The Snatch

8

I remembered nothing, and I remembered everything.

Vividly brief scenes with no continuity, like film edited and spliced together by a madman. All in floating, surrealistic white and gray, except for the brilliant red color of blood. And when the reel of film ended, abruptly — only the richest and deepest of blacknesses.

I knew the pain.

Even through the blackness, I knew the pain.

It raged and seethed inside me, and then, sated on my flesh, it grew still and became little more than dull, half-realized throbbings in my stomach and my head. I lay with it, coming out of the velvet midnight, watching the dawn consume the darkness at the edges, and at first I was calm, waiting.

But then the film began again, without warning, and half comatose and half rational, I relived it all and saw the blood, and I was terrified. A voice cried out in rising decibels, and it was my voice, and my hands beat at the air with the frantic flutterings of a wounded bird. Fingers soft and gentle took my arms and stilled them and laid me down again, and something cool and moist brushed with careful strokes across my forehead.

I heard myself whimpering, a child’s whimpering, and somehow I managed to stop that. Then the voice that was not my voice, that was too high-pitched and too filled with terror to have been my voice, began crying, “He stabbed me and took the money, I’m dying oh please you have to call Martinetti, Martinetti has to be told about the money!”

The cool, moist strokes continued, and it was a woman’s caressing, a woman wearing apple-scented perfume and talking to me in words soft and gentle like her fingers. Some of the panic left me, and I could feel calm returning, and I was aware that I was coming out of it, that I was waking up. I did not want to wake up, because I was afraid of what I would learn, but the panic was no more and with the calm came the need to know. I could not stay under much longer.

My brain began to clear, and it was full dawn soon and the blackness was gone. I lay there, awake now, with only a fuzziness disturbing the clarity of my thoughts, my eyes squeezed tightly shut and my hands pulled into fists at my sides. I knew I was in bed, in a hospital; there were the faint odors of ether and disinfectant and floor wax-institutional smells-pushing away the quiet apple scent of the woman, and knowing this, my body took on a stiffness, a rigidity, and images tried to push their way into my mind. I fought them, I fought them desperately, because they were carefully buried images of things I had seen in field hospitals in the South Pacific, and I knew that if I allowed them to return they would bring the panic and the terrible fear with them. I fought them, and I won, and they retreated. The confrontation left me gasping for breath. I closed my mouth and willed normalcy to my lungs.

I listened. There was a faint, faraway ticking that would be a wall clock, perhaps, and the sounds of hospital activity muted by thick walls, and now the scraping of a chair, and now a muffled cough, and now nothing.

I opened my eyes.

My vision was clear, except for lingering, shimmering pulses of light at the periphery of it. I was looking at a big man in a white hospital smock, with big capable hands and gold-rimmed spectacles and a neat salt-and-pepper mustache. He was smiling, a tired and wan smile, standing just beyond the tubular gray rail at the foot of the bed on which I lay. The walls of the room behind him were a pale green, with an off-white ceiling, and there was a white table with a stainless-steel water carafe and some plastic cups on it.

I looked at the doctor, blinking a little. I said in a calm, clear voice-my voice, “Am I dying?”

“No,” he answered gravely, “you’re not dying.”

I grasped that with my mind, and clung to it, and I saw in his eyes that it was the truth. The quiescence, so tenuous before, now became firm and complete; there would be no more panic. I said, “My belly …”

“A nasty cut, but not deep enough to have done much damage. You lost a lot of blood, and it took twenty-seven stitches to close you up, but you’ll be all right.”

“I thought … I thought my entrails were …”

“Shock,” the doctor said, with a small, understanding nod. “It magnifies things out of proportion. You’re not badly hurt, you can believe that.”

I let my mind focus on the pain in my stomach now, and it was still dull and vaguely pulsing. They would have used Novocaine as a local anaesthetic, and given me some kind of pain-killer, too, which would account for the fuzziness at the fringes of my thinking; the pain perhaps would be stronger later, but I would be able to tolerate it, knowing that I was not dying.

I swallowed into a parched throat, and raised one of my hands off the bedclothes to touch my forehead just over my right eye, where the pain in my head seemed to be centered. I encountered a bandage, with a sensitive lump beneath it. I said, “How did I get this?”

The doctor moistened his lips, and his eyes shifted to my right. For the first time since I had come completely awake, I realized that there were other people in the room. I turned my head on the pillow.

A slender, doe-eyed young nurse stood near the window, auburn hair tucked under one of those little newspaper-sailboat white hats. Her face was solemn and very dedicated, and she would have soft hands and an apple scent about her. In a hard metal chair pulled back from the bed, a very fat man in a dark brown worsted suit sat with his hands flat on his knees. He had shiny black eyes, like smooth Greek olives, and they were watching me with no expression other than a kind of resigned weariness. His mouth was thick and sleepy-looking, and there was a ponderousness to the set of his shoulders, the tilt of his head; but I had worked with cops of one kind and another for a long time, and I knew that that was what he was, and I knew as well that he was not half as soft and sleepy as he appeared or pretended to be.

He shifted a little on his chair and looked at the doctor and the nurse. They left the room immediately, wordlessly. The fat man said to me, “You got the lump when your car went off the road. Steering wheel or windshield. It could have been worse, but you only sideswiped a couple of eucalyptus and nosed into a ditch.” He spoke softly and carefully, as if weighing each sentence before putting voice to it.

I said, “Who are you?”

“My name is Donleavy. I’m with the District Attorney’s Office of San Mateo County.”

I looked at the identification he produced, and moved my head on the pillow in careful acknowledgment. Special investigator. Well, he wouldn’t be here if it was just the knife wound in my stomach, I thought-or even if they had only found the dead man by the sandstone rock. But he would have come out, all right, if the authorities had wind of the kidnapping.

Donleavy was watching me think. After a time he said, “Mr. Martinetti is waiting at his home just now, with my partner. If you were wondering whether you should say anything.”

“How did you find out?”

“You told us,” Donleavy said. “Indirectly.”

I just looked at him.

“Man who lives in the house near where you went off the road heard the crash and went out to investigate. He called the hospital here-Peninsula Emergency, if you’re interested-and they sent an ambulance. You were delirious when it arrived, kept repeating the name Martinetti and something about a kidnapping and murder and the money being gone. The attendants passed it on to the staff here when they brought you in, and they relayed it to us.

I took a long, slow breath, remembering the shouting I had done in the half-world of returning consciousness. “What time is it now?” I asked Donleavy.

“Just past five A.M.”

“Has the boy been released yet?”

“No.”

“Any word?”

“No.”

“Oh Christ,” I said softly.

“Yeah,” Donleavy said. “You want to tell me what happened at the drop last night?”

“Do you know the location?”

“Martinetti told us.”

“You found the dead man, then.”

“Uh-huh. Stabbed in the back, below the right kidney, and cut up deep under the breastbone.”

“Who was he?”

“A guy named Paul Lockridge,” Donleavy said. “You want to answer some of my questions now?”

“Oh,” I said. “I’m sorry.”

“Sure.”

I told him what had happened, exactly as I remembered it, going over it again to make sure I had left nothing out.

Donleavy said, “And you never saw the guy’s face?”

“No. It all happened too fast.”

“Did he say anything at any time?”

“No.”

“Can you remember anything about him?”

“He wore some kind of long coat.”

“What kind?”

“I couldn’t tell.”

“Is that all?”

“I’m afraid so.”

He sighed. “How do you figure it?”

“I hadn’t thought that far.”

“Well, think that far now.”

I pushed it around for several seconds, but my head ached, and I let it go finally and said, “It looks like a double-cross. Two in on the snatch instead of one, and as soon as the money was dropped the killer pulled a knife on this Lockridge. But he wasn’t accurate in the dark and the fog, and he just wounded him with the first thrust, in the back. Lockridge screamed and turned and the killer stabbed him under the breastbone, and then I came down in time to get myself cut.”

“That’s the way it looks, all right,” Donleavy said.

“I hope that’s not exactly the way it is.”

“Why?”

“The boy should have been released by now,” I said. “If he was going to be released at all.”

Donleavy’s forehead wrinkled like the brow of a hound. “A guy uses a knife like that, he hasn’t got much conscience or regard for human life, has he?”

“No,” I said grimly, “he hasn’t.”

I lay there and stared down at the top of the tight white bandages ringing my lower stomach, visible through the open front of the cotton hospital gown they had dressed me in. I could feel Donleavy’s eyes on me. After a time I said, “How’s Martinetti?”

“How would you expect?”

“Yeah.”

“He didn’t want to talk to us when we went out to his place,” Donleavy said. “But he couldn’t deny something was wrong, not the way he looked and the way his wife and the others there looked. It was past midnight, and he’d figured things went wrong because you weren’t back. We told him what had happened to you as far as we knew it, and he gave us the whole story then. He was a damned fool for not coming to us in the first place with it; if he had, none of this would have happened.”

Donleavy’s voice had hardened somewhat, but his eyes and his mouth were still sleepy. I said, “You won’t get any argument on that.”

“Why weren’t we notified?”

“Martinetti must have told you that.”

“I want you to tell me.”

“He didn’t want the law. He only wanted to pay the ransom to get his son back, to follow the instructions the kidnapper gave him.”

“And you went along with that?”

“He didn’t ask me for my opinion.”

“Maybe you should have offered it.”

“It wasn’t my place-or my son.”

“What was your place?”

“To make the drop for him, that’s all.”

“No investigating, or anything like that?”

“No, just make the drop.”

“How much were you getting for that?”

“Fifteen hundred dollars.”

“That’s nice money for a little drive into the hills.”

“And a knife in the belly?”

“You couldn’t have foreseen that, could you?”

“Listen, what are you trying to say, Donleavy? That I should have turned down a sour but legitimate job when I could use the money? That I should have violated a client’s trust and phoned you people about the kidnapping? That I didn’t try to talk Martinetti out of paying the ransom money because that would have meant I’d lose a fifteen-hundred-dollar fee?”

“All of those things crossed my mind.”

“And all of them are so much horseshit.”

“I’ve heard of you a little,” Donleavy said. “You used to be with the Frisco cops, didn’t you?”

“For fifteen years.”

“You don’t work much, but you’ve got a decent name.”

“Thanks.”

“I’m not leaning on you,” Donleavy said mildly. He shifted his weight on the chair. “You’ve been through enough for one night.”

I met his eyes. “Look, Donleavy, nobody feels any worse about this whole thing than I do-and I don’t mean getting cut. I’m not trying to excuse myself or my actions, right or wrong; I just want you to understand what motivated them, and what didn’t motivate them.”

“Sure,” Donleavy said, and got ponderously to his feet. He sucked in his round cheeks, and puffed them out again, like a blowfish. “We’ve talked enough for now. I think they want to give you something to make you sleep.”

“Will you tell Martinetti what happened?”

“Yeah, I’ll tell him.”

“All right.”

He did that thing with his cheeks again. “I got cut once, in the side, not half as big a gash as you got,” he said slowly. “It happened in a bar in Tucson, just after the Korean War; I was new on the cops there and I went up against a guy waving a straight razor. I was never more scared in my life after he slashed me, and I never forgot what happened. I’ve still got the scar, and every now and then I still get nightmares about it.”

He turned, fat but never soft, and shuffled over to the door and opened it and went out without looking at me again. I stared at the ceiling for a while, and then I closed my eyes to rest them. But when I did that, I could see the blood running out between my fingers in the dome light of the car, and I snapped them open again and watched my hands trembling on the bedclothes.

I thought: I’m never going to forget it, either. The scar will see to that. And maybe some nightmares, too, just like the ones Donleavy has every now and then.

* * * *