The Ferguson Affair

“Whatever it is, she’s mighty low on it now.”

“You mean she talked to you?” Whitey said. “What did she say?” There were dancing orange gleams in the centers of his eyes, as if he was burning up with curiosity.

“She said a lot of things. They’ll keep. Let’s get a temporary dressing on this shoulder.”

He answered slowly. “I guess we better do that. Ronny, leave the pig lay for now. I may need your help with Mr. Gunnarson.”

The hinges of my knees were as loose as water. I barely made it to the ambulance. They hoisted me up into the back, turned on the roof light, and let me down gently on a padded stretcher. As soon as I was horizontal, my head began to swim and my eyes played tricks. Whitey and Ronny seemed to hover over me like a pair of mad scientists exchanging sinister smiles.

“Strap his wrists,” Whitey said.

“That won’t be necessary, I won’t fight you.”

“We won’t take any chances. Strap his wrists, Ronny.”

Ronny strapped my wrists to the cold aluminum sides of the stretcher. Whitey produced a triangular black rubber mask attached to a narrow black tube.

“I don’t need anesthetic.”

“Yes you do. I hate to see people suffer, you know how I am.”

Ronny snickered. “I know. Nobody else knows, but I know.”

Whitey shushed him. He fitted the soft rubber mask over my nose and mouth. Its elastic strap circled my head.

“Pleasant dreams,” he said. “Breathe out and then breathe in.”

A sense of survival deeper than consciousness made me hold my breath. Behind my eyes, broken black pieces were falling into place. I had heard Ronny’s snicker on the telephone.

“Breathe out. Then breathe in.”

Whitey’s face hung over me like one of the changing faces you see between sleeping and waking at the end of a bad day. I raised my head against the downward pressure of his hand. The end of the black tube was wrapped around his other hand. Using both hands, he forced my head back down.

“Listen,” Ronny said. “There’s a car coming up the hill.” After a listening silence: “It sounds like a Mercury Special.”

“Cop car?”

“Sounds like it.”

“You should have been monitoring the police calls. You goofed, man.”

“You said you needed me in here.”

“I don’t any more. I can handle him.”

“How’s the patient doing?”

“He’ll be gone in a minute. Get out there and give them a story. We pulled him out of the fire, but he died of asphyxiation, poor fellow.”

He leaned hard on the mask. I was far from gone. One of my sports was diving without a lung.

Ronny leaned over to look at me. I doubled up my right leg and kicked him in the middle of his face. It felt like stepping on a snail.

Whitey said: “You devil!”

I tried to kick him. He was beyond the reach of my flailing legs, bending over my face with his full weight on me. The dark wheel of unconsciousness started to spin in my head. I tried to breathe. There was nothing to breathe.

The sound of a motor whining up the grade detached itself from the whirring of the dark wheel. Before the two sounds merged again, headlights filled the ambulance with light. The pressure was removed from my face. I caught a blurred glimpse of Whitey standing over his prostrate partner with a black automatic in his hand.

He fired it. The ambulance interior multiplied its roar like an echo chamber. The single sharp crack that followed was more than an echo. Whitey bowed like a performer at the footlights, clasping his abdomen.

Pike Granada came into the ambulance and took the rubber thing off me before I followed Broadman and Secundina all the way into darkness.

chapter 26

SPOTLIT ON A BLACK, jagged landscape, Sally was being carried away by a gorilla who was wooing her in Spanish. I caught them and tore off the gorilla suit. Then I was wrestling with a man whose name I couldn’t remember. I opened my eyes and saw Lieutenant Wills scowling at me through bars.

“You can’t keep me in jail,” I think I said. “Judge Bennett will give me a writ of habeas corpus.”

Wills grinned at me balefully. “It will take more than that to spring you out of this.”

I sat up swearing. My head took off from my shoulders and flew around the big dim room, bumping into empty beds. It looked more like a dormitory than a jail.

“Take it easy, now.” Wills leaned on the barred side that turned my bed into a sort of cage. Grasping my good shoulder, he pressed me back onto the pillowless sheet. “You’re in the recovery room in the hospital. You just got out of the operating room.”

“Where’s Sally? What happened to Sally?”

“Nothing happened to her, except in the course of nature. She gave birth to a little girl last night. Six pounds ten ounces. The two of them are right here in this same hospital, down on the third floor. Both doing well.”

“Is that where she went last night?”

“This is where she went. What bothers me is where you went, and why. What were you doing up in the mountains there?”

“Hunting deer by moonlight out of season. Arrest me, officer.”

Wills shook his head curtly. “Get off the pentothal jag. This is serious, Bill. You ought to know how serious. Pike Granada says you were within seconds of getting smothered to death. It he hadn’t been keeping an eye on those ambulance drivers, you would have been a goner.”

“Thank Granada for me.”

“I’ll do that, with pleasure. You owe him personal thanks, though, and maybe an apology, eh? Just for good measure, he gave you a pint of his own blood this morning.”

“Why would Granada do that?”

“He happens to be your blood type, and the bank was out of your type and you needed it. You needed it in more ways than one, maybe. You could do with a little Spanish blood in your veins. And a little cop blood.”

“Rub it in.”

“I don’t mean to do that. But you gave me a bad ten minutes yesterday, until I had a chance to talk to Pike. You know what you are, don’t you? Prejudiced.”

“The hell I am.”

“Prejudiced,” Wills repeated. “You may not realize it, but you don’t like cops, and you don’t like Spanish people. If you want to practice law in this town, do it effectively, you’re going to have to get to know la Raza, understand ’em.”

“What does la Raza mean?”

“The Spanish-American people. They call themselves that. It’s a proud word, and they’re a proud people. You don’t want to undersell them, Bill. They have a lot of ignorance, a lot of poverty, a lot of crime. But they make their contribution to this town. Look at Granada. He came up out of the gangs, sure, but you don’t judge a man by what he did in his crazy teens. You judge him by his contribution over the long hike.”

“I get the message.”

“Good. I thought I’d get my oar in while you were still feeling no pain. You were pretty hot against Granada.”

“I was half convinced that he killed Broadman.”

“Yeah. We all know different now, thanks to Granada. He figured out for himself that Whitey Slater and his