Kiss Tomorrow Goodbye by Horace McCoy

said. He soon filled the basket and went back inside the market. Joe followed him in dragging the box of milk bottles on a piece of rope tied through the handle.
    ‘You got this straight?’ I asked Jinx.
    ‘I slept on it. I follow you to Hartford’s. I turn the car around and park outside. I go inside and wait by the icebox till everything checks.’
    ‘Right.’ I opened the door and got out.
    ‘I’ll keep my fingers crossed,’ he said.
    ‘You save that for next time,’ I said.
    He started the motor and backed out, heading the sedan for the street. I idled over to the milk truck. A fat, frowsy woman came out of the back door of the market eating a candy bar and carrying a manila shopping bag so full the paper sides were straining at the twine handles. When she passed I leaped into the milk truck, crouching down behind the front seat. I lifted the automatics from my coat pockets and laid them on the floor. Then I took off my hat and coat rolling them into a bundle which I pushed into a corner of the seat. I put one automatic in my left hip pocket and held the other one in my right hand, and then, over the top of the seat, I saw Joe emerge from the market, dragging the empty wooden box. When he reached the truck he picked up the box and tossed it over the seat, over my head, into the truck. He stepped into the truck and was about to crawl over the seat into the rear when he saw me.
    ‘Come back here,’ I said. My face was not more than two feet from his face. He was scared. He opened his mouth and I knew he was trying to scream; and I swung hard, left to right, laying the barrel of the automatic across the side of his head just above the ear. There was a sound like thumping a cantaloupe and the blood spurted. He fell forward and I grabbed him with my left hand, hauling him over the seat, out of sight, thinking only one thing now: I had to keep his white jacket from getting bloody, I had to get it off him in a hurry. It was some mess back there in that narrow truck, with me trying to get his jacket off and milk bottles and butter and cheese packages spilling off the shelves and making so much racket that I expected at any moment to have somebody stick in his head to see what was going on. But I finally got the jacket off, and I hit him on the head again, straight down this time, feeling reasonably certain that this would hold him for awhile. I slipped into his jacket and put on his cap, which was a trifle small for me, and got under the wheel of the truck, rolling out into the street. Out of the corner of my eye I saw Jinx fall in behind me.
    I turned the corner and drove down the street to Hartford’s, stopping just inside the driveway, leaving room between the milk truck and the sidewalk for Jinx to put the Zephyr, making sure that there would be absolutely no way for the Zephyr to be hemmed up when the time came to get away. I cut the switch and sat there, watching Jinx turn the Zephyr around and back it into the slot I had made for him. Then he got out, moving to the rear entrance of the market. I crawled into the rear of the truck and started filling the wooden box with milk bottles. Joe was bleeding like a stuck hog. You wouldn’t believe that an old man could bleed so much. The blood was running down a little drain in the center of the steel floor and I took a quarter-pound of butter from the rack and plugged the drain with it. Then I crawled over Joe’s body, over the seat, out of the truck and went inside, dragging the box of milk behind. Nobody paid any attention to me. I opened the icebox door, and was stacking the bottles inside when Jinx came up and opened the other door, pretending to be a customer.
    ‘Okay in front,’ he said.
    ‘Let’s go then,’ I said.
    I closed the icebox door, shoved the empty wooden box over to one side, against a row of breakfast foods, and started up the steps to the office. I looked out to my left. There were about a dozen customers in the market; from up here, on the