Page 45 - Like No Business I Know

Reformulation

just let me do the talking, okay? This is going to be unfamiliar
territory for me, as well.”
“Whatever you say. If I had something more pleasant to do than
either being here or going back to the office and facing the music I’d
be doing it.”
One of the bowlers wiped his hands on a towel and casually joined
the onlookers, throwing himself into the plastic bucket seat next to
Phil. His saurian gaze flicked over the older men, shrewd and
suspicious.
“I’m the reformulator.”
Phil and Cary automatically reached for their business cards,
alarming the bowler. Phil checked himself, put his hand on Cary’s
arm and smiled his investor-wooing smile.
“Sorry. No documents—I remember now. We’re not cops: I made
the appointment. I’m Philip T. Luker and this is Cary Cashion. We
need your help, sir. You know who sent us.”
“The envelope.” No hand-shaking, either.
Phil moved his hand more cautiously into his jacket and retrieved a
plain white letter-size envelope. He handed it to the other man as
Cary’s eyebrows arched. The reformulator took it, opened it and
counted the sheaf of hundred-dollar bills. Satisfied, he stuffed the
envelope inside his shirt, leaned back and stared at the 7-10 split his
friend had just rolled.
“What’s the problem?”
“Cary here is an organic chemist. I’m in marketing. We both
worked at a company—the name doesn’t matter—where he
discovered something he didn’t have to share with our employer,
mainly because they went broke soon after and neither of us left with
much more than a lightweight severance package. We decided to go
into business together to develop a product based on his discovery. I
won’t go into it—obviously it is proprietary, and we have a patent
pending—but suffice it to say we can tweak a few molecules in a
compound based on ethyl mercaptan which renders it non-flammable
and odorless but exhibits a very interesting property: it instantly
changes color in the presence of a variety of chemicals, running
virtually through the entire visible spectrum depending on what it is
exposed to. And many of those substances are illegal drugs: our
reagent gives a clear signal of their presence in the urine. Thus we

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