"Where is his EpiPen, Verlene?" I said. "His mother packed one. You said she sent a whole pharmacy. Where is it?"
She looked at me for a long second. The phone was still at her ear. The dispatcher was saying something, I could hear the little tinny buzz of it, and Verlene wasn't listening.
"It's in the car," she said.
"Your car? Where? Which car?"
"In the cooler. In the Spider-Man bag. In my car. In the lot." She lifted her chin. "Rule 11.4. No bags on the deck. I'm the president of this Association. I can't make an exception for my own family. How would that look."
The car was a pearl-white Lexus SUV parked in the reserved board-member space by the clubhouse door, in full sun. The thermometer on my truck had said ninety-four when I parked. The inside of a closed car in that kind of heat goes past a hundred and thirty degrees in an hour, and epinephrine is supposed to be kept between sixty-eight and seventy-seven. I knew that. Everyone who lives with this knows that. But a cooked pen is still better than no pen, and Clem had only one dose left, and her one dose was in Verlene's left hand.
I didn't argue. I ran.
That's where my part of the story splits off for a while, and where I have to rely on Yoshiko's footage and on the body camera of an Olathe police officer named Gage Sutter.
I got to the Lexus. It was locked. Of course it was locked. I could see the Spider-Man cooler on the back seat through the tinted glass, red and blue, with a white pharmacy bag stapled shut and tucked into the mesh pocket on its side. I tried every door anyway, the way you do. Then I heard a siren, far off, and then I heard it stop getting closer.
The siren was stopped at the gate.