The Name of the Game is Death

I

From the back seat of the Olds I could see the kid's cotton gloves flash white on the steering wheel as he swung the car from Van Buren onto Central Avenue. The strong, late-September, Phoenix sunshine blazed off the bank's white stone front till it hurt the eyes. The damn building looked as big as the purple buttes on the rim of the desert.

Beside me Bunny chewed gum rhythmically, his hands relaxed in his lap. Up front the kid's face was like chalk, but he teamed the Olds perfectly into a tight-fitting space in front of the bank.

Nobody said a word. I climbed out on the sidewalk, and Bunny got out opposite and walked around the rear of the car to join me. His dark glasses and bright yellow hair glinted in the sunlight. The thick, livid scar across his throat was nearly hidden by his week-old beard. Across the street a big clock said five minutes to three. Under it on another dial a long thermometer needle rested on ninety-four. A shirtsleeved man stood idly beneath the clock.

We crossed the sidewalk and passed through the bank's outer glass doors. I'm five-ten, but Bunny towered six inches over me. I could see the rolled-up canvas sack under his arm. In the bank's foyer, the air-conditioning bit hard at the sweat on my face and arms. Bunny led the way into the main floor lobby. He went left. I went right. There were two guards on the main floor.

I found my guard showing an old man how to fill out a deposit slip. I moved in, and when I saw Bunny's arm go up across the lobby I slammed the red-creased neck of the guard in front of me with a solid chunk of Smith & Wesson. He went down without a sound. The old man continued writing. I heard a choked gurgle from Bunny's guard. That was all.

I switched to my Colt Woodsman while I took my first good look around. If we hadn't eliminated the two guards, we were nowhere. There were a dozen to fifteen customers, scattered. I fired the Woodsman three times, taking out glass high in the tellers' cages. Shattering glass is an impressive sound. In the echoing lobby the little Woodsman and the smashing glass sounded like a turret of sixteen-inchers in a china closet.

"All right," I said, loud and clear. "Everybody stand still and nobody gets hurt."

Nobody moved.

Nobody breathed.

Bunny vaulted the low gate up in front. I jammed the Woodsman back in my pants and balanced the Smith & Wesson in my palm. If somebody fast-pitched us, I might need the three heavier-caliber bullets I'd saved by directing traffic with the Colt.

Two big-assed women huddled together inside the railing with Bunny. They stood against the door leading into the tellers' cages, empty trays in their hands. Right where they should have been at two minutes to three.

Bunny motioned with his gun for them to open the cage door. They stared at him, cow-eyed. He whipped the flat of his automatic up against the jawline of the nearer woman. She fell sideways, mewling. Someone inside opened the door. Bunny stepped inside quickly and herded everyone to the rear. He began yanking out cash drawers. Bundles of hundreds and twenties went into his sack. Everything else he tossed on the floor.

The only sounds I could hear were the whimpering of the woman on the floor and the clatter and bang as Bunny emptied and dumped cash drawers. On my left something moved. I turned, and the movement stopped. Dead ahead on the balcony I caught the rapid blur of a gray uniform. I belted the guard over backward with my first shot. Bunny never even turned his head.

Two minutes, I'd figured, after we took out the first guards. Two-and-a-half, tops. All over town now bells would be ringing, but in another sixty seconds we'd be gone. I did a slow turn, my eyes skimming the balcony and the main floor. Nothing moved.

Bunny burst out the cage door, hugging the sack to his big chest. He jumped the railing, landing on his toes. I fell in six feet behind him, and we went out through the foyer at a fast walk. Bunny had just reached out to open the right-hand outer glass door when there was a sharp crack-crack-crack behind us. The best part of the door blew out onto the sidewalk. Heat rolled inside in an arid wave through the splintered glass.

Bunny unhunched his neck and started again for the Olds. Out on the sidewalk I whirled and took down the remaining half of the door, one high and one low. It made a hell of a noise. Anyone hurrying through the foyer should have had second thoughts with a yard of glass in his hair.

When I turned again, I caught a flash across the street— the shirtsleeved man under the clock running into a store. I headed for the car, but I nearly yelled out loud when I saw the kid had panicked. We'd gone all the way to St. Louis for a driver, and he'd panicked. Instead of staying under the wheel and drawing no attention to the car, he'd jumped out and run around and opened the doors on our side. His face looked like wet cottage cheese.

Bunny went onto the front seat in a sliding skid. The kid took one look at my face and started to run back around the front of the Olds. Across the street something went ker-blam!! The kid whinnied like a horse with the colic. He ran in a circle for three seconds and then fell down in front of the Olds, his white cotton gloves in the gutter and his legs on the sidewalk. The left side of his head was gone.

Bunny dropped the sack and scrambled for the wheel. I was halfway into the back seat when I heard the car stall out as he tried to give gas too fast. I backed out again and faced the bank, trying to have eyes in the back of my head for the unseen shotgunner across the street. West of the Mississippi everyone thinks he's Wyatt Earp. I listened to Bunny mash down the starter. The motor caught finally, and I breathed again, but a fat guard galloped out the bank's front entrance, his gun high over his head. He threw down on me in a hurry.

I swear both his feet were off the ground when he fired. The odds must have been sixty-thousand-to-one against, but he caught me in the left upper arm. It smashed me back against the car. I steadied myself with a hand on the roof and put two—a yard apart—through his belt buckle. They could hear him scream across town if they had their windows open.

I stumbled into the back seat again and Bunny took it out of there. The Olds bumped hard twice as it went over the kid. Across the street I could see the shirtsleeved man pumping frantically at his jammed shotgun. I raised the Smith & Wesson, then lowered it. I might need every bullet, so I couldn't afford any luxuries. I got the car doors closed within half a block.

"Handkerchiefs!" I yelled at Bunny as we flew up Central and on the red spun east on Roosevelt. "Ditch those glasses," I continued. "Slow down. Stay in traffic." Bunny tossed two handkerchiefs over his shoulder without looking back. He grabbed a blue beret from the seat beside him and crammed it down on his yellow hair. With the glasses off and his hair hidden, he looked like a different person.

I wadded up Bunny's handkerchiefs with my own and tried to staunch the double-ended leak in my left arm just below the short sleeve of my shirt. I didn't accomplish much. All the stuff about a bullet's initial impact being shock with no pain is a crock of crocodiles. I felt it going in, and I felt it coming out, like a red-hot sawtooth file.

I reloaded (he Smith & Wesson. I tried to ignore the warm molasses running down my arm, except to keep it from dripping on my pants. I watched the traffic lights. The kid had had the lights timed all the way to Yavapai

Terrace, but we didn't have the kid. I wanted to get south of Van Buren again so bad I could taste it.

The cops had to figure us for a main highway. East to Tucson and Nogales if anyone had seen the right turn on Roosevelt. North to Prescott or Wickenburg if they hadn't. Even west to Yuma and the coast. There'd be roadblocks up now on every main artery out of town. We weren't going out of town. Not yet.

We'd passed Seventh Street while I was fooling with the useless handkerchiefs, Twelfth while I was reloading. The first red light caught us at Sixteenth. We sat in tense silence, cars hemming us in completely. My guts shriveled down to pebble size, but so far we hadn't even heard a siren.

The light changed, and we sailed up to Twentieth and turned south. We were back across Van Buren before I had time to begin holding my breath. Past Adams and Washington, over the tracks to East Hcnshaw, then back toward town at the light. Up to Twelfth again in the double-back, a quick left, then a right. The black Ford sat ahead of us on Yavapai Terrace, shimmering in the sun, I'd parked where kids wouldn't bother it, under a eucalyptus tree close to a Chinese grocery. Bunny pulled in behind the Ford. We weren't more than two miles from the bank.

"Get something out of your bag for this arm," I told Bunny. He was out of the Olds before I'd finished talking. He came back from the Ford with my lightweight suit jacket and a shirt. "Shred it and fold it and tie it around this thing," I said, holding out my arm. "Tight."

Heat and dust and nausea filled my throat as he complied. I choked it down, whacked the larger pieces of crusted blood from my lower arm, and slung the jacket loosely over my shoulder to hide the crude bandage.

Bunny went back to the Ford. I followed after glancing up and down the dusty street. I watched the two-handed carry Bunny made with the sack as he transferred it, and for the first time I wondered about the size of the score. A fifty-pound sack holding twenty-five-percent hundreds and the rest twenties can let a man walk away with a quarter-million.

If he walks away.

The Olds we'd leave here. Bunny started the Ford, pulled ahead to get clear, then backed out onto Twelfth. He headed south slowly. The street names were Indian— Papago, Pima, Cocopa, Mohave, Apache—but the area was Mexican. The bushy shade trees were stunted and gnarled. The houses were close together, small, sun-blistered, and shacky. The front yards were overgrown tangles of brush. Bunny nosed the Ford into Durango Street, then parked across the street from a dark blue Dodge in the middle of the block.

I drew a deep breath as he set the brake. "Okay," I said. "New script, Bunny. Listen close. I'm grounded. We're not going to the cabin in the canyon." With the kid gone and me with a torn-up arm, we had to throw away the book. I rummaged in the sack at my feet. The first three money packets I picked up were hundreds. Fifteen thousand casually in my hand. I dropped two of them, found two strapped packets of twenties, and shoved the three of them into a jacket pocket.

"We split up here, big man," I went on. "You take the Dodge Get into a cheap motel, and don't forget to wash that yellow dye out of your hair. Day after tomorrow after dark pull out and head east. Stay off Highways 80 and 66. Go back on 70. Roswell, Plain view ... that way."

1 tried to think of everything. "Take the sack. Head south at Memphis for Florida. The gulf coast. Pick a small town. When you make it, mail me a thousand a week in hundreds, not new bills. To—" I groped for an alias clean with the law "—Earl Drake, General Delivery, Main Post Office, Phoenix, Arizona. Got it? Okay, take off. I'll join you the minute I can travel."

Bunny got out of the Ford. He walked around it and opened the door on my side. His big, hard-looking face was solemn. We shook hands, and he picked up the sack. He crossed the drowsy dirt street to the Dodge, his shoes making little puffs in the inch-thick dust. There was a layer of it on the Dodge from passing cars.

Bunny opened the back deck, rolled in the sack, and slammed down the lid. He looked over at me and waved before he got in and drove off. Just before he reached the corner I remembered that all my clothes were in the Dodge. I reached for the horn, then pulled my hand back. I had more immediate problems than clothes.

I sat there for a moment with a kind of all-gone feeling. All the adrenalin-charged-up excitement had drained away. My arm hurt like an aching tooth, and my stomach felt queasy. My mind still chugged along busily, but the rest of me felt almost numb.

Letting Bunny take the sack hadn't been in the blueprint, but it was the best place for it now. I had some scrambling to do, and the first rule of the game is don't get caught with it on you. If the cops have to sweet-talk you to try to find out where it is, twenty-to-life has a way of coming out seven-to-ten, with an early parole. Although plank-walking the guards on this frolic could have made everything else academic if they'd done the big somersault. The one on the sidewalk—

Clean away, except for the hole in my arm. And except lot the silly-bastard kid. I wouldn't be sitting here improvising on an ironclad plan if he'd just stayed with the car. Yeah, and if wishes were horses, beggars would ride.

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.

Five days Inter there was another envelope.

Seven days later there wasn't.

The mail clerk handed me a telegram addressed to Earl Drake. I got away from his window fast and opened it. It said IN TROUBLE STAY PUT DO NOTHING WILL CALL YOU. DICK.

I stared blankly at the recruiting posters on the walls. Bunny was in trouble, all right, but not the kind I was supposed to think. The telegram was a clinker. When we'd Inst teamed up, I'd arranged with Bunny that a telegram from either of us was to be signed "Abie."

I tut that was just the least thing wrong with the telegram. If he lived to be a hundred-and-four, Bunny would never call me about anything. The knife slash that gave him the livid throat scar had also reached his vocal cords. Bunny was a mute.

Bunny hadn't sent the telegram.

Only someone who had intercepted a thousand-dollar envelope meant for Earl Drake could have sent the telegram. I looked at it again. It had originated in Hudson, Florida.

I drove back to The Tropics and found Hudson in an atlas. It was a crossroads town south of Perry on U.S. 19, en route to Tampa.

I checked out of the motel.

The soreness was gone from the shoulder. It was still stiff, but it would have to do. Three-fifty, four hundred miles a day without killing myself, I figured. Five days.

Knowing Bunny, I was sure there was only one way he could have been dealt out of the game.

I had business in Hudson, Florida.