Naked Prey

the drugs, as smuggling the prices paid for them.”
    They sat looking at each other for a minute, then Lucas said, “That’s crazy.”
    “Want to know something even crazier? There probably isn’t any way to make it work better. Ask your wife.”
    Lucas took a few seconds to think about it, then said, “My partner claims that a tiny town like this can’t have two big crime deals going on at the same time without some relationship between them. I tend to agree, but if you’re telling me the truth, I don’t see what it could be.”
    “There isn’t one,” she said.
    “So tell me one more thing,” he said. “Where’d you get that Land Cruiser you were driving last night?”
    She blinked. “Up in Canada.”
    “In Canada?”
    “Yes. At an auction. We need a four-wheel drive for some of the roads here, when we’re doing our regular charity work. It’s a terrible truck, it has two hundred and fifty thousand kilometers on it, we’re always afraid it’s going to blow up. The transmission feels like . . . you’re shifting through a pound of liver. It squishes,” she said. Then, “Um, why did you want to know?”
    He was a little embarrassed, and shrugged. “I don’t know. You told me that story about raising pin money by driving for Calb.”
    “That’s true.”
    “But I’ve looked at trucks like that and they cost sixty thousand bucks or so. So . . . ”
    “What? We have the receipt.” She was getting a little warm. “We paid one thousand five hundred dollars for it.”
    “Okay, okay.” Lucas stood up to go. “You’re going to go down and talk to Letty?”
    “I’d be gone already, if Sister Mary Joseph hadn’tcalled. I’ll be going in one of our Corollas. Our expensive Land Cruiser might not make it that far.”
    “All right, all right. I had reason to ask.”
    “So what’re you going to do?”
    “Try to find whoever is doing the killing. I don’t care about your drugs, but if you think of anything —anything— that might hook it all together, you’ve got to call me. This guy won’t stop as long as he thinks he’s in danger.” He took a couple of steps toward the TV room, then looked back and said, “When you’re taking weed across the border, you’ve got to be careful. My partner could smell it on you the other day. He’s worked with dopers a lot, and he’s pretty sensitive. The guys at the border probably are, too.”
    “We were repacking that day,” Lewis said. “We’re very careful before we go across. We have no drug abusers here—zero. That’s one of our rules. The only people we allow to use drugs are survivors. Some of them are still on tamoxifen.”
    L UCAS LEFT THE room, looking for Del, then turned around and went back to her. “Why isn’t there a better way to price the drugs?”
    “Because the drug companies say, and they may be right—although they lie about everything else—that they won’t be able to create new drugs that everybody wants, or specialized low-profit drugs, if they don’t make a substantial profit from the ones they’re selling now. So they’re allowed to charge what they want in the United States.
    “Canada’s a small part of their market, and it’s got one central bulk buyer—the government, and they make the best deal they can. So the drug companies sell to Canada for a little bit more than cost, because the market’s small enough that it doesn’t have much effect on their overall profit.”
    “Why don’t we just make it legal to reimport the drugs?”
    “Because then Canada would essentially become a drug-wholesaling middleman for the U.S. The drug companies won’t allow that. They’d start charging Canada the American price, to get the profit they say they need. The end effect would be that Canadians would pay more, or go without, and Americans wouldn’t pay less.”
    “You know that bumper sticker about the Arabs? ‘Nuke Their Ass and Take the Gas’? Why doesn’t the U.S. just nuke the drug companies’ ass and take the drugs?”
    “Then who’s going to develop the new drugs we need? The government? The people who brought you the CIA and airport security and the Bush-Gore election?”
    L UCAS FOUND D EL watching Night of the Living Dead with the older woman who’d met them at the door. “You at a good part?” he asked.
    “There are no good parts,” Del said. “Everything okay?”
    “Okay,” Lucas said. “Let’s go.”
    “At least you didn’t open fire on anybody,” the older woman