"A man who knows exactly how many he's got, at all times." He heard himself say it, and heard how it sounded, and could not stop. It was like watching his own hand reach for a hot stove. "You understand how this looks, to somebody who doesn't know you. A notebook full of times and amounts and running totals. You understand that."
"It's a pain log," Mattie said, from the window. Her voice had gone very flat and very quiet, which was worse than loud. "Hospice asks every family to keep one. So the nurse can see how the pain is controlled and adjust the dose. The counts in the back are his own idea. I've never seen anybody do it that well. Nolan, if you'd read one page of it like a human being instead of a deputy, you'd know what it is."
He had read one page. He had read, without meaning to, the line that said Turned. Cried some, and the line on the next page that said 4:00. Pain 10. Nothing left till 8. Held her. He was not going to say so.
He closed the notebook. He held it, with the freezer bag, in his left hand, against his chest. He took a breath.
"Here's what I'm going to do," he said. "And I want everybody to hear me say I'm doing it by the book. Ancil, I'm going to hold on to this oxycodone, because it isn't yours and you can't tell me why you walked past the box, and I'm going to write you a property receipt for it. Mattie, I'm asking you to hold that hydromorphone until I've had a chance to call the prescriber myself, from my office, on a number I look up, not one off the prescription. That's not a big thing to ask. That's an hour."
"No," Mattie said.
"Mattie."
"No. It is my license on that prescription, Sheriff, not yours. I have exercised my professional judgment and I have verified it, and the law does not give you the power to stand in my store and tell me not to fill it. If you have probable cause to believe a crime has been committed you can go get a warrant. If you want his wife's INSPECT you can send a request to the Board of Pharmacy with a case number like everybody else. And while you're doing that, that woman is lying in a bed out on Tolbert Hollow Road with four tablets left in the house, and in about an hour she's going to start to hurt, and I am not going to be the reason. I'm filling it."
"Then I'll have to ask Ancil to come over to the Annex with me and we'll get it straightened out there."