I stepped up and read it. It looked legitimate, so I sat down
on a white stool beside the elevated sheeted table. I wanted no self-appointed abortionist whittling on my arm.
Dr. Sanfilippo had been watching me warily. I removed (lie jacket from my shoulder, and his mustachioed upper lip tightened when he saw the shredded, sodden shirt around my arm.
'Sure you will,' I soothed him. 'But you're a doctor. First you'll dress it.' I held out the arm. 'Like right now.'
He didn't move. His smooth, trim-looking features still expressed shock. 'The guard—' he began, and stopped. I le swallowed. His face was suddenly damp.
'The arm, Doc,' I reminded him. So one of the guards had died. Without knowing it, Santiago E. Sanfilippo, M.D., had just passed over an invisible line.
He finally got himself in motion and washed his hands in the basin. He dried them, then unwrapped the arm and examined it, front and back. 'Large caliber,' he said professionally.
'Large,' I agreed.
He turned to the green cabinet. 'Half an ampoule—'
'No anesthetic,' I cut him off.
He shrugged. It was my funeral, and for him it couldn't happen fast enough. He was getting his confidence back. He felt immeasurably superior to the sweaty, gun-holding type sitting in his office with a ragged, bloody hole in his arm. Next he'd be planning my capture. I had a feeling this boy was going to make it easy for me.
He laid out a tray of sharp things on the table, and I spread a towel in my lap. He bathed, swabbed, probed, disinfected, and finally bandaged. He was rougher than he needed to be, probably hoping I'd pass out. 'Don't move until I put a sling on it,' he said brusquely when he-finished.
'No sling,' I said. I took the dry end of the towel and wiped my perspiring face. I reached into my jacket pocket on the table and took out the wrapped package of fifty one-hundred dollar bills. I broke the seal and put it in my pocket, counted out fifteen bills on the examination table, and pushed them toward him. 'Nice job, Doc,' I said.
His expression changed
I stood up and kicked the stool I'd been sitting on in his direction. 'Sit, Doc. Real still.' I looked in the small mirror at the basin where he'd washed up. The mirror reflected a suntanned hard face with short black hair. I laid the gun on the edge of the basin, ran the water, and found a clean towel.
Stooped over, I could watch the doc's feet. If he could get to me before I got to the gun, he was a better man than I thought. One-handed I washed the oil and lampblack from my hair and the suntan makeup from my face and neck. When I emerged from behind the towel, Sanfilippo stared at hair and skin a nationality lighter.
I looked him over. Thin as he was, I still couldn't carry him from the office. 'Walk out to the car ahead of me,' I told him. 'I'm going to tie you and leave you in the garage.'
He didn't like it. I could see him thinking furiously, and I could have predicted the instant he brightened. Would I have paid him if I were going to kill him? Certainly not. The stupid bastard never stopped to realize if I'd been going to leave him around to do any broadcasting, he'd never have seen me out of the war paint. I followed him from the examination room after picking up something with a bone handle and six inches of steel from his surgical tray. I stuck it in my belt.
During the walk along the passageway I got out the Woodsman and put it under my armpit where I could get to it in a hurry. At the car Sanfilippo turned and looked at me expectantly. I kept a careful ten feet away from him. ' Think something's wrong—' I mumbled, weaving on my feet. Then I did a long, slow pinwheel to the garage floor, careful to stay off my bad side. From beneath nearly closed eyelids I could see Sanfilippo's startled look as he stared down at me.
My hand was close enough to the Woodsman to stop his clock if he came after me, or if he tried to run out of the garage. I didn't expect him to do either. I'd tabbed this guy as a wisenheimer, and I was willing to let him prove himself.
He took a final look at me, then spun around to the Ford. He flung open the rear door, and I could hear him pawing through the back seat. He left that in a hurry and tried the front. He ripped off something in Spanish and darted around to the rear. I'd paid him in hundreds, so he was sure the swag was in the car.
He wasn't bad, the doc. I couldn't see what he used— nil I could see were his legs under the Ford—but he popped the back deck lid in no time. I heard the
I eased myself to my feet and got over there. Sanfilippo had a knife out, and he was slashing away at the seat cushion. He was right down to the springs in a couple of places. I pulled the flat-bladed surgical tool from my belt. Sanfilippo whacked away at the cushion, cursing like a sailor, and then all of a sudden my presence got through to him. He started to turn, and I gave him four-and-a-half inches between the second and third ribs, blade flat to the ground for easier passage between the bones.
Sanfilippo was looking over his shoulder at me, and his black eyes didn't believe it. I pulled it out and gave it to him again, then grabbed his belt and steered him down away from the car. He sank like a deflated balloon, slowly at first and then with a rush.
His own knife was still in his hand. I left the surgical steel in him after wiping the handle. I reached down again and yanked his wallet from his hip pocket, stripped it, wiped it, and threw it down beside the body. It would be open and shut to any investigator: killed while pursuing a thief from his office. And for a bonus, no bullets in him to be matched up with the ones they took out of the bank guards.
I backed the Ford out of there and drove up to Nineteenth and Van Buren to a big motel, The Tropics. I registered as Earl Drake, the jacket again over my bandaged arm. 'I'll try your Western hospitality till my office gets me a new sample line,' I told the middle-aged desk clerk. 'They busted into my car in Nogales last night and cleaned me—clothes, samples, camera, the works. I'll pay you for a week.'
The clerk clucked sympathetically as he handed me my change. 'Excellent shops within a block or two, sir. Sorry to hear of your misfortune. I hope you enjoy your stay with us.'
I took the number 24 key he gave me and drove the car down in front of that unit. I went inside and locked the door, washed my face, eased down carefully into an inclined chair with a footrest, and closed my eyes.
I had a lot of unwinding to do.
The last conscious thought I had before I drifted off was that tin people at the bank were going to have one hell of a glass bill.
I lived in that chair for a week, aside from short trips to the on premises restaurant, I didn't dare get into the big double bed without a sling on the arm. The first incautious movement would have broken the wound open again. With a sling on, I might as well wear a sign: 'Here I Am.' I stayed in the chair.
I didn't sleep too much after the first day, but I dozed all the time. The first morning I caught a bright-looking busboy in the motel restaurant, gave him a list of sizes, and sent him out for clothes. I specified long-sleeved sport shirts. He came back with stuff that would have turned a bird of paradise pale with envy. I started to refuse it until I thought that it might be a good thing to have people looking at the clothes instead of at me.
The papers that first morning had a ball. The headlines were glaring. TWO GUARDS SLAIN IN BOLD DAYLIGHT BANK ROBBERY. KILLERS ESCAPE WITH BANK'S $178,000. ONE BANDIT, TWO GUARDS DEAD IN DOWNTOWN BANK SHOOT 'EM UP.
I looked at that figure of $178,000 a couple of times. It rested easily on the eye. Even allowing for the bank officers adding in their personal loan accounts, which isn't unknown, it was still a nice touch.
The papers speculated that one of the escapees might have been wounded. The descriptions were varied. One eyewitness insisted there'd been five bank robbers. The consensus, though, settled for a husky Swede and a little Mexican. Like I said, I'm five-ten. I weigh one-seventy, but I've noticed before that a big man doesn't always look big himself. He just makes anyone with him look small.
