Deathwatch

by Robb White

  “What?” Strick said and then turned to Ben. “What’s going on, Ben?”

  “It’s a long story, and he needs a doctor first.”

  Strick raised the flashlight and shone it in Ben’s face. “Where’s the dead man?”

  Ben walked around to the back and unfolded the tarpaulin. Strick shone the light in on the old man’s face. “Ugh,” he said. “No idea who he is?”

  “No. Just an old man. A prospector.”

  “You’d better come back inside,” Strick said.

  “Look, Strick, I’m hurt and so is Madec. I’ll leave the old man here, and we’ll go down to the Center.”

  Strick hesitated and then went back to Madec. “Where are you hurt, Mr. Madec?”

  “Ben almost killed me,” Madec said in a weak voice. “He broke my hand and broke my leg and just cut me to ribbons.”

  “What’ve you got him tied up for, Ben?” Strick asked, his voice unpleasant.

  “Because he’s dangerous.”

  “Who you kidding?” Strick said. “Untie him, and we’ll take him down to the Center. I’ll get a car.”

  As Strick went toward the garage, Ben leaned in and pushed Madec forward so he could reach the rope.

  “This is your last chance, Ben,” Madec said in a low, quick voice. “Ten thousand dollars. Take it and your troubles are over. If you don’t take it I’ll see to it that you spend the next ten years in jail. I can do that to you, Ben, believe me, I can.”

  “I believe you,” Ben said, untying his ankles.

  “You won’t take it.”

  “No.”

  “All right,” Madec said as the station wagon moved toward them. “If you thought I was tough in the desert, you haven’t seen anything yet.”

  Strick came over and gently helped Madec into the back seat of the wagon. “Just lie down there, sir. It’s only a couple of blocks.”

  “Thank you, officer,” Madec said.

  As Strick got in he said, “You bring the Jeep, Ben. Take it around to the back where they can get that body out.”

  Ben followed the white wagon down to the brand-new Diagnostic & Treatment Center, which was the closest thing the town had to a real hospital.

  As the station wagon drew up under the lights of the emergency entrance Ben drove on around to the back, parked and went over to the door. It was locked so he rang the bell and stood leaning against the wall until the door opened and a kid about nineteen named Souchek looked out. “You got the wrong door, Ben.”

  “I got a dead man in the Jeep.”

  “Wrong address, too,” Souchek said. “We don’t take ’em in, we carry ’em out.”

  He started to close the door, but Ben held it open. “Strick said bring him in.”

  “Who does Strick think he is! Yes, sir, Mr. Strick, anything you say, sir. Okay, I’ll get something. What happened to him?”

  “He got shot.”

  Souchek came back with a big canvas laundry basket on a dolly, and they lowered the old man, still wrapped in the tarpaulin, down into the basket and wheeled him into the building.

  In the light Ben saw that the tarpaulin had fallen back and the old man’s face, gray and shriveled-looking, was exposed, his mouth and eyes open.

  Souchek flung a soiled sheet over the basket and said, “What happened to you?”

  “I slid,” Ben said. “Is Doc Myers here?”

  “No, he’s in Phoenix.”

  “Nobody here?”

  “The Boy Genius is here.”

  That bothered Ben. All the way across the desert he had expected that Doc Myers would be here and would, in that way he had, take charge of everything. Doc Myers had seen it all, life, death, sickness, accidents; you couldn’t shake him.

  Everybody in town called this new doctor in the Center the Boy Genius. Ben had heard that he was the youngest man ever to graduate from the medical school at the University of California and had made the highest marks in the school’s history, or something. And everybody in town wondered why such a genius had decided to come to work in this little dry and drying-up town on the edge of the desert. A doctor like him, a boy genius … There must be something wrong with him, the town decided, and there was a lot of talk, a lot of speculation and a lot of rumors.

  His name was Saunders, and he was a thin, dark, intense man who had nothing to say to you if you weren’t sick or hurt.

  Ben had only met him once when his uncle had broken a finger in a Jeep transmission and didn’t have any feeling about the doctor one way or the other. A little cold, maybe, a little haughty, but he seemed to know what he was doing.

  He followed Souchek down the corridor to the emergency room and went in. Dr. Saunders, in a bloodstained green smock, and a nurse were in there and had Madec up on the table.

  Under the bank of hard lights Madec looked pretty bad. His leg from the knee down was a mess of blood and dirt, and both his hands and arms were covered with blood.

  Ben started over to the doctor but Strick saw him and put his hand on Ben’s chest, pushing him back toward the door. “You stay outside,” Strick told him. “You too, Souchek.”

  Outside the room, Ben pushed the laundry basket out of the way and sat down on a bench, stretching his legs out, his heels sliding along the floor. Souchek rolled the basket into a closet and came out with a big floor polisher. As he started unraveling the cord he said, “What’d you shoot him for, Ben?”

  “I didn’t,” Ben said.

  “Then who did?”

  Ben motioned with his thumb toward the emergency room. “He did.”

  Souchek stared at him. “Shot himself?”

  “Oh, him,” Ben said. “No, I shot him.”

  “What for?”

  “To keep him from shooting me.”

  “Oh, boy! What’d you guys do, find a gold mine or something, and then get into a fight about it?”

  “Something like that,” Ben said, letting his eyes fall shut. He had never felt so tired, so drained out in his life.

  “You mind moving your feet so I can polish?” Souchek asked.

  Without opening his eyes, Ben pulled his feet back, lifted them wearily and put them down on the bench.

  The polisher made a hideous, screaming noise.

  He must have fallen asleep, for it seemed that it was only a few seconds later that the door opened and Dr. Saunders wheeled Madec out on a rolling bed and took him down the corridor.

  Then Strick came out and beckoned to him. “Your turn,” he said and then followed Saunders and Madec into a room across the hall.

  Ben had known the nurse, Emma Williams, all his life and as he came in said, “Hello, Emma.”

  She was putting a clean sheet on the high, narrow table and didn’t say anything until she finished. Then she turned and looked at him. “That just goes to show you never can tell,” she said and went on fussing around.

  She must be as tired as I am, Ben thought, as he sat down on a little stool.

  “Don’t sit there,” Emma said sternly.

  Ben thought he wasn’t going to make it up off the stool.

  The doctor came in, glanced at him, and said, “Take off your clothes. Down to your shorts.” Then he went over to a glass-doored cabinet and began taking things out of it.

  “I haven’t got on any shorts,” Ben said.

  The doctor glanced at him with a cold and disgusted look but didn’t say anything. Emma, as though holding out a live snake, handed him a towel.

  It was painful getting his shoes and socks off and his bare feet began to bleed on the floor as he got his pants off, wrapped the towel around himself and started to take off his shirt.

  The cloth felt as though it had become his skin and, when he pulled at it, it felt as though he were ripping his skin off. It made him dizzy and he had to stop and hold on to the edge of the table to keep from falling down.

  The doctor came over and with one quick, painful yank stripped the shirt away. “Hmmm,” the doctor said. “All right, get on the table. Face down
.”

  The cool, clean sheet and hard table felt delicious. The doctor’s hands touching him here and there hurt, but they were cool, gentle and strong. Ben heard him say crisply, “All right, nurse, before we start I want you to write this down.”

  “You better say it so those sheriffs can understand or you’ll have to do it all over again,” Emma said disagreeably.

  “I know that,” the doctor said, and Ben could feel the ice in it. “General abrasions across back, shoulders, buttocks and legs. Minor lacerations in same areas. The same condition on knees, hands, arms, and tops of feet and …”

  “Not so fast!” Emma said. “… arms and tops of what?”

  “Feet,” the doctor said, and began to talk more slowly. “Both feet cut, abraded and bruised, swollen but not infected. Two-inch-long, clean cut on left cheek just below the eye. Entire body sunburned but with negligible blistering.” Then he flicked Ben on the shoulder with his fingertips and said, “Turn over.”

  Lying on his back, Ben looked at the doctor as he went on examining him and reciting to Emma what was wrong with him.

  The doctor was so cold, so remote that it made Ben feel uncomfortable, as though, to the doctor, he wasn’t even human.

  Then he suddenly seemed interested as he picked up Ben’s arm and looked at where Madec had shot him. “Hello, what’s this?” he said, and turned the arm over. He clamped down with his fingers. “Hurt?”

  “Yes, it does,” Ben said, “but not much.”

  The doctor flexed Ben’s arm, moving and twisting it as he felt the bones and tendons with his fingers. At last he laid it down on the table and said, “Lucky.” Then he said, “Nurse, gunshot wound, left arm, three inches below the elbow, clean entrance and exit wounds, minor damage, no bones involved.”

  As the doctor swabbed out the purplish holes and then put adhesive bandages over them, Emma finished what she was writing and said, “You have to put in the report what to do with him.”

  “Except for injuries noted, the patient is in apparently good health and can be released to the custody of the sheriff,” the doctor said.

  Ben looked up at him, wondering why he had to be so unfriendly about everything.

  The doctor said, without any sympathy, “This is going to hurt.”

  It hurt a lot and as Ben watched him sewing up the cuts on his feet, he wondered if the doctor had to be so rough about it. He rammed that curved needle through Ben’s flesh as though he were sewing up a ripped tarpaulin.

  He finished putting the bandages on and went out, saying to Emma, “I’ll be in the lab if anybody wants me. You’d better see to Mr. Madec.”

  As Emma started across the room Ben said, “Is that all?”

  “All of what?” she said and left.

  Ben was half-dressed, standing on his bandaged feet, when Strick came in. He looked sore about something as he leaned against the wall waiting for Ben to finish.

  Ben couldn’t get his boots on over the bandages so picked them up. He felt sick and weak and very tired.

  “You know what I’m going to do, Strick?” he said. “I’m going home and go to bed and sleep for a week. One week.”

  “Let’s go down to the office first. I’ve got to get some sort of statement from you about all this.”

  “Tomorrow,” Ben said. “I’m really bushed, Strick.”

  “Tonight would be better,” Strick said. “While it’s fresh in your mind.”

  Ben smiled, and his lips felt as though they hadn’t smiled for years. They were stiff and they hurt. “That’s going to be fresh in my mind for the next fifty years.”

  But Strick beckoned him to come and in the corridor headed him toward the front door. “What about my Jeep?” Ben asked.

  “It’s been impounded as evidence.”

  In the station wagon Ben said, “How’s Madec?”

  “What do you care?” Strick asked unpleasantly.

  “What are you so sore about, Strick?” Ben asked.

  Strick glanced at him as he turned in at the sheriff’s office. “I try not to let it get to me, but sometimes the things people do to each other make me mad,” he said.

  In the office Strick went around behind his desk and sat down, motioning to Ben to sit in the chair in front of him. Picking up a piece of cardboard, Strick began to read from it rapidly and tonelessly. It was something about Ben’s rights, that he could have an attorney, that he did not have to confess to anything if he didn’t want to.

  Strick put the cardboard down and said, “Do you understand what I just read to you?”

  “That’s why I’m here,” Ben said. “There was an accident, and I’m reporting it. I don’t need a lot of stuff about my rights, and I don’t need any lawyers.”

  “Hold it! Hold it!” Strick cautioned him. “If you want to talk to me here’s a waiver for you to sign. Just sign it right there.” He pushed a blank form across the desk.

  “What for?”

  “It just says you heard me read to you about your rights, and you understand what I read and are waiving ’em.”

  Ben signed it, and Strick took it back and put it in his drawer. Then he sat back in the chair, his arms over his head and said, quietly, “Why did you shoot him so many times, Ben?”

  Ben could see Madec again, coming toward him, the big gun swinging in his hand. Then he saw Madec down on the sand, still reaching for that gun. “To keep him from shooting me,” Ben said.

  “Then how can that be an accident?”

  For a moment Ben was confused. “Wait a minute, Strick. Who are you talking about?”

  “The old man,” Strick said.

  “I’m talking about Madec.”

  Without any change in his voice or position, Strick said, “All I’m trying to do is find out what happened, Ben. What was the beef between you and that old man?”

  Half of Ben’s face was numb from the novocaine. It felt as though spit were running out of the left side of his mouth, but he couldn’t stop it. Suddenly it was hard for him to think about all this; it seemed so long ago. “Beef?” he asked. “I didn’t even know that old man.”

  “All right, then let’s go back to Mr. Madec. How many times did you have to shoot him, Ben?”

  Ben tried to remember. “I don’t know, Strick. Once to make him drop the gun, and a couple more times when he kept going for it. Three? Four?”

  “You shot him more than once, though, is that right?”

  “Yeah. Look, Strick, I’m really wiped out. Let’s wait until tomorrow and then go through the whole thing.”

  “Be a lot easier to get it over with now.”

  “I can’t even think straight now,” Ben said. “Tomorrow.” He pushed himself up out of the chair. “Give me a call when you’re ready, and we’ll go through the whole thing.”

  As Ben started toward the door Strick said quietly, “Where’re you going, Ben?”

  “Home.”

  “I can’t let you do that, fella,” Strick said.

  Ben turned to look at him.

  Strick was writing something and said, without looking up at him, “I’m charging you with felony-aggravated assault, Ben.”

  “Okay,” Ben said and started toward the door again, wondering what walking around in the bandages was doing to them. Then he stopped and looked back at Strick. “With what? What does that mean?”

  “It means you’re not going home,” Strick said, his voice different now; tough. “It means you’re going to jail.”

  16

  THE JAIL WAS a one-room cell with concrete walls, a barred steel door, two bunks, a washbasin and a toilet.

  Ben was so tired that all he could do was stagger over to the empty bunk, sit down on it and begin to laugh. The only thing he could think about was that his old classmate, Strick, had put him in jail. Somehow it seemed funny.

  What was it Strick had said he’d done? Felony? And assaulting something. And aggravation.

  It was aggravation, all right, he thought.

  He knew that h
e should be outraged by the injustice of all this. He should be angry and doing something about it, but, as he let sleep come rolling in, he felt as he had in the desert; that it was not real, was not happening.

  Tomorrow everything will get straightened out, he thought. Tomorrow.

  When he woke up it was broad daylight. The door of the cell was open, and a deputy Ben didn’t know was standing out in the corridor.

  A kid in Ben’s Boy Scout troop named Don Smith came in with a tray of food and when he saw Ben almost dropped it. Not saying a word, he just stared at Ben as he put the tray down on the bunks and backed out of the cell.

  “Has anybody called my uncle?” Ben asked the deputy.

  “I’ll check the log.” the deputy said and shut the door.

  The food was good. When he finished Ben went to the door and tried to see out but could see nothing except the wall across a narrow corridor.

  It was a long time before Ben heard someone coming down the corridor.

  His uncle, looking worried and sad, peered in through the bars. “Ben,” he said in a sort of wailing voice, “what have you done?”

  “Nothing,” Ben told him. “See if you can get hold of Ham. Not Strick. Ham.”

  “He’s here,” his uncle said. “He’ll be ready for you in a minute. But listen, Ben, don’t say anything, hear? I’m going to get you a lawyer; I called Joe McCloskey as soon as I heard, but he can’t get here until tomorrow. So just don’t say anything until he gets here.”

  “I’ve got nothing to hide,” Ben said.

  “Just don’t say anything. How bad are you hurt, Ben?”

  “I’m okay. I just want out of here, Unc. Go tell Ham I want out.”

  “All right. But remember, Ben, don’t say anything.”

  Ben watched his uncle’s face disappear. He was a good man, Ben thought, a good, honest, sad man who still seemed to hope that his wife who had hated the desert and had walked out on him twenty years before, was going to come back-about any minute now.

  Ben got madder and madder as time passed, and no one else came to the door. Around ten o’clock the Boy Scout and the deputy came back to take the tray. As soon as the door opened Ben said, “Listen, Deputy, does Ham know I’m in here?”

  The deputy just looked at him and said, “Get the tray, Don.”