The Plan

Chapter 26.

KAZ GRINNED AT THE HEADLESS CORPSE. "TONY, YOU'RE beautiful, babe…"

Ryan tried to focus on the big man in the Hawaiian shirt, green and purple palm trees strobed on yellow Dacron. Ryan was bleeding badly as Kaz looked into the wound and whistled.

"You're missing a pound a' hamburger and a quart a' ketchup. We gotta get you fixed up, then I'll come back here an' take care a' this hard-on." He grabbed Ryan by the elbow and helped him up.

Heavy arterial blood started to ooze. Kaz got him in the back of the station wagon, stripped off his Hawaiian shirt, rolled up the florid monstrosity, and tied it above the wound. He looked around in the dirt for something to make a tourniquet and found the turn indicator that Ryan had thrown at Tony. Kaz stuck it through the knot and twisted it.

Ryan was gritting his teeth and felt himself starting to go into shock.

"Let this loose every minute or two. I know a guy in Trenton who can fix you up." Kaz put on his overcoat and got behind the wheel of the stolen wagon and pulled out, leaving his tan rental behind.

The "guy in Trenton" was an ancient, stringy black man named Dr. Jazz. He was in a ghetto wood house with boarded-up windows that seemed to be growing out of a bed of broken household appliances. Dr. Jazz had an Adam's apple the size of a handball. He was shaved bald and his black dome glistened. Bicuspids flashed in 24-carat gold. His black eyes were always laughing.

"I'm sittin' here feelin' the jazz and along comes an ugly fed name a' Kaz," he intoned, grinning and showing more shiny yellow metal. His voice was high and reedy with a singsong West Indies lilt. He was looking at Ryan in the back of the wagon. "Man, you be comin' real close t' glory. So come on in, tell Dr. Jazz the story."

Ryan was getting cold-he assumed, from loss of blood. He leaned up on his elbows, shivering as he looked at the black man standing on the porch with rotting wicker furniture sagging behind him.

"Ryan, this is Dr. Jazz," Kaz said. "He's gonna sew you up."

The old man grinned wider, showing two holes in his lower bridge.

Ryan looked over at Kaz. "What kinda doctor?"

"Dr. Jazz has zipped up more than one outlaw an' more than one lawman. Any time a man's got a hole in him, he thinks it's better not to report,. Dr. Jazz has the pizzazz."

"I put mor'n one stitch on yer tired, ugly ass," the doctor said. "Bring him inside 'fore he pumps hisself dry."

Kaz pulled Ryan up out of the back of the wagon and threw him over his shoulder in a fireman's carry. He lumbered up into the old man's house, across the porch, stepping over a sleeping cat, into the tattered front room.

"Bring you back here where we got the big mirror and set ya upright under the big light," the old man rhymed to his bleeding patient.

The guest bedroom was a doctor's office. There was a steel medical table, immaculate under an enormous surgical light. There were medicine cabinets and steel tables;

syringes in plastic wrappers were laid out on a white towel. A drug cabinet full of metal-topped bottles was on one wall. Ryan took some comfort from the equipment in the room.

"Kenetta," Dr. Jazz called out.

In a few seconds, a beautiful black woman, about twenty-five, with her hair braided in dreadlocks, moved into the room.

"Hey, Kaz, you look better than the last two times you was here."

"Kenetta, this is Ryan Bolt. Kenetta is Dr. Jazz's daughter."

She looked at Ryan for a beat while Dr. Jazz scrubbed up at a big sink in the adjoining bathroom. Then she leaned down and looked at the wound.

"Jeez, what did this?"

"Twenty-two dumdum," Kaz said.

"Come on, chile," Dr. Jazz yelled from the bathroom where he was scrubbing up. She took a green surgical smock out of the sterile wrapping and moved over to her father and opened it.

Kaz looked at Ryan, who was still not convinced. "Dr. Jazz was a surgeon in Kingston, Jamaica. He had some political trouble in the seventies and had to leave. The trouble chased him and he wasn't able to get licensed in this country. He knows what he's doing. Believe me, you don't wanna go to the hospital. Mickey will find you there."

Ryan was too weak and in too much pain to wonder who this huge, disheveled man was, where he had come from, and how he knew about Mickey.

He watched Kenetta get into her surgical gown and pile her braided hair up under a green paper cap.

`Think we better put da boy to sleep," Dr. Jazz said. Kaz nodded. "I'll be back once I take care of Tony." Kenetta moved to Ryan and stood over him. "This is ether. We don't have lidocaine, but I have Adrenalin her e a nd I'll monitor your vital signs. I'll bring you up if I have to. I'm sorry, but that's the way we do it."

"Shit," Ryan said, thinking he was a long, long way from the U. C. L. A. Medical Center with its pastel rooms and hermetically sealed breakfast trays. She poured the ether on a sterile cloth and held it under his nose. Dr. Jazz cut away the rest of his pant leg and studied the wound.

"Those dumdums sure do make a fucking mess, don't they, sugar?" he said, less poetically, as Ryan slipped under.

It took Kaz twenty-five minutes to collect what he needed. He also stopped and bought a flannel shirt at a surplus store.

He got back to the clearing in the stand of cypress trees at about eleven A. M.; he dug the hole in a ravine fifty feet behind the tree line. He worked for almost three quarters of an hour with a shovel he'd found in Dr. Jazz's garage. Finally, he dragged the Jersey killer over and rolled him onto a blanket. He ripped open the bag of lye Tony had bought and poured it over the body, closed the blanket, then powdered the top. It was time for the last rites.

"Dear Lord," he said in mock seriousness. "Blessed are the truly unwise for they bring hope to those destined to pursue them! Amen." Then he kicked the powdered burrito containing New York Tony into the shallow grave.