Recluse
04-27-2013, 11:52 AM
This second novel is kicking me in the keester pretty hard. It is research intensive on some things, with most of the research being in the form of interviews and phone conversations and on-site visits. Weather (and recovering from the hospital madness) has slowed down my flying to locales which has added to the frustration.
Nonetheless, the project moves forward and I figured I'd toss out the second chapter here for general consumption before I hole up again and become scarce. Have other things going on as well that are consuming time and resources, and not necessarily in a good way and will explain in another post.
In the meantime. . .
:coffee:
Chapter 2 (FALSE GODS)
THE OBVIOUS BULGE OF A gun underneath the jacket of the man in front of him didn’t intimidate the pharmacist one bit. Neither did the size of the man’s companion, which was considerable—although much of it was due to blubber born of too much time spent at the dinner table and too little time spent exercising. Carter Goode grew up in west Texas where guns were as common as ball-point pens. He himself had a Kimber .45ACP concealed in a holster under his white lab coat. Being a registered pharmacist he knew it made sense to be armed what with all the drug-crazed loonies running around. This was Gainesville, Texas, a small town about sixty-five miles north of Dallas. But it was on the interstate and the big superhighway transported human trash as easily as it did everything else and some of that trash unfortunately stuck around Gainesville.
The two men’s business cards read “arbitration and negotiation” but Goode was having none of it. He knew exactly who they were being paid by and for what. “For the last time, gentlemen,” he explained. “My pharmacy is not for sale. Not now, and not anytime in the foreseeable future.”
“You’re getting old,” the man with the concealed gun pointed out, a plastic smile stuck on his face. “Don’t you want to retire?”
“Sure,” Goode replied. “And both my son and daughter-in-law are registered pharmacists and they’ll take over the business. I have zero intention of ever selling it to your cookie-cutter employer.”
“Well, that’s too bad,” the larger man said. “We can open up a store here and then run you out of business, then you’ll have wished you had sold to us.”
“You really think that?” Goode asked. “My dad opened this pharmacy up when he came back from Korea. We’ve had this drugstore since before both of you boys were even born. I’ve got third and fourth generation customers and patients here that sure as hell aren’t going to hop ship over to some national chain that imports everything from communist China and treats their employees like garbage. In case you neanderthals haven’t figured it out, this is small town Texas and we don’t particularly care too much for your kind of business.”
Behind the men, the bells above the door jingled as a couple of customers came in. Looking up, Goode saw two familiar faces approaching his counter—and he couldn’t help but smile. “Something funny?” the smaller goon asked, the annoyance in his voice evident. This was the third time they’d come down to this hick town in northern Texas trying to buy this particular pharmacy. It was a gold mine that their employer desperately wanted. A perfect location, generations of pharmacy patients and exactly zero debt owed. They’d offered some serious money to this idiot and for the life of everyone involved, they couldn’t figure out why the stupid son of a bitch was being so damned stubborn. Didn’t matter. Their orders on this third visit were to get their point across unmistakably and by whatever means necessary. Well, almost by whatever means necessary.
“If you’ll excuse me, I have some customers to take care of, and—”
“We’ll decide when we’re through talking,” the larger man said, not even bothering to turn around and acknowledge the newly arrived customers. “This pharmacy is closed,” he said loudly, still facing Goode.
“That is odd. It looks open to me,” an accented man’s voice said. “Are you still open for business, Seņor Carter?”
“Absolutely, Ramon,” the pharmacist replied with a grin. “These gentlemen were just leaving, weren’t you boys?”
“No,” the other man said. “We were actually getting ready to lock the doors so we could complete the sale of your drugstore.”
“You are selling your drugstore?” Ramon Alvarez said. “That is news to me.” Turning to the man he’d walked in with, he asked, “Have you heard anything about Seņor Carter selling his drugstore.”
“Not a thing. News to me,” the man said. “I think maybe these two gentlemen have their wires crossed, you suppose?”
“I think you are right,” the Mexican agreed, walking up to the two men. “Why don’t you two let our amigo be and leave now.”
“Listen friend, I don’t think you’re in a position to be asking us to do anything and—”
“I am not asking,” the Mexican said easily. “I am insisting or otherwise you are going to need some of the pain medications Seņor Carter sells here. Probably even some that require a doctor to prescribe them for you—because if you insist on being a pendejo, you both will end up seeing a doctor before the hour is up.”
The smaller man who had the gun was looking at the Mexican’s companion. He had an unsettling air about him. He appeared to be in his mid-forties, stood about five foot ten inches tall, looked to weigh around one-hundred eighty-five or so pounds, was extremely fit and radiated absolute confidence. He was like a lion outside his cage—keenly aware of his surroundings, and completely without fear. He’d seen this man somewhere before... As he shifted to make his gun bulge more obvious, the man in front of him smiled slightly—knowingly, even—and shifted his sport coat back a few inches on his right side. Sitting in a high-rise, quick draw holster was a Colt 1911 45ACP. The Chicago thug’s brain began processing even more rapidly until it finally clicked. Oh ****.
“Carter, do you want these two big city boys to leave your drugstore?” the man in the sports coat asked.
“Well, Dillon, if you and Ramon would show them to their car, I would certainly be grateful,” the pharmacist said, still keeping his hand on the handle of the short-barreled shotgun he’d bolted underneath the counter. He’d seen the man’s gun-bulge the minute he’d walked in the door.
“You heard Seņor Carter,” Ram said moving up to the big man and looking directly into his eyes. “Leave. Now.”
Dillon Cole had locked eyes with the shorter man and as he looked up, the Chicago man could see just under his Stetson. It was then that he got his first good look at Dillon’s eyes and the promise they held. Moving deliberately slow, he tried plastering a smile back on his face but it came off more as a grimace. “We’re leaving. We just wanted to make Mr. Goode here the best possible offer we could, and—”
“Save it, ********, and get your asses out of here. If you come back, it’s going to get ugly.”
“Are you threatening us?” the larger man sneered.
“No,” Dillon answered. “I’m promising you. And by the way, we’ve got your rental car’s tag numbers and I’ll be calling them in to both the sheriff here and our local Texas Ranger. As soon as we get home, I’ll be faxing them to a senior inspector with the FBI as well as the local Special Agent in Charge in Dallas. So the best thing you two *******s can do is get out of here and don’t come back.”
The larger of the two Chicago men opened his mouth but his companion quietly shushed him. “We’re leaving. Like I said, it was just a misunderstanding.” The two men walked out the door without so much as a glance back.
After the bells quit jingling as the door shut, Dillon sighed and relaxed a bit. “OK, Carter. So what the hell was that all about?”
* * *
The man with the gun was quiet as he concentrated on traffic. It was a tricky entrance onto Interstate 35 from the U.S. Highway 82 northbound access road between the eighteen-wheelers and the Friday afternoon northbound traffic to the casinos just on the other side of the Red River. “I can’t believe you backed down like that,” the man’s companion continued to bitch. “One wetback and two old guys. We could’ve roughed them up a little, put some fear in their hearts and they’d be begging to sell that place before the weekend was over!”
“You didn’t recognize him did you?” the driver asked as he accelerated on the entrance ramp.
“Recognize who?”
“The guy in the cowboy hat. You didn’t recognize him?”
“Hey, I’m not a cop like you. I don’t have this police-trained memory. The guy didn’t look like anything special and I had him by at least four inches and a hundred pounds.”
“He would’ve handled you like a five-year-old.”
“Bull****! I could’ve—”
“Shut up just a ****ing minute, would you?” the driver snapped at his partner. “Do you remember a year or so ago when all those mass shootings were happening around the country? The muslims had put all these sleeper cells of shooters around the country and then started unleashing them in shopping malls and restaurants and public parks and stuff. In the first couple of weeks alone, over a thousand people were shot and over half of them died.”
“Yeah, I remember that. Who doesn’t?” the big man replied, glaring out his window. I could’ve taken all three of those guys and never broke a sweat.
“Do you remember what happened at the shooting on the campus of Tulsa University?”
“Remind me.” Truth was, the big guy’s memory was often a steroid-induced fog until someone spelled things out for him.
“There were four muslims with fully-automatic AK-47s spraying the place down. This one guy in there was armed. All he had was a Colt .45 auto but he blew three of those towel-heads away lickety-split. He got shot up in the process but survived.”
“Big deal. I’m not carrying a gun. He wasn’t going to shoot an unarmed guy, and if he tried, you were there—”
“Listen to me, *******!” the driver said angrily. “I did some digging on this guy after that shooting up in Tulsa. He and his wife adopted a teenage girl after he got out of the hospital. She was an orphan. Some guy at the children’s home she was staying at tried to rape her. He was a big guy like you—but even bigger, stronger and meaner. All-American offensive lineman until he flunked out of college. Our guy finds out his about-to-be daughter was assaulted by this guy and he travels out to east Texas, walks into a country beer joint and proceeds to dismantle the big man. I mean, totally ****ing destroy him. The guy’s left knee will never work again and the bone damage around it is so bad it can’t even be replaced. He will always walk with a cane, but he’ll have a hard time holding it because he also got both hands so badly crippled and broken that they are all but useless. His right elbow was dislocated at the socket with some sort of karate move. The guy did even more damage and he did it so fast and easy that the undercover DEA guy who was in there told me he couldn’t believe what he was seeing.”
Finally the man’s companion had shut up and was now looking at him, waiting on him to finish his tale. “What really blew the fed away was that the guy hung this kind of an ***-kicking on someone six inches and over a hundred pounds bigger than him, and he did it less than ten days after taking three AK-47 rounds in Tulsa. So you think you would’ve kicked his ***? My friend, I’d still be picking pieces of you up off the floor if you’d tried.”
The big man was looking through the windshield at the state line sign coming up welcoming them into Oklahoma. “You have your gun,” he pointed out.
A snort. “Yeah, and you have chemicals where your gray matter should be. Do you not remember me just saying this is the guy who popped three AK-47-wielding terrorists with his handgun and nailed three of them? When I patted the side of my jacket where my gun is, the son of a bitch just smiled and did the same and that’s when I saw his Colt holstered up. And if by some miracle I’d managed to get him first, that Mexican would’ve taken both of us down before we could’ve blinked.”
This was beginning to be too much for the big man. He’d always been the meanest and toughest guy on the block in Chicago and if he needed more muscle, he just went a grabbed some cop—like the one he was riding with—that was already on the company’s payroll. This was his first venture into territory this far south, and he was finding the people of the South, and especially Texas, downright unfriendly.
“The Mexican’s name is Ramon Alvarez. He used to be a freelance pistolero in Mexico when he was in his teens and twenties. He organized protection groups for the criminals and crooked politicians. But then he married, got religion and jumped to the other side. He started training the Mexican federales and their shooters and running deep cover missions into the new heroin cartels that were springing up in Mexico. Now he lives on a ranch with the other guy we just met. His name is Dillon Cole. I know he’s a former U.S. Marshal and was a legendary manhunter. But he is also former military, but nobody can find out with which service or exactly what he did. He sure as hell didn’t learn those fighting or shooting skills being a Navy accountant.”
The big man was now finally paying attention. “So you’re saying if these two guys are standing in Carter Goode’s corner, we might have problems?”
The cop took out a cigarette and lit it. As he cracked the window and exhaled a stream of smoke, he looked over at the big man. “You know? Maybe you aren’t as dumb as you look.”
* * *
Carter Goode walked over to his wall cooler and pulled out a couple of Cokes. Handing one each to Ram and Dillon, he motioned over to the waiting area by his pharmacy counter. “The big pharmacy retailers are trying to buy all us independents up,” he explained. “They’re gobbling up small mom and pop pharmacies all over the U.S.”
“What if you do not wish to sell?” Ram asked, twisting the top off his Coke and taking a long drink. “They can not make you.”
“They threaten to come in here, build across the street from you and lowball you on price until you give in, right?” Dillon tossed out, already knowing the answer.
“You got it,” Goode nodded. “But it’s been different here.”
“How so?”
“I know for a fact that the big companies have been looking for land around here—the local realtors tell me every time one of them comes down to look for a place to build.”
“And?”
The older pharmacist smiled. “Nobody will even give the realtors the time of day. They just smile and nod and then tell them their land isn’t for sale. So now the Chicago folks want my patient list and corner lot here. They’ll tear down this building and build a new one. I’m just not crazy about that idea and neither is anyone else in town. Let them build out on the interstate with all the other national businesses. This is Gainesville. We like our home-owned businesses staying right here downtown.”
“I agree,” Dillon said. “I saw enough of that **** when Vicki and I were living in the big cities. Dallas was bad enough, but those other cities were nuts. There’s a damn good reason why we bought land several hours outside of the city. Besides, I used to have to deal with these giant corporations back during my ad agency days. Because of those experiences, I make it a point to shop with as many locally owned businesses as I can.”
“I agree,” Ram chimed in. “I like keeping my money here at home with people I know.”
“Well, speaking of money,” Dillon said, reaching into his back pocket for his wallet. “Let’s get the girls’ prescriptions and get you paid so Ram and I can get back to the ranch. Three sick women is more than two healthy men should ever have to manage.” The two men had driven into Gainesville to pick up antibiotic “z-packs” for their wives and the Cole’s teenage daughter. All three women had come down with a nasty head cold a few days earlier. Felicia Alvarez, Ramon’s wife, was a registered nurse but now the tables were switched and it was her husband who was waiting on her hand and foot, as was Dillon with his wife Vicki and their daughter Brittany. “I appreciate you getting these things filled as fast as you did, along with the other things on the doctor’s list.”
“That’s what we’re here for, Dillon,” Carter Goode reminded the two men. “Let’s see these big-city pharmacies try and give that kind of service. Doesn’t happen.”
As the two men gathered up the prescriptions and other items they had purchased, Dillon turned around at the front door. “Carter, if those two boys come back you give me or Ram a call.”
“You still have that shotgun under the counter?” Ram asked.
“It’s still where you strapped it in, Ram,” the pharmacist nodded. “I appreciate you doing that. And I still have my own 45ACP right here,” he said, pulling back his white pharmacist’s jacket and revealing the holstered pistol.
Dillon nodded. “Like I said, if they come back or anyone else from that company gives you trouble, let us know.”
“I’ll do that. Now you boys get on out of here and go take care of those sick girls you have at home.”
# # #
Nonetheless, the project moves forward and I figured I'd toss out the second chapter here for general consumption before I hole up again and become scarce. Have other things going on as well that are consuming time and resources, and not necessarily in a good way and will explain in another post.
In the meantime. . .
:coffee:
Chapter 2 (FALSE GODS)
THE OBVIOUS BULGE OF A gun underneath the jacket of the man in front of him didn’t intimidate the pharmacist one bit. Neither did the size of the man’s companion, which was considerable—although much of it was due to blubber born of too much time spent at the dinner table and too little time spent exercising. Carter Goode grew up in west Texas where guns were as common as ball-point pens. He himself had a Kimber .45ACP concealed in a holster under his white lab coat. Being a registered pharmacist he knew it made sense to be armed what with all the drug-crazed loonies running around. This was Gainesville, Texas, a small town about sixty-five miles north of Dallas. But it was on the interstate and the big superhighway transported human trash as easily as it did everything else and some of that trash unfortunately stuck around Gainesville.
The two men’s business cards read “arbitration and negotiation” but Goode was having none of it. He knew exactly who they were being paid by and for what. “For the last time, gentlemen,” he explained. “My pharmacy is not for sale. Not now, and not anytime in the foreseeable future.”
“You’re getting old,” the man with the concealed gun pointed out, a plastic smile stuck on his face. “Don’t you want to retire?”
“Sure,” Goode replied. “And both my son and daughter-in-law are registered pharmacists and they’ll take over the business. I have zero intention of ever selling it to your cookie-cutter employer.”
“Well, that’s too bad,” the larger man said. “We can open up a store here and then run you out of business, then you’ll have wished you had sold to us.”
“You really think that?” Goode asked. “My dad opened this pharmacy up when he came back from Korea. We’ve had this drugstore since before both of you boys were even born. I’ve got third and fourth generation customers and patients here that sure as hell aren’t going to hop ship over to some national chain that imports everything from communist China and treats their employees like garbage. In case you neanderthals haven’t figured it out, this is small town Texas and we don’t particularly care too much for your kind of business.”
Behind the men, the bells above the door jingled as a couple of customers came in. Looking up, Goode saw two familiar faces approaching his counter—and he couldn’t help but smile. “Something funny?” the smaller goon asked, the annoyance in his voice evident. This was the third time they’d come down to this hick town in northern Texas trying to buy this particular pharmacy. It was a gold mine that their employer desperately wanted. A perfect location, generations of pharmacy patients and exactly zero debt owed. They’d offered some serious money to this idiot and for the life of everyone involved, they couldn’t figure out why the stupid son of a bitch was being so damned stubborn. Didn’t matter. Their orders on this third visit were to get their point across unmistakably and by whatever means necessary. Well, almost by whatever means necessary.
“If you’ll excuse me, I have some customers to take care of, and—”
“We’ll decide when we’re through talking,” the larger man said, not even bothering to turn around and acknowledge the newly arrived customers. “This pharmacy is closed,” he said loudly, still facing Goode.
“That is odd. It looks open to me,” an accented man’s voice said. “Are you still open for business, Seņor Carter?”
“Absolutely, Ramon,” the pharmacist replied with a grin. “These gentlemen were just leaving, weren’t you boys?”
“No,” the other man said. “We were actually getting ready to lock the doors so we could complete the sale of your drugstore.”
“You are selling your drugstore?” Ramon Alvarez said. “That is news to me.” Turning to the man he’d walked in with, he asked, “Have you heard anything about Seņor Carter selling his drugstore.”
“Not a thing. News to me,” the man said. “I think maybe these two gentlemen have their wires crossed, you suppose?”
“I think you are right,” the Mexican agreed, walking up to the two men. “Why don’t you two let our amigo be and leave now.”
“Listen friend, I don’t think you’re in a position to be asking us to do anything and—”
“I am not asking,” the Mexican said easily. “I am insisting or otherwise you are going to need some of the pain medications Seņor Carter sells here. Probably even some that require a doctor to prescribe them for you—because if you insist on being a pendejo, you both will end up seeing a doctor before the hour is up.”
The smaller man who had the gun was looking at the Mexican’s companion. He had an unsettling air about him. He appeared to be in his mid-forties, stood about five foot ten inches tall, looked to weigh around one-hundred eighty-five or so pounds, was extremely fit and radiated absolute confidence. He was like a lion outside his cage—keenly aware of his surroundings, and completely without fear. He’d seen this man somewhere before... As he shifted to make his gun bulge more obvious, the man in front of him smiled slightly—knowingly, even—and shifted his sport coat back a few inches on his right side. Sitting in a high-rise, quick draw holster was a Colt 1911 45ACP. The Chicago thug’s brain began processing even more rapidly until it finally clicked. Oh ****.
“Carter, do you want these two big city boys to leave your drugstore?” the man in the sports coat asked.
“Well, Dillon, if you and Ramon would show them to their car, I would certainly be grateful,” the pharmacist said, still keeping his hand on the handle of the short-barreled shotgun he’d bolted underneath the counter. He’d seen the man’s gun-bulge the minute he’d walked in the door.
“You heard Seņor Carter,” Ram said moving up to the big man and looking directly into his eyes. “Leave. Now.”
Dillon Cole had locked eyes with the shorter man and as he looked up, the Chicago man could see just under his Stetson. It was then that he got his first good look at Dillon’s eyes and the promise they held. Moving deliberately slow, he tried plastering a smile back on his face but it came off more as a grimace. “We’re leaving. We just wanted to make Mr. Goode here the best possible offer we could, and—”
“Save it, ********, and get your asses out of here. If you come back, it’s going to get ugly.”
“Are you threatening us?” the larger man sneered.
“No,” Dillon answered. “I’m promising you. And by the way, we’ve got your rental car’s tag numbers and I’ll be calling them in to both the sheriff here and our local Texas Ranger. As soon as we get home, I’ll be faxing them to a senior inspector with the FBI as well as the local Special Agent in Charge in Dallas. So the best thing you two *******s can do is get out of here and don’t come back.”
The larger of the two Chicago men opened his mouth but his companion quietly shushed him. “We’re leaving. Like I said, it was just a misunderstanding.” The two men walked out the door without so much as a glance back.
After the bells quit jingling as the door shut, Dillon sighed and relaxed a bit. “OK, Carter. So what the hell was that all about?”
* * *
The man with the gun was quiet as he concentrated on traffic. It was a tricky entrance onto Interstate 35 from the U.S. Highway 82 northbound access road between the eighteen-wheelers and the Friday afternoon northbound traffic to the casinos just on the other side of the Red River. “I can’t believe you backed down like that,” the man’s companion continued to bitch. “One wetback and two old guys. We could’ve roughed them up a little, put some fear in their hearts and they’d be begging to sell that place before the weekend was over!”
“You didn’t recognize him did you?” the driver asked as he accelerated on the entrance ramp.
“Recognize who?”
“The guy in the cowboy hat. You didn’t recognize him?”
“Hey, I’m not a cop like you. I don’t have this police-trained memory. The guy didn’t look like anything special and I had him by at least four inches and a hundred pounds.”
“He would’ve handled you like a five-year-old.”
“Bull****! I could’ve—”
“Shut up just a ****ing minute, would you?” the driver snapped at his partner. “Do you remember a year or so ago when all those mass shootings were happening around the country? The muslims had put all these sleeper cells of shooters around the country and then started unleashing them in shopping malls and restaurants and public parks and stuff. In the first couple of weeks alone, over a thousand people were shot and over half of them died.”
“Yeah, I remember that. Who doesn’t?” the big man replied, glaring out his window. I could’ve taken all three of those guys and never broke a sweat.
“Do you remember what happened at the shooting on the campus of Tulsa University?”
“Remind me.” Truth was, the big guy’s memory was often a steroid-induced fog until someone spelled things out for him.
“There were four muslims with fully-automatic AK-47s spraying the place down. This one guy in there was armed. All he had was a Colt .45 auto but he blew three of those towel-heads away lickety-split. He got shot up in the process but survived.”
“Big deal. I’m not carrying a gun. He wasn’t going to shoot an unarmed guy, and if he tried, you were there—”
“Listen to me, *******!” the driver said angrily. “I did some digging on this guy after that shooting up in Tulsa. He and his wife adopted a teenage girl after he got out of the hospital. She was an orphan. Some guy at the children’s home she was staying at tried to rape her. He was a big guy like you—but even bigger, stronger and meaner. All-American offensive lineman until he flunked out of college. Our guy finds out his about-to-be daughter was assaulted by this guy and he travels out to east Texas, walks into a country beer joint and proceeds to dismantle the big man. I mean, totally ****ing destroy him. The guy’s left knee will never work again and the bone damage around it is so bad it can’t even be replaced. He will always walk with a cane, but he’ll have a hard time holding it because he also got both hands so badly crippled and broken that they are all but useless. His right elbow was dislocated at the socket with some sort of karate move. The guy did even more damage and he did it so fast and easy that the undercover DEA guy who was in there told me he couldn’t believe what he was seeing.”
Finally the man’s companion had shut up and was now looking at him, waiting on him to finish his tale. “What really blew the fed away was that the guy hung this kind of an ***-kicking on someone six inches and over a hundred pounds bigger than him, and he did it less than ten days after taking three AK-47 rounds in Tulsa. So you think you would’ve kicked his ***? My friend, I’d still be picking pieces of you up off the floor if you’d tried.”
The big man was looking through the windshield at the state line sign coming up welcoming them into Oklahoma. “You have your gun,” he pointed out.
A snort. “Yeah, and you have chemicals where your gray matter should be. Do you not remember me just saying this is the guy who popped three AK-47-wielding terrorists with his handgun and nailed three of them? When I patted the side of my jacket where my gun is, the son of a bitch just smiled and did the same and that’s when I saw his Colt holstered up. And if by some miracle I’d managed to get him first, that Mexican would’ve taken both of us down before we could’ve blinked.”
This was beginning to be too much for the big man. He’d always been the meanest and toughest guy on the block in Chicago and if he needed more muscle, he just went a grabbed some cop—like the one he was riding with—that was already on the company’s payroll. This was his first venture into territory this far south, and he was finding the people of the South, and especially Texas, downright unfriendly.
“The Mexican’s name is Ramon Alvarez. He used to be a freelance pistolero in Mexico when he was in his teens and twenties. He organized protection groups for the criminals and crooked politicians. But then he married, got religion and jumped to the other side. He started training the Mexican federales and their shooters and running deep cover missions into the new heroin cartels that were springing up in Mexico. Now he lives on a ranch with the other guy we just met. His name is Dillon Cole. I know he’s a former U.S. Marshal and was a legendary manhunter. But he is also former military, but nobody can find out with which service or exactly what he did. He sure as hell didn’t learn those fighting or shooting skills being a Navy accountant.”
The big man was now finally paying attention. “So you’re saying if these two guys are standing in Carter Goode’s corner, we might have problems?”
The cop took out a cigarette and lit it. As he cracked the window and exhaled a stream of smoke, he looked over at the big man. “You know? Maybe you aren’t as dumb as you look.”
* * *
Carter Goode walked over to his wall cooler and pulled out a couple of Cokes. Handing one each to Ram and Dillon, he motioned over to the waiting area by his pharmacy counter. “The big pharmacy retailers are trying to buy all us independents up,” he explained. “They’re gobbling up small mom and pop pharmacies all over the U.S.”
“What if you do not wish to sell?” Ram asked, twisting the top off his Coke and taking a long drink. “They can not make you.”
“They threaten to come in here, build across the street from you and lowball you on price until you give in, right?” Dillon tossed out, already knowing the answer.
“You got it,” Goode nodded. “But it’s been different here.”
“How so?”
“I know for a fact that the big companies have been looking for land around here—the local realtors tell me every time one of them comes down to look for a place to build.”
“And?”
The older pharmacist smiled. “Nobody will even give the realtors the time of day. They just smile and nod and then tell them their land isn’t for sale. So now the Chicago folks want my patient list and corner lot here. They’ll tear down this building and build a new one. I’m just not crazy about that idea and neither is anyone else in town. Let them build out on the interstate with all the other national businesses. This is Gainesville. We like our home-owned businesses staying right here downtown.”
“I agree,” Dillon said. “I saw enough of that **** when Vicki and I were living in the big cities. Dallas was bad enough, but those other cities were nuts. There’s a damn good reason why we bought land several hours outside of the city. Besides, I used to have to deal with these giant corporations back during my ad agency days. Because of those experiences, I make it a point to shop with as many locally owned businesses as I can.”
“I agree,” Ram chimed in. “I like keeping my money here at home with people I know.”
“Well, speaking of money,” Dillon said, reaching into his back pocket for his wallet. “Let’s get the girls’ prescriptions and get you paid so Ram and I can get back to the ranch. Three sick women is more than two healthy men should ever have to manage.” The two men had driven into Gainesville to pick up antibiotic “z-packs” for their wives and the Cole’s teenage daughter. All three women had come down with a nasty head cold a few days earlier. Felicia Alvarez, Ramon’s wife, was a registered nurse but now the tables were switched and it was her husband who was waiting on her hand and foot, as was Dillon with his wife Vicki and their daughter Brittany. “I appreciate you getting these things filled as fast as you did, along with the other things on the doctor’s list.”
“That’s what we’re here for, Dillon,” Carter Goode reminded the two men. “Let’s see these big-city pharmacies try and give that kind of service. Doesn’t happen.”
As the two men gathered up the prescriptions and other items they had purchased, Dillon turned around at the front door. “Carter, if those two boys come back you give me or Ram a call.”
“You still have that shotgun under the counter?” Ram asked.
“It’s still where you strapped it in, Ram,” the pharmacist nodded. “I appreciate you doing that. And I still have my own 45ACP right here,” he said, pulling back his white pharmacist’s jacket and revealing the holstered pistol.
Dillon nodded. “Like I said, if they come back or anyone else from that company gives you trouble, let us know.”
“I’ll do that. Now you boys get on out of here and go take care of those sick girls you have at home.”
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