Closer
1223 Words
Tuesday was normal.
Kamsi opened the pharmacy at eight. Made her tea. Greeted Tolu. Served her customers. Answered three prescription queries and one very detailed question from a woman who had read something on the internet and needed it firmly corrected.
Normal. Completely normal.
Except that twice she looked up from her counter and felt the particular feeling of being watched and found nothing — just the street outside her window, just Lagos going about its business, just ordinary Tuesday things.
She told herself it was nothing.
She was a pharmacist not a paranoid person and she had built her life on logic and evidence and there was no evidence of anything except a feeling and feelings were not data.
She went back to work.
At noon Tolu went for lunch.
At 12:08 a man came in.
Not the same men as Monday. Different. Younger. He browsed the shelves for four minutes — she timed it — without picking anything up. Then he came to the counter.
"Do you have something for a headache?" he said.
She looked at him.
He looked back.
"Paracetamol or ibuprofen?" she said.
"Whichever is better."
She reached below the counter. Set a pack of paracetamol down.
He paid. He left.
She watched him go.
He turned left outside. Away from the bus stop. Away from the market. Into the side street that led nowhere useful.
She picked up her phone.
Kamsi: Someone just came in. Young man. Bought paracetamol he didn't need. Left in the wrong direction.
The response came in forty seconds.
Zion: I see him.
She stared at the message.
Kamsi: You're outside?
Zion: I've been outside since nine.
She put the phone down.
She picked it back up.
Kamsi: You've been sitting outside my pharmacy since nine AM.
Zion: Across the street. Grey car. Don't look.
She looked.
Grey car. Across the street. She could see the outline of someone in the driver's seat — still, patient, the particular stillness of someone who was very good at waiting.
She looked away.
Kamsi: You should have told me.
Zion: You would have told me not to come.
She thought about that.
Kamsi: Yes.
Zion: Which is why I didn't tell you.
She put her phone in her pocket.
She served two more customers.
At two o'clock Tolu came back and Kamsi told her she was stepping out for fifteen minutes and walked out of her pharmacy and across the street and knocked on the window of the grey car.
It lowered.
He looked at her with the expression of a man who had expected this and was not entirely sure whether to be amused or concerned.
"I told you not to look," he said.
"I looked anyway," she said. "I do that."
"I know." Almost smile. "Get in."
"I'm not getting in your car."
"Then stop standing at my window. You're drawing attention."
She looked up and down the street. He was right. Two women outside the provisions store were watching with open interest.
She got in the car.
It smelled like him — something clean and expensive and faintly dangerous. The interior was dark and the windows were tinted and it was strange, she thought, how quickly you could feel the world outside become very far away.
"How long has someone been watching my pharmacy?" she said.
"Since yesterday afternoon."
"And you've been watching them watch me."
"Yes."
She looked at him in the close interior of the car. In this light — grey afternoon Lagos light filtered through tinted windows — he looked less like a rumour and more like a person. Tired around the eyes in a way she hadn't noticed before. The weight of something carried constantly.
"You can't sit outside my pharmacy every day," she said.
"I'm not going to." He looked straight ahead. "I'm making arrangements."
"What kind of arrangements?"
"The kind that mean you don't need me outside." He paused. "Or anyone else."
She looked at his profile.
"Zion." First time she had used his name directly. She felt him notice it — a slight shift, barely visible. "What did that man see in the corridor that makes his information so dangerous?"
He was quiet for a moment.
"Evidence," he said carefully. "Of things a sitting senator has spent four years and considerable money burying."
"What things?"
He looked at her then. Direct and assessing.
"The less you know," he said, "the safer you are."
"The less I know the more afraid I am," she said. "I function better with information."
He looked at her for a long moment.
"Financial crimes," he said finally. "Money that was meant for hospitals and roads and schools in three states. Gone. For eight years." His voice was even but something underneath it wasn't. "People died because of what he took. People are still dying."
Kamsi was quiet.
She thought about her pharmacy. About the elderly man with the blood pressure medication he could barely afford. About the mother with the feverish child who had apologised for the price of the prescription like it was her fault.
She thought about money meant for hospitals.
"You're trying to expose him," she said quietly.
"I'm trying to make sure the evidence reaches the right people." He looked straight ahead again. "My family has resources he doesn't. And reasons."
"What reasons?"
A longer pause.
"My mother died in a public hospital seven years ago," he said quietly. "In a state where the health funding had been systematically stolen for four years." He paused. "The equipment that could have helped her hadn't been replaced. The drugs that could have saved her weren't available."
The car was very quiet.
Kamsi looked at him.
This man. This cold dangerous powerful man with a dead mother and a reason that wasn't about power at all.
"I'm sorry," she said quietly.
He looked at her.
Something in his face — just briefly, just for a moment — opened completely. Raw and real and gone again before she could fully see it.
"Don't be sorry," he said. "Just stay safe."
She looked at his hands on the steering wheel. Still. Controlled.
She thought about a corridor and a man on his knees and evidence that could change things for people who needed things to change.
"I won't say anything," she said. "To anyone. About any of it."
"I know."
"And I don't need babysitting."
"I know that too." The almost-smile. "You handled Monday better than trained people handle things."
"I have good instincts."
"You do." He looked at her steadily. "Which is why I need you to trust them right now and go back inside your pharmacy and act like this conversation didn't happen."
She held his gaze.
"And if they come back?" she said.
"They won't," he said. "Not today."
"And tomorrow?"
He looked at her.
"I'll be across the street," he said quietly.
She looked at him for a long moment.
Then she opened the car door.
"Get a better parking spot," she said. "The women outside the provisions store are terrible gossips."
She heard him laugh.
Actual laugh — warm and brief and completely unguarded.
She was already closing the door so she didn't have to manage her expression.
She walked back across the street.
She did not look back.
But she was smiling.
Just barely.
Just enough.
- Writer
