The Best American Mystery Stories 2002

Clark Howard The Cobalt Blues

From Ellery Queen’s Mystery Magazine

Lewis got off the Harrison Street bus, turned up the collar of his old surplus Navy watch coat, and walked, head down against the cold March wind, to the Cook County Medical Center down the street. Chicago, he thought, was a lousy place for a guy to have to spend the last weeks and months of his life. He should have moved out to Arizona or down to Florida a long time ago, like most of the rest of the old gang he had grown up with did. At least he could be lying out in the sun while he died.

At the big, sprawling medical complex, he made his way to the Radiology Building and entered the foyer. He paused a moment to turn down his collar, catch his breath, and pull a tissue from his pocket to dry his watery eyes. On his way to the elevators, he looked up at the lobby clock and saw that it was 8:52. As usual, he began making the mental bet he made every Thursday morning. Would he be the first to arrive and sign in? The second? Or the third? There were three of them that had the nine o’clock appointment: himself, a skinny white guy named Potts, and a sullen black man named Hoxie. The radiology technician had three come in at once because there were three phases to the treatment, and he could have a patient in each phase as the morning progressed.

Because Lewis was an obsessive gambler, his mind, without conscious direction from him, invariably broke everything he did in life down to odds for or against. So when he stepped onto one of the elevators and reached past two Hispanic orderlies to press the button for five, he started trying to decide how it would be today: Would he be first, second, or third? The rule he applied was that he had to make up his mind before the elevator door opened on five. That was the only fair way to do it. Otherwise, he might see one of the other two in the hall upstairs. Then there could be no bet. Just like if he encountered one of them in the lobby. No bet.

The elevator stopped on three and the orderlies got off. The door closed and the car started again. Since he was now alone, Lewis said aloud, “Okay, one, two, or three? What’s it gonna be?”

This was important to him. This, in his mind, might tell him whether he was going to have a winning day or a losing day. To a confirmed gambler, every day was a new beginning, a fresh start, another chance to hit it big. Yesterday never mattered. A gambler that looked back on what he lost yesterday was a fool. The same as a gambler who planned what to gamble on tomorrow. Yesterday was over, tomorrow wasn’t here. There was only today.

The elevator stopped on five. A split instant before the door opened, Lewis decided. Second. He would be second today.

On five, he walked down a long corridor to a door with a sign above it that read: OUTPATIENT RADIOLOGY. Taking a deep breath, as if he had a fortune bet on the moment, Lewis opened the door and entered the waiting room. In a glance he saw that Potts, the skinny white guy, was already there, slouched down in a corner chair, leafing through one of a dozen outdated magazines spread about the room. Hoxie, the sullen black man, sat in an opposite corner, looking straight ahead, not moving, as if he were in a trance.

Lewis cursed under his breath. He had lost. Disgruntled, he signed in at the reception window and found a place to sit that was well away from either of the other two. Controlling his annoyance at this unlucky turn of events, he took off his heavy coat, pulled a racing form from one of its pockets, and began to reevaluate bets he had made earlier that morning in the day’s lineup at Calexico Downs.

An hour before catching a bus to the hospital that morning, Lewis had been knocking impatiently on the door of a basement apartment on the near Northwest Side, in the neighborhood where he had grown up, once all Irish and Italian, now mostly mixed black, Hispanic, and Asian. He had to pound on the door three times, the cold wind whipping at his ankles, before his friend Ralph opened the door.

“What the hell, you going deaf?” Lewis complained peevishly. “I’m freezing out here.”

“You’re lucky I’m letting you in at all,” Ralph replied without rancor. He closed and triple-locked the door behind Lewis. “This ain’t no Vegas casino, y’know. It’s a business. We got reg’lar hours. Especially on Thursdays and Fridays, which is count days.”

The two men retreated into what had once been a basement apartment but had been converted into a neighborhood betting parlor, where bets were taken not only on daily lineups from seasonal racetracks around the country, but also on baseball, football, basketball, and hockey games, as well as major boxing matches. The parlor was owned by Cicero Charley Waxman, who was nicknamed after the Chicago suburb where Al Capone had once had his headquarters. Waxman had two dozen similar locations, all of which were illegal but much more popular than the state-owned off-track betting sites, because the former accepted wagers on all sports, the latter only horse racing.

The parlor where Lewis gambled was managed by his friend Ralph, one of the gang he had grown up with, and the only one other than Lewis who was still around. Ralph had started as an errand boy for Cicero Charley while still in elementary school, and over the years had grown into gambling-parlor middle management. Even though his net income depended on the earnings of the parlor, he constantly nagged Lewis about his gambling problem.

“Why the hell don’t you give it a rest for a few days, Lew?” he griped now. “Go out and buy yourself a decent overcoat instead of laying bets every day.”

Lewis threw him a derisive look and did not even bother to respond to such an absurd suggestion. The day Lewis did not lay a bet would be the day when all racehorses, boxers, and football, baseball, basketball, and hockey players were dead. At a counter next to the betting cages, Lewis spread out a Green Sheet racing form and began filling out a wagering slip.

“So how’s the gallbladder treatment going?” Ralph finally asked, seeing that Lewis was ignoring his advice.

“Slow.” said Lewis. “The stones are shrinking, but slow.”

Lewis had not told anyone what was really the matter with him; the thought of someone feeling pity for him was nauseating. Ralph thought he was going to the hospital every Thursday morning for some kind of treatment that shrank and dissolved gallstones. That was the reason he let Lewis in early to bet on Thursdays. The parlor normally opened at ten.

Standing across the counter from each other, the two men were acutely but not uncomfortably aware of the marked differences between them. Both forty-six, Ralph now had a wife, two teenage daughters bound for finishing school, a two-story colonial home in an upscale suburb, two sedans, and a recreational utility vehicle. Lewis lived alone in a shabby little kitchenette in a tenement building in the same neighborhood in which they had grown up. He had no family, no regular job, and wore secondhand clothes from St. Malachy’s Thrift Shop.

Over the years, Ralph had tried to interest Lewis in bettering himself. Just a month earlier he had talked to Cicero Charley Wax-man about giving Lewis a janitorial contract for all of Waxman’s gambling parlors. “It’ll put you on easy street, Lew,” his friend had promised. “You hire a dozen welfare mothers to do the work, see, and you pay them in cash so they don’t have to declare the income. All you gotta do is supervise them. I know guys that would cut off a toe for a setup like that.”

But not Lewis. He shied away from steady employment like a two-year-old resisted discipline. When he had to work — emphasize had to, as in riding out a losing streak — he took a temporary job as a dishwasher or a trucker’s helper, or delivered advertising fliers door-to-door, whatever — as long as it was not permanent. Lewis wanted nothing in his life that was permanent. Especially now.

“Did I tell you Debbie finally got her braces off?” Ralph asked now, as Lewis continued to fill out his wagering slip. From his wallet, Ralph extracted a wallet-size photo of his eldest daughter. Lewis looked at it, seeing a girl who resembled Ralph too much to ever be pretty, but who did have, after thousands of dollars of orthodontics, a near-perfect smile.

“She’s a looker,” Lewis lied. “You’re a lucky man, Ralph.” Inside, he shuddered at the mere thought of such responsibility.

As they were standing there, another knock sounded on the outside door and Ralph went over to answer it. He admitted two men, both very large, wearing hats and overcoats, each carrying two large suitcases. As they walked past Ralph, one of them asked, “Count room unlocked?”

“Yeah, go on in,” Ralph said. “I’ll be with you in a minute.”

Returning to the counter, Ralph took the wager sheet, tallied it up, validated it in an automatic stamping machine, and shook his head in sad resignation as Lewis counted out sixty-five dollars and gave it to him.

As Lewis made the bets, an old, familiar thought surfaced in his mind: Maybe today will be the beginning of a winning streak that will give me enough money to get the hell out of cold, dirty Chicago and go live where it is warm and sunny for the rest of my life.

What was left of it.

The following Thursday, he walked from the elevator to the outpatient radiology waiting room, again betting with himself that he would be the second of the three patients to arrive. When he got to the door and was about to open it, he paused, hearing a quiet voice inside. He did not think it was either of the other two patients, because they never talked. Opening the door, he went in and saw at once that Potts, the skinny white guy, sitting alone in a corner, appeared to be talking quietly to himself. When he glanced up and saw Lewis, he stopped at once. A nut, Lewis thought as he signed in. At that moment, Hoxie, the black man, came in, looking angry as usual, not speaking to either of them, and sat down as far away as possible.

Just as Hoxie sat down, the waiting room door immediately opened again and two uniformed, armed men brought in a younger man, his wrists cuffed to a waist chain, wearing an orange jumpsuit stenciled on the back with large black letters: ISP. Illinois State Prison. The radiology technician met them in the waiting room and escorted them directly into the treatment room.

Lewis, Potts, and Hoxie exchanged curious looks, but none of them commented about it.

A little while later, the young man was brought back through again, and this time the three regular patients were prepared and all got a better look at him. He was pretty ordinary in appearance, his only outstanding feature being a head of thick, curly black hair that, Lewis and the others knew, he would soon lose if his radiation treatment was above the neck. Potts, when Lewis had first seen him, had healthy blond hair combed straight back. Because he was undergoing radiation treatment for a brain tumor, he was now bald as an egg. Lewis, who had cancer of the pancreas, and Hoxie, cancer of the esophagus, were both radiated below the head and had kept their hair, such as it was. As if to make up for the hair loss, however, Potts did not have the other debilitating side effects; he experienced a temporary loss of taste, but that was mild compared to the vile nausea, vomiting, and fatigue suffered by Lewis and Hoxie.

After his original diagnosis, Lewis had gone to the medical section of the main public library and researched his illness. He concluded that he had a one-in-five chance of living five more years. When he had subsequently learned in conversations with the radiology technicians the types of cancer Potts and Hoxie were dealing with, he had, out of curiosity, returned to the library and researched their illnesses. Potts he put at eight-to-one to reach five years, Hoxie at nine-to-five.

Lurking somewhere in the back of his mind, Lewis had a vision of a huge national pool made up of cancer patients between the ages of forty and sixty. If each one put in a hundred bucks, the last patient still living would become a very wealthy person. He doubted, however, that the American Medical Association would approve such a plan. Doctors only approved of taking chances with life and death, never money.

The following Thursday, Lewis was the first patient to arrive, and the first to go in for treatment after the young convict had been treated and taken away. While he stripped to the waist, and as the radiology technician adjusted the Cobalt-6o applicator for his treatment, Lewis surreptitiously looked down at the technician’s desk. As he expected, there was a new clipboard there, in addition to his and those of the other two regular patients. He was able to quickly read that the young prisoner’s name was Alan Lampley, age twenty-eight, residing in the Joliet Correctional Center south of Chicago, diagnosis lymphatic leukemia. Lewis was not familiar with that particular type of cancer, so he could not put any odds on it.

“Ready, Lewis?” the technician asked, coming out of the little control room where he was protected from radiation.

“Sure thing,” Lewis replied.

Lewis stretched out on the leather treatment table. He stared at the ceiling as the technician began painting a design on his upper torso with water-soluble orange dye. When he was finished, he carefully placed leather pads filled with lead all around the outside of the pattern, to deflect the radiation from those parts of the body where it was not needed. The radiation itself would come from the Cobalt-6o applicator, which the technician had adjusted following instructions from a radiologist-oncologist as to the diameter and filtration of the cobalt beam and the target distance at which Lewis was lying. That beam was generated by radioactive cobalt pellets sealed in a stainless-steel cylinder mounted behind shields jacketed with sheet steel and carried by a mechanical arm to an open port through which it would be aimed at Lewis.

It continued to amaze Lewis that such a powerful beam could penetrate his body without pain, without heat, without any sensation at all — yet that same ray would — could — might — destroy a malignant cancer that was trying to destroy him. The doctor had explained it to him, of course. The radiation beam did not affect ordinary body tissue; it merely passed through it. Radiation affected only what would absorb it: cells, cartilage, bone — and tumors.

When the technician finished preparing Lewis, he retreated to his safe room and presently activated the Cobalt-6o applicator. Lewis closed his eyes. But instead of dozing, as he usually did, he found himself wondering what Alan Lampley had done to be sent to prison.

On the next treatment day, after Alan Lampley had been taken through the waiting room by his guards, Lewis spoke up to the others and announced, “I know what he done.”

Potts and Hoxie, startled at the sound of his voice, jerked their heads around to stare at him. “He killed a guy,” Lewis said.

“Man, how do you know?” Hoxie challenged.

Now Lewis and Potts stared at Hoxie. Neither of them had ever heard him speak before. His voice matched his demeanor: angry; it cracked like a whip.

“I looked him up in the library,” Lewis said.

“The li-brary?” Potts said incredulously. He had a slow, Southern drawl, lazy-like. Lewis and Hoxie looked at each other in surprise. Both of them had the same thought: redneck. There had been an influx of them recently, Southerners coming north looking for high-paying factory jobs. It happened every time crops failed.

“Yeah, the library,” Lewis confirmed. “I got his name off the chart in the treatment room. Alan Lampley. Then I looked up his trial in the old newspapers down there at the library. He was in a couple stories four years ago. Killed a drug dealer.”

Hoxie snorted derisively. “Poor little white boy junkie got carried away, huh?”

“He wasn’t the junkie,” Lewis said. “It was his sister. The dealer who got her hooked on crack put her on the street to hustle for him to support her habit. This kid Alan came looking for her; they were both from some little town in Indiana somewheres. When he found them in an apartment where she was living with the guy, the sister was so humiliated that she ran into the bedroom, got the dealer’s gun from a drawer, and blew her brains out right in front of both of them. The dealer panicked and tried to beat it, but Alan picked up the gun, ran after him, and shot him four times as he was getting into his car.”

“Good for him, by God,” Potts drawled.

“I suppose,” Hoxie said, glaring at both of them, “that the dealer was a black man.”

“Paper didn’t say,” Lewis told him. “But what difference does it make?”

“I’ll tell you what difference it makes,” Hoxie said, jabbing an accusing finger at both of them. “If he had killed a white dude, he wouldn’t be here taking no treatments; he’d be waiting on death row to get the needle.”

Potts grunted disdainfully, looking down at the floor, shaking his bald head. Lewis just shrugged and said, “Maybe, maybe not. Works out about the same, anyway. The kid got fourteen years for second-degree murder. Far as he’s concerned, it’s still a death sentence.”

“Oh, yeah?” Hoxie said, his voice almost a growl. “Why’s that?”

“He’s got it in the lymph glands,” Lewis explained. “I seen on his chart that he’s getting megavolts that go three inches under the skin. That means it’s prob’ly spread too far to stop. I read up on all this cancer stuff at the library. Even money he ain’t got six months left.”

Hoxie started to say something, reconsidered, and looked away. His fixed, dark countenance seemed to soften a little, and he blinked rapidly several times. Potts sat up straight instead of slouching. Lewis chewed on the inside of his mouth. Alan Lampley’s mortality had somehow synchronized with their own.

None of them said anything further until the young prisoner’s treatment was over and his guards brought him back out. Lewis and the others then looked at him with new interest; he was a person now, with a story as well as a dread disease.

When Potts rose to go in for his own treatment, he impulsively paused at the door and asked, “How long you fellers got after your treatment before you get sick?”

Lewis shrugged. “I got about three hours.”

“ ’Bout four for me,” Hoxie said. “Why?”

“Well, I don’t get real sick, you know, but I start to lose my taste after two or three hours. So what I do is, I go down Harrison Street ’bout three blocks, toward the lake there, and around the corner on Ashland Avenue is a little bar called Billy Daly’s Place. I like beer, see — nice, cold, draft beer. An’ I only have a little while to drink it before my taste goes. So I was just thinking, if you fellers want to mosey on down when you get done here, I’ll buy you a pitcher of beer. What d’you say?”

Lewis and Hoxie exchanged looks. Lewis sensed that it was up to him to speak first; Hoxie’s expression was again almost hostile.

“I wouldn’t mind.” Lewis said. He and Potts looked at Hoxie, who glared back at them. “Come on, man,” Lewis said quietly. “We’re all the same inside — especially now.”

Hoxie nodded curtly. “I be there.”

Billy Daly’s Place was one of those Chicago neighborhood taverns that opened at eight A.M. to accommodate people who had to have one or two drinks to steady their morning shakes so they could go to work. Those who worked nearby were back in at lunchtime to steady their afternoon shakes.

When Lewis arrived, Potts was at a small table in the back, almost finished with his first pitcher of cold draft. By the time Hoxie got there, Potts was well into his second pitcher, and Lewis was working hard on his first. When the bartender put a glass and pitcher in front of Hoxie, he reached for his wallet, but Potts held up a hand and said, “Hey, no, I already paid for one pitcher apiece for you fellers. After that, you’re on your own.”

As men who drink together for the first time invariably do, they got around to telling each other about themselves. Potts, who had drunk the most, got around to it first.

“I come up to Chicago from a little town in Tennessee to find work. I had a good job down there in a paper mill, but some Japanese land group bought up all the property and closed down the mill. They was supposed to be going to develop some kind of industrial complex: said there’d be good jobs for ever’body. That was two years ago; they ain’t developed nothin’ so far. I went on unemployment for six months, then picked up odd jobs here and there for another six. But with a wife and three kids to take care of, things just kept gettin’ tighter and tighter, so finally I got on the bus and come on up here. Got me a pretty decent fac’try job with Motorola. Moved into a ratty little kitchenette so I’d be able to send home enough money ever’ week to take care of my family. I was riding the bus down twice a month to be with ’em for a weekend. Ever’thing seemed to be going along fine — then I started having what they call focal seizures, where my arms and legs would start shaking like I was freezing to death. Fac’try doctor sent me for a MRI scan and they found a brainstem glioma. They put me on a anticonvulsant drug and started radiation. I collect disability pay, but it ain’t enough to send anything home. So me and my wife worked it out for her and the kids to go on state welfare by saying I’d abandoned my family. Now they get along pretty good — but I can’t come around in case somebody was to see me there. So here I am: got no job, got no family, got no hair, and ain’t got no future to speak of.” He grinned crookedly. “Like the feller once said: Life’s a bitch — and then you die.”

“Man, ain’t that the truth,” Hoxie enthusiastically agreed. “A year ago, I had it knocked, you know? Me and my old lady had just got divorced after thirty-two years of marriage. It had got down to the point where we couldn’t stand being in the same room with each other. I tell you, she had turned into the meanest damned woman that ever drew breath. Never happy. Nothing pleased her. She could find things to complain about before they even happened. Like she’d say, ‘I know what you’re gonna do next Wednesday. You gonna go out with those no-good friends of yours.’ Next Wednesday she’s complaining about, and it ain’t even here yet.

“Anyway, I finally had enough of it; I moved out and we got divorced. I took early retirement from my job at the post office, and that was when I really started living. I got a little place of my own, got a new TV, new stereo, new set of wheels, and — best of all — I started running around with this little fox in her second year of college. She had one of those father-complex things, you know; had to have an older man in her life. ’Course, everybody said I was having a midlife crisis; tru’f is, I was having a ball. Only thing was, I started getting these damned sore throats all the time, and my voice would go hoarse.” Hoxie smiled widely. “This young fox of mine, she say it sounded sexy. After a while, though, it didn’t feel sexy. When I went to the doctor about it, I found out why.”

Hoxie sat back and sighed wearily. “Now the young fox is gone, the apartment’s gone, the new wheels are gone, my daughter and her husband have the TV and the stereo, and I got a room in their basement where I’m welcome to stay as long as they’s the beneficiaries on my life insurance.” He raised his beer glass in salute. “Like you said, life is a bitch.”

Hoxie fell silent then, and he and Potts sat looking at Lewis with expressions that said: Okay, man, what’s your story? It took Lewis a few moments but he finally caught on. All he could really say, however, was that the only effect cancer had on his lifestyle was that he had to get his Thursday bets down early, and he’d begun to brood about dying in a cold climate.

“That’s it?” Hoxie said incredulously. “Hell, you might as well not even have cancer.”

“That’s fer sure,” Potts agreed. “I’ve knowed people with the flu had their lives more messed up than you.”

“Well, excuse the hell out of me,” Lewis said, annoyed. “Sorry I don’t have something worse to tell you. Hope I ain’t ruined your day.”

Potts and Hoxie exchanged glances and then suddenly burst out laughing.

“You know what this reminds me of?” said Hoxie. “The day I tol’ my daughter and son-in-law about my diagnosis. Know what my fool son-in-law said? He said it was too bad I couldn’t have a respectable disease like sickle-cell anemia. Said cancer was a white person’s disease!”

“You think that’s bad,” Potts told him, “listen to this. I was feeling kind of down about a month ago, so I went to see this Baptist preacher, thinking maybe he could console me a little, jack up my spirits, you know. Guess what the idiot said. He told me to thank God I had a disease like cancer instead of something impure like AIDS. Said AIDS was the Lord’s way of punishing the homosexuals of the world, but that cancer was for decent folks. An’ he was serious, too!”

Lewis loosened up then and joined in the laughter, although normally he was not the laughing type. He tried never to show any emotion; he did not consider emotion appropriate for a gambler. But with these two men, it did not seem unfitting in any way. Despite the conspicuous differences among the three of them, along with the fact that it had taken them more than two months to even say “Good morning” in the waiting room, Lewis now began to feel at ease with them and sensed that each one of them felt the same with him and with each other. All of a sudden, it seemed as if they had been friends for a long time.

When their laughter subsided, and before they could order more beer, Lewis began to feel sick and said he had better leave; he needed to be back in his apartment before the intense nausea hit him. Hoxie said he would leave, too, since his own nausea was imminent. Potts decided he would leave with them, saying, “No sense in drinking it if you can’t taste it.”

It was then that Potts suggested that they meet there again Saturday afternoon to have a few pitchers and watch the Bears game on the bar’s big-screen TV. Lewis and Hoxie, to their mutual surprise, readily agreed to the plan.

On his way home on the bus, with the numbers and odds and calculations in his mind beginning to spin about from the buzz of the beer, Lewis inexplicably blocked them out and again began thinking of Alan Lampley. Lewis had thought it was bad to have to spend the last months of his life in cold and dirty Chicago, but what must it be like to have to spend them locked in a prison cell?

The three of them began to meet at the bar several times a week: Wednesday nights before their treatment; Thursday afternoons following treatment; Monday evenings to watch a preseason Bulls game. They began to talk about Alan Lampley. Casually, at first, wistfully.

“Too bad that boy can’t join us for beers,” Potts said at one point.

“Yeah,” said Lewis. “Hell, big spenders like us, we’d even buy for the guards.”

Another time, Hoxie said, out of the blue, “Damn shame, kid that young having to deal with cancer and prison.”

“Yeah, it ain’t like he killed some upright citizen,” said Lewis. “All’s he done was ice a drug dealer.”

“It ain’t right,” said Hoxie.

“They call that justice?” Potts demanded.

“Don’t confuse justice with the law,” Lewis said sagely. “Them’s two different things.”

On Thursdays now, when the guards brought Alan in, the three began bobbing their chins at him, nodding, giving him a wink. Potts even stood up one day to talk to him, but one of the guards got between them and said to Alan, “Just keep moving, Lampley.” To Potts, the other guard said, “Sorry, the prisoner isn’t allowed to talk to anyone except medical personnel.”

But they knew that Alan had recognized their overtures of friendliness, understanding, even commiseration, because he began to nod back their greetings, and even grin a little. The little signals they passed to him seemed to say: You’re not alone.

In the bar, the three new friends, after a pitcher or two, began to daydream of helping Alan. “If I was to win me the lottery,” Potts said, “you know what I’d do with part of it? I’d hire the bes’ damn criminal lawyer in the city to try and get that boy paroled or something, so’s he could die in some real nice place.”

“Yeah,” Lewis said drily, “like us.”

“If I was to win the lottery,” Hoxie said, “I wouldn’t mess with no lawyers. I’d hire me three or four real tough street dudes to jump them guards and turn that boy loose. Give him enough money to skip out to South America or someplace.”

“Now that’s a good idea,” Lewis allowed.

“Only thing bad about it is ain’t none of us gonna win no lottery,” Potts said glumly.

“Seems like,” Hoxie said, “I always be reading how some group or organization or something be trying to get some worthless piece of shit off death row ’cause he’s got a low IQ, or his mama whipped his ass too much when he was a kid, or something. But don’t nobody seem to be helping this boy. Leastwise, nobody we know of.”

“People don’t help other people ’cause they’ve usually got something to lose by doing it,” Lewis said. “Only time people really go out on a limb for somebody is when they got nothin’ to lose.”

“You mean people like us?” Potts asked.

Neither Lewis nor Hoxie answered.

For a long time, nobody said anything. But they all knew what the others were thinking.

They got down to it the next time they met, when Potts said, “I wish there was some way we could help the kid.”

Without consciously realizing it, that was what Lewis had been waiting for.

“We could,” he said simply.

“What do you mean?” Hoxie asked. “How?”

“Get the jump on those two guards. Be easy. They ain’t expecting no trouble from three sick guys like us. We could take ’em down with no problem, let the kid go, and use them shackles they got on him to chain up the guards and the radiology tech in the scan room. Before anybody knew what was happening, we could all be out of the hospital and gone.”

“Yeah, but gone where?” Potts asked. “The hospital knows who we are, where we live — hell, we’d be caught before lunchtime.”

“Not if we had an escape plan,” Lewis said.

Hoxie frowned, but with interest. “What kind of escape plan?”

“I ain’t sure,” Lewis admitted. “But it’d have to be a plan where we could all get out of the country. Go to someplace where we couldn’t be extradited. And where we could still get our treatments. Like Argentina.”

“Lewis, good buddy, you are dreaming,” Potts said. “An escape plan like that would take a whole hell of a lot of money.”

“Well,” Lewis said quietly. “I just happen to know where we can get our hands on a whole hell of a lot of money.”

He told them about the four suitcases of cash that he saw being brought into the betting parlor run by his friend Ralph every Thursday morning. Hoxie’s eyebrows went up.

“Man, are you talking about sticking up one of them parlors that’s owned by Cicero Charley Waxman? If you are, that ain’t too smart.”

“Who’s Cicero Charley Waxman?” Potts asked.

“Bigtime rackets boss who runs the gambling on the North Side,” Hoxie told him. “We steal from him, he’ll have his hoods after us like fleas after a junkyard dog.”

Potts shrugged his skinny shoulders. “So what? Look, if we busted this kid loose, we’d have the Chicago cops and the Illinois state police after us anyways. A few hoodlums wouldn’t make no difference.”

“He’s right,” Lewis said. “If our escape plan worked, we get away from everybody. If it didn’t, what’s the difference who catches us? We go to jail or we get killed. We’re dying anyways.” Lewis leaned forward with his elbows on the table and lowered his voice. “Look, I’m gonna be straight with you guys. I want those four suitcases of dough as much for myself as I do for the kid. I don’t know if I’m gonna beat this cancer or not — just like you guys don’t know if you’ll beat yours. But if I don’t beat it, I’d like to spend my last days in someplace clean and warm; maybe some little beach village not too far from a city where there’s a modern hospital where I can get my treatments—”

“You know, I got the same feeling,” Hoxie admitted. “I’d like to have a way to get the hell out of my daughter’s house. I don’t want to die in no basement room. That little beach village sounds mighty good to me.”

Lewis and Hoxie looked at Potts. The Southerner nodded slowly. “I guess I got a reason, too. I’d like to have my wife and kids with me when I go. Somebody to say goodbye to besides strangers.” He blushed slightly. “No offense.”

“Looks like we all understand each other,” Lewis said.

They sat back and raised their beer glasses in a silent toast.

They met in Lewis’s shabby little apartment the following evening and, over pizza and beer, began to make plans.

“First thing in the morning,” Lewis said, “we go downtown to the federal building and get passports. Then we gotta figure some way to get a gun—”

“I can cover that,” Hoxie said. “My son-in-law gots a thirty-two-caliber Saturday-night special he keeps in a drawer nex’ to his bed. It’s a little gun, but he had it chromed and it looks bigger.”

“Just one gun all we need?” Potts asked.

“Yeah, the other two guys can keep their hands in their pockets like they got guns, too,” Lewis said. “Anyway, we’ll take guns off the guys carrying the money. They’re bound to be strapped.”

“Okay. What else?” Hoxie asked.

“Plane tickets,” said Lewis. “I checked out the airlines this morning. There’s an Argentine Air flight from here to Buenos Aires at nine o’clock every night. One-way fare is eleven hundred and eighty bucks, first class.”

“First class!” said Potts.

“Certainly,” Lewis confirmed. “We’ll be in the money; you don’t think we’re gonna fly coach, do you?”

“Where we gonna get the money to buy first-class tickets?”

“We don’t need no money. The airline will hold the tickets at the airport until two hours before flight time; we pay for them when we check in. But we do need a little front money for a few other things.”

“Like what?” Hoxie wanted to know.

“We need to rent a car. We need to rent a motel room out near the airport. And we need to buy some clothes for the kid; we can’t have him running around in that orange jumpsuit. Either of you guys got a credit card?”

“Not me,” Hoxie said glumly. “My daughter canceled mine. She gives me an allowance now, like I was some kid.”

“I got a Visa card,” said Potts. “I don’t use it much; just for groceries and stuff when I run short of cash.”

“What’s the credit limit on it?”

“Five hundred.”

“That ought to be enough. You got a driver’s license?”

“Yeah. Tennessee license.”

“That’ll do. We’ll rent the car at the airport the night before, and drop it off when we go to catch the flight.”

“We taking the kid with us?” Potts asked. Lewis shook his head.

“Can’t. He won’t have no passport. We’ll give him a fourth of the money and then he’s on his own.” Hoxie and Potts exchanged cheerless looks. Lewis shrugged. “It’s the best we can do for him.”

For a long moment then, the three men were silent: looking at each other, looking down at the remains of the pizza, sipping beer that was turning warm, drumming silent fingers. It was a brief time of limbo, a heavy interval in which any one of them could have hesitated just a hint, looked even a trace tentative, and maybe the whole unlikely scheme would have broken to pieces in their minds and evaporated like some juvenile plan to steal a math test the night before the exam. But none of them faltered.

“Well then,” Potts drawled, “when do we do it?”

“A week from Thursday,” Lewis said. “We should have everything set up by a week from Thursday. We’ll do it then.”

When a week from Thursday came and Lewis’s friend Ralph opened the parlor door to let Lewis in to make his early bets, the parlor manager was surprised to find Lewis accompanied by two men he had never seen before. “What the hell?” he said, holding the door only partly open.

“These are a couple of guys I go to the hospital with,” Lewis explained. “Just let ’em stand inside out of the cold while they wait for me, okay?”

“Damn it, Lew, I shouldn’t even be letting you in before the place opens,” Ralph complained. “Now you’re taking advantage by showing up with two guys I don’t even know—”

“They’re okay,” Lewis assured him, gently shouldering his way in and gesturing for Potts and Hoxie to follow. “They’ll wait by the door, you won’t even know they’re here, Ralph. Come on, let me get my bets down...”

Reluctantly, Ralph closed and locked the door behind them. Walking around the betting counter, he studied Lewis curiously. There was something different about him. Suddenly it dawned on Ralph what it was.

“Where’s your racing form?” he asked. It was the first time in twenty years that he could remember seeing Lewis without a racing form either in his hand or sticking out of a pocket.

“I, uh — guess I forgot it,” Lewis said. He tried to sound casual, but he knew at once that he had blown the ploy; the nervousness that he heard in his own usually sanguine voice betrayed him.

Ralph glanced at Potts and Hoxie, who were just inside the door, watching intently. His eyes narrowed suspiciously. “All right, Lewis, what’s going on?” he demanded.

Lewis locked eyes with him but did not answer. Ralph wet his lips. Swallowing, he moved one hand to reach under the counter. There was a red telephone under there that was Cicero Charley Waxman’s hotline. Just taking it off the hook without saying anything was enough to send a quartet of thugs from the neighborhood to check out the problem.

Before Ralph could get to the receiver, however, Lewis reached over and grabbed his arm. “Keep both hands up on the counter, Ralph,” he said quietly.

Hoxie walked over and drew his son-in-law’s chromed revolver. “Do what the man say,” he ordered.

Ralph looked at Lewis in utter disbelief. “Are you out of your mind, Lewis?”

Before anyone could say anything else, another knock sounded at the door. Lewis quickly pulled Ralph around the counter. He jerked his head at Hoxie and the black man hurried to stand behind where the door swung open. Potts stood with him.

“Open the door, Ralph,” Lewis instructed, nudging him toward it.

“You’re crazy,” Ralph muttered.

“Open it.”

Ralph did as he was told, and immediately through the door came a pair of burly men, each carrying two suitcases. Before it could register with them what was happening, Potts slammed the door behind them and locked it, and Hoxie stepped out to face them with the revolver leveled.

“Put the bags down and stay real still!” Lewis snapped, all nervousness dissolved from his voice by adrenaline.

“Do what he says,” Ralph told the men. “He’s crazy. Don’t make trouble.”

The couriers remained still while Potts relieved each of them of an automatic pistol and fished around in their coat pockets until he found the keys to the suitcases.

“All right, get in that closet,” Lewis then ordered. “You too, Ralph.”

It was a small closet behind the counter, the door usually open, with shelves on which the parlor kept pads of betting slips, boxes of ballpoint pens, rolls of calculator tape, cartons of disposable coffee cups, and other supplies. There was hardly room for all three men to squeeze in together. As Ralph followed the two couriers in, he shook his head in pity at Lewis.

“You’ve bought yourself a lot of trouble, Lewis, for a few thousand bucks.”

“A few thousand, huh?” Lewis smirked.

“That’s what I said, smart guy. A few. What, did you think you and your friends were going to get rich here today?”

“Four suitcases full of money,” Lewis pointed out. “A week’s take from all of Cicero Charley’s parlors—”

“That’s not parlor money,” Ralph said evenly. “That’s football-game parlay-card money from all the cigar stores and candy stores and bars. Ninety-five percent of it is minimum bets. You’ve got yourself four bags of mostly dollar bills, Lewis. Maybe twenty, twenty-five thousand, maximum.” Ralph pointed a stiff finger at him. “But you got a million bucks’ worth of grief from Cicero Charley.”

A stunned look on his face, Lewis guided his friend into the closet and closed the door. Turning, he found Hoxie and Potts staring at him with sick expressions. Stepping over to Potts, he took the suitcase keys out of his hand.

“Do the door,” he said to Hoxie.

The black man shoved the revolver into a coat pocket, drew a ball-peen hammer from under his belt, and from another pocket got out a handful of four-inch carpenter nails. As he proceeded to nail the closet door shut, Lewis knelt and unlocked one of the suitcases. It was filled with sheaves of cash held together by rubber bands. Checking half a dozen of them, he found that Ralph had been telling him the truth: there were occasional fives and tens mixed in the currency, but the vast majority of the bills were singles.

“We done stepped in something soft now,” Hoxie said, looking down from his hammering.

“What the hell we gonna do?” Potts asked, his voice breaking as he stood there incongruously with a large automatic pistol in each hand.

“For now, we’re gonna follow the plan and get out of here,” Lewis said. He bobbed his chin at Hoxie. “Finish the door.” To Potts, “Get the car.” He himself tore all the phone wires out of the wall, including the hotline.

Moments later, Potts pulled up in a rented Buick and opened the trunk. Lewis and Hoxie carried the suitcases out one at a time and loaded them. Then they all crowded into the front seat and Potts drove off.

“We got two decisions to make,” Lewis said tensely. “One: Do we follow our plan to spring the kid — or do the three of us make a run for it now? Two: If we do spring him, do we give him part of the money or just cut him loose?”

“Making a run from here ain’t gonna give us much of a head start,” Potts reasoned. “We started this because we were sorry for the kid. If we don’t go ahead with that part of it, we’ll really feel like fools. I think we ought to spring him.”

“Me too,” Hoxie agreed. “But I don’t think we ought to split the dough with him. We gon’ need it a lot worse’n him. I mean, Cicero Charley ain’t gon’ be after him. I say give him the clothes we bought him and a few hundred bucks. Let him take his chances.”

Lewis thought it over for a few moments, then concurred. “Sounds fair to me. Head for the hospital.”

They parked in the visitors’ lot of the Cook County Hospital complex and unobtrusively made their way to the Radiology Building. When they got upstairs to Outpatient Radiology, they entered and signed in as usual, then took separate seats in the familiar waiting room as they always did. From past experience, Lewis had already calculated that the odds were five to four that they wouldn’t have to wait more than fifteen minutes. He was right; they only had to wait eleven.

When the two prison guards walked in with Alan Lampley between them, they proceeded, as usual, directly to the treatment room door. As they were about to enter, Lewis nodded to Potts and the lanky Southerner jumped to his feet and drew one of the guns taken from the money couriers.

“Don’t shoot or I’ll move!” he ordered. The guards, Alan Lampley, Lewis, and Hoxie all looked at him with mixed expressions. Potts swallowed and said, “I mean, don’t m-m-move or I’ll shoot!”

“Take it easy, mister,” one of the guards said. “Nobody’s moving.”

Hoxie quickly stepped up behind the guards and disarmed them. “We gon’ be able to open a gun shop pretty soon,” he muttered.

Just then, the door to the treatment room opened and the radiology technician came out. Potts turned the gun on him. “Hand it! Put your holds up! Damn it, I mean hold it and put your hands up!”

The technician froze. Alan Lampley looked around incredulously. “What’s going on?” he asked.

“You’ll find out in a minute,” Lewis told him. “All right, everybody into the treatment room. Move it!”

In the treatment room, Lewis searched the guards, found keys, and unlocked Alan Lampley’s cuffs and waist chain. “Get out of that jumpsuit,” he said. To the technician, he said, “Take off that lab coat and your pants. Hurry up!”

In less than five minutes, Lewis and the others had the two guards and the technician, in his underwear, handcuffed and chained to the floor-mounted Cobalt-6o X-ray machine in the treatment room.

“You won’t get away with this,” one of the guards warned.

“Five to two you’re right,” Lewis agreed. He turned to his cohorts and their liberated prisoner. “Okay, let’s go. Straight down to the fire stairs at the end of the hall.”

Six minutes later, they were in the rented Buick, driving off the parking lot.

From the rear seat, where he sat with Hoxie, Alan Lampley said, “You guys are crazy. You just got yourselves in a hell of a lot of trouble.”

“We thought you’d consider it a favor,” Lewis said wryly. “So you wouldn’t have to spend your last six months or so in prison.”

“I don’t have six months,” Alan said. “They figure three at the most.”

“Well, three, then,” Potts said, glancing back over his shoulder from the driver’s seat. “Wouldn’t you rather be out than in?”

“Sure, I would,” Alan admitted. “But not for the trouble you guys are into now. I mean, why’d you do it? You don’t even know me, or anything about me—”

“Yeah, we do, son,” said Hoxie. “We know why you’re in jail; about your sister and that drug dealer an’ all.”

“Anyway,” said Lewis, “we’re doing it for ourselves, too. We pulled a stickup this morning to get enough dough so we could all live out what time we got left in a little style. On’y thing is, we didn’t get as much as we figured. But we can still give you enough dough to get out of town, maybe go out to Las Vegas or L.A. or someplace and at least die a free man.”

“Canada,” Alan said. “I want to go to Canada.”

Lewis grimaced. “What the hell for? It’s cold up there. Don’t you wanna go someplace warm?”

“I’ve got an uncle in Canada,” Alan explained. “He went up there years ago to avoid the draft during the Vietnam War. He’s got a little badger ranch up near Moose Jaw, that’s in Saskatchewan. Raises badgers and harvests their hair like people shear sheep for their wool. They use the hair to make expensive shaving brushes. If I could get up to my uncle’s ranch, I know he’d let me stay there and look after me for the time I’ve got left.”

“Wouldn’t work,” Lewis said, shaking his head. “You couldn’t get there without no ID of any kind: no driver’s license, no passport, nothing. You’d never get in.”

“I’d get in, all right,” Alan promised. “I’ve been up there and gone on fishing trips with my uncle. There’s places in the Grasslands National Park on the Montana border where you can just walk into Canada like you were crossing the street. You just get me a Greyhound bus ticket to Shelby, Montana. I’ll take it from there.”

Lewis and Potts exchanged looks, and Hoxie nodded to them in the rearview mirror. “You got a deal, kid,” Lewis said.

In the motel room they had rented, about a mile from O’Hare Airport, Alan showered and dressed in the new clothes they had bought for him while Lewis and the others opened the four stolen suitcases, dumped all the money on one of the beds, and set about counting it.

“Throw all the ones on the other bed,” Lewis said. “I’ll start putting them in hundred-dollar bunches with rubber bands. You guys sort the bigger bills.”

“That ain’t gonna be hard,” Potts cracked.

While they were counting, Alan finished getting ready and came into the room. He looked distressed. “I can’t do this,” he said. “I can’t let you guys go on with this plan. It’s not fair. I’m going to get away and you guys are going to get caught and go to prison. Then in three months or so, I’m going to be dead and they’re going to be bringing you guys in from Joliet for radiation treatments — and you’re going to die in prison.” He shook his head determinedly. “It’s all wrong. Look, if I give myself up, maybe they’ll go easy on you. Maybe you’ll just get probation.”

The three men who had freed him exchanged glances, each in his own way moved by Alan’s concern.

“Look, Alan,” said Lewis, “it’s nice of you to feel that way about us, but the fact is, it ain’t only you and us and the cops that are involved in this thing. See all this money here? We stole it from Cicero Charley Waxman, a mobster — and Cicero Charley don’t grant probation. If he catches up with us, we’re dead — and he’ll catch up with us just as easy inside prison as out.”

“Maybe easier,” Hoxie amended.

Potts went over and draped an arm around Alan’s shoulders. “What he’s saying, old buddy, is that we’re up to our necks in this thing. Ain’t no way out for us now. We got to play it right to the end. It just might turn out that the only thing we get out of this is knowing we helped you get away. You take that away from us an’ it could turn out that we done it all for nothing. You don’t want to do that to us, do you?”

“No,” Alan shook his head, “I don’t.”

“You best get on up to that little badger ranch then,” Hoxie told him quietly. “That way we get something out of it.”

“All right,” Alan said, lowering his eyes. He looked like he might cry.

Lewis guided Alan over to one of the open suitcases, which was now neatly packed with bundles of currency. “There’s three thousand dollars in one-dollar bills, another fifteen hundred in fives and tens, and here” — he handed Alan a separate bundle — “is another five hundred in mixed bills to put in your pocket. Potts is going to drive you over to the Greyhound terminal near the airport. He’ll go in and buy you a ticket on the first bus leaving; it’s safer for him to do it, ’cause there won’t be no pictures of us out yet. Then you take the ticket and get on the bus. Wherever it takes you, you can start out from there for Canada. Eight to five you’ll make it.”

Alan shook hands with Lewis and Hoxie, and left with Potts.

Lewis and Hoxie went back to counting dollar bills.

When Potts returned, Lewis and Hoxie were watching television.

“We made the evening news,” Lewis told him.

“Made it bigtime,” Hoxie added. “Lead story.”

“They got a picture of the kid on there, but none of us yet. We got the city cops, state police, and FBI after us. They got the feds in on it ’cause they say we’re prob’ly gonna leave the state and that’s something called ‘Interstate Flight.’ How’d the kid do?”

“Good,” said Potts. “Got him on a bus to Omaha, Nebraska. He said he can make Montana easy from there, then just walk into Canada through the woods.” Potts looked at one of the beds, which was piled with bundles of money. “All counted, huh?”

“All counted,” Lewis confirmed. “My friend Ralph estimated it pretty close. Total take was twenty-three thousand six hundred and twelve dollars. Minus the five grand we gave the kid, leaves us with eighteen thousand six hundred twelve. That comes to sixty-two hundred and four bucks apiece.”

“Damn poor wages,” Hoxie muttered, “considering we got all that law plus Cicero Charley after us.”

“Yeah, sixty-two hunnerd ain’t gonna get us far,” said Potts.

“We could still make Buenos Aires,” Lewis pointed out. “At least we’d be out of the country, and each have five grand to last us down there.”

“Count me out,” Potts said. “I got my wife and three kids to think about. Only reason I went in on this was I figured to have enough money to send for them, so’s they could be with me when I die. Since that ain’t worked out, I’ll prob’ly just send my share of the dough to them and go on the bum around the city here until I get picked up.”

“Hell, you can send them my puny little share, too,” said Hoxie. “I’ll go on the bum with you. Anything to get out of my daughter’s basement.”

“There is one other thing we could do,” Lewis said quietly. He was sitting with his eyebrow’s knitted together in a frown, looking like a cross between James Cagney and an owl. “I don’t know if you guys would go for it or not.”

“Well, let’s hear it. I mean, we ain’t never let you down yet, have we?” Potts said drily.

“Yeah, tell us all about it,” Hoxie declared. “Hell, we wouldn’t be where we are today if it wasn’t for you, my man.”

“I thought of something while we was counting all them dollar bills,” Lewis explained. “It was something my friend Ralph said to me one Thursday morning when he let me into the parlor early to lay my bets. He said I was lucky he was letting me in at all — especially on Thursday. Because Thursdays and Fridays was count days. Thursdays and Fridays. If the chump change from parlay cards comes in on Thursdays, the serious money from track and sports betting must come in on Fridays. I picked the wrong day for us. The big bucks should be delivered in the morning.”

Hoxie looked askance at him. “Lewis, are you saving what I think you’re saving?”

“Next thing you know,” Potts said, “you’ll be wanting to hold up a bank.”

“I thought about that,” Lewis admitted, “but with the security and alarms and all, I figured it was nine to five we’d get caught.”

“And you think we won’t get caught if we rob the same place tomorrow that we robbed today?” Hoxie asked incredulously.

“That’s exactly what I think,” Lewis said. “Right now, Cicero Charley thinks he’s lucky that we hit him on Thursday. Ralph’s already admitted to him that he let me in on Thursdays only. Cicero Charley’s got no idea I even know that Friday is a count day, too. Plus which, by now he already knows from the news what else we done, springing the kid, and he knows the law’s after us. Right now, he figures we’re running for our lives. He wouldn’t think in a million years that we’d hit him again tomorrow.”

“That friend of yours, Ralph, ain’t gonna open the door again,” Potts pointed out.

“He won’t have to. Look, we got guns. We take down the couriers on the sidewalk, after they get out of their car. We can do this in two minutes, be in our own car, and be gone. We’ll slash their tires so they can’t follow.”

Potts leaned forward, a look of intense interest on his thin face. “What do you think the odds are, Lewis?”

“Eight to one, our favor,” Lewis said confidently.

“Hmmm,” Hoxie said, “that high?”

“Absolutely.”

It only took a moment for them to decide.

“I’m in,” Potts said.

“Me too,” Hoxie added.

Lewis smiled.

Potts telephoned out for pizza and beer, and when it was delivered, the three dying men began planning their second stickup.