The Name of the Game is Death (2 page)

I roused myself, with an effort. I had a lot to do. First I Inn I a doctor to find. A doctor would be trouble, but I'd cross that bridge when I came to it. I slid over under the wheel and started the Ford.

Night then I had a real bad moment. Bunny's strength in setting the hand brake was almost too much for my weakened left arm. I cursed fiercely at the salt perspiration linking my eyes before I succeeded in freeing the brake. The shirt bandage on my arm was sopping.

When I turned the first corner, the sun through the windshield nearly scared my eyeballs. The first two fronted signs I slowed down for were a realtor's and a plumber's. The third one drew down the money. The sign said
Santiago E. Sanfilippo, M.D
. I drove by slowly. A garage connected with the house. There was no car in the garage, and none in front of the house.

No time for anything fancy. I drove up the driveway and into the garage. I draped the jacket over my shoulder again and walked along the enclosed passageway that led to the house. I could see an office inside through a glass panel in the door. I had to knock twice before a man in white ducks and a white jacket opened the door. He had a stethoscope sticking out of one pocket.

Dr. Sanfilippo was a tall, thin, young-looking job. He was coffee-colored, black-eyed, and good-looking, with a misplaced-eyebrow type of mustache. From the look he gave me I wasn't what he'd been expecting to see. "Yes?" he demanded impatiently when I outwaited him. I couldn't see or hear anyone in the office behind him. "This is a private entrance," he went on. He looked over my shoulder at the Ford. "Is that your car? What do you mean by driving it into my garage?"

"I'm a patient, Doc," I told him.

" Then go around to the patients' entrance," he snapped. "And get that automobile out of here before you do."

"Let's arbitrate it," I suggested. I showed him the Smith

Wesson about ten inches from his belly. His eyes popped, and he backed away from the door until he ran into a desk behind him. I moved inside and closed the door. "You alone, Doc?"

"I'm alone," he admitted. He looked unhappy about it "I keep no drills on the premises," he added.

"Inside, Doe." I motioned with the gun and steered him from the cluttered office into a small examining room. It had whitewashed walls and a basin in one corner. Both room and washbasin looked fairly clean. There was a phone in the office but none in the examining room.

I In n was only one door, and I was between it and the doctor. A framed diploma hung on the near wall, and I stepped up and read it. It looked legitimate, so I sat down

on a white stool beside the elevated sheeted table. I wanted no self-appointed abortionist whittling on my arm.

Dr. Sanfilippo had been watching me warily. I removed (lie jacket from my shoulder, and his mustachioed upper lip tightened when he saw the shredded, sodden shirt around my arm.
"Madre de Dios!"
he breathed. His black eyes flicked from a battered radio on a green cabinet back to my arm. "You know I'll have to report this," he said huskily.

"Sure you will," I soothed him. "But you're a doctor. First you'll dress it." I held out the arm. "Like right now."

He didn't move. His smooth, trim-looking features still expressed shock. "The guard—" he began, and stopped. I le swallowed. His face was suddenly damp.

"The arm, Doc," I reminded him. So one of the guards had died. Without knowing it, Santiago E. Sanfilippo, M.D., had just passed over an invisible line.

He finally got himself in motion and washed his hands in the basin. He dried them, then unwrapped the arm and examined it, front and back. "Large caliber," he said professionally.

"Large," I agreed.

He turned to the green cabinet. "Half an ampoule—"

"No anesthetic," I cut him off.

He shrugged. It was my funeral, and for him it couldn't happen fast enough. He was getting his confidence back. He felt immeasurably superior to the sweaty, gun-holding type sitting in his office with a ragged, bloody hole in his arm. Next he'd be planning my capture. I had a feeling this boy was going to make it easy for me.

He laid out a tray of sharp things on the table, and I spread a towel in my lap. He bathed, swabbed, probed, disinfected, and finally bandaged. He was rougher than he needed to be, probably hoping I'd pass out. "Don't move until I put a sling on it," he said brusquely when he-finished.

"No sling," I said. I took the dry end of the towel and wiped my perspiring face. I reached into my jacket pocket on the table and took out the wrapped package of fifty one-hundred dollar bills. I broke the seal and put it in my pocket, counted out fifteen bills on the examination table, and pushed them toward him. "Nice job, Doc," I said.

His expression changed
tout de suite.
His tongue ran over his lips nervously, his black eyes never leaving the money. He reached out almost tentatively and picked it up, then riffled it and stuffed it into a wallet he returned to his pocket at once.

I stood up and kicked the stool I'd been sitting on in his direction. "Sit, Doc. Real still." I looked in the small mirror at the basin where he'd washed up. The mirror reflected a suntanned hard face with short black hair. I laid the gun on the edge of the basin, ran the water, and found a clean towel.

Stooped over, I could watch the doc's feet. If he could get to me before I got to the gun, he was a better man than I thought. One-handed I washed the oil and lampblack from my hair and the suntan makeup from my face and neck. When I emerged from behind the towel, Sanfilippo stared at hair and skin a nationality lighter.

I looked him over. Thin as he was, I still couldn't carry him from the office. "Walk out to the car ahead of me," I told him. "I'm going to tie you and leave you in the garage."

He didn't like it. I could see him thinking furiously, and I could have predicted the instant he brightened. Would I have paid him if I were going to kill him? Certainly not. The stupid bastard never stopped to realize if I'd been going to leave him around to do any broadcasting, he'd never have seen me out of the war paint. I followed him from the examination room after picking up something with a bone handle and six inches of steel from his surgical tray. I stuck it in my belt.

During the walk along the passageway I got out the Woodsman and put it under my armpit where I could get to it in a hurry. At the car Sanfilippo turned and looked at me expectantly. I kept a careful ten feet away from him. " Think something's wrong—" I mumbled, weaving on my feet. Then I did a long, slow pinwheel to the garage floor, careful to stay off my bad side. From beneath nearly closed eyelids I could see Sanfilippo's startled look as he stared down at me.

My hand was close enough to the Woodsman to stop his clock if he came after me, or if he tried to run out of the garage. I didn't expect him to do either. I'd tabbed this guy as a wisenheimer, and I was willing to let him prove himself.

He took a final look at me, then spun around to the Ford. He flung open the rear door, and I could hear him pawing through the back seat. He left that in a hurry and tried the front. He ripped off something in Spanish and darted around to the rear. I'd paid him in hundreds, so he was sure the swag was in the car.

He wasn't bad, the doc. I couldn't see what he used— nil I could see were his legs under the Ford—but he popped the back deck lid in no time. I heard the
whaaaaang
of broken metal as he snapped the locks on my tool chests in the trunk. When he found nothing he sounded off again and came around the car on the trot. He dived into the back seat again, only his legs outside.

I eased myself to my feet and got over there. Sanfilippo had a knife out, and he was slashing away at the seat cushion. He was right down to the springs in a couple of places. I pulled the flat-bladed surgical tool from my belt. Sanfilippo whacked away at the cushion, cursing like a sailor, and then all of a sudden my presence got through to him. He started to turn, and I gave him four-and-a-half inches between the second and third ribs, blade flat to the ground for easier passage between the bones.

Sanfilippo was looking over his shoulder at me, and his black eyes didn't believe it. I pulled it out and gave it to him again, then grabbed his belt and steered him down away from the car. He sank like a deflated balloon, slowly at first and then with a rush.

His own knife was still in his hand. I left the surgical steel in him after wiping the handle. I reached down again and yanked his wallet from his hip pocket, stripped it, wiped it, and threw it down beside the body. It would be open and shut to any investigator: killed while pursuing a thief from his office. And for a bonus, no bullets in him to be matched up with the ones they took out of the bank guards.

I backed the Ford out of there and drove up to Nineteenth and Van Buren to a big motel, The Tropics. I registered as Earl Drake, the jacket again over my bandaged arm. "I'll try your Western hospitality till my office gets me a new sample line," I told the middle-aged desk clerk. "They busted into my car in Nogales last night and cleaned me—clothes, samples, camera, the works. I'll pay you for a week."

The clerk clucked sympathetically as he handed me my change. "Excellent shops within a block or two, sir. Sorry to hear of your misfortune. I hope you enjoy your stay with us."

I took the number 24 key he gave me and drove the car down in front of that unit. I went inside and locked the door, washed my face, eased down carefully into an inclined chair with a footrest, and closed my eyes.

I had a lot of unwinding to do.

The last conscious thought I had before I drifted off was that tin people at the bank were going to have one hell of a glass bill.

I lived in that chair for a week, aside from short trips to the on premises restaurant, I didn't dare get into the big double bed without a sling on the arm. The first incautious movement would have broken the wound open again. With a sling on, I might as well wear a sign: "Here I Am." I stayed in the chair.

I didn't sleep too much after the first day, but I dozed all the time. The first morning I caught a bright-looking busboy in the motel restaurant, gave him a list of sizes, and sent him out for clothes. I specified long-sleeved sport shirts. He came back with stuff that would have turned a bird of paradise pale with envy. I started to refuse it until I thought that it might be a good thing to have people looking at the clothes instead of at me.

The papers that first morning had a ball. The headlines were glaring. TWO GUARDS SLAIN IN BOLD DAYLIGHT BANK ROBBERY. KILLERS ESCAPE WITH BANK'S $178,000. ONE BANDIT, TWO GUARDS DEAD IN DOWNTOWN BANK SHOOT 'EM UP.

I looked at that figure of $178,000 a couple of times. It rested easily on the eye. Even allowing for the bank officers adding in their personal loan accounts, which isn't unknown, it was still a nice touch.

The papers speculated that one of the escapees might have been wounded. The descriptions were varied. One eyewitness insisted there'd been five bank robbers. The consensus, though, settled for a husky Swede and a little Mexican. Like I said, I'm five-ten. I weigh one-seventy, but I've noticed before that a big man doesn't always look big himself. He just makes anyone with him look small.

FBI IN CHARGE, the subheadings blared. The dear old FBI. I hadn't talked to them in a long time. They'd trace the kid's prints to St. Louis, and between here and there they'd tear everything up, down, and sideways. A hell of a lot of good it would do them. When he left St. Louis, the kid didn't know where he was going, and either Bunny or I had stayed with him all the time to make sure lie didn't do any talking about his newfound partners. It should make for less heat on the west coast of Florida.

I found a short paragraph on an inside page of the paper.
Area Physician Stabbed In Garage
, the small-type headline said. The story continued. "The body of Santiago E. Sanfilippo, M.D., 31, of. . . ."

I read the item three times before I put the paper aside. The police would be out rounding up all known arm-blasters and pill-poppers. It plugged the last hole in the blueprint the kid had kicked by not staying with the car.

I wasn't afraid of Bunny's getting picked up. He had the best naturally protective coloration I'd ever seen. It was^ one of the reasons I'd picked him, along with his nerve and his confidence in me. I've been in this business a

while. Two guys with guts and a to-hell-with-you-Jack disregard for consequences have about three chances in ten of pulling off a big, well-planned smash-and-grab. If one of them can shoot like me and the other one is Bunny, the odds are a damn sight better.

The first week at the Tropics I had a fever nearly all the time. The arm needed treatment which I couldn't get. I swallowed aspirin by the gross. When the arm wasn't throbbing, it was itching. The second week my fever was gone, but my legs felt like spaghetti. I'd wake from a nap dripping with sweat, needing to change from the skin out.

It was lonely in that damn motel room. When I'm on the road, I usually have a dog with me. Animals I like. People I learned a long time ago to do without.

For the first five days the newspaper headlines listed us as having been sighted in half the towns between Guantanamo, Cuba, and Nome, Alaska. We dropped back onto the ninth page after that, and then right out of the news.

The third week I began to take an interest in the restaurant's menu instead of just shoveling something down. The arm was going to be scarred but otherwise it seemed all right. A couple of times when it had been bad I'd debated slipping down into Nogales, Mexico, and trying for a doctor but I decided I couldn't risk it. If the authorities weren't watching anywhere else in the world; they'd watch that Mexican border.

I drove to the main post office the middle of the third week. I had a wallet full of crap identifying Earl Drake. There were two envelopes at the general delivery window, and I signed for them. Hack in the car I slit the first one and unwrapped ten hundred-dollar bills neatly sealed in oilskin paper, The second was a duplicate. There was no message in either, T he return address said Dick Pierce, General Delivery, Hudson, Florida. Bunny had made it
big.