She flinched as the man with the hand truck banged in through the doors from the shipping area. He wheeled it over to a room to our right, was gone for a moment, then came back out with three more cases, followed by a tall dark-skinned woman with thick black hair in a braid that fell below her belt.
“That’s the inspector,” the pharmacist said. “If you have any questions, please speak to her. I’ve told you all I know.”
The crowd surged toward the woman, who seemed momentarily startled.
“Why can’t we get our prescriptions?” a man called out.
“I’m sorry, sir,” she said. Suh, in a rich Brahmin accent. “But regulations specify that no products can be dispensed during an inspection.”
I had spoken to her only once on Winston Chan’s speakerphone, but I knew her voice instantly: Sumita Desai, enforcement officer for the Registered Pharmacists’ Association of Ontario. No wonder nothing had come up in Silver’s last inspection. She was in on it. No red flags went up? No shit.
“Why are they taking all this stuff away?” another man asked. “Is it being recalled?”
“Not at all,” the inspector said. “We are conducting a routine inspection to ensure the safety of all medications and the continued good health of consumers like you. The sooner you allow us to complete it, the sooner business can get back to usual. Shouldn’t be more than an hour or two.”
There was some general grumbling but people started to disperse. “I’ll take you to Dotson’s,” a middle-aged man told the lady in the walker. “My van seats seven if anyone else needs a ride.”
Sumita Desai was heading back to the exit door when I moved into her path. Her hair was a dark glossy marvel, her eyes every bit as black. “Excuse me,” I said. “Can I ask why you’re inspecting these premises?”
“I’m sorry, suh. Our process is completely confidential.”
“I had a prescription filled yesterday,” I said. “How do I know it’s safe?”
“Take it up with your pharmacist,” she said.
“Have you spoken to Mr. Silver today? Informed him about the inspection?”
“He couldn’t be reached,” she said. “I am told he is ill.” Her voice didn’t sound warm and tropical anymore. It was clipped and precise and very, very cold.
CHAPTER 38
“ They’re saying he called in sick,” I told Ryan.
“But you think it’s worse than that.”
“Ryan,” I said.
“What?”
“You didn’t-”
“Didn’t what?”
“Take the initiative.”
“Get the fuck out. If something happened to him, it wasn’t me.”
“The emmes?”
“The who?”
“The truth?”
“Look, Geller. I know I’m a low-life to you,” he said. “You’ve made that perfectly clear.”
“Oh, come on.”
“But I didn’t kill anyone today. Yet. Check my BlackBerry, you don’t believe me. You’ll see, nobody killed this week. No men, no women, no kids.”
“Okay, okay. I believe you.”
“Like I give a shit.”
“Don’t get your feelings hurt again.”
“How about taking responsibility for your words?”
“This from a hit man?”
“Quit harping on that. Quit defining me only by what I do. What I’ve done. I’m more than one dimension but you don’t see it. Despite everything I’ve told you, despite the other sides of me you’ve seen, you still don’t consider me a whole person.”
“Okay,” I said. “When this is over we’ll go into couples therapy. For now, we have to stall that truck for an hour.”
“Why?”
“I’m going to Silver’s house.”
“What?”
“If something’s happened to him, I need to know. And if nothing has, I’m going to make him tell me who we’re up against.”
“I told you we can’t contact him.”
“Not when Marco was alive, we couldn’t, because he’d know it was you who told. That’s not the case anymore.”
Ryan pondered that for a moment. “You said an hour?”
“His place is fifteen minutes each way-if I pretend I’m in NASCAR. If he’s there, another half an hour maybe to get the truth out of him.”
He flipped me the keys to the Dadmobile. “Promise me one thing: if his house is a crime scene, you don’t even stop. You’re driving my car, don’t forget.”
“Agreed.”
“So the challenge you present me, as I understand it, is to delay that truck for at least one hour without arousing suspicion.”
“That’s right.”
“Not a problem.”
“No?”
“It’s a pharmacy,” he said. “They got rubbing alcohol and whatnot on the shelves?”
“Sure.”
“They got a sprinkler system?”
“One would think.”
He took out his slim gold lighter, flipped open the top and rolled the flint wheel until a steady flame appeared. “Then I got everything else I need.”
I sat in Ryan’s Volvo watching Laura Silver through my field glasses as she pulled weeds from a bed of pink and white impa-tiens in front of her house. Lucas was on the same multicoloured tricycle I had seen in Ryan’s surveillance photo, riding up and down the mutual drive between the Silvers’ house and their neighbour’s. Laura was wearing jeans and a light denim shirt, a worn straw hat perched atop her hair. Her work gloves were muddy, so whenever sweat began to run down her face, she wiped it away with her bare forearm.
She stopped to take a long drink from a bottle of spring water and then called Lucas over. “Come have a drink, honey.”
He pedalled up the drive toward her, helmet askew atop his dark curls, bare tanned legs pumping as fast as they could, making vroom vroom sounds with his mouth and sounding at least as good as my Camry. When he reached Laura, he got off the tricycle and drank greedily from her bottle until water spilled down his chin and the front of his shirt.
I got out of the car and walked slowly, casually, toward the house. Lucas was squatting beside Laura as she pulled up a clump of spiny weeds, digging a trowel into the earth to make sure she got the roots.
“What are you doing?” I heard him ask.
“Getting rid of weeds.”
“Why?”
“Because they won’t let the flowers grow if I leave them there.”
“They look cactusy.”
