'Shot? Honest to God?'
'What I heard,' I said.
Gray stubble next to me said, 'Know his name?'
'No,' I said. 'Heard a car got burned too.'
'Honest to God,' the counter girl said. Two cops came into the restaurant. They sat down at the counter three stools past gray stubble.
'Hey, Lenny,' the counter girl said to one of them, 'what happened out on Quaiabin Road the other night? This guy says somebody got shot.'
She poured coffee for both of them without being asked.
Lenny was maybe twenty-five with a thick blond moustache and his police cap crushed like a bomber pilot on his fifty-third mission. He looked down the counter at me. 'What's this?' he said.
'I heard there was a shooting out on Quabbin Road,' I said. 'Heard a car got burned too.'
'Where'd you hear that,' Lenny said.
'Got it from an eyewitness,' I said.
Lenny looked at his partner. 'You know anything about a shooting, Chuck?'
Chuck was blond too, but taller than Lenny and clean-shaven. Chuck drank from his coffee cup holding it in both hands, his wrists limp, his shoulders hunched, the way Jack Palance did it in Shane. He sipped another sip and then put the cup down slowly and looked at me, turning only his head.
'Don't know anything about it,' he said. 'I would be real careful about the rumors I was spreading in this town, pal.'
'Oh, sure,' I said. 'I'm probably wrong, just talk you hear around.'
'You know something,' Lenny said, 'you report it to us, otherwise you do yourself a favor and keep your trap shut, you understand?'
Chuck kept gazing at me with his best baleful gaze. Baleful gazes are more effective if you aren't twenty-five and blond and can't grow a moustache.
'Gotcha,' I said. 'Thanks for clearing that up, officers.' I left three one-dollar bills on the counter and got up and strolled out onto the street.
Susan had a new car, a bullet-shaped red Japanese sports car with a turbo-charged engine that would go from 0 to 5 million in 2.5 seconds. She blazed around in it like Chuck Yeager, but it scared me half to death and whenever I could I drove it with the cruise control set to fifty-five so it wouldn't creep up to the speed of light on me when I glanced at the road. I nursed it away from the curb and went out Main Street toward the Wheaton Union Hospital. I picked up the Wheaton cruiser in my rearview mirror almost at once. They had their open tail on me again. I was supposed to pick them up in the rearview mirror.
About a quarter of a mile farther I picked up another tail, behind the cops, a silver Ford Escort. I love a parade.
Wheaton Union was a square two-story yellow-brick building with some glass brickwork around the entrance. A sign pointed around back to the emergency room and outpatient clinic. I parked and went in.
There was a waiting room with three people in it, and beyond a glassed-in reception area with two white- coated women, and beyond that the corridor and examining rooms.
I went to the reception room and spoke with one of the women.
'I understand a man was brought in Friday night around six o'clock with a gunshot wound in the left thigh,' I said.
Behind me a Wheaton cop, no one I'd seen before, strolled into the reception area and sat down in one of the spring-back wheeled chairs behind the desk next to the one I stood before. He was eating an apple.
'I beg your pardon, sir?' the woman at the desk said.
The other woman said, 'Hello, Dave,' to the cop with the apple.
I said, 'The guy that got shot Friday night, I wondered how he was.'
The cop swallowed his apple and said to my receptionist, 'Hey, Jenny, you and Kevin coming to the softball banquet?'
She nodded at the cop and looked at me and said, 'I'm sorry, sir, I have no record of anybody with a gunshot wound.'
'Without even checking?' I said.
'A gunshot wound would be news, sir. There's been no one brought in here shot.'
The cop took another bite of his apple. My receptionist looked at him and then the other receptionist.
'You don't know anything about a gunshot victim, do you, Marge?'
Marge pushed her lower lip out and shook her head slowly. To my right a small blackhaired woman came into the waiting room and sat down.
The cop was short and round-faced and wore his cap on the back of his head. He took a last bite out of the apple and looked around for the wastebasket. Didn't see it and put the core in an ashtray.
My receptionist picked it up with a wrinkled nose and dropped it in the basket under her desk.
'Really, Dave,' she said. 'Did you grow up in a barnyard?'
