three beds. It’s a converted ranch-style house.”
Caridad scowled, her nose and eyes wrinkling in disgust. “If it’s so small, why was he always coming in here to ask us to transfer cases of narcotics?”
She nodded. The world blurred, and hot water dripped down her face.“That’s how I figured it out. He shouldn’t have needed anywhere near that much. And then, like yesterday, Francis said that I had to give him six hundred thousand dollars.”
“You have six hundred thousand dollars to give him?” Caridad asked, her luminous dark eyes wide and aghast on Dree’s tiny phone screen.
“God, no.” Dree said, gulping air. She used her palms to smear the tears off her cheeks. “I hadseventhousand, total, in my savings account, and I’d saved that by scrimping for years. I bought all my produce off the half-rotten shelf. I drove a ten-year-old Hyundai Accent, the base model one, and I don’t even like green cars. And he stole it and sold it.”
“If he was a drug dealer,” Caridad said to her, “why did he need money? Isn’t that the whole point of dealing drugs, that you get money for doing it?”
The question was so obvious that Dree’s head seemed to be filled with buzzing. “I don’t know.”
“If he’s six hundred thousand dollars in debt, he’s a really bad drug dealer.”
“He said he was. I don’t know why. He said some awful things to me about what he was going to do to get another six hundred thousand dollars. I mean, he said some scary, horrible things.”
Caridad asked her, “What did you say to that?”
“I told him to drop dead.” And now she felt awful about her choice of words.
“Good,” she said, nodding on Dree’s phone screen. “I know now he’s dead so it doesn’t make any difference, but you can’t go back to a man like that. You can’t go back to a known drug dealer. In the Philippines, when we have a guy like that, we all get away from him. It doesn’t matter if he’s your cousin or your uncle, we get away from him.”
“I did. I broke up with him. But he’s dead now.”
“Is that why they fired you and they want us to call the police? Because they thought you were the drug dealer?”
Oh, God.That made sense. “I don’t know. I guess so.”
“They told us not to call 911 or the general line. They told us to tell HR, and then HR was going to call a certain police guy.”
Dree’s heart fell. “What certain police guy?”
“The police officer who has been snooping around here every day. He says he’s waiting for you and wants to know where you are. None of us told him anything, though.”
“Is he a white guy, tall, with light brown eyes and squints?”
“Yes,” Caridad said. “That’s him.”
That was the guy who had driven her around in Phoenix until she’d jumped out of the car at a stoplight and who’d been on the phone when she’d tried to report Francis.
Caridad and Dree said their good-byes and stay-safes, and they hung up. Dree thanked God for good friends at work who hadn’t told that dirty cop anything.
Later, a woman massaged Dree’s back while she stared at the floor through the round window in the massage table. She blinked while she tried to make sense of what was happening, but the ragged pieces whirled like a dust devil that had sucked up tumbleweeds and broken glass.
The massage therapist said, “Madame, you are very tight in your shoulders. You must reduce your stress.”
“Uh-huh,” Dree said. Her eyeballs were dried out, so she blinked again.
