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McDorr glanced at the clock. "It’s past closing time, sir."
The fleeting look on the man’s face—something not at all genteel—u
It was already close to a thousand-dollar order: there were some expensive exotics on the list. McDorr stared back. "Really?"
The man nodded, his face relaxing, the fleeting look, if it had ever been there, now gone. "It’s an ongoing experiment. Once I get started, I can’t bear to be interrupted. An a
McDorr nodded. "Suit yourself." Pretty cushy if the university’s springing for it, he thought to himself. What’s a thousand here, a thousand there? While he had to watch every pe
He went into the back and began pulling bottles and cans and vials off the shelves, weighing or measuring them out, packing and sealing. A damned odd group of chemicals. McDorr wondered what kind of experiment this strange-looking professor was ru
Forty minutes later he was back with three plastic trays, their compartments loaded with chemicals.
The man eyed the tray with an intensity—even a hunger—that again alarmed McDorr. But when the man spoke it was in the same mild voice: "If it isn’t too much trouble, I’ll take the trays, too."
"Of course," said McDorr, setting them down on the counter and ringing up the order.
"The paper?" the man said.
McDorr’s hand paused at the register. "What paper?"
"The list of chemicals you wrote out."
McDorr removed it from his shirt pocket. "This?"
The man plucked it from his fingers. "Thank you. Proprietary information."
He paid. McDorr rapidly counted the money, but by the time he’d finished and looked up to give the man his change, he found himself staring at an empty shop. The man had vanished. Odd: the entry buzzer hadn’t even sounded when he’d opened the door to leave. Perhaps McDorr had been too busy counting the crisp new hundred-dollar bills the man had given him to hear it. And the man had left with almost thirty dollars in change coming to him. He glanced down at the name on the paperwork: Maurice de Poincarélle, M.D., and he remembered he was supposed to have asked for identification. He cursed inwardly, but it was too late.
And then the phone began to ring. The wife, no doubt, checking on why the hell he wasn’t home yet.
With a sigh, McDorr exited the shop, locking the door on the still ringing phone. Outside, he paused to look down East Sixty-Second, inhaling the crisp evening air. It was a beautiful night. Snow was falling. The big flakes dropped slowly out of the night sky, glittering momentarily as they passed the streetlights, then settling onto a layer of fresh snow covering the sidewalks and parked cars. He paused, staring for a moment at the single dark set of footprints that led from his shop door and off into the night, footprints that were rapidly vanishing under the deepening blanket of snow. Strange man. He wondered just what Maurice de Whatever would be doing that Christmas, and shivered involuntarily.
As for himself, he thought, what could be more perfect than a quick stop at Tammany’s on the way home for a little refreshment with the boys? Yes, that’s exactly what he would do, damn the Christmas shopping and damn the wife.
Life, he said to himself, was just too short.
Copyright © 2002 by Splendide Mendax, Inc. and Lincoln Child