Naked Prey

Lucas, and said, “I’ll be out in the TV room.”
    When he was gone, Lewis said, “Sit down.” Lucas pulled out the kitchen chair opposite her. She asked, “Want a cup of coffee?”
    “No, I’m fine. So. What’s the story?”
    “I wasn’t surprised to hear from Sister Mary Joseph. I’d been more or less expecting it.” She paused, but Lucas kept his mouth shut. “Anyway,” she continued, “we all talked about it, and several of our sisters have left in the past two days—people not yet too involved, so if you decide to bust us, they can pick it up later.”
    He kept his mouth shut.
    She said, “So we talked about it, and not one of us could figure out how we could be involved in anything that had to do with the girls. We couldn’t see any possible connection.”
    “Good,” Lucas said. “The parents of the other girl are coming up here today. You could meet them, if you like.”
    Her hand went to her throat. “That’s cruel.”
    “Keep going with the story,” Lucas said. “What’re you doing? I’ll figure out for myself if there’s a connection.”
    “We’re smuggling drugs,” she said abruptly. “We bring them down from Canada. We put on nun’s habits so that the border people don’t check too closely, and bring them across.”
    “Marijuana?”
    “Some. But that’s more complicated. Usually, it’s tamoxifen and ondansetron. They’re cancer drugs and we get people in Canada to buy them for us at Canadian government prices. We bring them across the border and distribute them to people who can’t afford them. Because of the way the drugs are sold in Canada, they only cost about ten or fifteen percent of what they cost in the U.S. Tamoxifen in the states costs a hundred a month, or more, and you might take it for years. The poor tend to skip days or skip whole months and hope they can get away with it. Ondansetron is a really expensive antinausea drug. It costs two hundred dollars to cover the nausea from one chemo treatment—so a lot of people go with a cheap drug that doesn’t work as well, and just put up with the nausea. Ever been nauseous for a week straight?”
    “No.”
    “Neither have I, but it looks pretty unpleasant. We can buy the stuff in Canada for thirty bucks.”
    “Cancer drugs,” Lucas said.
    “And some marijuana. The marijuana is the cheapest way to fight nausea—sometimes, it’s the only way—and the best marijuana for our purposes comes from British Columbia. We don’t bring it across too often because of the dogs. The dogs don’t care whether we’re wearing habits or not. And if we have to, we can get it in California.”
    “Huh,” Lucas said. Then: “Just, uh, for the sake of my own, uh, technical knowledge, how do you get it past the dogs?”
    “We have a number of religious young men and women from Winnipeg who have grown out their hair. We provide them with what you might call “doper clothing,” and they drive vans across the border ahead of us. If the dogs are working, they’ll do the van every time, and as soon as the people see the dogs, they let us know with a walkie talkie. If there are no dogs, we’ll come across.”
    “Okay. Cancer drugs.”
    “Yes.”
    “That’s all a little hard to believe.”
    “Sister Mary Joseph said that if you don’t believe, you should ask your wife. I don’t know exactly what that means . . . is she a cancer survivor?”
    “No. She’s a doctor.”
    “Then she’ll know. I promise you this, Lucas, and Sister Mary Joseph would tell you the same thing—this is only for people who might die if they don’t get the drugs. People can get the standard chemotherapy, one way or another, even if they don’t have money, but the ancillary drugs and the follow-up drugs . . . lots of times, it comes down to a choice between eating and taking the drugs. I’m absolutely serious about that—that’s what it comes to. Our drug shipments involve about four thousand patients at the receiving end.”
    “Four thousand—”
    “And we’re growing.”
    “And you weren’t involved with Deon Cash or Jane Warr or Joe Kelly.”
    “No. Except that we drive for Gene Calb, and they did.”
    “They never tried to cut in on your drug deal.”
    “There is no money in the drugs. We don’t get any money. We don’t buy or sell anything—the whole point is that our clients can’t afford to buy it. You have to understand, except for marijuana, all these drugs are legal downhere. We’re not so much smuggling