Pushing past a man in a wheelchair seemed wrong, but he wasn’t leaving me with much choice. I wasn’t leaving those pills behind. They were my only evidence, and Clement’s future depended on it.
I dodged to the side around Saul’s wheelchair and back behind the counter where he’d dumped the pills into the plastic tray. I grabbed for them, but they slipped out of my hand and skittered across the floor.
Crap!
“Don’t go after them, Nicole.”
Normally I wouldn’t have listened. It’s not like he could chase me down if I found them and ran. But a note in his voice—half command, half plea—made me stop and look up at him.
Saul had a gun pointed at me.
24
Stall him, the voice in my head—the one that sounded suspiciously like my mom and stayed calm even when I wanted to panic—said. Stall him and call for help.
But I couldn’t call for help. It’s not like Saul would let me pull out my phone and dial Chief McTavish any more than he would let me pick up Clement’s pills and the bottle and walk out of here.
I might be able to text. I kept my upper arm still and wriggled my phone out of my pocket. My hands shook, making it harder than it should have been.
“Why would you bring a gun to work?” I tried to keep my voice innocent and naïve. I didn’t have to fake a wobble. It did that on its own. “I haven’t heard of any robberies in Fair Haven lately.”
Saul had the gun in his right hand, his elbow resting on the arm of his wheelchair and his left arm supporting the right to keep the gun straight and level at me. The man wasn’t taking any chances of missing if he fired.
“I think you’re smart enough to figure that out,” he said. “It seems like you’ve figured out other better-kept secrets.”
I lowered my gaze just enough to spot Chief McTavish’s name in my text contacts list. My shaking fingers missed his name and hit Mandy’s instead.
My throat closed. I’d have to spend too much time staring at my phone to back out of my messages to Mandy and select McTavish. Now I had to decide between risking that—and having Saul shoot me because he figured out I was sending a message for help—or risking sending a message to Mandy and having her not realize the urgency of it.
Meanwhile, Saul was staring at me, clearly waiting for my response. “It’s hard to think straight when there’s a gun pointed at me, but if I had to guess, I’d say it was to shoot someone.”
Nice, Nicole. Get sarcastic with the man pointing a gun at you. My chances of getting out of this one alive didn’t seem great unless I could get a text sent for help immediately.
Saul gave a slow I’m-disappointed-in-you head shake.
Disappointment wasn’t an emotion I’d expected in this situation. The look on his face dug up the evil voice in my head that told me a disappointment was all I’d ever be. It’d picked a fine time to come back to life after I’d worked so hard to stab a stake through its heart and bury it.
I was panicking again and losing my focus. I could feel it. Now wasn’t the time to think about the ways I still fell short of the person I wanted to be. I had to do something. Maybe if I reminded him that we’d been—if not quite friends—amiable acquaintances.
“I’m sorry, Saul. That wasn’t kind of me, but I thought we liked each other, and now you’re going to kill me.”
I moved my thumb onto the keypad on my screen and texted Help pharmacy gun to Mandy.
At least I hoped that was what I’d sent. I couldn’t afford to break eye contact with Saul now. Hopefully it’d make it more difficult for him to pull the trigger and kill me if he had to do it while looking me in the face. If he told me to close my eyes or turn around, he had another thing coming.
I also had to hope that message was enough for Mandy to call 911. I’d have been more confident if the name I’d hit by accident were Mark’s, but his, unfortunately for me, had been higher up because he was the person I texted most often. I hadn’t gone with him right away because I’d wanted to save time by texting Chief McTavish.
Saul’s upper body slumped slightly in his chair. “I’m not sure yet if I’m going to kill you or myself.” He moved his left hand off the gun and wiped his forehead. He brought his hand right back into place. “I bought this gun before my surgery. I wanted a quick way out if things went badly, and at the time, I didn’t want to take the risk of stealing something from work to use in case I ended up not needing it. But then when they told me I’d never walk again and the pain would continue to get worse for the rest of my life…”
His throat worked, and red crept up into his cheeks.
My phone buzzed softly in my hand. I pretended to drop my gaze to the counter.
Fun? Mandy had texted in reply.
Crap wasn’t a strong enough word. My blind texting skills weren’t up to par at all.
Saul swallowed hard. “All I could think when they told me was it wasn’t fair. Then Clement came in my first day back to drop off his new prescription for the high cholesterol meds. I decided I wasn’t going to kill myself. I wasn’t the one who deserved to die. I hadn’t done anything wrong. There were other people who deserved to be punished for ruining innocent people’s lives.”
Other people? Plural? The heat in the pharmacy felt like it’d jumped up twenty degrees.
Dear God, it wasn’t just Clement. He’d done this to others as well.
Dr. Horton’s was the only pharmacy in Fair Haven, and Saul knew enough about medications to tamper with them for anyone he wanted revenge on. Like putting something useless in his diabetic brother-in-law’s insulin syringes. Or swapping out Victor Kristoffersen’s blood thinners for a blood clotting medication. He could have killed others, too, that I didn’t know about.
And no one would have suspected anything because he’d orchestrated all of it to look natural.
“I wish it hadn’t been you who figured it out,” Saul said.
That made two of us. Or, at least, I wished I’d figured it out sooner, when I was somewhere safe and could have told Chief McTavish about my suspicions and had him follow up.
Saul raised the gun up a few inches, level with my heart. I sucked in a breath and held it. He lowered the muzzle a fraction again.
I had to keep him talking. He didn’t want to kill me. I wasn’t one of the people who’d wronged him. I’d been kind and friendly. Maybe I could talk him into turning himself in or delay long enough that Mandy would realize something was wrong when I didn’t reply to her.
I put my phone back in my pocket and raised my hands slowly to chest height in a gesture halfway between don’t shoot and wait. “I’m only a few months away from getting married. I just became a godmother to a beautiful little boy, and I want to see him grow up. I don’t want to die. I haven’t done anything to hurt you.”
The gun dipped another half inch, but he still didn’t lower it completely. He knew what letting me go would mean for him. He’d obviously worked hard to kill in a way that would be hard to prove and even harder to trace. I couldn’t expect him to throw the gun aside and give up at my first plea.
