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which was half what the clinic charged for a doctor’s visit. Meanwhile, he kept the money he made from selling the meds, offering the docs a $1,000 weekly fee for the use of their DEA registrations, which allowed him to order the drugs. All in all, a much better deal than the 50/50 split on total profits that he’d had with Overstreet.

    As the weeks went by, more and more of the patients came from out of state, especially hill-country states like Kentucky and Tennessee, where authorities had cracked down on narcotic painkillers. They were white country people, mostly, and they stood out in South Florida in their pasty winter skin and camouflage baseball caps, scrawny as crack fiends or spilling out of their T-shirts and cutoff jeans shorts. They usually drove down in groups, and they looked and smelled like people who had spent a long time in a car, with their rumpled clothes and sour breath. Some looked sick, sweaty, like they had the flu.
    The new doctors liked having Derik around. Things seemed to run better, and he made them feel safe.
    One night, Dianna drove Derik home and asked him if he would come on board full-time. The place was growing. They needed him.
    Derik wasn’t sure. He’d always made good money in construction, but he wasn’t sure whether he could make ends meet going solo. He still didn’t have a driver’s license, and getting to worksites was tough.
    Dianna said: Don’t worry about the money. We’ll give you whatever you want.
    So Derik started working every day at South Florida Pain. Chris paid him $1,000 a week to start out. Derik was good with the patients. He came up with ways of dealing with the constant overflowing parking lot, kept order in the waiting room, developed systems for the paperwork. He figured it was a short-term gig. He’d make a little money and return to construction when he got his driver’s license back.
    At first, Derik kept mixing up the name of the primary drug they were selling. Dr. Overstreet had told Chris to order generic versions of Roxicodone instead of the better-known but more expensive OxyContin. They were basically the same drug—oxycodone—but Overstreet also believed OxyContin prescriptions were more closely monitored than the generics. Plus, a lot of recreational users seemed to prefer roxies, especially the little blue ones made by Mallinckrodt, which were supposed to be easiest to crush, dissolve, and inject. Derik kept calling them RoxiContins, which apparently didn’t exist, and the others busted his chops about it.
    In those early days, everything was loose and easy, and everything was funny. Dianna brought her wiener dog, Moe, to the clinic each day, because they usually stayed open late. When Derik got a phone call from someone he didn’t want to talk to, he’d say that the caller needed to talk to the clinic’s office manager, Moe, but he was sorry, Moe wasn’t available right at that moment. Or he’d put Moe’s name on paperwork. Derik and Chris flew remote control helicopters in the parking lot, and zapped each other with stun guns. Derik kept the fridge in a back room stocked with cold Bud Lights. When the lines in the waiting room got too long and people were getting impatient, Derik would buy a meal for the whole room. The toilet at South Florida Pain was always out of order, so they’d put up a sign directing patients to use the restrooms at C.C.’s Fish Camp across the street. Two hours later, when that bathroom was destroyed, they’d put up a new sign telling people to go to McDonald’s to relieve themselves. People would drive by and see the long lines outside and think the Christian radio station in the bungalow next door was doing a giveaway promotion. Parking was a problem from the get-go. They rented four extra spots from the podiatrist to their east, but that wasn’t enough. Patients parked in neighboring businesses’ lots, wherever they could find a spot. It was chaos, and the most fun place Derik had ever