Brandi had got off the phone. She went to the pick-up window. Ancil heard the man say, "Should be one for Caudill. Amlodipine." He heard Brandi say, "Date of birth?" and the man give it, and then the rattle of the bins behind the window as Brandi went looking.
And then Brandi, who was new, and twenty-three, and had been on the phone with a pharmacy benefit manager in Phoenix for nineteen minutes, turned from the bins with a white bag in her hand and called over her shoulder toward the back counter, not loudly, but not quietly either, in the ordinary voice of a tired person keeping track, "Mattie, you want me to bag the partial on Sizemore's Dilaudid, or are you doing that one?"
Mattie turned from the counting tray and gave her a look that could have taken paint off a barn. Brandi's hand went to her mouth.
It was perhaps a second. Then Mattie said, evenly, "I've got it," and turned back.
Ancil sat in the booth with his cap on his knee and felt, through the frosted glass on his right, the man at the pick-up window turn his head.
Nolan Caudill had not thought anything at all when he walked in. That was what he would remember afterward, when he went back over it, the way he went back over traffic stops and calls he'd been on when they turned out bad, trying to find the place where it had tipped. He had said hello to Ardella Gaither by the greeting cards and given the girl at the window his name and his birthday, and he had been thinking about the coconut pie.
Then the girl said Sizemore and Dilaudid in one breath, and he turned his head, and through the frosted glass of the consultation booth he saw the shape of a man on the stool, a man in a brown canvas coat with a corduroy collar and gray hair cut short above the ears, sitting with his hands on his knees.
He knew the coat. Everybody in Gentry County over the age of forty knew that coat. And he knew the truck in front of the hardware store, now, the ladder rack, the dent in the tailgate. He had looked at it a second longer than the minivan and he had not known why, and now he knew.
And he thought, before he could stop himself thinking it: W/M APPROX 60-70, GRAY HAIR, WORK CLOTHES. CLAIMING TO BE CAREGIVER FOR SPOUSE. DRIVES OLDER PICKUP, POSS WHITE.