The drawing of the three - Stephen King [158]
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 perscribe it in the first place . . . unless you’re going to give the patient you’re perscribing 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 BOY-FRIEND 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