One Endless Hour

3

The final hour of waiting was the worst.

I was ready mentally long before "lights out" arrived at 9:45 P.M. I waited another half hour for the ward to quiet down, then slipped out of bed and removed aerosol cans, gauze, tape, and cosmetics from under the mattress. I wrapped them loosely in my robe.

I lifted the hospital bed, worked free the steel caster in its leg, and pulled it out. I walked around the bed and did the same thing on the other side. I stretched out on the bed again with fists balled around a caster in each hand, a precaution against Spider Kern's accelerating his intended double cross.

It was forty minutes later when a shadow flitted by the end of the bed and tapped lightly on the metal. It was Kern's signal that everything was ready. I waited five minutes longer before I got out of bed and walked in darkness to the ward washroom, bundled robe under my arm, steel caster in each hand. There was only a night light on inside the long room with its familiar odor. The only sound was the water running in the urinals. I opened the door of the last cubicle. Piled on a stool were shirt, trousers, sport coat, socks, shoes, and a broad-brimmed straw hat.

I added robe and casters to the pile, then closed the door. Kern was supposed to be standing guard outside to keep anyone from entering until I was ready. It still didn't leave much time. I went to the closet with its cleaning materials and pulled the case of toilet tissue toward the front. With no need for finesse, I pitched rolls of tissue until the back of the closet was waist deep before I reached the bottom layer in the case and once again retrieved my twelve hundred dollars.

I retreated to the cubicle and dressed quickly. The clothing was cheap and ill-fitting. The jacket was too tight and the trousers much too loose. I managed. I distributed all my contraband in various pockets except the right-hand pocket of the jacket. That one I kept empty.

I left the hospital clothing on the floor where I'd dropped it except for one white institutional sock. I put the two steel casters into the sock, then carried it to the nearest washbasin where I added a jumbo-sized bar of soap to it. I put the loaded sock into the empty right-hand jacket pocket.

I stood in front of the washbasin mirror and tried on the plantation-style straw hat. It fitted snugly over my head bandages, but it fitted. The bandages extended downward only as far as my nose. Under the high-crowned, broad-brimmed hat, they were even more inconspicuous than I had hoped.

When I left the washroom, Spider Kern was standing just outside the door, where he was supposed to be. There was no sign of Rafe James. "All set?" Kern asked me. He made no comment on my appearance. I could hear tension in his voice. The action was getting to him, I decided.

"All set," I said.

"Let's go, then."

He led the way down the ward in the dim light. He glanced through the heavy glass door before unlocking it. No one was in sight in the outside corridor. We passed through the door. I heard it click behind me for what I had made up my mind was the last time. I wasn't coming back.

Kern glanced across at me once as we walked side by side the twenty-five yards to the side door leading to the parking lot. I kept my right hand on the weighted sock in my jacket pocket. There was always the chance that Kern's sadistic tendency would outweigh his greed for money. He might lead me right up to the outside door, then shout the alarm and "capture" me. If he tried it, the steel casters in the sock were going to see to it that Spider Kern needed plastic surgery worse than I had.

In the better light in the corridor I tried to locate a suspicious bulge on Kern that would pinpoint a weapon. Even in his thin hospital whites, I couldn't see anything. It had to mean that Rafe James was carrying the armament.

I was keyed up so high for what I felt was the crucial moment at the side door that Kern had it unlocked and we were outside almost before I realized it. The night air felt warm and moist. It was my first breath untainted by the odor of hospital antiseptics in almost two years.

"My car's around the corner," Kern whispered. He started alongside the building, walking on the grass. I knew where his car was. I fell in a half step behind him. The almost total darkness on the visitors' side of the huge parking lot was relieved only by a faint refraction of light around the corner where a single arc-light on its standard illuminated the employees' cars. I couldn't hear a sound except the soft pad-pad of our feet on the grass and the occasional distant cheeping of a brook frog.

I took the loaded sock from my jacket pocket before we reached the corner of the building. I gripped it by the ankle elastic with the heavy soap and casters dangling in the toe, swung it twice around my head in a tight circle, and smashed it as hard as I could behind Spider Kern's right ear. He gave a kind of coughing grunt, stumbled, then pitched forward on his face in the grass.

I knelt beside him quickly, sock upraised, but he was unconscious. I would have liked to finish him off, but I had a use for him alive. I went through his pockets rapidly. I took his car keys and his wallet. He had seven hundred of the thousand I'd given him, and seven or eight dollars in loose bills. I was glad to see them. I'd need them when I had to get gas later. My own money was in hundred-dollar bills.

Amidst the clutter in Kern's pockets was a penknife. I used it to cut his metal-studded belt in two places and then I removed his key ring. The penknife saved removing his belt altogether. Without his keys, it would take Kern quite a while to get back inside the hospital. I listened for a moment to the sound of his stertorous breathing before I rose to my feet. He wouldn't be moving at all for a while. Long enough for me to handle Rafe James.

I shook a caster out of the sock and placed it in my hand with the long steel pin protruding between my fingers. I left the side of the building and walked out into the darkness of the main parking lot. I made a deep circle and came up behind the little cluster of employee's automobiles around the corner. I moved along the row in a crouch until I saw a head silhouetted against the night sky.

I approached the open window on the driver's side noiselessly. The outline of Rafe James's horse-like features was dimly visible. He was watching the corner of the building around which Kern and I were supposed to appear. Something bulky rested on James's lap.

I took a step closer, reached inside the window with my left hand, and jabbed the steel pin of the caster into the back of James's neck, hard. "Don't move!" I barked. "Or I'll shoot!"

He stiffened, then froze.

I reached down with my hand and took the bulky object from his lap. It was a sawed-off double-barreled shotgun. The stock had been cut down, too. It wasn't any longer and not much heavier than an old-time dueling pistol, but probably fifty times as lethal. "Out of the car," I ordered James. He complied numbly. He was in a state of shock. I handed him the keys to Spider Kern's automobile. He looked down at them blankly. "Get into Kern's car," I said.

He led the way to it. It was parked four cars away. If Kern and I had entered it and started through the hospital grounds, Rafe James would have been right behind us, shotgun at the ready. When I handed over the supposed five thousand to Kern for aiding my escape, my life would have run it's useful course as far as the two attendants were concerned. James would have stepped in with the shotgun.

I had the shotgun now. I held if on James while he got under the wheel of Kern's car, then slid into the passenger's seat myself. "Drive to the farthest corner of the dark side of the lot and park it again," I said. "Then we'll walk back to your car." James did as he was told. There was a sheen of perspiration on his face. Walking back to his car, he held his arms stiffly at his sides as though he didn't know what to do with them. "Now out to the highway," I directed.

I knew that it was a mile to the highway. "Stop here," I said when I judged we were halfway. The headlights showed thick bushes on either side of the road and a ditch on the left. "Get out," I said when James hit the brakes. He started to whimper. "Out," I repeated.

I nudged him with the shotgun. He started out slowly, then bolted and started to run. His lank frame zigzagged as he picked up speed. "Stop running!" I yelled at him. I had intended to knock him out, tie him up, and leave him in the ditch. I scrambled out after him. I couldn't wait. I didn't know the load in the shotgun. At twenty yards I touched off the front trigger. Ker-blamm-m-m! Whatever the charge was, it picked up Rafe James's running figure bodily and rolled him down into the ditch.

I looked up and down the road for advancing headlights. There were none. I climbed down into the ditch to check on James. From the look of him, the shotgun had to be loaded with buckshot. Even with the unchoked, sawed-off barrel, he must have caught half the charge. Rafe James was no longer a part of the problem.

I left Spider Kern's hospital keys and car keys beside the body. It might help to confuse the issue when James was found. I thought I knew how Kern would think when he regained consciousness. He would look first for his keys, then for his car. When he couldn't find either, and couldn't find James, Kern would assume I'd somehow got the drop on James and forced him to drive me away in Kern's car. Spider's self-preserving account of the situation should have the police looking for two men, one with head bandages, in Kern's car.

Instead, I'd be alone, without head bandages, in Rafe James's car. Kern's car wouldn't be noticed until daylight disclosed it in the morning. It gave me a few hours incognito. I rolled away from there.

When the gateway leading out to the highway loomed up in the headlights, I pulled off onto the shoulder of the road again. I removed my bandages and took one of the tubes of facial makeup, squeezed some onto my palm, and worked it into my scalp and face. In the hospital I had seen in the case of Willie Turnbull how the makeup dulled the pink gloss of new skin,

I put the hat back on. Without the bandages, it fitted more loosely. I opened the glove compartment when I was ready to take off. There were half a dozen loose shotgun shells in it. I examined one in the dash light. All were number 0 buckshot Each pellet was the equivalent in size of a.32-caliber bullet. No wonder a single barrel had cut James down. At twenty yards a quarter of the load must have gone right through him.

It was ironic that the attendant I would have preferred to see dead, Kern, I had had to leave alive, while the one I didn't care about either way, James, had copped it because he expected me to blast him as he had intended to blast me.

With luck, by the time Kern's car was noticed in the morning and a corrected all-points went out on the police radio, I'd be close to where I wanted to be. Bunny's cabin where the Phoenix loot was buried.

I started up the car again, turned on the radio, and moved out onto the highway.