Chapter 15
AT THE SAME time, one hundred miles to the south, in her Civic hybrid parked down the block from a CVS pharmacy on La Cienega Boulevard, Sheila Vicente was a woman on the verge of a nervous breakdown.
An assistant district attorney juggling a monstrous caseload, including the upcoming prosecution of a capital murder case, she was also a divorcing mother of two, and on the line with her soon-to-be ex-husband.
“Do you think I’m a doormat you can just walk on?” Vicente demanded.
Silence. Then her husband, cold, said, “No, just the same old inflexible—”
“Bitch?” she said, struggling for control. “I’m a bitch because you have the gall to call me at the eleventh hour and ask for a different weekend with the boys so you and your plastic-boob girlfriend can jet down to Cabo for a quick forty-eight in the sack?”
“Pat’s got two days off from rotation,” her husband shot back. “It’s rare.”
“Not as rare as a day off is for me!” Sheila shrieked. “I haven’t had one in three weeks.” She threw down her cell.
Sheila shook from head to toe, trembled against every bit of will she had left, staring into the distance at what had once been a dream life, barely aware of the blond man with the scruffy beard, the mirror sunglasses, the baggy pants, and the Lakers hoodie pimp-strolling confidently by her car, up the sidewalk, and into the pharmacy.
“Mommy?” a thin little voice came from the backseat. “Mommy sad?”
She looked in the mirror, saw her two-year-old son so worried, and knew now she had no choice. She had to go through with it.
As much as she hated the idea, she was going to fill a prescription for antidepressants. Serious antidepressants.