He did not believe it. He would say that, later, and it would be true. He did not believe that Ancil Sizemore was driving around southern Indiana altering prescriptions. But there was a part of him that did not need to believe a thing to act on it, a part that had been built over thirty-one years in a county where the nicest people he knew had turned out, one after another, to be the ones selling their mother's pain pills out of the glove box, where a deacon at the Pentecostal church on 56 had run a pill mill out of his chiropractic office for three years, where a retired schoolteacher with a Bible on her dashboard had been caught with eleven hundred hydrocodone in a cooler. That part of him had already started walking.
And under that there was something else, that he did not look at. It was the same thing he did not look at on the board in the fourth row, third from the left. He would understand that much later too. He did not understand it then. He only felt the floor tilt, very slightly, the way it tilts on a boat, and he stepped toward the booth to steady himself against it.
"Ancil," he said.
Ancil Sizemore turned on the stool and looked up at him. He had a long, weathered, deeply lined face, the face of a man who had been outdoors in every kind of weather for forty years, and pale blue eyes, and a white scar through his left eyebrow where, the story went, a crossarm had come loose on a pole in 1989. He did not get up. He nodded.
"Sheriff."
"How's Ivah?"
"About like you'd expect."
"I was sorry to hear." Nolan meant it. He had heard at church in July. He had meant to send a card, and had not. "Hospice, is it?"
"Yes."