Easy Death (18 page)

“She did that?”

“Yeah, she come up to that guy that shot at you and put him off killing me.”

“Yeah?”

“Yeah, and she give me the idea how to pull you up out of that car. So I figure, her being a woman and us maybe owing her something for helping out like she done…. Nope, I just can’t kill her.”

“I guess not.”

I’d started seeing tracks in the snow and next thing we were driving past houses on our way into the city. A lot of them had those colored lights out for Christmas, strung up on the porch and around the windows. Now and then a car would crawl up the road at us and we even saw a snowplow limping along like a tired boxer waiting for the bell.

“Do you want to kill her, I won’t stop you,” I said. “I can’t do it myself, Walter, but I ain’t going to fight you for her.”

He looked at her a long couple seconds. Listened to that ungodly noise she was making. Then, “My hands ain’t well enough to shoot a gun I guess.”

“We could put her out the car do you want to,” I said, “I mean, like I told you, I can’t do it myself. But does she bother you, I’ll drive on out of the city and let you put her out and likely she’ll freeze to death before anyone finds her.”

“I guess not.”

“You sure?”

“You gonna make me say it, ain’t you?”

“Say what?”

“I guess I can’t kill no woman neither. Even one as looks like that. And like you say, she maybe did us a good turn back there.”

“So I guess we take her into the hospital?”

“It’s getting dark enough, we should get it done easy and nobody seeing us too much.”

“That’s good,” I said, “because we’re just almost there now.”

It was a couple short blocks through the downtown, all decked out in red and green bells, candy canes and silver tinsel, and the store windows all full of toys and nice clothes, flashing colored lights and what-all. I turned a corner to come up on the back of the hospital where they bring in the emergency cases.

And right there was every cop car in the world, just sitting there.

December 20, 1951

5:30 PM

Walter and Eddie

Well, hell.

Okay so it wasn’t every cop car in the world; there was maybe only a half-dozen or so, from a couple different cities, the Sheriff’s Office and the Highway Patrol—and no one in them that I could see. They were parked around an oversized tow-truck, and hanging off the back of that truck there was a big square boxy-looking thing that looked like an armored car in the gathering dark.

So they hadn’t let any grass grow underfoot, that was sure, but they weren’t exactly coming up behind us either. I just hadn’t figured the cops to be throwing their party here at Bootheville General Hospital. Why the hell weren’t they in Willisburg?

Then I remembered that guard I shot. They’d naturally want to get him to a hospital and likely his brother too, to get what details they could out of them while they got looked at. So they’d come to the closest hospital same as I had, and that landed us all here in Bootheville and Merry Christmas, everybody.

I eased the truck in past the cop cars and up to a big glass double-door where I hoped there’d be an orderly standing, but no such luck.

“Wait here.” I eased my leg out from under Callie’s head and she stopped her snoring long enough to moan up some, like a baby doll does when you lay it down. In the light from outside I could see Walter was gritting his teeth, wincing with the hurt from his hands and feet and trying not to show it too much. “Right back,” I said to him. “Anybody comes out, make like you’re hurt real bad.”

“Won’t be hard,” he said.

Outside in the parking lot there was some kind of speaker thing turned on and playing

To save us all

From Satan’s power

When we were gone astray,

Ohhhh tidings of co-om-fort and joy…

I walked through snow that had been plowed and salted and covered with ashes till it was just ankle-deep slush up to the emergency-room doors. They were those glass doors, the new kind like they had in stores, where you step on a rubber mat and the door swings open and hits you in the face. On the other side, about fifty feet down a hall, I could see a guy in a white uniform, likely an orderly or something—and most likely he was the guy I needed to get that Callie woman out of the truck and off my hands. But he was talking to somebody.

I stopped just short of stepping on the mat and took a good look at who he was talking to—I didn’t want to go interrupting some cop and keep him from going about his duties. No sir, not me. The guy was wearing a trench coat and a battered hat with a wide, drooping brim, and I figured him for a plain-clothes detective at first. Then I saw he was short and skinny and wearing glasses thick as boot heels, so most likely he wasn’t a cop at all, and I figured to chance it.

I stepped on the mat and the door swung open and they both turned to see what it was.

“Emergency out here.” I said it loud, but not shouting. “Stretcher case!”

The guy in white said, “Stretcher case?” and the one in the trench coat said, “I’ll help you.”

Before he walked over he picked up a hefty camera with a flash on it big as an electric fan and slung it around his neck and as he came out the door I saw he had something pinned on his coat that said
PRESS
, and I know I said it before but it bears repeating:

Well, hell.

They both came out that door carrying a canvas stretcher, and while I wondered what to do next I opened up the passenger side of the truck and Walter fell out and landed in the dirty snow at their feet. He moaned as the guy in white tried to help him up, and I wondered was he was faking it like I told him or was he really bad hurt, trying to stand on his frozen feet. His knees started to buckle and I moved in to prop him up against the side of the truck—and to kind of block them from seeing all those money bags piled up in the bed. But I guess the hurt was too bad, and he was sure too heavy for me to hold, so he just sat down in the snow again.

The orderly took a look at him in the light from overhead. “Hey, we don’t treat them here.” And the reporter got a look on his face like he’d lost interest. That was fine with me as we weren’t planning to stick here anyway.

“Not him,” I said, “in the truck.”

“The hell,” the orderly said. He looked in the truck and saw the big bulky lump stretched along the seat. “What happened to this guy?”

“Not sure,” I said, “she said she got shot.”

“It’s a woman?” The reporter woke up again, like he could see a story coming on. “Let’s get her inside.”

The orderly set one end of his stretcher against the edge of the seat and I held the far end while they got Callie’s feet up on it and started easing her out, gently, along the axis of her body, pulling by the hem of her heavy coat to keep it from hanging up.

When they had her almost out on the stretcher the reporter looked my way. “What’s your name, Officer? Where’d you find her? What happened?”

I almost said I was Officer Drapp, since I was getting used to it by now, but then I figured that him being a reporter he might have covered that murder of Gonzago case, and if he did, he’d know Drapp personal, so I said,

“Jack Tull. I’m Captain of the Citizen’s Auxiliary, Piketon Police.”

“Piketon?” I could see his opinion of me drop a notch when I said I wasn’t a real cop, but just a jack-leg deputy from a tooner-ville town like Piketon. Meantime, they got Callie all the way out onto the stretcher and I tried to casually hand my end off to him but he went on, “Piketon in on this too?”

“Not really.” I sort of nudged my end over to him again but he didn’t take me up on it. “Chief wanted us to set up roadblocks as a precaution in case they came our way. That woman there, she drove up on me in this truck, driving crazy all over and I flagged her down and then I saw she was shot. Then I saw this feller inside near froze-up, but she was too bad hurt to tell me anything, they both was bad hurt like this and just almost passed out, so I radioed in and the chief said to get in the truck and take her here because with these roads the way they are they sure couldn’t get a medic out to us, so I did like he said and I guess I’m here now.”

He lost interest in me about halfway through all that and started blowing on his hands in the cold, which is what I was hoping. I made to hand him my end of the stretcher again, but the orderly said, “Let’s get her inside.”

“I’ll just get a shot of the truck, be right in,” the reporter said.

Dammit.

And next thing I was carrying my end of that heavy stretcher—jeez, that woman weighed a ton!—into the hospital, down one hallway then another, past a bunch of cops hanging around, and the orderly decided he’d be helpful to the cops, so while we were rolling Callie onto a bed with wheels on it he called out, “This woman’s been shot,” and they all perked up good and came over.

Well, dammit again.

Time to ease away, get back out there, get Walter back in the truck and get us lost. I would have done it, too, but things just kept getting better and better. Right then the reporter runs in and yells to the cops standing around,

“Hey! Outside! It’s the money from the robbery!”

Dammit, dammit, dammit.

There was a big rush for the back door, and me with my cop clothes I blended right in with the blue crowd and we all came out the door and around the truck. The reporter stayed inside; likely wanted to be the first to talk to the daring young lady who rescued all that money. I thought about what he’d do when they pulled back that hood Callie was wearing and he got a look at her, but that was somewhere off the back of my mind. Main thing I was thinking about was what the hell was I going to do now?

We got outside to the truck, and there was about six or eight of us I guess. I took a long breath when I saw Walter had crawled away and he was sitting up against a wall in a shadow by a vent blowing warm air. Don’t know how he got himself there—couldn’t have been easy work, not for a man with frozen hands and feet, but he’d done it and that made things a little less awful.

Which ain’t saying much.

Me and all these cops crowded around the back of that truck while the music out there played,

…the horse knows the way

to carry the sleigh

O’er the white and drifting sno-oww,

Over the river

And through the woods…

and we stared at the money bags a while. Then everyone started talking, asking where’d the truck come from and who brought it here, and I played just as dumb as the rest of them, like I’d never seen that truck before in my life and it could have dropped from Mars for all I knew. Finally somebody in the crowd wearing stripes on his sleeves said, “I’ll call the chief. You guys get that money inside.”

So I backed off and just watched as a half-dozen cops picked up all those bags of money and carried them in the hospital.

Once they were all inside and nobody looking, I walked through the packed-down ice-slush over to Walter. He’d propped himself up a little more, but he still looked like Death on a rainy Monday morning, and I bent down to him.

“Walter,” I said, “we got a job of work ahead of us.”

December 20, 1951

5:45 PM

Eddie

“You wait here,” I said, “I’m coming right back and get you inside.”

“Wasn’t going far anyhow,” he managed.

I guess nowadays they keep wheelchairs handy by the hospital doors to help folks in and out, but back when I’m writing about that idea never struck anybody yet, so I had to look around inside a few minutes before I found one in a back room. And don’t you know, just when I started wheeling it out, that orderly, the one that helped to get Callie in, he comes by, so I tried to look busy and official.

Didn’t work, though.

“What you doing?” he asked.

“Man outside,” I never broke my pace, “needs took care of.”

“I told you outside, officer, we don’t treat those Sambos here.” He talked like a man who doesn’t get to give orders very much, so when he can he wants to get the most out of it. “They got a place on Fourth Street you can take him there.”

I just ignored him and kept moving, and hoped he wouldn’t follow me out in the cold. That worked, anyway.

It was kind of a tough job out there, getting Walter up and into that wheelchair. Finally I bent over and had him lock his arms around my neck, then I straightened up, pulling him up with me, grabbed his belt through his coat and we danced around till I got him sat in the chair, while all the time that music was going,

….make the Yuletide gay
,

From now on
,

Our troubles will be far awaaaay…

“Don’t forget to act sick,” I said, unnecessaily.

I hand-hauled that wheelchair backwards through the snow-sleet gunk in the parking lot till we got to the dry place at the door. Then as we were coming in, that orderly pops up again.

“I told you he can’t come in here.” He moved in front of us, and I started calculating how it might be to kill him and stuff his body in one of the big trash cans outside. It sounded like too much work just now, so I just gave him the same look I gave those two guards on the armored car this morning and said,

“Find me a doctor.”

For just a half split second he looked back at me like he was going to make a fuss out of this. Then he read the look in my eyes, gulped and went scuttling away and came back before long with somebody else.

I guess you never can tell, but I had my own ideas about the kind of doctor who ends up working on the late shift in a hospital, and it ain’t a real high opinion. This one looked to be fifty maybe, with a belly that bounced into the hall ahead of him. His shoes were scuffed, and there was a mustard stain on his white coat. He took a short dainty puff on a filtered cigarette and flashed a smile at me that beamed like a dull thud. Then he looked down at Walter in the chair through smudgy wire-rim glasses. Before he could say anything the orderly who brought him here said, “I told him he couldn’t come in, Doctor Robbins. I told him we don’t treat them here.”