by Gil Brewer
“I haven’t forgotten,” he said.
“All right.”
“I want you to know, pal,” he said. “I’ll never forget, and when things were a little tight today— Well, you know how it is, pal. Everything depends on what I’m doing. It’s important. Only I want you to know I haven’t forgotten how you saved my life, pal. There wouldn’t have been any hospital if you hadn’t come along.”
Now he had the hospital all built.
“I’d like to make you my first patient,” he said.
I wanted to tell him to shut it off. It was getting to me. Everything was getting to me, from every angle, angles he couldn’t or wouldn’t see.
Ruby, Ruby, I thought. What a Ruby you are!
I was crying, sitting there behind that wheel, crying and driving like hell. Because it was getting to me from every angle about everything and it was all cockeyed and mixed up with wanting to reach Ruby, and this guy believing what he believed….
The police car wasn’t closing in like it should. Then I heard why. Up there ahead of us someplace the sirens were converging and we were cut off. They had a radio and they used it.
“We’re going to stop,” I said.
“We’ll have to, won’t we, pal?”
“Yes. Right up ahead there. We’ll run for it.”
I glanced over at him and he was loading the clip for the Luger, slipping the gleaming brass shells in, tick, tick, tick.
I thought of wrecking the car, trusting luck to pull me out of it. But I wanted to live too much. I couldn’t do it, and by the time I had her slowed down, he went snickety-smack with the slide and was waiting, with the Luger all ready.
We were in a fine section of town. For maybe a mile square there was nothing but scrap heaps, junk yards, factories old and new, demolished and in process of building, railroad yards stringing through everything.
I drove the car up a long cement ramp into a huge empty barn made of sheet metal. From the ceiling of the barn hung a single electric light bulb. Yellow light from the bulb didn’t reach the distant walls and barely touched the floor.
“Let’s go, pal,” Angers said.
We climbed out of the car and stood there a moment. He had his big roll of blueprints that I’d never seen. They were under his arm again. He looked almost as he’d been this morning except that his beard had grown. That was all.
You could hear the sirens, plain.
We started walking toward the back of the barn, where a pale rectangle of light showed there was a door. We came out onto some railroad tracks and started running across toward what looked like a black tunnel.
Chapter Nineteen
THERE WAS NO TUNNEL. It was a board fence and its shadow was deceiving. We came along that to where it ended, and turned behind it into a junk yard. In the moonlight were the bodies of old cars stacked ten and fifteen high, like layers of steel cake. It was a morgue for old cars that were waiting to be buried.
“Let’s go on through,” Angers said.
Back there the sirens came into the barn and you could hear men running. I looked at him and he was watching me. All around us, now, hovered the dark hulks of buildings. Fences and girders and smokestacks spouting sputtering embers into the night.
“We’ve got to hide,” he said. “We’ve got to make it, pal.” His voice was flat and even and all this time there had never been the slightest expression on that face.
A single siren moaned up to the left, then ceased, and two car doors slammed.
“They’re coming after us,” I said.
“Yes.”
“They’ll surround the place. But it’s a big place.”
He didn’t say anything. He touched my arm and we started walking through the yard, down aisles between the stacked cars. It was very quiet, and far off to the left, coming from somewhere you couldn’t see, was the sudden hiss and white glare of a welding torch. It flared and hissed and steel clanged and banged. Shadows stood out in stark black shapes. The white glare shot up fanlike into the darkness, cutting it just like metal. A brilliant shower of bright white sparks arced up and over onto the stacked cars.
We went down along the dirt yard, walking through puddles of water and through a gate in a board fence.
We were in an alley. Over across the way was an immense building, girders sticking up, corrugated iron sides riffling the shadows as the torch flared.
Two men were working in there, making steel ladders. They wore what looked like diving suits and helmets with glass facepieces, not just the helmets themselves. A furnace was roaring in there. A man shoveled coal into the open furnace door from a wheelbarrow. The man was stripped to the waist and he looked red and you could see the sweat from where we stood.
“We’ve got to keep moving,” Angers said.
We crossed the dirt floor of the alley and moved on down past the shed where the welders were. We passed a long row of single-storied open-fronted garages, with wrecked cars standing out front. Inside were more wrecked cars and it was all brightly lit in there, with men working on them, or talking.
Yet it was quiet. We kept on moving and pretty soon we came to a lumber company.
“Let’s go in here,” Angers said.
We turned into a passage that led between two buildings. A truck was parked there with its lights on.
Somebody ran hard back there someplace and stopped and a flashlight cut the night and somebody shouted. We went up over a pile of lumber and Angers dropped his roll of blueprints. He looked down at them, then at me.
Then he jumped off the lumber and grabbed the blueprints. He scrambled back up. I had waited for him.
We came down off that pile, dropping into the dirt. It was darker in here. You could smell the sweet, clean, fresh, good smell of the green-cut lumber. It was all around. It seemed endless. Pile upon pile of boards and planks stretched and faded as far as you could see.
“Thing to do,” Angers said, “get on through to the other side and find a car.”
“Sure,” I said.
“We’ve got to get a car. I’ll have to leave this town, pal, that’s all there is to it. It’s a shame, because I wanted to build here.”
“There’s lots of nice towns.”
“How far do you think this place runs? Not the lumber, pal, the whole place?”
“About a mile.”
He looked at me.
“We better run for a while,” he said. “Come on, pal.”
We started running, jogging along down between the tiers of stacked lumber. Occasionally we’d pass a dangling light bulb, shedding its glare on the freshly cut planks.
There was an alley between the lumber and down there was a door, with a red light by it. It led outside, and you could see the sky again.
Angers sat on a small pile of boards, leaned the roll of blueprints against his leg, and looked at me. His eyes were bloodshot and glassy. They weren’t seeing anything, only the things inside his head. He might talk with you and agree with you on things, or disagree, even carry on a conversation, but he was only seeing what was in his head. I knew nothing really affected him then, and I knew how lonely it was.
And I saw how he hadn’t ever talked much, too. It had only been about one thing. The hospital.
It was all very well, feeling sad and all that. But the way he looked at me now, I wanted to run—run like hell.
He sat there with the gun resting on his knee. He stared at the gun for a while and the only sound was our breathing.
Then they came at us from both directions. I saw their uniforms and they were running at us, down the tiers of lumber.
“Come on, pal,” Angers said. “We’ve got to push.”
I was ahead of him, making for the door with the red light by it. We went out into the night, running, and found we were in the shed with the welders. There was a cement floor and every step rang out like a drumbeat.
“Keep straight through,” he said.
There were only three men in the building. They stood watchi
ng us. One of the guys in a diving suit with a torch in his hand yelled something, but I couldn’t make it out.
We went right on across that endless cement floor.
Behind us there was a shot and the slug slammed into sheet steel and glanced off and clanged against another sheet of steel.
Angers stopped and turned. A cop was running across the cement floor at us and Angers lifted the gun and fired and the cop dropped. He was some shot. The other three men in the building dropped and another gun banged by the door from where the lumber was.
We turned and ran.
We went on down an alley and past some lighted store fronts advertising auto parts, used, and down another alley.
Then we were running on soft earth by pine trees, and to our left were the railroad tracks. They were about a block wide, with switches lit up green and red and freight cars parked on the tracks in places.
The road we were on had just been cut from woods; the tree stumps still stood in some places.
I heard a car and looked behind us and a spotlight began probing around back there. It was a cruiser, running right up the road behind us.
Angers looked back and fired three times, then turned and ran. I was a little behind him now. He could sure run. He turned, looked back at me, his face all white in the dark. His face looked slick.
“Come on, Steve! We’ve got to run!”
“Sure.” I came up to him and we slogged along. Up ahead there was a street. There was a hump in the road where it crossed the railroad tracks. I saw a car coming along the street.
Angers ran over onto the tracks, kind of looking at the car, and then there were two cars.
“Steve, we’ll run over there to the other side,” he called back. “Hurry up, Steve—pal!”
He kept calling to me, but I couldn’t run any faster. Up ahead, the railroad tracks vanished into darkness between some big warehouses that sat right up against the road.
“There they come!” he shouted.
He was almost to the street and two of the cars were coming along toward the tracks. They were police cars, all right. You could tell from the spotlights on the roofs. But they hadn’t seen him, or they’d have used the lights.
The other car that had been behind us was still coming along, and it hadn’t seen us, either. The spotlight was turned off now.
I crossed on the tracks, running toward Angers. I was dazed. I didn’t know why I was running. I was tired, and as I ran I kept staggering.
I quit running. I just stood there watching. I could feel everything go up tight inside me and stay that way, like steel and iron and wire, and then it began coming loose, a strand at a time.
Angers was at the crossing. Then the lights by the crossing began blinking red. You could hear it coming, like a big wind blasting someplace, only you didn’t know where it was coming from.
“Steve,” he called. “Hurry up, pal!”
I ran stumbling along the tracks toward him. I crossed over onto the other side when I reached the street and he turned to look at me. I couldn’t speak. I wanted to but I couldn’t do it, not for anything.
Then they put the spotlights on him and he just stood there with the roll of paper in one hand and the gun in the other. He looked straight into the spotlights and shot that crazy wild bursting laughter at them. He set his head back and shot that laughter into the sky. It was all bright there with him standing in the middle with the spotlights on him, like that, laughing. Laughing like all hell, he was.
The warning lights kept flashing.
And you heard it coming. I wanted to run out there and grab him, push him—something, anything. But I couldn’t. I couldn’t move. I couldn’t even speak. And he turned with the spotlights on him all the time and looked at me with his face all shiny with sweat, then he looked back at the cars and laughed again.
“Come on, pal,” he said. He said it flat and even, just like always.
They began shooting at him. He shot back, facing those spotlights, not even crouched down. He just stood straight and fired at them.
Well, they missed and I took a step onto the tracks. I guess they were out of the cars along the side of the road. Then I jumped back off the tracks and she burst out from between the warehouses like a one-eyed monster.
The train crashed straight out toward us with the big train spotlight weaving back and forth and the horn blatted so loud I couldn’t hear.
It rushed right on by and he was gone.
I stood there and waited while the rest of the train went by, with the brakes squealing, steel on steel, and finally it was all past and slowing up there in the yards.
He was there, all right. The roll of blueprints was all cut on the tracks and I took one look at him and turned away.
He was still holding the Luger.
They called my name out there.
“Logan?”
I just waited. I stood there by what was left of Ralph Angers. Then they came up onto the tracks and stood with me in the bright white glare of their spotlights. One of them reached down and picked up the Luger. He stood there looking at it and said, “Just think.”
At the police station, they talked with me for a while, and I told them what I knew. As I talked with them I was still out there at that railroad crossing in my mind’s eye. It was something I would never be able to forget. They were probably picking up what was left of him out there now.
He’d been exactly what he claimed. Reports from Dr. Bernstein at the hospital in Seattle had come in, and Ralph Angers was a top surgeon, all right. He had a breakdown in Korea because he’d worked too hard, and the same thing had happened weeks before in Seattle. There had been a hospital fund, too, and Bernstein was coming here from Seattle to pick up the body because Angers had no family. Everything Ralph Angers told me had been the truth. All except the building of the hospital. He’d stolen the blueprints, met Lillian someplace, and then gone off on the beginning of the end.
I told the police about Harvey Aldercook and gave them what money Angers had taken from him. All but the two hundred and seventy dollars. I figured that was mine.
They got a laugh out of that.
I figured that since Angers had been right about everything else, he might just be right about my eye, too. So I planned to ask this Dr. Bernstein what he thought, when he showed up the next day.
Lillian was at the station, and when they released me, they let her go, too. We walked over to the hospital together. I was scared, let me tell you. I didn’t know whether I even wanted to go to the hospital. So much had happened that I was sick.
“Don’t worry,” Lillian said. And we walked along and she said, “I’ll be leaving tomorrow, Steve. I’m going home.”
I told her that was good and we walked along and there wasn’t anything to say. Finally we shook hands in front of the hospital and I gave her fifty dollars and she kissed me and went away.
At the desk I asked one of the Gray Ladies what room Ruby Logan was in. She told me, and then I asked her about Betty Graham and she said Mrs. Graham was getting along just fine.
Well, I felt a little better.
Ruby was in a white bed and she looked up at me and she kept spinning and smiling and spinning through all the tears in my eyes.
“We’ll call him Steve, like you,” she said. He was some boy, all right. She had him there in bed with her.
“Like hell,” I said. “I won’t stand for any Juniors in this family.”
“Yes, we will, hon. I like that name.”
And she kept on spinning through the tears and then the nurse came in and took young Steve away. I didn’t care, right then.
“Gosh, hon, I was scared,” she said. “I was awful sick and you didn’t come for so long.”
“I’m here now, Ruby.”
“Sure, hon.”
Well, she’d had to go through a Caesarean operation and they’d had a time because she was a little anemic, or something like that. They told me that can cause trouble. Imagine, Ruby anemic!
THE END
Serving as inspiration for contemporary literature, Prologue Books, a division of F+W Media, offers readers a vibrant, living record of crime, science fiction, fantasy, western, and romance genres. Discover more today:
www.prologuebooks.com
This edition published by
Prologue Books
a division of F+W Media, Inc.
10151 Carver Road, Suite 200
Blue Ash, Ohio 45242
www.prologuebooks.com
Copyright © 1958 by Gil Brewer, Registration Renewed 1986
All rights reserved.
This is a work of fiction.
Names, characters, corporations, institutions, organizations, events, or locales in this novel are either the product of the author’s imagination or, if real, used fictitiously. The resemblance of any character to actual persons (living or dead) is entirely coincidental.
eISBN 10: 1-4405-4210-4
eISBN 13: 978-1-4405-4210-7
Cover art © 123RF/Veronika Trofer
