by Mike Resnick
My mind made up, I drove the Olds to the outskirts of a slum area, left it there, and tried to flag down a cab. Five of them passed me by before I found one who was willing to take a chance on me despite my looks. I had the driver take me to the Plaza Hidalgo, where I went to the deserted men’s room and spent about an hour trying to clean and bandage my wounds. I spent the next two hours taking a nap in one of the stalls, and when I emerged it was getting on toward five in the afternoon.
I didn’t want to leave for the hospital before dark, so I stayed in the general area of the Plaza Hidalgo, stopping for a Big Mac and a Coke at the omnipresent MacDonald’s, buying a Mexican girlie magazine and trying to imagine what the captions said, and otherwise passing the time.
When the sun set I walked into the adjoining residential section, hot-wired another car—a British Land Rover, which was a long way from home—and took off. I was pretty sure I would have a posse on my tail if I made it out of there in one piece, so I filled the tank when I was about eight miles from San Benedicto.
I drove up to the gate, told the attendant—a different one than the last time—that I was here to visit my terminally ill father, parked in the lot, and walked to a side door. It was locked, and I tried two or three more doors before I found a service entrance that was open.
Once inside the hospital, I checked my watch and decided that I’d better wait a few hours, until midnight at the earliest, before rummaging around. I considered hiding in a bathroom, as I had done at the Plaza Hidalgo, but it occurred to me that a building like this, unlike a huge sporting arena, might only have one or two stalls per bathroom—and someone who was waiting for a stall might get a little suspicious if it took him four hours to get in.
I heard footsteps coming toward me from a cross-corridor, and quickly ducked into a nearby room. There was an ancient, incredibly withered woman lying on a bed, with half a dozen tubes stuck in her arms and legs and a couple more going up her nose. She was breathing shallowly, and twitching every couple of seconds. I knew she was oblivious to what was going on around her, so I crawled under her bed, pulled the edge of a sheet down to afford myself some cover, and waited.
A nurse came in at 9:30 to change a couple of the bottles that were attached to the tubes, and an orderly opened the door and glanced in at 11:00, but no one saw me, and after the nurse checked in again at 12:30 I felt it was safe to crawl out from where I was hiding. My body had stiffened up again, and my left forearm was throbbing pretty badly. I wondered if there was anything on the tray of medications near the old woman’s bed that would help me, but I decided not to chance it.
I gave the nurse another fifteen minutes to finish her rounds on that floor, or at least that corridor, then carefully opened the door and stepped out into the hall. There was an almost tangible silence in the corridor, along with the pungent odor of disinfectant, and I had to be careful that my shoes didn’t click on the freshly waxed tile floor.
I had no idea where they stored their drugs, but common sense said that the storeroom wouldn’t be on the ground level: it was too easy a target for thieves and hopheads. Besides, I hadn’t spotted it when I was there the day before.
So I found a stairwell, walked up to the second floor, and stuck my head out into a new corridor. It was empty, and I began walking carefully along it. Twice I had to duck into rooms when I heard nurses approaching, but both times the patients were sound asleep and probably medicated to the gills, and within half an hour I had determined that the storeroom wasn’t on the second floor.
I climbed up to the third floor and began searching again, and this time I hit paydirt.
The drug storeroom was a huge thing, perhaps thirty feet long, all clean and white and polished, with locked metal cabinets lining the walls and a walk-in freezer/refrigerator unit at one end.
I didn’t know if vaccines had to be kept cold or not, but the refrigerator seemed like as good a place as any to start. I walked into it, turned on an overhead light, and began checking labels. Most of them were in Spanish, but after about five minutes I found what I was looking for: two small boxes with the word Amalgamated printed on them. I checked them for some sign of a packing slip or flight number, and came up with a stamped notation containing a couple of Spanish words and a date: Monday, June 14. Obviously it was the day the shipment had been received—and it just happened to be the day after the Federated flight landed. I opened one of the boxes, pulled out a vial with Diphtheria Vaccine typed in English on its label, and stuffed three vials each of diphtheria and measles vaccine into my pocket. Then I turned off the light and prepared to leave.
I had almost reached the door to the corridor when I heard footsteps approaching. I darted back into the refrigerator unit and closed the door behind me. Whoever it was found what he or she was looking for in a matter of seconds and walked right back out.
I waited a minute, then gingerly stepped into the main storeroom, checked the corridor, and left. I made it to a stairwell without being seen, and a moment later I was on the ground floor, trying to remember which direction led to an exit. I could always try to bluff my way past the main desk if I got lost, but I was sure they cleared the hospital of visitors at nine or ten, and there would be some awkward questions concerning what I was doing there at 1:30 in the morning. Also, my borrowed clothes were very tight, and I was sure the vaccine vials were making a pretty obvious bulge in my pocket. And finally, if any face ever looked like it had no business skulking around after hours, it was mine.
I waited in the stairwell for a few minutes, and after I heard three different people walk past from my right to my left, I opened the door and headed off in the opposite direction. I had gone about two hundred feet and made a couple of turns when I came to an exit. It was one of the ones that had been locked from the outside, but all I had to do was lean on a metal crossbar and push against it and the door opened outward. A minute later I was walking toward the Land Rover, still unable to believe I had made it this far with so little difficulty.
And then the problems started.
There was a night watchman leaning against the Land Rover. I didn’t know if he was waiting for me to return, or just taking a break, but I sure as hell didn’t want to have to tell him why it wouldn’t start unless I hot-wired it, or even what it was doing there at all at this time of night. I ducked back into the shadows before he saw me.
My next thought was to go back into the hospital and try to steal the keys to a doctor’s or intern’s car. Not impossible, but pretty damned risky, with the added disadvantage that I could wind up looking awfully foolish trying the keys out on a whole row of cars before finding the one they belonged to. As it turned out, I didn’t have an opportunity to put it to the test: someone had locked the door through which I had entered a few hours earlier.
Well, there’s no law that says a good detective necessarily makes a good fugitive: I was in no condition to walk back to the city, I couldn’t get to the Landrover, I couldn’t sneak back into the hospital, and I was a marked man the instant the sun came up. In fact, I was still mildly surprised that my friendly neighborhood inquisitor and his golden-haired gunman hadn’t staked out the place already.
Then I heard an ambulance siren wail in the distance. Keeping to the shadows, I walked around the building until I could see the emergency entrance. Then I knelt down, hid behind some bushes, and waited.
A white Ford van with a siren and blinking lights attached to it pealed up the long driveway, skidded to a halt at the door to the emergency room, and two young Hispanic men in white smocks leaped out of the car, raced around to the back, opened the doors, and pulled out a stretcher that held a very old, very feeble-looking gentleman. The door to the hospital opened and they disappeared inside the building a few seconds later.
I waited just long enough to make sure they weren’t coming right back out, then walked as casually as I could over to the van, opened the driver’s door, got in, breathed a little prayer of gratitude when I found the keys still in the i
gnition, and turned the van around.
I drove very slowly up to the main gate, then hit the lights, flasher, and siren just before I got there. The attendant opened up for me and I was doing ninety before I was out of his field of vision.
I turned off the flasher and the siren a couple of minutes later but didn’t slow down. When I saw the lights of downtown Monterrey ahead of me I took a sharp left, started my light and music show again, and made like Bobby Unser while everyone thoughtfully pulled out of my way.
I figured the theft must have been reported to the cops by now, so as soon as I pulled clear of traffic I shut down all my systems again, turned onto a side street, parked the van, unlocked a Ford Taurus with a credit card, hot-wired it in about twenty seconds, and took off toward the west.
I didn’t slow down until I hit Paila a couple of hours later. I filled the tank up and headed westward again. I turned right on Highway 45 and reached the tiny town of Mirador just after sunrise. As far as I could tell no one was following me, and I chanced parking the car on the main drag and ordered breakfast at a greasy spoon.
I must have looked pretty strange, because the waitress did a double-take at the sight of me, but she never said a word, just served me fast and hoped I would get out of there quick. I obliged her.
I filled the tank again, though it really didn’t need it, then drove as far as Hidalgo del Parrel before my arms and side started throbbing so much that I thought I was going to pass out. I didn’t want to stop until I got to the States, but I knew if I didn’t get some medical attention pretty damned quick I was going to save someone the trouble of faking a car wreck. I parked at a public lot, found a local drugstore where the pharmacist spoke English, and asked if there were any American doctors in town. I knew a Mexican doctor would call the cops the second he got a look at me; I hoped an American might at least hear me out and let me explain why reporting my presence to anyone, even the police, could prove detrimental to my health. The pharmacist told me that Hidalgo del Parral had no American medics, but that one had set up a small practice in San Francisco del Oro about fifteen miles away.
I thanked him, got the car, drove there, and hunted up the office of a Dr. Jason Marcus. He was a tall, very thin man with a huge shock of white hair, and he evidently wasn’t doing much business, because he escorted me into an examination room right away.
I showed him my ID, told him that I was in considerable danger and would be in even more trouble if my whereabouts were known, and told him to check me out with Mike Pratt. He had the operator hunt up the police station through Information, just in case I was giving him a phony number to call, mentioned my name to Pratt, and evidently got Mike to confirm the need for secrecy.
He shrugged, hung up the phone, and turned back to me.
“You’d really be much better off in a hospital,” he said, starting to examine my facial wounds.
“Out of the question,” I replied. “I know that sooner or later you’re going to have to report this to the police. How much of a head start can you give me?”
“A few hours,” he replied, probing my nose gently with his fingers. “Don’t worry about it. And don’t try to speak—I’m going to have enough trouble patching up that lip as it is.”
He told me a bit about himself as he worked on me. Evidently he had had a practice in Oregon for a number of years, but both his sons had started up a manufacturing business in Hidalgo del Parral a few years back, and when his wife died a year ago he had moved down here to be near them. He was past retirement age, and sure wasn’t hurting for money, but he liked to keep his hand in, so he’d set up shop in San Francisco del Oro and worked at it three days a week. I had lucked out and caught him on one of the days that he wasn’t tending his garden.
I didn’t feel any better when he was done working on me—but I didn’t feel any worse either, and that in itself constituted an improvement. The sum total of what he had to do was staggering: sixteen stitches in my left arm, seven in my right, twenty in three different spots on my left side, six more on my lower lip, some kind of support jammed into my nose, four different bottles of drops for my right eye, two shots of antibiotics, a steroid shot, and enough bandages to cover Boris Karloff.
I must have been there for better than three hours. When he was finished I told him that I probably didn’t have enough money with me to pay him, but that he could put through a call to Casa Grande and Nettles would make good the bill with a check or a credit card.
He jotted down the number, had me wait while he made the call, seemed satisfied with whatever Nettles told him, and explained patiently that I was alive and reasonably well but in no condition to speak on the phone. Nettles must have put up an argument about that, because it took Marcus a good five minutes of explanations and apologies before he could finally get off the line.
“You’re welcome to sleep in one of my examination rooms,” he offered after he hung up the phone. “I’ll see to it that you’re not disturbed.”
“I’d rather drive straight through,” I said, finding it more difficult to articulate now than when I had arrived.
“You’re in no condition to do so. If you try, you’ll probably pass out or fall asleep at the wheel.”
“What if I took some No-Doz?” I asked.
“Then you’ll crash an hour later,” he said with conviction.
“All right,” I said after some consideration. “I need two more favors. Nettles will pay for them.”
“Stop worrying about money and tell me what I can do for you,” replied Marcus.
“First, I’d like you to call a woman named Joan Linwood in Phoenix. I can’t remember her number, so you’ll have to get it from Information. Tell her I’m going to have to stay at her place for a day or two as soon as I get out of Mexico, and that under no circumstances should she tell Nettles or Pratt that she’s heard from me.”
He scribbled furiously on a prescription pad, nodding each time he would momentarily catch up with me.
“And what else?” he said, looking up.
I pulled the vials out of my pocket and handed him one of each.
“Send these to Captain Juan Vallero of the Monterrey Police and tell him to run a lab analysis on them.”
“I can do that myself, if you wish,” he said.
“You’d be letting yourself in for a batch of trouble,” I said. “Let Vallero do it. The less you know about them, the longer you’re likely to live.”
“All right. Now I want you to get some sleep.”
“Shit!” I muttered as he was leading me to an examination room. “I’m going to need a car, too. I can’t use the one I’ve got.”
“It will be taken care of, ” he said soothingly, helping me onto a table. “I’ll call your employer again while you’re sleeping.”
“And the Taurus,” I mumbled as I lay back and rested my head on a hard pillow. “I’ve got to hide the Taurus in case they’re looking for it.”
But he was gone, and I didn’t have the strength to get up and go after him. I looked up at the ceiling, and suddenly it seemed that the light fixture was starting to whirl around in ever-increasing circles. I made a bet with myself that I could fall asleep before I got so dizzy I fell off the table.
I won in a walk.
11.
Marcus was as good as his word. He woke me a little after midnight, gave me a bowl of soup and a sandwich, and led me out to a beautifully nondescript blue Chevrolet he had rented over in Hidalgo del Parral.
“You ought to reach the border sometime this morning,” he told me. “I’ll make my report to the local police at noon.”
“That’ll be fine,” I replied. “If I haven’t made it to the States by noon, then I’m not going to make it at all. Have you made arrangements to send the vials to Vallero?”
“One of my sons picked them up in late afternoon and is driving them there personally. He should be arriving just about now.”
“And Joan Linwood?”
“She’ll be waiting for y
ou at her home. I’m afraid I was a little vague with her, but since you didn’t want her speaking to the police or your employer, I didn’t know how much you trusted her.”
“I just don’t want her to get more involved than necessary,” I said. I didn’t add that I thought Nettles’s and Pratt’s phones might be bugged, since he had called both of them.
I thanked him again for all his help, and he started getting embarrassed, so I finally got in the Chevy and pointed it north.
I hit Chihuahua at about three in the morning, filled up at the only gas station that was open, and reached Moctezuma just before sunrise. I passed through Ciudad Juarez by 8:30, spent more than an hour convincing the Federales to let me cross the border in the Chevy—it wasn’t the same car I’d entered the country with, which seemed to be against the law—but finally I greased the right palms, passed through the checkpoint, and pulled into a truck stop in El Paso almost two hours before Marcus was due to call the Mexican cops. I resisted the urge to drop to my knees and kiss the hot Texas pavement, but it was an effort.
I picked up a newspaper, read the sports section while I was waiting for my breakfast, and found out that I wasn’t the only Cincinnatian who had been having a rough time of it. The Reds had lost three out of four to lowly Philadelphia, and the only thing keeping them in the race was the fact that the Dodgers and Astros were taking turns beating each other. Hal Morris had sprained his back, Neon Deion Sanders was playing with a pulled hamstring, Barry Larkin had been spiked while trying to tag a runner at second base, and Jose Rijo’s elbow was hurting again. I felt like a member of the team.
I finished what the menu called an El Paso omelet, hastily washed it down with two glasses of water, and waited for the fire in my mouth to subside. When it did, I walked across the road to a tourist shop, bought an Original Authentic Ten-Gallon Texas Stetson for $9.98, and also picked up a pair of sunglasses. It wasn’t much of a disguise, but it was the best I could do on the spur of the moment.