“I’m afraid so. He’s losing hair up there. Of course a plastic surgeon could erase most of it.”
“I’ll keep it.” Sergeant Proudy rubbed his hands together. “When some rookie asks me what happened, I’ll just tell him I got it in the head with a fire ax. You got any aspirin?”
“I never carry it. My theory is that any patient too dumb to buy his own is too dumb to live anyway.”
“I’ll get some,” Candy said. She bustled out, and they heard the stair groan beneath her weight.
Barnes said, “That girl enjoys nursing. You ought to hire her, Dr. Makee.” He stood with his back to the fireplace, where the wreck of a table burned.
The physician shook his head and snapped his bag shut. “There was a time when I would have taken you up on that. Now I’ve had to learn restraint.”
Sergeant Proudy stood, swayed, and gripped the back of a chair to steady himself. “How much do I owe you, Doc?”
Dr. Makee winked at Stubb. “I can always tell when they’re getting better. They call me Doc.”
“How much? If it isn’t more than I got on me, I’ll pay you now.”
“Ten dollars. Quite a few years ago, I swore I’d never charge more than ten dollars for a house call.”
Stubb said, “Nobody else even
“I don’t either. I’m retired, or that’s what I keep telling people.”
“Here’s the aspirin,” Candy announced. “I’ll get you a drink, if the pipes aren’t frozen yet.” To Barnes she added, “Madame Serpentina’s packing. I listened outside her door.”
Stubb glanced at the dark and silent television. He whispered, “Where’s Free?” but Barnes only shrugged.
Sergeant Proudy gulped down two aspirin tablets and wandered across the room to look out the window.
“There he is!” Sim Sheppard shouted.
Everything stopped. Everyone turned to look. For perhaps twenty seconds, the prominent nose and small eyes of Sergeant Proudy appeared at the parlor window, still recognizable beneath a rakish cap of white surgical gauze.
Sim’s coffee was trampled in the snow. Steve Marshal’s attache case came unattached. No physicist could say how hard the front-runners struck the door. They were weighty men, most of them, police and sales alike; they had been sprinting, and they were unable to brake on the ice. Behind them were a dozen more even weightier and equally unable—or unwilling—to stop.
The weakened door made a sound much like that of a large model plane jumped upon by a small boy.
The Retreat
“You too, huh?” Barnes asked.
Stubb looked around at him. “Yeah, me too.”
It was night, and snow clouds hung over the city; there was no light anywhere that was not mankind’s. It might have been a city of clouds, with a few stars peeping through. They might have been in some vast, dark, rolling country, a land of hills and black pines.
“I thought they’d have more down.”
“It was almost quitting time when they got Candy out.” Stubb chuckled.
“What was that gunk under her robe?”
“Baby oil, I think.”
“I’m the one who’s supposed to know about novelties. If I had greased the floor in the hall …”
“They probably would have dropped her and broken her neck.”
“Or she would have gone through to the basement. How much does she weigh?”
“How the hell should I know? Two hundred, maybe.”
“Two hundred and fifty, at least. Maybe three hundred.”
“Maybe three hundred,” Stubb conceded. “Who gives a damn?” He tossed his cigarette into the snow. “It’s God-damned cold out here, Ozzie. You got a new place to stay?”
“Yes, I do.”
“Not me. They let me put my bag behind the counter in the Sandwich Shop up the street, and I’m still looking around.”
“Yes,” Barnes said again.
“We kind of worked together this afternoon, right? And it didn’t go too bad. Hell, with Candy it almost went good enough.”
Barnes nodded.
“Ozzie, I was wondering whether I could bunk with you. Just for tonight. I’ll get a place of my own in the morning.”
