The Drawing of the Three

look into the Mortcypedia told him where in the store he could get it.

He strode down one of the aisles toward a high counter with the words PRESCRIPTIONS FILLED over it.

14

The Katz who had opened Katz's Pharmacy and Soda Fountain (Sundries and Notions for Misses and Misters) on 49th Street in 1927 was long in his grave, and his only son looked ready for his own. Although he was only forty-six, he looked twenty years older. He was balding, yellow-skinned, and frail. He knew people said he looked like death on horseback, but none of them understood why.

Take this crotch on the phone now. Mrs. Rathbun. Ranting that she would sue him if he didn't fill her goddamned Valium prescription and right now, RIGHT THIS VERY INSTANT.

What do you think, lady, I'm gonna pour a stream of blue bombers through the phone? If he did, she would at least do him a favor and shut up. She would just tip the receiver up over her mouth and open wide.

The thought raised a ghostly grin which revealed his sallow dentures.

'You don't understand, Mrs. Rathbun,' he interrupted after he had listened to a minute—a full minute, timed it with the sweep second-hand of his watch—of her raving. He would like, just once, to be able to say: Stop shouting at me, you stupid crotch! Shout at your DOCTOR! He's the one who hooked you on that shit! Right. Damn quacks gave it out like it was bubblegum, and when they decided to cut off the supply, who got hit with the shit? The sawbones? Oh, no! He did!

'What do you mean, I don't understand?' The voice in his ear was like an angry wasp buzzing in a jar. 'I understand I do a lot of business at your tacky drugstore, I understand I've been a loyal customer all these years, I understand—'

'You'll have to speak to—' He glanced at the crotch's Rolodex card through his half-glasses again. '—Dr. Brumhall, Mrs. Rathbun. Your prescription has expired. It's a Federal crime to dispense Valium without a prescription.' And it ought to be one to prescribe it in the first place …unless you're going to give the patient you're prescribing it for your unlisted number with it, that is, he thought.

'It was an oversight!' the woman screamed. Now there was a raw edge of panic in her voice. Eddie would have recognized that tone at once: it was the call of the wild Junk-Bird.

'Then call him and ask him to rectify it,' Katz said. 'He has my number.' Yes. They all had his number. That was precisely the trouble. He looked like a dying man at forty-six because of the fershlugginer doctors.

And all I have to do to guarantee that the last thin edge of profit I am somehow holding onto in this place will melt away is tell a few of these junkie bitches to go fuck themselves. That's all.

'I CAN'T CALL HIM!' she screamed. Her voice drilled painfully into his ear. 'HIM AND HIS FAG BOYFRIEND ARE ON VACATION SOMEPLACE AND NO ONE WILL TELL ME WHERE!'

Katz felt acid seeping into his stomach. He had two ulcers, one healed, the other currently bleeding, and women like this bitch were the reason why. He closed his eyes. Thus he did not see his assistant stare at the man in the blue suit and the gold-rimmed glasses approaching the prescription counter, nor did he see Ralph, the fat old security guard (Katz paid the man a pittance but still bitterly resented the expense; his father had never needed a security guard, but his father, God rot him, had lived in a time when New York had been a city instead of a toilet-bowl) suddenly come out of his usual dim daze and reach for the gun on his hip. He heard a woman scream, but thought it was because she had just discovered all the Revlon was on sale, he'd been forced to put the Revlon on sale because that putz Dollentz up the street was undercutting him.

He was thinking of nothing but Dollentz and this bitch on the phone as the gunslinger approached like fated doom, thinking of how wonderful the two of them would look naked save for a coating of honey and staked out over anthills in the burning desert sun. HIS and HERS anthills, wonderful. He was thinking this was the worst it could get, the absolute worst. His father had been so determined that his only son follow in his footsteps that he had refused to pay for anything but a degree in pharmacology, and so he had followed in his father's footsteps, and God rot his father, for this was surely the lowest moment in a life that had been full of low moments, a life which had made him old before his time.

This was the absolute nadir.

Or so he thought with his eyes closed.

'If you come by, Mrs. Rathbun, I could give you a dozen five milligram Valium. Would that be all right?'

'The man sees reason! Thank God, the man sees reason!' And she hung up. Just like that. Not a word of thanks. But when she saw the walking rectum that called itself a doctor again, she would just about fall down and polish the tips of his Gucci loafers with her nose, she would give him a blowjob, she would—

'Mr. Katz,' his assistant said in a voice that sounded strangely winded. 'I think we have a prob—'

There was another scream. It was followed by the crash of a gun, startling him so badly he thought for a moment his heart was simply going to utter one monstrous clap in his chest and then stop forever.

He opened his eyes and stared into the eyes of the gunslinger. Katz dropped his gaze and saw the pistol in the man's fist. He looked left and saw Ralph the guard nursing one hand and staring at the thief with eyes that seemed to be bugging out of his face. Ralph's own gun, the .38 which he had toted dutifully through eighteen years as a police officer (and which he had only fired from the line of the 23rd Precinct's basement target range; he said he had drawn it twice in the line of duty … but who knew?), was now a wreck in the corner.

'I want Keflex,' the man with the bullshooter eyes said expressionlessly. 'I want a lot. Now. And never mind the REX.'

For a moment Katz could only look at him, his mouth open, his heart struggling in his chest, his stomach a sickly boiling pot of acid.

Had he thought he had hit rock bottom?

Had he really?

15

'You don't understand,' Katz managed at last. His voice sounded strange to himself, and there was really nothing very odd about that, since his mouth felt like a flannel shirt and his tongue like a strip of cotton batting. 'There is no cocaine here. It is not a drug which is dispensed under any cir—'

'I did not say cocaine,' the man in the blue suit and the gold-rimmed glasses said. 'I said Keflex.'

That's what I thought you said, Katz almost told this crazy momser, and then decided that might provoke him. He had heard of drug stores getting held up for speed, for Bennies, for half a dozen other things (including Mrs. Rathbun's precious Valium), but