Manhunt. Volume 2, Number 10, December, 1954

She took a slow step toward me, and there was fear in her eyes now. “Give me a break, for God’s sake.”

“I’m giving you one. I know you’ve got heroin here. I’m not even going to look for it. All I want is the name of your pusher, and an idea of where to find him.”

She bit at her lower lip a moment. “What’ll I do when the pile’s gone?”

“You’ll find another pusher. You junkies always do.” I paused. “This is the last time around, Liddie. Tell me who and where.”

She told me who and where.

I let myself in with one of my skeleton keys. There was no one home. I went through the pusher’s apartment until I found the stuff. I’d expected more, but there were only seven packets of it. I stuffed them into my pocket, darkened the room, and sat down in an easy chair to wait.

An hour crawled by, and then another, and finally the door opened. I got up silently, slid my hand down into my trenchcoat pocket, and worked my fingers around the butt of my short-barreled .38. The guy was fumbling for the light switch, a very tall guy with outsize shoulders.

When the light came on, I said, “Easy, Carter. Keep your hands in sight.”

He closed the door slowly, and if there was any expression at all on his face, it was only a very mild surprise.

“You a cop?” he asked.

“That’s right. Come over here.”

He stayed where he was. “You been here long?”

“Long enough to find the stuff.”

“Yeah. Well, that’s not so good, is it?” His right hand came up to one of the buttons on his coat and he began to toy with it.

“I told you to come over here,” I said.

“Can we make a deal?” he asked. “I’ll make it pretty good.”

“No deal,” I said.

He nodded slowly, as if thinking it over, and then suddenly his hand was inside his coat.

I could have shot him then, but I didn’t want to ruin a good trench-coat. I jerked the .38 out and shot him twice, once in the stomach and once in the face.

When I got home, the first thing I noticed was the ash tray. It was loaded with butts. I closed the door and took off my coat.

Barbara came in from the kitchen. I tried not to look at her face. I knew what I’d see there.

“Any luck?” she asked. “I... I’ve been going crazy, Walt.”

“In my trenchcoat pocket,” I said.

She grabbed up my coat and shoved her hand into one of the pockets.

She was so jittery she dropped the coat. She picked it up and clawed through the other pocket, whimpering a little. I had to look away from her.

“Is this all?” she asked. “Just two?”

“There were only seven packets to begin with,” I told her. “I had to take five of them to the station house, to book as evidence.”

“You turned over Jive of them? Why? Damn you, Walt!”

“There’s a man dead because of this,” I said. “I had to make it look good.”

But she wasn’t even listening. She was too busy tearing open one of the packets of heroin.

A Bachelor in the Making by Charles Jackson

It was so nice, being treated like an adult. Knowing everything — about everybody...

* * *

When, at fourteen, Don began to work at the Arcadia Grocery, a whole new wonderful word opened up to him; and not the least of its delights was the sense of worldliness he rapidly acquired, a sophistication beyond his years, with its attendant pleasurable notion that he had already seen enough of life to disillusion him with a certain well-known institution.

He came to work as soon as school was out at three-thirty, and worked until the store closed at six; but on Saturday it was all day, from seven-thirty in the morning till ten-thirty at night. He loved it. He liked his two employers very much, the partners Mr. Heffelfinger and Mr. Kunkel; they were awfully good to him, and treated him as an equal. He loved, too, the importance of being behind a counter to so many people he had known all his life, and who had, till now, regarded him as a kid. And he loved all the gossip; the secret lives of friend and stranger alike were openly discussed in his presence as though he wasn’t fourteen at all, and he soon learned to join in the general, ribald amusement that seemed to be universal in the grown-up world and occupy the greater part of their conversation. It was quite different from the veiled allusions he often overheard at home, when his mother uttered half a sentence and then cut herself off with a sigh and a headshake over the carryings-on of one of their neighbors; or when his father laughed outright over some tidbit he had brought home but which he only fully disclosed to Don’s mother when he himself was out of hearing. At the Arcadia Grocery gossip was not only openly rife but there was something even better: if you kept your eyes and ears open, actual evidences were all around you of the choice scandals from which that gossip sprang. Like Mrs. Corbin, for instance, and the telephone.