Vance wasn’t sure he’d ever seen a more depressing place as he stepped in, in his sweaty shirt and rumpled pants, removing his hat.

Schmeltzer was at a table drinking a beer in a wifebeater T-shirt and pink shorts. He was thin, with coarse, curly hair, bald on top, and sideburns clear down to his chin. Maybe forty. He was with a couple of other lowlifes who, Vance thought, might have recently crawled their way out of the Everglades, and didn’t look a whole lot higher up the food chain than Schmeltzer himself.

Vance walked up to his table. “Dexter Vaughn said I could find you here. He said you could help me with my back. Hurts like the devil. Show me how it works down here.”

“Dexter, huh?” Schmeltzer looked at him a bit skeptically, squinting over his shades. “He said that. Not that it really matters . . .” The guy grinned, clearly not sizing Vance up as much of a threat. “That’s the beauty of it down here. I know what you’ve come for and welcome to the Promised Land.”

He proceeded to try to raise Dexter by phone, just to be sure, but failing to for obvious reasons, Vance knew—Schmeltzer just said, “Ah, hell with it,” and offered to take Vance around. They climbed into a silver Mercedes convertible, Schmeltzer saying how he had to do a little business anyhow, so why not climb on in. “So how you know Dex?” he asked casually.

Vance pressed his fingers against the fancy leather console. He felt the gun in his belt dig into his back as he pressed against the seat. “Through his cousin. Del. From South Carolina.”

“That’s where you’re from?”

Vance shrugged. Didn’t really matter much if he told him the truth. . . So he simply nodded.

“Del? Not sure I know any Del,” Schmeltzer said, squinting over his shades.

“No matter.” Vance shrugged, looking ahead. “You probably never will.”

“So what’s your story?” Schmeltzer asked. “Work accident? Chronic? Got any disability papers? X-rays you can show? A scrip?”

“Uh-uh.” Vance shook his head.

“Man, they really sent you down here cold, didn’t they?” Schmeltzer squinted. “Tell me, partner, no secrets here, you even got a bad back?”

Vance looked at him and smiled thinly. “Nope.”

“Ha! No worries, bro. Your secret’s safe with me. You will need some kind of story, though. We can do migraines. You’re under a doctor’s treatment up where you live, right? But you’re visiting. I know exactly where to take you. You may have to just spiff the doc a fifty or something. Okay by you?”

“Sure, whatever,” Vance said. He sat back. He felt the gun. He felt he was close.

“So relax! Won’t be but a while, and that back of yours will be floating in the clouds. Welcome to paradise, dude. Take off that jacket . . . Enjoy the ride.”

Vance pushed back deeper into the seat. John got off the highway at Oakland Park Road. In Ft. Lauderdale. The street was busy and commercial. Gas stations. Car dealerships. Fast-food outlets on both sides. Lots of long lights and traffic.

There was something else Vance soon noticed. Pain clinics. Lots of fucking pain clinics. One after another.

“Welcome to Broward County,” Schmeltzer proclaimed, noticing Vance crane his neck. “Pharmaland, USA. More fucking pain clinics on the streets than there are McDonald’s. And that’s a fact!”

“This is where you get them?” Vance had thought Schmeltzer was going to take him to his source, maybe a doctor who wrote bogus scrips. But this . . . “A pain clinic.” He widened his eyes in surprise. This was starting to make him mad. “All legal?”

“Clinic?” Schmeltzer’s grin was wide. “Dude, I’m on the VIP list of half the pill mills from here to Palm Beach. For an extra five bills they sell you a gold card. No wait. Back-to-back prescriptions. Everything you need filled directly on-site. Oxy. Vicodin. Muscle relaxers . . . Whatever floats your boat! All you need to be a dealer here is a license to be an MD! These guys are raking it in.”

Vance felt his fists clench.

“Some of these places, you can just walk right in and rub your back like you’re in pain and they’ll lay it all out like a Chinese take-out menu. Won from Corumn A . . . Just a drug dispenser. But you gotta know the ropes. And you gotta choose your sources carefully. Comprende, partner . . . ? Which is what I do. I used to drive around in some Korean piece of shit. Now look at what we’re riding in . . .”

Vance looked around. There were more of these clinics than there were barbecue stops back where he was from. All you need is an MD? This was how the sonovabitches poisoned his Amanda. “I’m especially interested in the ones where you got what you gave Dexter,” he said.

“Dexter?” Schmeltzer grinned, kind of deferentially. “You are? No worries, I’m gonna take good care of you. And your back!”

Getting closer to the beach, they passed a more upscale section of office buildings—brick and glass. Vance was feeling himself growing angrier by the minute.

Schmeltzer slowed. “See that one over there?”

Across the street. On the ground floor of a redbrick office building. A fancy glass front.

The Harvard Pain Remediation Centers.

“I see it,” Vance said, feeling his pulse start to pound.

“There’s the one. You said Dexter, right? Top-of-the-line. There’s a real MD on the premises, not some Pakistani just out of med school looking to rake in a few bucks. You need a real prescription. No scrip, they turn you away. But no worries . . .” Schmeltzer patted his pocket. “I know someone there. I got us covered . . .”

“This is where the pills you sold to Dexter came from?” Vance’s mood picked up. The Harvard Pain Remediation Centers. He felt he was at the end of a long journey. He felt his fingers itch. “You’re sure about that?”

“Dexter. Frank. Hector . . . Got all the bases covered, dude.” Schmeltzer pulled into the turn lane and shot Vance a quick glance. “You’re not a cop, are you?”

A cop? Vance looked back at him. “No.”

“Good. ’Cause you’re starting to sound to me like you wouldn’t know an Oxy from an Advil . . . And I gotta be sure.”

“My daughter . . .” Vance started to say.

“Your daughter . . . ?” He cut in at a break in the traffic and pulled into the driveway of the clinic, going behind the store and into a spot with PAIN CLINIC written on the concrete barrier.

No one was around.

Schmeltzer shook his head. “Just be glad your daughter’s not from down here. More shit in the schools down here than in the damn hospitals. ’Course, I probably don’t help those numbers, if I say so myself . . . No age discrimination when it comes to business. That’s the Fourth Amendment, right? Everyone gets to pay.”

He put the car in park and cut the motor. “Anyway, you were saying . . . ?”

He turned back to Vance and his eyes almost popped out of his head when he saw the gun.

“My daughter ran over a woman and her baby,” Vance said, hardening his gaze on Schmeltzer’s startled eyes. “Jumped the road while she was high—on OxyContin. Ran ’em over right on their own front lawn. The woman’s husband was in Afghanistan. Never even saw his own kid. Not once.”

Schmeltzer swallowed. “I’m sorry, mister.”

“Her boyfriend gave it to her. Who got it from some leech named Del. Dexter’s aforementioned cousin . . .”

A bead of sweat wound its way down Schmeltzer’s temple. “Where you going with all this, friend? You said that Dex—”

“Dexter’s dead,” Vance said. “They’re all dead. Del. Wayne. All of them except my little girl, Amanda, who might as well be. She’s serving twenty years. And where I’m going with it, friend . . .” Vance said, “is that I traced back the Oxy that twisted my little girl’s brain that day, that done ruined her very existence, to you.”

Schmeltzer stared back at him, the grimness and resignation on his face suggesting that he realized he only had a few more seconds to live. “This ain’t gonna solve anything, you know. They’re just gonna get it from somewhere. Fuck, man, they can find it in their parents’ medicine chests if they—”