It was the bottle. That was all. The bag against his ribs, under the coat. He could feel it there, and he knew it was nothing, a quart freezer bag with a pill bottle in it on its way to a steel box, and still it sat against him like something he had stolen.
He got out of the truck. He put his cap on. He walked down the sidewalk past the hardware store and the empty window and the barbershop, where old Elmo Pickens was in the chair and lifted two fingers to him from under the striped cape, and he pushed open the door of Holcomb Drug, and the bell over it rang, the same bell, the same note, the bell he had heard ring when his mother brought him in here for a bottle of pink amoxicillin in 1968.
Sheriff Nolan Caudill had been awake since five-fifteen, which was when he was always awake, whether he set the alarm or not. He had been awake at five-fifteen for thirty-one years, since his first week on night patrol as a deputy under old Sheriff Absher, when he had worked eleven to seven and come home and slept four hours and then lain in bed listening to Verlie make the coffee, and somehow the body had decided that five-fifteen was where the day began and refused to hear any argument.
He made the coffee himself now. He had been making it himself for nearly six years and he still did not make it as well as she had. He used the same can, Folgers in the red plastic tub, and the same machine, a Mr. Coffee she had bought at the Walmart in Seymour in 2014, and the same paper filters, from the same drawer to the left of the sink, and the coffee always came out tasting of the plastic tub.
The filters were in the drawer with the dish towels and the matches and the rubber bands and the warranty for the dishwasher. He did not look in the back of the drawer. He had not looked in the back of that drawer for a long time. He took a filter from the front and shut the drawer with his hip.
He drank the coffee standing at the counter looking out the kitchen window at the yard, which needed mowing one last time before frost, and at the bird feeder Verlie had hung on the dogwood, which he kept filled because she would have, and at the empty kennel along the back fence, where the last of the beagles had lived until two winters ago. The house was a brick ranch on two acres on the Salem road a mile out of town, and it had been too big for two people when Dakota left and was a great deal too big for one. He kept it clean, the bed made with army corners. He kept Verlie's reading glasses on her nightstand and dusted around them on Saturdays.
His phone buzzed on the counter at six. It was a text from dispatch, the overnight summary, which Carla on nights sent out to him and the chief deputy every morning at six whether anything had happened or not. Most mornings nothing had. This morning there had been a rollover on 135 with no injuries, a domestic on Bear Wallow Road that turned out to be a brother and sister arguing about their mother's truck, and a welfare check in Possum Trot on a man who turned out to be alive and deeply annoyed and watching the Reds with the ringer off. And at the bottom, forwarded from the Washington County Sheriff's Office over in Salem: ATTN AREA PHARMACIES/LE — W/M APPROX 60-70, GRAY HAIR, WORK CLOTHES, PRESENTING ALTERED SCRIPTS FOR CII OPIOIDS CLAIMING TO BE CAREGIVER FOR SPOUSE. WALGREENS SALEM 10/6, CVS SCOTTSBURG 10/7. DRIVES OLDER PICKUP, POSS WHITE OR SILVER. ANY INFO CONTACT DET. STARNES.
He read it twice. Then he forwarded it to the six pharmacies in Gentry County that were part of what the newspaper had called, two years ago, the Gentry County Rx Watch, with a photograph of him standing in front of the blue drop box in the lobby with his thumbs hooked in his belt. Five of the six pharmacies were in the program. The sixth was Holcomb Drug. Mattie Holcomb had come to the meeting at the Methodist fellowship hall, and listened to the whole presentation with her hands folded on her purse, and at the end she had stood up and said, very politely, that she would always cooperate with any lawful request from law enforcement and she would always report what the law required her to report, and she would not be calling the sheriff's office on her patients because they had a prescription she didn't like the look of, because that was what a pharmacist was for, and she'd thank him to let her do her job. A few people had clapped. Nolan had smiled and said he respected that, and had not spoken to Mattie Holcomb for more than five sentences at a time since, though he still got his blood pressure pills at her store, because her father had filled his father's prescriptions and because he would be damned if he would drive to Salem to the Walgreens like a man who held a grudge.
He was out of the blood pressure pills. That was one thing he had to do today. He wrote it on the back of his hand with the pen from his shirt pocket, AMLO, the way he had since high school.
He showered and shaved and dressed in the tan shirt and the brown trousers with the stripe, and clipped the badge on, and buckled the duty belt, and put on the hat, a brown felt with a crease he had kept the same since he was first elected in 2010. He was fifty-nine years old, six foot one, two hundred and twenty pounds, most of it still where it had been in the army, with a big square head going bald on top under the hat and a mustache that had turned from brown to sand to the color of cigarette ash over the last ten years. People said he looked like a sheriff. He knew it. He had won four elections in part because of it, and he did not pretend otherwise. He drove a 2021 Tahoe with the county seal on the doors and the light bar on top and a bumper sticker on the back that somebody had put there as a joke and he had never taken off, which said in red, white, and blue, GENTRY COUNTY: WE'RE NOT LOST, WE'RE HOME.