He passed the Recovery Café on the north side of the square, with its hand-lettered sign. There were three people sitting at a table in the front window with Styrofoam cups and a box of donuts. One of them was a young woman he had pulled out of a car on the Pekin road in 2023 with her lips blue and her eyes rolled back, and had knelt over her in the gravel with his knee on a broken beer bottle and given her two doses of Narcan, four milligrams in each nostril, and counted her breaths when they came back. She saw him through the glass and lifted her cup to him. He touched his hat brim.
That was the job. People did not understand that, the ones who wrote letters to the newspaper about the drop box and the Rx Watch and the board. They thought it was about arresting people. Some of it was. But most of it was that girl in the window lifting her Styrofoam cup. Most of it was trying to keep the pills from getting to the people before the people got to the pills.
He had said that once at the Kiwanis Club, and somebody had printed it on a mug.
Across the corner, under the green awning of Holcomb Drug, he stopped, and looked down the sidewalk toward the hardware store, out of habit, at the vehicles parked along the curb. A Dodge Ram with a Purdue plate. A Buick he knew was Mrs. Gaither's. A minivan with a car seat in the back. And in front of the hardware store, a white Chevy Silverado, maybe fifteen, twenty years old, with a dented tailgate and a ladder rack on the bed.
He looked at the Silverado for perhaps a second longer than he looked at the minivan.
Then he went in, and the bell rang over his head.
Holcomb Drug had been laid out in 1961 to be walked all the way through, and it still was. You came in the front door under the bell and you were in the part of the store that sold everything else: greeting cards in a rotating wire rack, reading glasses on a tall spinner, cough drops, heating pads, hearing-aid batteries, a rack of blue and gold Burkett's Ford Bobcats sweatshirts. Along the right wall, where the soda fountain had been until 1983, there was still the long marble counter with its row of chrome stools, and on the counter now there were blood-pressure cuffs and a free coffee pot and a basket of dum-dum suckers for the children. You walked past all of that, down the middle aisle, on an old floor of black and white tiles worn gray in a path, and at the back of the store, raised up one step behind a half-wall with a counter on it, was the pharmacy.
The pharmacy had two windows. The left one said DROP OFF and the right one said PICK UP, and between them, set back in a little three-sided booth with a frosted glass panel on each side and a sign on top that said CONSULTATION, there was a third window, smaller, with a stool in front of it. Behind the windows were the shelves, floor to ceiling, white and orderly, and the counting trays, and the two computer screens, and the safe. Ancil had never seen the safe, but everybody knew it was there. Everybody in the county knew Holcomb's had kept its Schedule IIs in a time-locked safe since 2011, when two boys from Jackson County came in at closing with a pellet gun painted black and old Mr. Holcomb, who was seventy-eight, told them to go ahead and shoot him because he wasn't opening anything.
To the left of the front door, against the wall under the window, where Ancil had passed it coming in, stood the kiosk. It was gray steel, about the size of a small refrigerator, with a slot in the top like a bank's night deposit, and a placard on the front that said SAFE MEDICATION DISPOSAL — ACCEPTED: PRESCRIPTION AND OVER-THE-COUNTER MEDICATIONS, INCLUDING CONTROLLED SUBSTANCES — NOT ACCEPTED: SHARPS, AEROSOLS, ILLICIT DRUGS, and below it a smaller placard with a federal registration number and a line that said ANONYMOUS — NO QUESTIONS ASKED.
Ancil had stood in front of it for a second. Then he had walked past it.