Hold Tight
She glanced over his shoulder. Mike turned around. Carson with the broken nose was glaring through the glass. Mike met his eyes and calmly waited. A few seconds later, Carson broke eye contact and hurried away.
“They’re just boys,” Mike said.
“No, they’re not.”
He let it drop. “Talk to me.”
Rosemary settled back. “Let’s speak in hypotheticals, okay?”
“If that’s what you want.”
“That’s what I want. Let’s say you’re a girl from a small town. Your brother dies of a drug overdose.”
“Not according to the police. They say there is no evidence any of that happened.”
She smirked. “The feds told you that?”
“They said they can’t find anything to back up the claim.”
“I changed some of the facts, that’s why.”
“Which facts?”
“Name of the town, name of the state.”
“Why?”
“Major reason? On the night my brother died, I was arrested for possession with intent to sell.” She met his eye. “That’s right. I gave my brother the drugs. I was his supplier. I leave that part out of the story. People tend to judge.”
“Go on.”
“So I formed Club Jaguar. I already told you my philosophy. I wanted to create a safe haven where kids could party and let loose. I wanted to channel their natural inclination to rebel in a protected way.”
“Right.”
“So it started that way. I busted my butt and raised enough money to get it off the ground. We opened this place in a year. You can’t imagine how difficult that was.”
“I can, but I really don’t need to hear about it. How about fast-forwarding to the part where you started holding pharm parties and stealing prescription pads?”
She smiled and shook her head. “It’s not like that.”
“Uh-huh.”
“I read in the paper today about a widow who did volunteer work for her local parish. Over the last five years she’s skimmed twenty-eight thousand dollars from the tithing basket. Did you see that?”
“No.”
“But you’ve heard of others, right? Dozen of cases like that. The guy who works for the charity and siphons off money to buy himself a Lexus—do you think one day he just woke up and decided to do that?”
“I don’t really know.”
“That church lady. You know what I bet happened? One day she’s counting out the money in the tithing basket and she stays late and maybe her car is broken down and she can’t get home. It’s getting dark. So maybe she calls the taxi company and figures, well, she volunteers all this time and the church should pay for it. She doesn’t ask. She grabs five bucks out of the basket. That’s all. She’s more than owed it. That’s how this stuff starts, I think. It’s an incremental thing. You see all these decent people getting arrested for embezzling from schools or churches or charities. They start small and move so slow it’s like watching clocks—they don’t even see. They don’t think they’re doing anything wrong.”
“And that’s what happened with Club Jaguar?”
“I thought that teens wanted to party in a social way. But it was like the midnight basketball program. They wanted to party, yes, but with booze and drugs. You can’t create a place to rebel. You can’t make it safe and drug-free because that’s the whole purpose—they don’t want it safe.”
“Your concept failed,” Mike said.
“No one showed—or if they did, they didn’t stay. We were labeled as lame. We were viewed like one of those evangelical groups that make you take a virginity pledge.”
“So I don’t get what happened next,” Mike said. “You just started letting them bring in their own drugs?”
“It wasn’t like that. They just did. I didn’t even know about it at first, but in a way it made sense. Incremental, remember? One or two kids brought some prescription drugs from home. Nothing too heavy-duty. And we aren’t talking cocaine or heroin here. These were FDA-approved medicines.”
“Bull,” Mike said.
“What?”
“These are drugs. Hard-core drugs, in many cases. There’s a reason you need a prescription to get them.”
She made a scoffing noise. “Well, sure, a doctor would say that, wouldn’t he? Without you being the arbiter of who gets what medicine, your business is dead—and you’ve already lost a lot of money to Medicare and Medicaid and all the squeezing from insurance companies.”
“That’s crap.”
“Maybe it is in your case. But not every doctor is as caring as you are.”
“You’re justifying a crime.”
Rosemary shrugged. “You could be right. But that was how it started—a few teens bringing in some pills from home. Medicine, when you think about. Prescribed and legal. When I first heard about it, I was upset and then I saw how many kids we were attracting. They were going to do it anyway and I was giving them a safe place. I even hired a medical practitioner. She worked at the club just in case something went wrong. Don’t you see? I was getting them in the doors. They were better off here than somewhere else. I had programs too—so they could talk out their problems. You saw the flyers about counseling. Some of the kids signed up for those. We were doing more good than harm.”
Mike said, “Incremental.”
“Exactly.”
“So naturally you still need to make money,” he said. “You find out how much these drugs are worth on the street. So you start asking for a cut.”
“For the house. For expenses. I hired the medical professional, for example.”
“Like the church lady needing taxi money.”
Rosemary smiled, though there was no joy in it. “Yes.”
“And then Adam walked in the door. The son of a doctor.”
It was like the cops told him. Entrepreneurial. He didn’t care about her reasons really. She may be handing him a line or maybe not. It didn’t much matter. She had a point about how people slip-slide into trouble. That church lady probably didn’t volunteer her time in order to start skimming money. It just starts to happen. It happened in their town Little League a couple of years ago. It happened with school boards and the local mayor’s office, and every time you hear it you can’t believe it. You know these people. They aren’t evil. Or are they? Is it circumstances that make them do it—or is it more this self-denial that Rosemary was describing?