We hit the floor together.
My head connected hard with the edge of a crate on the way down and I could feel my eyes film. For a few seconds tiny particles of fire burned my cheek, then the whole side of my face felt as if it were lying in a brazier of hot coals. I pushed Poochie’s limp form from me and fought my way to my feet.
The shot had come through the pane-less window. I yanked the. 45 from under my shoulder, thumbed off the safety, kicked the slide back. I threw the shack’s crude door open and dashed outside.
The beach was deserted.
No overt sounds interrupted a silence that wasn’t really silence at all, wind whispering over sand, waves lapping, trees rustling, my watch ticking. A motorboat, not close enough to have carried away the assailant, put- putted along, no telling how far out, the way wind carried sound on the water.
The moon showed me footprints in the sand by the window, but they led to the line of trees up and back, behind the shack. Where the sand gave way to grassy land, I bent down and laid my ear to the ground. Somebody was running, running hard. Very faintly, I picked up the footsteps, but they grew steadily fainter and died out altogether.
He was gone.
The bastard.
Holstering the. 45, I ran back to the shack. Poochie was prostrate on the floor, blood seeping through his shabby robe. I ripped away the t-shirt beneath and examined the wound. It was high up against his neck. The bullet had gone through cleanly, not touching the bone, missing the jugular vein by a hair.
I pulled a handkerchief from my hip pocket and tore it in half, then made a compress of each section and pressed it to the openings of the hole. I tore off the tail of my shirt and tied it around his neck to hold the compresses in place.
Poochie’s eyes flickered once. He smiled, and passed out again. The little dope had tried to take that bullet for me. He had deliberately thrown himself in front of me to save my life. By God, from now on he was going to stay under my wing.
And if he died somebody was going to leave this world screaming with a broken back.
He was light as a feather in my arms. I cradled him as gently as I could and half-ran to the Wesley house. By the time I reached the car, I was panting heavily. That trek through the sand had taken it out of me. I gently rested Poochie down in the passenger’s seat, then got behind the wheel and backed out of the driveway and took off for town like a bat out of hell.
That heap of mine was a pre-war number that looked like nothing but was really something, with good rubber and a souped-up engine. Trees blew by like a giant picket fence as I cut down the middle of a highway that was all mine, hitting one hundred by the time the modest twinkling of lights announced Sidon.
I went through the city with my hand on the horn. Parked cars glared at me with the reflection of my brights in their unlit headlamps as I swept by. A few lights were on and there was a small crowd stuffed in Big Steve’s place-probably reporters. In front of the grocery I braked to a stop. The two floors above the grocery were Dr. Moody’s office and living quarters. I hoped my old drinking buddy wasn’t on a Saturday night bender.
But Dr. Moody opened the door, looking crisp and alert in what was likely his one and only suit. As the coroner, he’d had to inspect Sharron Wesley’s corpse and he was still dressed for the occasion. His eyes flared at the sight of the little guy I had carried up two flights like Daddy conveying a slumbering child to a bedroom.
“What have you got there, Mike?”
“Gunshot wound. Where’ll I put him?”
Moody led us back down a flight to his offices on the second floor, unlocking the door quickly as I carried the unconscious Poochie into a small waiting room, ancient but clean. The doc pointed to a door, which he opened for us, and I lugged Poochie in. The examining room was done up as well as any hospital’s, and just as completely. The old boy may have been a drunkard, but he still knew his stuff.
As gently as possible, I laid the unmoving form down on the examining table with its crisp white paper. Moody was washing his hands at a gleaming sink. When he finished, he came over and unfastened the crude bandages I had applied and inspected the wound.
I asked, “How does it look?”
“He’ll live.”
“I like the sound of that diagnosis.”
“Maybe so, but little Poochie here came really close to cashing in. We’ve graduated from a severe beating to a nearly fatal gunshot wound. What the hell happened this time?”
As I told him, Moody cleansed and dressed the wound. Together we got Poochie out of his rags down to his skivvies and slid him into a white gown. The doc cranked the examining table into a prone position and made sure his unconscious patient had his head comfortably positioned. The little guy was still out. I guess the shock of it was too much for him.
Moody crooked his finger for me to follow him, and I did, back out into the waiting room. We took a couple of chairs and I scooted mine to face him.
“Mike, you’ll have to leave him here with me for a few days.”
I gave him a quick look. “Why, Doc? It’s a clean wound-in and out.”
“Infection. That and shock are real possibilities. I know Poochie pretty well, and his habits, from eating to exercise, aren’t conducive to good health-his kind doesn’t have much resistance to this sort of thing. He’s little more than a hobo, Mike.”
“He makes his way in the world okay.”
“Yes he does, under normal conditions. But right now, no-he’ll be better off where I can keep an eye on him.”
“Listen, Doc,” I said, “somebody took a shot at me and that little guy stepped in front of it-stepped into it- purposely. I owe him. He saved my life, and if anything happens to him, I’ll rip this lousy town wide open.”
Moody was raising his hands in surrender. “Nothing will happen.”
“You don’t get it yet, Doc. Some bastard tried to murder me… and Poochie was staring at the window at the time. He saw who did it… and I want him to be able to talk.”
Moody sighed, thought that over. Then he prescribed me a cigarette and I took him up on it.
We lit up.
“You know, Mike,” he began, “I am fully aware of the deplorable conditions in this town. As a doctor, I have the questionable distinction of being connected with the so-called local legal system as police coroner. However, that service is rendered by me purely as a protective measure.”
He pulled heavily on his cigarette and blew a cloud of smoke toward the ceiling and continued.
“I was a good doctor once,” he said. “I had a fine practice and a family, over in Wilcox… but I lost that family at one blow. It happened when our car overturned while coming home from a trip. From then on I went to pieces. I began drinking, realizing the consequences that would follow, but not caring. Naturally, my practice dropped off. Before I went completely to pot, I moved to Sidon with all my equipment. The police coroners offered me the post and I took it so that, in any event, I would still have an income. As the only doctor, I do have a small practice here in town. I’ve been careful to limit my self-sedation to off-hours. I can honestly say I have never endangered any patient’s life with my… weakness.”
“So what do you think of the local law, and the angles they play?”
“They stink-the cops and their angles. You’ve been here enough times, Mike, to know that the town operates solely for the profits it derives from its summer visitors. As long as the political system assists the local populace in getting the almighty dollar, a populace that overlooks the methods practiced in doing so, they keep the system in place and intact. Of course, by now the system has its hooks so far into the people that they have to vote a certain way, to protect their own interests.”
“I figured that out in about fifteen seconds. What about Sharron Wesley? How does she figure? Or I should say, how did she?”
Moody squinted at me curiously. “How much do you know about her?”
“Just about everything,” I told him.
Maybe I was making a mistake, admitting that. Moody’s disapproval of the local “system” didn’t lessen his obligation to the dirty cops and corrupt public officials who provided him with a pay check.
