Deadline at Dawn

He took such a long time to bring it out, that finally the prescriptionist said, with a sort of impersonal asperity. “What can I do for you, young man?”

He brought it out slow. He’d been rehearsing each word, and he wanted to keep them the way he had them arranged. “Mister, look. Suppose I walked in here, and I was — well, kind of upset, shaky all over, nerves shot, what would you recommend?”

“Best thing I know of is a little spirits of ammonia in half a glass of water.”

Quinn came out with part two. “That what you usually give?”

The pharmacist chuckled with a sort of tart geniality that seemed to be a characteristic of his. “Want to be sure what you’re getting before you take it, eh? Sure, I usually give that.”

Quinn held his breath.

It came. “Matter of fact, I already gave that to one fellow, couple hours or so ago. You’re the second one tonight.”

Quinn let his breath out, soft and slow. As easy as that. As simple as that. He couldn’t believe he’d actually hit bull’s-eye like that, at the very first shot. Wait a minute, he cautioned himself. Take it easy. Find out a little more about it first, before you go jumping to conclusions. It mayn’t be it at all. It’s too good to be true, too pat, too easy.

“Somebody else was in my fix, hunh?”

He got a nod on that; that was all that one got. “Well, do you want me to give you some?”

“Yeah, you can.” He had to have some excuse for staying in there and talking to him.

The prescriptionist went behind the fountain and shot a little water into a glass. Then he dumped something cloudy into it from a large bottle and stirred it a little. He took the spoon out and handed it over to Quinn. “Try that,” he said. “Ten cents, please.”

It didn’t smell bad, but it looked like soapy water. He wondered how it was going to taste.

“Don’t be afraid of it, drink it down.”

He wasn’t afraid of it. It was just that he wanted to make it last as long as he could.

The druggist was eying him shrewdly. “You don’t act very jumpy. Fact you act sort of absent-minded.”

Quinn dipped his tongue in, hauled it out again in a hurry. He quickly blocked the verbal opening that had been made by shoving his foot into it. Again verbally, “Maybe his grief wasn’t mine. He acted sort of jumpy, hunh?”

The prescriptionist chuckled again in that tart way of his, this time reminiscently. “He sure had ants in his pants. He couldn’t stand still. He kept going from here over to the entrance, looking out into the street, coming back again. He couldn’t stand still, the guy.”

Quinn made an ingenuous discovery. He said, “Hold on.” He looked up at the topmost row of bottles on the shelf, to make it more plausible. He said, “That sounds like someone I know. Just like someone I know.” He wetted his tongue in the mixture again, without allowing its quantity to diminish any. “What’d he look like?” he said artlessly.

“Worried,” the druggist chuckled.

Quinn threw in a name gratuitously, to act as a stimulus. “I bet it was Eddie. What’d he look like?”

This time it paid off. The druggist fell for it, it had been woven into the fabric of the conversation so dexterously. “Thin sort of a guy. Little taller than you are.”

Quinn nodded raptly. He would have nodded if he’d said he was an Eskimo. “Little taller than me. And—” He made a pass up toward his own hair, but left out the color-adjective that the ear expected to hear accompany the gesture.

Automatic response did the rest. The druggist supplied it without realizing he was filling a void. His tongue tripped; he thought he was just corroborating, not making a unilateral statement. “And sandy hair.”

Quinn said it after, not before him. “And sandy hair.” He nodded in completely hypocritical confirmation. Then he added quickly, “Did he have on a brown suit?”

The druggist said, “Come to think of it, he did. Yeah, he did, he had on a brown suit.”

“That’s Eddie all right,” Quinn said. He took a deep breath. Now he was going good. Now he was on the beam. Now he was coming in for a landing, he told himself. “Yeah,” he repeated. “That was Eddie.” And to himself, unheard: Eddie, hell. That was Death.

He’d milked that for all it was worth. There didn’t seem to be anything more he could get out of it.

Suddenly something more came. Like a left-over drop dripping from a faucet after it’s already been turned off.

“He acted like he was having some kind of a chill,” the druggist said.

“Shivering, hunh?” Quinn said.

“No, but he was holding his coat up close, like this, the whole time he was in here.” The druggist grasped both his coat-reveres with one hand to show him and drew them together up under his chin.

“Maybe he was coming down with flu,” the druggist said. “It ain’t cold out tonight, you couldn’t ask for a milder—”

It is if you’ve just committed a murder, thought Quinn. It’s fourteen below.

“Then what’d he do, go out again?”