Killing Time

Fourteen

Peevishly, Harcum said, “You’re causing me one hell of a lot of trouble, Tim.”

“I’m real sorry,” I said. I was still shaky, and it was the best I could do.

We were at the Winston General Hospital, where a man in white had put some goo on my head. I hadn’t wanted to go to the hospital, since I could pretty nearly walk, but everybody had insisted. Now I was just glad to be alive and sitting down, and I didn’t really care how much trouble I was causing Harcum. I’d lied when I told him I was sorry.

“Frankly,” he said, “I was with Sherri.”

“I’m with muscatel, myself,” I told him. I wasn’t thinking yet, I wasn’t even trying to think. Breathing was plenty good enough for me right now. Thinking I could do later.

And old Joey Casale was dead. It was one of those stupid freak things. The grenade — that’s what Hal Ganz had said it looked like, before Harcum had whisked me away to the hospital — had blown out the front windows, demolished the den furniture, and cracked the wall between den and staircase. It had also jounced all the furniture in the living room. It had jounced the sofa, and when the sofa landed, it knocked a huge chunk of plaster out of the grocery-store ceiling. Joey Casale had still been bent over the cold-cut slicer, cleaning it, and the plaster had caught him in the neck.

It was beginning to look as though I was a dangerous guy to be near.

It was now after two in the morning, and I’d been hours in that hospital. I had a neat new bandage on my head, and I was nervous and shaky, and they’d told me what my apartment looked like. And I wasn’t ready to start thinking yet, or to try to answer Harcum with any degree of sense.

He sighed now, and got to his feet, and went over to the door. The man in white was in the next room, where I’d been patched up, and Harcum said to him, “Can Smith leave here now? Is he all right?”

The man in white — I didn’t know if he was an orderly, a doctor, or what — came in and looked at me. He was in his late twenties, and looked tired and serious. “How do you feel?” he asked me.

“All right, I guess,” I said. “A little shaky.”

“You don’t want to go to sleep yet,” he said. “Not with that hit on the head. Stay up for a while, as long as you can. Drink coffee if you want, but no alcohol.”

I nodded.

“Come back tomorrow afternoon to have that cut looked at and the bandage changed,” he said.

“Okay.”

“Come on,” Harcum said. “My car’s out front.”

We left the white room and the white man and walked down the green-smelling corridor and out a door bracketed with red-lettered signs. The sign on the inside said EXIT. The sign on the outside said EMERGENCY ENTRANCE.

Harcum’s car was a new Oldsmobile, two weeks old. Every June, when the prices on this year’s model begin to drop, Harcum trades in last year’s car for a new one, at Hutchinson’s Auto Dealers, catty-corner across from City Hall. And any voter who thinks he does that on his salary also thinks the world is flat and is carried on the back of a turtle.

We climbed into the Olds, which still had that squeaky smell of newness, and Harcum purred it around the oval to the street. We traveled a dozen blocks or more before he made a wrong turn and wasn’t heading toward my place any more.

“Hey,” I said. “I live back that way.”

“I know where you live,” he answered, but he didn’t slow down or turn around or say anything else.

“What is this, Harcum? I live back that way.”

“The doctor said you shouldn’t go to sleep yet,” he said.

“I can stay awake at my place,” I told him.

He gave me a sour look, and went back to his driving. “You’re a menace, Tim,” he said. “You’re a walking accident. I’m putting you in protective custody until morning.”

“What the hell for?”

“So nobody else will get killed in your place,” he said.

“You can’t do this, Harcum,” I told him, foolishly.

“Watch me,” he said.

And I was still too woozy and shaken up to fight it. I lit a cigarette, leaned back in the corner, and wished the fog would clear up. It was too much effort to think or to argue.

Harcum drove downtown, stopped in front of City Hall, and walked me down the stairs to Police Headquarters in the basement. A three-handed game of pinochle was going on in one of the rooms beyond the main desk. Harcum sat me down at the table and said to the others, “Here’s a fourth for you, boys. He got a knock on the head, so he isn’t supposed to sleep for a while. And he isn’t supposed to go home, either, not before morning.”

“We can play double-deck,” said one of the cops. It was Dan Archer, one of the two who had come to the diner last night, when this whole thing had started. And was that only last night? By God, it was.

Harcum went away, Dan produced another deck, and I sat watching him as he tried to shuffle ninety-six cards. He was my partner, and he dealt me a good hand, but I couldn’t keep my mind on the game, so we didn’t make our bid.

I played till five o’clock, lost seven bucks and change, and then I just couldn’t keep my eyes open any more. They promised to wake me at eight, and I went to sleep on a cot in the next room.