One Endless Hour (6 page)

    He grinned. "Guess not. When you plannin' on handin' over the packet?"

    "When you deliver me to the main highway."

    He nodded. "I been thinkin' the same way. I want you off the grounds when the blowoff comes."

    "I'll need clothes, shoes, and a hat. And the gun."

    "Okay." He frowned, considering. "It works out," he decided. "When we're set, I'll bring you the stuff and you can dress in the john. We'll walk out the ward door here together. I'll take you down the corridor to the side door that'll let us out onto the parkin' lot. From there I'll drive you to the highway in my car."

    "It sounds fine." I pretended to agree. "I'll be picking up the cash alongside the driveway between the hospital and the highway." I stopped as though I'd said more than I intended.

    I could see him changing gears while he thought that one over. The critical moment for me would be when Spider Kern thought I had the cash in my hands. I was sure that it was his intention to gun me down as an escapee at that moment. "All right," he said after a moment. "When's it gonna be?"

    "How about a week from tonight?"

    "That soon? No reason why not, though." He was studying me. "You're pretty sure of yourself, ain't you? Pretty cool?"

    "I'm just leaving everything up to you."

    "Yeah, that's the way. Okay, anything else we need to know or do?"

    "Make sure the hat's a broad-brimmed one."

    "Right. I'll pick up a straw sombrero. We'd better make the move around eleven P.M. so I can get back on the ward before the shift changes at midnight. I want your disappearance discovered on the owl shift, not on mine. Okay, let's pack it in."

    I went back to bed but not to sleep.

    Despite Spider Kern's question about my coolness, I felt far from cool after the months of inactivity.

    

    

    All during the final week I paid close attention to the manner in which Dr. Afzul rebandaged my head after each session with the aerosol spray can in his office. There was less bandaging necessary each time. Mornings in his office I would unbandage myself while he was making his preparations. At night in bed I practiced unbandaging and rebandaging myself following Afzul's patterns until I was sure I could do it alone.

    I still hadn't seen myself. There was no mirror in the doctor's office, and all my practicing was done in the dark. If Dr. Afzul ever noticed anything different in the arrangement of the bandages when I walked into his office mornings, he never said anything.

    "You'll be getting a package in the mail one of these days with no return address on it," I told him on the morning of what I hoped would be my next-to-last day in the institution. "Don't open it until you're alone."

    He knew what I meant. It would be the balance of the twenty thousand I'd promised him for the face job. I said it casually, as though it were still something a long way in the future. There were ways he could have helped my getaway, but I didn't ask. During the hours he'd worked over me I'd probed him sufficiently to be sure in my own mind that he wasn't flexible enough to help actively in my escape. I had no intention of jeopardizing the half loaf I had for a potential whole one.

    Then something happened that made me wonder if I hadn't bought more of Dr. Afzul than I'd realized. For the first time in our association, he went out of his office and left me alone in it. I didn't waste time worrying about whether he suspected that my leave-taking was imminent. I hurried to his cabinet and removed a flat packet of gauze and a roll of tape, which I shoved into a pocket of my robe.

    There were a stack of makeup kits in the cabinet, and I moved the top layer aside and opened the bottom kit. I took from it two tubes of a facial cream that Afzul had explained to me some time before would improve my appearance during the healing process. I put everything back so that no one could tell there had been tampering until the bottom kit was opened. I passed up the chance to take the entire kit. It was too bulky.

    I would have liked to say goodbye to little Dr. Afzul when he returned to his office, but I didn't trust him that much. He had carried his share of the load, and I didn't want to rock the boat. Back on the ward I put gauze, tape, and makeup under my mattress. The aerosol cans were already there.

    I had had to move my twelve hundred dollars several times during the months of plastic surgery. Each time the case of toilet tissue got down to the next-to-last layer, I removed my cash and stashed it temporarily until a new case went into the closet and I could hide the bills in the bottom layer again. I didn't think Kern was going to do anything to derail the situation now that he undoubtedly had a plan for taking care of me, but it didn't hurt to be careful.

    It was a long day. I had made all my preparations, and there was nothing to do but wait. I didn't have a foolproof plan by any means. A major weakness in it was the timing, but I'd been unable to find a way around it. Kern and James went off duty at midnight, which meant my escape had to be made before then.

    This timing meant that I'd have only a short period from the moment I reached the outside until the midnight change of shift. If anything happened to Kern and James during my escape, and there was almost no way as I saw it that nothing could happen, they would be missed at midnight. There would be an immediate bed-check, I'd be found missing, and the alarm would sound.

    Aside from the short lead time, the advantage was with me. The options of Kern and James were limited by the fact they had to coddle me until they had the cash. When they did, I was expendable. They would never intend for me to return to the ward alive. A dead escaping prisoner told no stories.

    My own options were flexible. My first plan was to kill Kern on the ward, take his keys, and let myself out of the place and take his car in the parking lot. A drawback was that although I knew which key on his key ring opened the ward door, I didn't know which one opened the side door to the parking lot. Even near midnight I could hardly stand at the door trying a succession of keys without risking observation and questioning by someone.

    There was another fact. An overriding factor, the more I considered it. From his conversations with me, Kern planned to take me to his car and drive me to the point between the hospital and highway at which I would presumably hand over the money. Almost surely Spider would want Rafe James along on the expedition so that when the moment came no mistakes would be made in disposing of me.

    James could hardly be waiting in Kern's car, though, since even a supposed dimwit like me might reasonably be expected to balk at two-to-one odds at such a critical moment. That meant Rafe James in another car, following us. The more I thought about it the more sure I was that was the way it had to be.

    And the more I thought about it, the better I liked the idea.

    Properly handled, it would give me the chance I needed to add to my lead time following my escape.

    

    

    The final hour of waiting was the worst.

    I was ready mentally long before "lights out" arrived at 9:45 P.M. I waited another half hour for the ward to quiet down, then slipped out of bed and removed aerosol cans, gauze, tape, and cosmetics from under the mattress. I wrapped them loosely in my robe.

    I lifted the hospital bed, worked free the steel caster in its leg, and pulled it out. I walked around the bed and did the same thing on the other side. I stretched out on the bed again with fists balled around a caster in each hand, a precaution against Spider Kern's accelerating his intended double cross.

    It was forty minutes later when a shadow flitted by the end of the bed and tapped lightly on the metal. It was Kern's signal that everything was ready. I waited five minutes longer before I got out of bed and walked in darkness to the ward washroom, bundled robe under my arm, steel caster in each hand. There was only a night light on inside the long room with its familiar odor. The only sound was the water running in the urinals. I opened the door of the last cubicle. Piled on a stool were shirt, trousers, sport coat, socks, shoes, and a broad-brimmed straw hat.

    I added robe and casters to the pile, then closed the door. Kern was supposed to be standing guard outside to keep anyone from entering until I was ready. It still didn't leave much time. I went to the closet with its cleaning materials and pulled the case of toilet tissue toward the front. With no need for finesse, I pitched rolls of tissue until the back of the closet was waist deep before I reached the bottom layer in the case and once again retrieved my twelve hundred dollars.

    I retreated to the cubicle and dressed quickly. The clothing was cheap and ill-fitting. The jacket was too tight and the trousers much too loose. I managed. I distributed all my contraband in various pockets except the right-hand pocket of the jacket. That one I kept empty.

    I left the hospital clothing on the floor where I'd dropped it except for one white institutional sock. I put the two steel casters into the sock, then carried it to the nearest washbasin where I added a jumbo-sized bar of soap to it. I put the loaded sock into the empty right-hand jacket pocket.

    I stood in front of the washbasin mirror and tried on the plantation-style straw hat. It fitted snugly over my head bandages, but it fitted. The bandages extended downward only as far as my nose. Under the high-crowned, broad-brimmed hat, they were even more inconspicuous than I had hoped.

    When I left the washroom, Spider Kern was standing just outside the door, where he was supposed to be. There was no sign of Rafe James. "All set?" Kern asked me. He made no comment on my appearance. I could hear tension in his voice. The action was getting to him, I decided.

    "All set," I said.

    "Let's go, then."

    He led the way down the ward in the dim light. He glanced through the heavy glass door before unlocking it. No one was in sight in the outside corridor. We passed through the door. I heard it click behind me for what I had made up my mind was the last time. I wasn't coming back.

    Kern glanced across at me once as we walked side by side the twenty-five yards to the side door leading to the parking lot. I kept my right hand on the weighted sock in my jacket pocket. There was always the chance that Kern's sadistic tendency would outweigh his greed for money. He might lead me right up to the outside door, then shout the alarm and "capture" me. If he tried it, the steel casters in the sock were going to see to it that Spider Kern needed plastic surgery worse than I had.

    In the better light in the corridor I tried to locate a suspicious bulge on Kern that would pinpoint a weapon. Even in his thin hospital whites, I couldn't see anything. It had to mean that Rafe James was carrying the armament.

    I was keyed up so high for what I felt was the crucial moment at the side door that Kern had it unlocked and we were outside almost before I realized it. The night air felt warm and moist. It was my first breath untainted by the odor of hospital antiseptics in almost two years.

    "My car's around the corner," Kern whispered. He started alongside the building, walking on the grass. I knew where his car was. I fell in a half step behind him. The almost total darkness on the visitors' side of the huge parking lot was relieved only by a faint refraction of light around the corner where a single arc-light on its standard illuminated the employees' cars. I couldn't hear a sound except the soft pad-pad of our feet on the grass and the occasional distant cheeping of a brook frog.

    I took the loaded sock from my jacket pocket before we reached the corner of the building. I gripped it by the ankle elastic with the heavy soap and casters dangling in the toe, swung it twice around my head in a tight circle, and smashed it as hard as I could behind Spider Kern's right ear. He gave a kind of coughing grunt, stumbled, then pitched forward on his face in the grass.

    I knelt beside him quickly, sock upraised, but he was unconscious. I would have liked to finish him off, but I had a use for him alive. I went through his pockets rapidly. I took his car keys and his wallet. He had seven hundred of the thousand I'd given him, and seven or eight dollars in loose bills. I was glad to see them. I'd need them when I had to get gas later. My own money was in hundred-dollar bills.

    Amidst the clutter in Kern's pockets was a penknife. I used it to cut his metal-studded belt in two places and then I removed his key ring. The penknife saved removing his belt altogether. Without his keys, it would take Kern quite a while to get back inside the hospital. I listened for a moment to the sound of his stertorous breathing before I rose to my feet. He wouldn't be moving at all for a while. Long enough for me to handle Rafe James.

    I shook a caster out of the sock and placed it in my hand with the long steel pin protruding between my fingers. I left the side of the building and walked out into the darkness of the main parking lot. I made a deep circle and came up behind the little cluster of employee's automobiles around the corner. I moved along the row in a crouch until I saw a head silhouetted against the night sky.

    I approached the open window on the driver's side noiselessly. The outline of Rafe James's horse-like features was dimly visible. He was watching the corner of the building around which Kern and I were supposed to appear. Something bulky rested on James's lap.

    I took a step closer, reached inside the window with my left hand, and jabbed the steel pin of the caster into the back of James's neck, hard. "Don't move!" I barked. "Or I'll shoot!"

    He stiffened, then froze.

    I reached down with my hand and took the bulky object from his lap. It was a sawed-off double-barreled shotgun. The stock had been cut down, too. It wasn't any longer and not much heavier than an old-time dueling pistol, but probably fifty times as lethal. "Out of the car," I ordered James. He complied numbly. He was in a state of shock. I handed him the keys to Spider Kern's automobile. He looked down at them blankly. "Get into Kern's car," I said.