Page 23 of Alistair

“Hey, are you ladies okay?” asked Garr.

“Yeah, yeah, we’re fine,” said one of the women. “She’s just tired.”

“Maybe she should eat something,” said Matt.

“She’s not hungry. We don’t eat much,” she said defensively.

“It shows,” frowned Alistair. “It’s not healthy. You don’t have enough weight to be healthy.”

The woman tried to get up and walk again, only to fall flat on her face. When her friends couldn’t rouse her, the men went to work.

“Call 911,” he yelled at the bartender.

“How much did she take?” asked Kev.

“Three pills. How did you know?” cried her friend nervously.

“It’s pretty damn obvious. These aren’t just diet pills. They have an addictive narcotic in them. You have to stop taking them,” said Kev.

“We can’t! You don’t understand. We used to be the fat girls at work. Now we’re the skinny ones.”

“That’s right,” said Garr. “Skinny. Not healthy. Not attractive. Look at yourselves in the mirror. Your hair is thinning. Your teeth are yellowed. The drug is eating away at you.”

“I’ve no pulse,” said Matt.

Gator began compressions as the other men rushed trying to get her to respond and come back with them to the land of the living. As he compressed, he could hear her ribs cracking.

“I’m fucking breaking her ribs. She’s so damn thin, I’m cracking everything. If I stop, she doesn’t have a chance.”

“Just keep doing what you’re doing, brother. We have to try,” said Alistair.

When EMS arrived, they let them take over. Alistair turned to talk to one of the women, and they were gone. Looking at the bartender, he practically jumped the bar.

“Where did they go? Where?” he growled.

“I-I don’t know. I was busy watching you guys.”

“Un-fucking-believable,” he moaned. “They left her.”

“They knew the cops would ask questions they didn’t want to answer,” said Garr. “But they left something behind.” He held up the pill bottle with the pharmacy name and prescribing doctor.

“Looks like we have an appointment tomorrow.”

CHAPTER SIXTEEN

The young woman was pronounced dead by the time they entered the hospital. Officially, it was an overdose of an opioid, but the VG team knew it was much more than that. They had a name, and they were going to find the doctor who wrote the prescription.

“Let’s see if we can talk to the pharmacist,” said Garr. “If he’s prescribing this shit without it being approved or legal, we can shut him down.”

Following the directions for the address on the bottle, they found themselves parked in the middle of Huntley Meadows Park. A rural park of trees, trails, and picnic spots, there was no pharmacy to be found.

“It’s all a front to make it look as though they were legal drugs,” said Gator. “This shit is real. That woman is dead because of this, and her two friends aren’t far behind her.”

“What about the prescribing doctor? Do we have an address for him?” asked Alistair.

“Yep, but I’m going to bet my next steak it will be another park or vacant lot,” said Kev.

They drove the short distance to the address near Mount Vernon and were surprised to find an actual practice inside a small federal-style building.

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