They trusted no one. And after what they had done to her, they might be even more suspicious than usual. She needed something else—something less obvious. The answer came by accident when Leah overheard two women talking on the bus.
One of them was complaining that she could not sleep through the night. The other told her to dig out some old prescription sleeping pills from years back.
“That stuff knocks you out cold,” the woman said.
The idea hit Leah all at once. Her aunt had left behind an old box of medications in the apartment. Leah hurried home and went through every bottle and packet. Among them she found two bottles of a strong sedative once prescribed for severe anxiety. Each bottle still held fifty tablets.
She read the label carefully. The normal dose was one or two pills at bedtime. Too much could cause deep sleep, confusion, and in serious cases, coma. Leah thought it through: if she dissolved enough of them into a few bottles of strong wine, would it be enough?
To knock out four grown men, she would need a heavy dose. Now she just had to figure out how to get them to drink it.
Over the next two weeks Leah watched them carefully from a distance, learning their routine. They showed up at the garage every day around two in the afternoon and stayed there until late. Sometimes they went off on whatever business they had, but they always came back.
She noticed one important detail. On Fridays, they usually drank harder than on any other day and let their guard down.
Leah chose Friday, March 7, exactly three weeks after the attack. That morning she called in sick to the sewing shop. Instead, she went to the flea market and bought three bottles of the cheapest fortified wine she could find.
It was thick, sweet, and harsh-smelling. The kind of stuff that could cover almost any chemical taste.
Back home, she crushed all one hundred tablets into powder and divided it among the three bottles. She opened them carefully, poured in the powder, and shook them until it dissolved. The wine turned slightly cloudy, but not enough for a bunch of drunk men to notice.
Then she sealed the bottles again as tightly as she could. Around the necks she wrapped dark electrical tape so they would look unopened at a glance…
