All Heads Turn When the Hunt Goes By (17 page)

Beggs lived nearby, around the corner on 51st, in a brick apartment house that was typical of the architectural style of the neighborhood, massive Greek columns in front, railed balconies up and down. It wasn't a very quiet street, too many small children with working mothers. Everyone slathered on Jitterbug to keep the mosquitoes off and slept out on their balconies in the summertime. When they weren't sleeping they were promiscuously minding each other's business.

Jackson found a parking space for the Ford and walked toward the apartment house with his medical bag. Lightning was nearer than before, touching off the roofline and community of windows, announcing him in a saturnine glare. He went in through the screen door and up the steps to Beggs's door, which he opened, making almost no sound, with the key she'd given him.

Inside there was a foyer with a night-light burning, an electric candelabrum mounted on one wall. Jackson passed by his reflection in a moody mirror and went through an arched doorway into the living room. The room was furnished with dumpy stuffed chairs, a sleigh-shaped couch covered in green velvet the color of the skin on a drying-out pond, standing lamps with ball-fringed shades offered at right angles to the perpendicular, and a collection of vasa murrhina displayed on shelves, windowsills and the mantelpiece. A clock was ticking on the mantel between ebony-framed photographs: Beggs and the girls, each of whom had her faithless dusky eyes, that attitude of artless promise and the unaffected come-on; Begg's husband, with tankers' goggles on his forehead and a cigar stub between his teeth, looking devil-may-care and pleased to be at war. Flocked curtains were joined over the closed windows and glass doors to the balcony, and the shades had been pulled down as well. As a result the temperature in the apartment may have been close to a hundred degrees. Jackson turned on a lamp with a forty-watt bulb in it and wondered why Beggs had left the place closed up.

Facing him was another arched doorway, draped and overdraped with more of the green couch velvet Beggs was so stuck on. Beyond the doorway was the dining room, with a small kitchen on the left, another short hallway straight ahead to the back bedroom. Holding the drapes aside, he stepped into the dining room, his mind on the liquor cache in the sideboard, what Kansas City folk called the old Ignorant Oil. A long shadow came out of the kitchen, followed by a tall, thin, glistening, nearly naked man with a glass of Coke in one hand and an army-issue .45-caliber automatic in the other.

He aimed the pistol at Jackson, who came to a standstill, sweat popping out all over his face. Major Charles Bradwin of the unhorsed U.S. Cavalry? Too bloody right.

"Beau?" said the major, in a crude voice that was only slightly above a whisper. "I'll kill you, Beau, if I have to."

For a weightless moment they were close in the matter of this threat, as close as longtime lovers. The major's eyes were earnest and unwinking but not too well fixed on Jackson himself, an indication that emotionally he was out the back door of the mind somewhere, balancing, in the dark, on a high thin wire, with only a pencil spotlight to show him the way.

While he was trying to put together an answer that would neither startle the major nor give credence to his worst suspicions, Jackson took professional inventory of wounds recently healed. Two-inch scar on the right upper quadrant of the abdomen, penetration wound, most likely the result of a bayonet thrust. The tip of the bayonet undoubtedly had gone through the diaphragm and the pleura and may have holed the right lung, resulting in a pneumo-thorax. Serious but not often fatal unless untreated for a long period of time.

The other wound, the one across his throat which was responsible for his lack of voice, had come close to killing him. Since he was alive today it meant there'd been a field hospital on the perimeter of the battlefield, because a surgeon who was both lucky and good had had to do a fast job of tying the artery in the neck. Even so, if the major's brain had fasted without blood for more than a few minutes, then today he would be in a vegetable bin instead of running around loose. Also possibly credit an alert medic who'd pounced on the major shortly after he went down with his throat slashed and spurting blood.

Though he was now ambulatory and seemed to have normal reflexes, he could still be permanently crazed by reason of his ordeal, or by a crucial loss of oxygen to the part of the brain that did most of his thinking for him. He'd established right away that he was no one to trifle with.

"Major," Jackson said, "I'm a friend of your friend Beggs. A doctor. She asked me to look in on you tonight to make sure you were comfortable."

"I see," Major Bradwin replied, with no indication in his face or voice that he'd even been listening. That was bad. Somehow he gave the impression, without speaking again or batting an eye, that he was willing to shoot Jackson just for practice. The hammer was cocked and it wouldn't take much, only a minor miscalculation on the major's part. Jackson felt his lips about to twitch, in mirth or high hysteria. Jackson Holley, unemployed sawbones, died last night in Kansas City of a minor miscalculation. His last words, which will be distributed along with his personal effects to the Salvation Army, were:
I don't even know what I'm doing here
.

With economy and a touch that said he knew his weapon intimately, Major Bradwin pointed the .45 at the ceiling and lowered the hammer with his thumb. He placed the gun on the dining-room table, but within easy reach.

"You're British, aren't you?"

"Yes," Jackson said.

"What's your name?"

"Holley. Jackson Holley, Mayor—"

"Forget that. Just call me Champ if you want to. I've been Champ all my life."

"Okay."

"Would you care for a Coke?" There was, in his phrasing of this inquiry, the suggestion of a man of quality, a West Pointer, perhaps, though he wore no rings, only dog tags like every other soldier. "There's no ice," Champ added. He drank from the glass in his hand. "I learned to like it without ice while we were at Oro Bay. That's in New Guinea."

"Oh—yes."

"Too hot in here for you?"

"I think so."

"I closed up after she left today. That was the only way I could sleep. Knowing the place was closed up."

"Who's Beau?" Jackson asked imprudently.

Champ's quick eyes had ice picks in them. Then he smiled, but his smile was out of sync with his guarded manner.

"Someone I'm having trouble with. What about it drink? Whiskey? She probably has some around here."

"In the sideboard."

"Fine. Why don't you help yourself? You must be more at home around here than I am. Sorry about the way I sound. It's better than it was, though. They did more surgery at Letterman, the vocal cords, and my voice is corning around."

He cleared his throat, almost bringing up a cough, which he was able to suppress by tensing muscles all over his body. Then he looked down at his glass as if something rare and interesting had fallen into it. Jackson walked gingerly to the sideboard, put his medical bag down, opened the doors and took out a bottle of Teacher's and a shot glass.

"We'll sit in the living room" Champ said when Jackson had measured out his drink. Jackson looked at him. "Go ahead," Champ said, his eyes dead level, his mouth grim again. He picked up his shooting iron.

"You can trust me, major," Jackson said hopefully.

"I know that. You're a friend of a friend, aren't you? Go ahead friend."

They went into the living room and, after some minor skirmishing, body English and shifting eyes, chose opposing chairs. Champ in his olive-drab skivvies sat with his back to the corner nearest the fireplace, art glass like a church window, all around his head. The .45 he placed in his lap. Every inch of his body gleamed, it drizzled sweat. His hands, forearms and face were much darker than the rest of him, the tropical tan like a permanent walnut stain with a yellowing glaze that showed in the jaw hollows. He was clean-shaven. The eyes were brazen in their private darkness, the forehead high and broad at the temples, giving him a brainy, high-caste look. An archdruid, but the angular slatted body was that of a country man and so were the wide, penurious lips, the bony chin and the hint of a cowlick, though he kept his coarse brown hair short.

He fingered the well-raised scar at his throat, it was like a pink exclamation mark lying almost on its side: first the nick on the left collarbone, then the broad and upward slash, his assailant having attempted to hack his head clean off. It was obvious he had a fever that was worsening, and he had to drag for breath, which hurt him.

"Where do you come in?" Champ said hoarsely.

"Angel of mercy, and all that."

"I can get along without a doctor. What I need—" He went into a fit of coughing, his face going darker with effort and a heartfelt anguish. Jackson tasted his whiskey and looked calmly at the struggling man. Tears were running down Champ's face by the time he got himself under control.

"I'm trying—to get home. She said—she'd fix it. Confidentially. So where do you—come in?"

Jackson got up, took off his wrinkled jacket and headed for the dining room.

"Where do you think you're going?"

"Just sit there and shut up." Jackson brought back the bottle of scotch and a clean glass. "Drink it," he said to Champ, "It won't do any harm. Then I'll get to work."

He rolled up his sleeves, opened his medical bag and set out what he would need. Champ sipped the whiskey cautiously, then eased back into his chair. Jackson made a trip to the linen closet for a clean towel, found a brighter light bulb Beggs had squirreled away and replaced the bulb in the lamp by Champ's chair. He cleaned his hands in alcohol, then took Champ's temperature, listened to his heart and lungs. He opened his bag again and got out a sterile hypodermic needle and a Squibb ampule filled with a chalky liquid.

Champ studied the needle and the drug. "What's that?"

"It's called penicillin, but it's not legitimately available in this country. The military is getting all of it, and it's saved a great many lives. May well have saved you from a lethal infection, assuming they had it at the field hospital where your throat was stitched together."

"I don't want any drugs. I told you I had to get home right—"

"Now see here, mayor, you're walking around with what I believe is a serious case of pneumonia, involving both lungs. With a course of penicillin and plenty of bed rest you'll pull through. Otherwise you could be dead in a week."

"If penicillin is so scarce, how did you get hold of it?"

"There's a small black market in the drug. Very small. You have to know the appropriate shady characters."

Jackson filled the hypodermic partway, swabbed Champ's bicep with alcohol and injected the penicillin. Champ flexed his arm and sipped more whiskey.

"You don't look as if you ought to know shady characters."

"I could be a shady character myself. Now that I've saved your life, and I must say that's bloody expensive stuff, how about letting me have the gun?"

"Why?"

"If you should nod off while you're sitting there, I wouldn't want you to start slinging lead in your dreams. I'm not the Yellow Peril."

Champ nodded, picked up the automatic, shucked out the magazine and handed it to Jackson for safekeeping.

"Also the cartridge in the chamber, if you don't mind."

Champ smiled and pulled the slide back, ejecting the round. "You know about weapons."

"I know a little about a lot of things," Jackson said, pocketing the loose cartridge. "Could you stand a refill, major?"

"Some water this time." He began coughing again, but not so violently. "So it's pneumonia. I feel as if there's a hot horseshoe stuck in the middle of my chest."

"I've given you a miracle drug, but even miracles take time. With further treatment you'll be feeling a new man in forty-eight hours."

"Lord, I hope so."

They sat together for another hour without much being said. Champ wanted to know why Jackson wasn't serving King and Country, and Jackson showed him the scars on his head and mentioned the long-standing case of malaria. Why wasn't he working back home, then? Personal reasons. Jackson continued to water down Champ's scotch, and Champ drank a lot of it.

After a while Champ's eyes closed, and presently Jackson heard a tentative snore. He went quietly across the stifling living room, opened the drapes and cracked the French doors for a draft of air that was surprisingly cool. There was a brighter burst of lightning than he'd noticed earlier. Maybe at last it was going to rain.

He approached the chair in which Champ was sitting with his head thrown back and took the nearly empty glass from Champ's big hand.

Champ opened his eyes and his fingers closed on Jackson's wrist. He had a painful grip. Jackson stared down at him. Champ looked awake, but Jackson sensed he was merely somnambulistic.

Champ's other hand encircled his own throat, but gently. There was panic in his eyes; he gasped. "Wasn't the Jap," he said in his husky voice. "I killed the Jap. It was Clipper who did this to me, Clipper came back with Boss's saber in his hand! You think I'm crazy—but I swear it. I know what I saw. Clipper came back from the grave to get
my
head too!"

Jackson flinched. "Major, you're dreaming. Major—you're going to break my wrist!"