Pillbillies Read online

  Pillbillies

  K.L Randis

  .

  For S.

  Copyright 2014 by K.L Randis

  All Rights Reserved. No part of this book may be reproduced, scanned or distributed in any printed or electronic form without permission,

  Cover Design Copyright 2014 by K.L Randis

  All Rights Reserved

  Characters, places and incidents are used fictitiously and any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, business establishments, events or locales is entirely coincidental and not intended by the author.

  Author’s Note:

  Thank you to the paramedics, police officers, recovering addicts, family members and friends whose invaluable input, personalities and stories are embedded in the crux of this novel.

  .

  ALSO BY K.L RANDIS

  #1 Bestselling Novel

  Spilled Milk: Based On a True Story

  Table of Contents

  CHAPTER ONE

  CHAPTER TWO

  CHAPTER THREE

  CHAPTER FOUR

  CHAPTER FIVE

  CHAPTER SIX

  CHAPTER SEVEN

  CHAPTER EIGHT

  CHAPTER NINE

  CHAPTER TEN

  CHAPTER ELEVEN

  CHAPTER TWELVE

  CHAPTER THIRTEEN

  CHAPTER FOURTEEN

  CHAPTER FIFTEEN

  CHAPTER SIXTEEN

  Excerpt from PILLBILLIES: BOOK #2

  Acknowledgements

  ALSO BY K.L RANDIS

  CHAPTER ONE

  “Lacey is dead, there’s nothing else we could do for her.” The paramedic avoided Jared’s gaze as he spoke. “How old was she?”

  Was. Past tense.

  “Son?” asked the paramedic. He didn’t have time to feel sorry for the twenty-something-year-old standing in front of him. The police had just arrived, swarming the house with the vitality of an angry beehive, and he would need to answer their questions about the body. “How old was she?”

  Jared pushed through the raging voices in his head, “She just turned three. Last week. How did she—?” His mouth was dry. The paramedic had to be lying. Lacey couldn’t be dead. Jared saw her playing with the blocks stacked by the woodstove that morning. She had carried over the giraffe he’d given her when she was born, asked to sit in his lap and—

  “From the looks of it she panicked when her face hit the water in the bathtub. She was face down but rigor had already set in on her extremities.” As he struggled to push out the last two words, he licked his mustache and looked into Jared’s eyes for the first time.

  Jared could tell the emergency responder didn’t want to apologize for a loss that could have been prevented but he was forced to. It was part of his ethical duties.

  “I’m sorry,” he mumbled. In a subtle attempt to force Jared to acknowledge the reality of the situation the paramedic coaxed him, “What’s the last thing you can remember?”

  * * *

  Jared muttered under his breath at his Mom as she ran over emergency contact numbers. When she started explaining Lacey’s bedtime routine for the third time he groaned and looked up at her, “I got it, Mom. Get to Dad’s fancy medal dinner, I can handle Mickey Mouse and a few bedtime stories.”

  “Don’t get smart Jared. This is exactly why your father asked you to move out after this weekend, you always get smart. It’s not a fancy medal dinner, it’s a tribute to the fallen heroes your father had the privilege of working with during 9/11. You just don’t get it—”

  “Oh, I get it all right Ma. It’s very clear to me. Crystal. Dad’s elite firefighter chief status can’t be compromised and he’s too embarrassed to share space with his drug addict son. Even though I’ve been sober for over four years I’m still an embarrassment, right?”

  “Four years? We found your stash of pills under Dad’s La-Z-Boy not even eight months ago. What if your little sister found them? Lacey could have died.”

  A smirk crept over Jared’s face. He had forgotten about the baggie he taped to the underside of his dad’s recliner and was impressed his mom remembered. He had meant to grab them before their weekly cleaning lady found them, but he was too high and in too much of a rush to meet up with some of his regular customers to go over his mental checklist before leaving the house. The momentary lapse of judgment happened only one time—he had a reputation for being the most reliable pill pusher—but his mom was left to decipher the clues.

  “How can you sit there and lie and tell me that paying thousands of dollars for rehab for you did nothing?” she continued. “Wasn’t it enough watching Troy die? Did even that not inspire you to finally get yourself together?”

  “You shut the hell up!” Jared lurched in the direction of his mom with clenched fists and his arms flailing. He didn’t make contact, he wouldn’t, but knew he could if he tried. “Don’t talk about shit you know nothing about. Don’t ever bring up Troy’s name. Ever.”

  The look on his mom’s face was familiar. She had worn the same arched eyebrow and pencil thin lips when Jared begged her to send him to rehab when he was nineteen.

  It was true though.

  He had watched Troy die.

  Troy pushed more heroin into his body than he meant to that February night. He looked at Jared just before the push, his eyes dancing like they often did when school used to be cancelled for snowstorms that were common to the Pocono Mountain area. Snow days meant an entire afternoon of drug-induced solitude, disrupted only by the faint lingering of hunger sometime around 3 P.M despite Facebook’s explosion of status updates: Sleeping in! Snow tubing! No quiz today!

  Jared and Troy’s only concern was to get high.

  They were considered adults after graduating high school though, needing to find areas of back woods and winding roads in the uneventful town of Brodheadsville, Pennsylvania to park the 5-speed souped-up Honda to replace their snow days. Troy had a habit of letting out a war cry as he pushed the decadent liquid in-between his toes to hide the residuals from his girlfriend and Jared would hum mindlessly as he untwisted a Ziploc baggie of assorted pills to pick out his favorites. Troy died in the passenger seat of Jared’s car that night, a smile spread across his face so wide he’d make the Batman Joker jealous.

  “All I’m saying Jared,” his mom started, “is that you have so much potential…I just wish you could see it like I do.” She sighed as she exited the kitchen, “Come on Lacey, Mommy and Daddy have dinner to go to. Jared will give you a bath, we’ll be back late.”

  Lacey squealed and came running around the corner, her emerald eyes meeting Jared’s as she made him promise that the bath would have tons of bubbles, “Dons of bubbles Jare, I want dons of them.”

  Lacey pushed her Barbie through the soapy lagoon as Jared turned off the faucet. He understood that his dad kicking him out was a final desperate attempt to get him to man up and get clean.

  The timing couldn’t have been worse. He had a Nike shoebox full of heroin baggies that he was set to start distributing. Graduating from dealing pills to heroin was not a decision that came lightly. Jared had sworn that after Troy he would never touch the stuff, but the amount of money to be made was inviting: He could afford to get his own place, Tina would move in with him for sure and maybe she would stop snooping on his phone if she knew where he was more often.

  Maybe he would get her a ring.

  Probably not.

  “Jare, you wanna have this Barbie?” Lacey held up a soaking wet Ariel and teasingly rocked her side to side. The white beaded bracelet they had made together a few days earlier clicked and jingled with the motion of her wrist.

  “Why you still calling me Jare? It’s Jared. There’s a duh at the end. Nah Lace, I’m good.” He laughed at the shortened pet name he used fo
r her too. Jared eyed the bathroom door, staring towards the direction of his bedroom. His inner conscience told him that maybe trying the new heroin while he was watching Lacey wasn’t the best of ideas. Although the conversation he’d had with his dad earlier that night reinforced that he didn’t give a shit if they came home from dinner and he was still high.

  Jared sighed and pushed the tussles of hair from his forehead, “Hey Lace sing that song for me, the one from Mickey Mouse. I need to get something. I want to hear you super loud, yell it to me, okay?”

  That jumble-toothed smile.

  Lacey held the Ariel Barbie out in front of her face and belted out the theme song as Jared slipped into the next room and pulled a baggie from his closet. It took him less than three minutes to get the needle ready, he’d watched Troy do it a million times.

  It took Jared by surprise when he met his heroin supplier earlier that week, shaking the kid’s hand wondering if he was even eighteen. If he was, he couldn’t have been two years out of high school and at first he thought the kid was sent as a decoy meant to test Jared’s authenticity in wanting to join a new crew as a heroin pusher.

  Brodheadsville was a tight run ship and it had taken him several months of negotiations through mutual friends to land the gig. It was hard to convince a heroin provider that someone like Jared was switching product.

  Jared’s reputation as the go-to guy for prescription pills was years in the making. There were truckloads of competition he’d trampled. In the world of drug dealing there was a simple supply and demand equation to success. Heroin came in, pills were pushed out; heroin offered a stronger high at a lower price. He had two options: retire while he was on top of his game, diving into the work force for the first time since his two-week stint of employment at Burger World while in high school or switch majors.

  Heroin it was.

  There were other reasons Jared had been itching to try the heroin hiding in his closet. It looked different than he’d remembered when Troy used. There was a hint of green in those baggies, not the usual coffee colored substance. Someone must have stepped up their game and made it more pure. Either way, Jared readied his needle and spoke out loud to the beige bedroom walls.

  “Can’t sell the stuff if you don’t know how it works, right Troy? Just a little hit, no biggie.” He found a vein just below the tightened belt on the opposite side of his elbow. The needle was only half of what he thought his tolerance level could handle, just in case. He had always been a functional addict: school, girlfriends, babysitting Lacey on the occasion. If he could function on drugs it meant he was always in control.

  The rush was instant.

  The immediate realization that Jared made a huge mistake was just as fierce. As he stumbled into the living room and grabbed his cell phone off of the side table, he could feel himself floating away. Tick tock.

  “9-11 what is your emergency?” said the woman on the other end.

  “I need someone, sircle, comeeee….Pleash-”

  “Sir? Hello?”

  “I…can’t…”

  His body slowed. Each breath was a forced push and pull from his lungs. As Jared lay sprawled out on the plush carpet, a muffled woman’s voice disappearing into the background, he had the faint feeling of needing to remember something important.

  It didn’t matter.

  Nothing mattered.

  * * *

  The paramedic poised over Jared Vorcelli’s body as the familiar sting of a needle slid into the crook of his left hand. Jared couldn’t open his eyes but the stench told him the emergency responder was called in from a family dinner. Garlic, lots of garlic. “Give me a sixteen gage, and for Christ sake someone take the tourniquet off before his arm explodes.”

  A woman’s voice, “I got it.”

  Jared’s body was being shuffled around the living room floor as he was being prodded. “Push this into the vein. Wait until you see blood before pulling it out. I said wait, damn it. Okay, now push the plastic catheter forward and dispense the needle.”

  Jared would have smiled at the rookie if he could.

  Amateur.

  “Put the pigtail on there and get that I.V started, 20 cc’s should do it.”

  The woman’s voice again. “Okay, then the Narcan right? That comes next?”

  “Yep. And push it slow, if you do it too fast he’ll wake up madder than a tornado in a trailer park and puke. I hate puke.”

  “Okay, slow…got it.”

  Jared’s eyes shot open ten seconds later. Clutching his chest he struggled to get his dad’s La-Z-Boy recliner into focus. What in the hell is going on?

  “You’ve overdosed. Can you tell me your name?” said Garlic man. “Do you know where you are?”

  The room shifted and spun into familiar shapes and layout. Garlic man and the woman were on bended knee at his side. Jared wondered how long he had been out and the cell phone he had used to call 9-11 on before passing out brushed the knuckles of his right hand as he propped himself into an upright position.

  “I didn’t overdose, I could hear you working on me. And I could smell you.” Jared rubbed the bridge of his nose in disgust at the accusation. The heroin hit him harder than he’d anticipated.

  The paramedic rolled his eyes. “Okay let’s get you to the hospital, get you checked out. It took us a while to get to you since we didn’t have an address. Can you stand?”

  “The hospital?” Jared nodded his head, “Yeah, I guess.” He let Garlic man help him to his feet and he wondered how he was going to explain everything to his mom as he stepped over a stuffed giraffe.

  Lacey.

  “No! Where’s Lacey? Do you have her? DO YOU HAVE HER?” Jared shouted.

  “Who’s Lacey?” Garlic man looked around for the imaginary person in the room.

  Jared couldn’t hear what the paramedic was saying as he sprinted for the bathroom. He tackled the ajar door and let out an endless curdling scream at Lacey’s body floating on the surface of the bathtub.

  “She’s gone. Oh holy Jesus, she’s purple man, she’s gone,” the paramedic cried out, pulling him backward when he attempted to scoop her up. His muscles strained under Jared’s brute strength and futile attempt to free himself, “Don’t touch her! Come on, we can’t help her.”

  Lacey’s delicate ivory skin was patterned with cobblestoned patches of purple. Those emerald eyes were somewhere beneath the murky water. Ariel floated near her left hand, abandoned, and staring at Jared with accusing eyes.

  The little fingers that had waved at him earlier were stubbornly stiff.

  “God no, no no no no no. Lacey… LACE!” Jared fell to his knees in the doorway of the bathroom, sobs echoing off the hallowed hallway walls as two other paramedics swarmed behind him, attempting to keep him at bay.

  One guy shouted orders over his shoulder as he reached into the bath, “Water is lukewarm.” He carefully positioned his fingers near her bicep area, flinching a little when her small frame bobbed peacefully across the water. “No pulse. We need to seal the house and wait for the police, this is a crime scene now. Call in for a second bus,” he said, glaring at Jared from a bended knee beside the tub, “and get this guy out of here.”

  CHAPTER TWO

  Dennis Grooms hung one meaty leg over the side of his flattened mattress, dragging the sole of his sock across the ashen floor. He never cared to use his prison commissary funds for hygiene products like soap or razors, especially since the good stuff was more expensive: Cracker packets, chips, M&Ms. Prison lacked luxuries and his money was better spent indulging in the few things available to make his belly feel more satisfied.

  “You don’t need soap when you have no one to impress,” he had told Jared a few months into their relationship as bunkmates. “Now that I got a cellie, maybe you can splurge and buy me some if ya want. If not that’s okay too, I don’t mind the smell.” He lifted his right arm to display a large ring around the armpit of his faded navy scrubs. Jared turned his head, half smiling and half disgusted.
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  “Yeah, I guess that’s true. I, on the other hand, need to impress the judges. They’re the ones who decide if I get any leniency. Not that I deserve it.”

  “What the hell’d you do, set a daycare on fire?” Dennis started to laugh and the years of smoking caught in his chest. He simultaneously wheezed, hacked and sputtered like a Farmall tractor that had been sitting for fifty years. After a three-minute fit he wiped his mouth and sat up on the cot, curly hair oiled to the sides of his head.

  “When’s the last time you showered exactly?” Jared asked.

  “Never mind. Want to know why I’m in here?”

  Jared opened his mouth but Dennis overruled, “I killed my girlfriend. Choked her. Well, actually I snapped her neck trying to choke her.” He held his hands around his own neck to show Jared. “Lord knows I’ve never tried to kill no one I’d been sleeping with before, so I didn’t know what the hell I was doing. But she died all the same, that was the point. So here I am stuck in this shithole of a prison with you, Princess.”

  Jared stared at him, ‘Oh’ was all he could say. His mind flashed to the last time he’d seen Lacey’s lifeless body. He was trying to shake the image from his head and a distraction seemed like a safe way to do that, even if that meant engaging in conversation with the likes of Dennis. “So you wanted to kill her? Your girlfriend?”

  “Wife,” Dennis corrected, “and awe hell no.” He flopped backward onto his cot, a round hump of flesh peeking out from underneath his shirt. Clearly Dennis had no desire to use the jail’s workout equipment. “I loved her man, I didn’t want to kill her. But she forgot to mop the damn floor. I mean what kinda woman forgets to mop the damn floor? Doesn’t make sense to me why, so I guess she was askin’ for it.”

  Jared tried to hide the gleam in his eye, “Yeah, man, I get you. I like a clean floor too I guess.” He had no idea what he was doing. He had heard stories from acquaintances and pushers of his who had been sent to prison, but he never really thought to ask any in-depth questions about what it would be like to survive when you’ve become just a number in a prison instead of a breathing human being. Do you befriend your cellie? Keep to yourself? All Jared knew was that he was 24 years old, relatively decent looking and had no idea what the hell he was going to do if anyone started with him. The first several months Jared spent in a cell by himself or with someone while they were in the process of being transferred to a different facility. He’d never had a cellmate for longer than a few days. Agreeing with anything Dennis said seemed like a safe bet. They were likely to be together for the remainder of his incarceration.