by Brad Latham
“To you?”
“Yeah. I’ve made wrong decisions, or decisions I wished I hadn’t made. Everybody does.”
“But young guys with families don’t get killed because of it!”
“Hook, that’s what we sometimes deal in, you and me—life and death. Like doctors. Like judges. Like Marine captains in the war. That’s what you sign up to do. I’ve lost guys under me. For dumb reasons. For reasons I’ve kicked myself a hundred times for using.”
Brannigan reached out his hand, enveloped Lockwood’s unwounded left one, and squeezed it. “Hey, you’re all the better because it bothers you.”
Lockwood sighed with relief. “You’re just the medicine I need right now, Jimbo,” he said. “I feel better. Spoon me some more chow.”
For the next few minutes they said nothing as Brannigan gently fed him meat loaf, mashed potatoes, peas, and carrots. With his undamaged left arm, Lockwood was able to lift the glass of milk and drink it.
“What time is it?”
“Eight o’clock. You been asleep all day.”
“It all happened this morning?”
“Yes. See? You’re making progress already,” Brannigan joked. “Pretty soon you’ll be hoisting them C and Cs of yours.”
“Where’s Braunschweiger?” Lockwood asked.
“Right upstairs, under heavy guard.”
“You find out where the goods are?”
“No. We’re not likely to either.”
“Why not?”
“He lost a lot of blood from your shot. He’s in shock. His blood ain’t taking to the extra blood the does have given him. Not like you have.”
“They gave me blood?”
“At least a quart.”
“Jesus! How bad’s my wound?”
“Not bad at all. Flesh wound. Just hit the artery in your arm. Soon as you adjust to the shock, you ought to be able to get up.”
“Soon?”
“Maybe tomorrow?”
“What about the bombsight?”
“So that’s what it is!”
“Yeah. But don’t say anything.”
“The Feds think it was definitely there, and that it was carted off.”
“Damn! When?”
“Maybe yesterday. Maybe the day before.”
“So it could still be in the New York area?”
“Yep.”
“Can’t you get it out of Braunschweiger? It’s important, Jimbo.”
“The docs tell me the only way to get anything out of him fast is with some new drugs they got, and they’re likely to kill him—if you get anything at all.”
“This thing’s important, Jimbo.”
“You can’t persuade a doctor to kill a patient.”
“But—”
“Look, I’m going to leave now,” Brannigan said. He stood up. “You need sleep. You let us worry about the bombsight. We got everybody and his seven-year-old son looking for the damn thing.”
Lockwood felt the concern and smiled at Brannigan.
“Hey, Brannigan.”
“Yeah, Hook?”
“For a rough corncob you make a guy feel pretty good, you know that?”
Brannigan flushed. “You had a rough time, buddy.”
“Yes.”
“I want you back out there. We have good times, you and me.”
“Yeah.” Lockwood felt much better now.
“Go to sleep,” Brannigan said. Closing the door softly, he left, and Lockwood closed his eyes to see if he could sleep. When he opened them it was morning. He felt refreshed, alert, and ravenous, but he couldn’t have been asleep more than a few minutes, ten at the most. Yet outside he saw it was broad daylight, and the cool air felt like morning. A nurse came in.
“So, you’ve finally woken up!”
“How long did I sleep?”
“According to your chart you were asleep at 9:00 last night, and it’s 10:00 now.”
“Thirteen hours!” Lockwood felt his arm and the bandage there. “It doesn’t hurt.”
“It may ache for a while, but the doctor says you can leave this morning if you feel strong enough. Recuperate at home. You have a couple of visitors.”
“Visitors?”
She opened the door, and Mr. Gray and Steven McPherson came in. Mr. Gray stood there with his fedora in hand and looked around the room timidly.
“How’s he doing, nurse? Can we talk to him?”
“I’m fine, Mr. Gray,” Lockwood said. “Feel terrific. Ready for a big breakfast.”
“Will it tire him if we spend a few minutes with him, nurse?” Mr. Gray asked, still ignoring Lockwood.
“Mr. Gray! I said I’m fine! You want to visit, come closer and sit down and visit.”
The nurse looked from Mr. Gray to Lockwood and back, as if she thought the two of them might be nuts, and she walked out without a word.
Steven walked around the timid Mr. Gray and said, “Say, Bill, you look like you made a miraculous recovery.”
“I’m doing fine, Steven. Get a chair for the chief.”
Gradually Mr. Gray got over most of his timidity, and they chatted for a few minutes. Lockwood realized that he had never seen Mr. Gray outside the RCA Building. Once, as a joke, he had even called Mr. Gray at 1:00 at night, and Mr. Gray, still there in that corner office, had answered the phone just as he did at 10:00 on a weekday morning—“Gray here.” One of the other investigators said he had called Mr. Gray at noon on a Sunday, and he had also answered the same way—“Gray here.”
“Well, it’s good to see you looking okay, Lockwood,” Gray said finally.
“Thank you, sir. I’m flattered that you’ve come to see me.”
Gray ignored this comment, as he did any personal comment from one of his claims investigators. Steven smiled, he knew Lockwood was baiting their boss.
Gray said, “We thought you’d been shot to death, Lockwood. The company would have lost a valuable employee. The board will be pleased to hear it was only a surface wound.”
“Flesh wound,” Steven corrected him.
“Flesh wound,” Gray repeated. “Steven here, I want him to drive you back to your place, now that—”
“Except you got another offer, Bill,” Steven said.
“Another offer?” Lockwood asked.
“Yes. Miss Rodman of Moriches called and said you’d need some nursing and volunteered her services and her place, if I would drive you.”
“Myra! Her place! Say, that would be swell. And you’d drive me, Steven? Do you mind, Mr. Gray?”
Gray looked pained. “Lockwood, the company will make the contribution of his time to drive you to your recovery, but the doctor says by Monday you could well be recovered enough to do light paper work, and I would like your pledge that you won’t malinger this into—”
“Sir, when I’m able, you can be sure I’ll be back at work.”
“Yes. That’s what I told Tom Gordon.”
“Mr. Gordon knows I got shot?”
“Oh, yes. He wrote this damn—dumb—policy, and the federal government has been at him about it for days now. He has quite an interest in making sure that this matter gets resolved.”
For Mr. Gray, his thin smile expressed intense enjoyment.
That afternoon they left the hospital at 2:00. They took Lockwood’s Cord, and the drive out was as gorgeous as that Lockwood had first made the previous Wednesday when he had started this case. The dogwood had blossomed, and in every town the birds flew about and chirped joyfully, and Lockwood could hardly believe his luck in heading toward Myra’s for a long weekend of her caring for him. He got her on the telephone before they left and she told him that she had been able to take the two days off till the weekend—Greer could handle things at the plant—and they could spend lots of time together.
“We have a lot to talk over,” Lockwood said.
Her answer vibrated warmth and strength. “A lot.”
“I won’t be in your way? I don’t want to be a bother.”
“Just the opposite
! What’s a house for—what’s a friend for—if you can’t help out in a spot?”
“It’s peaceful in your cottage. I need the rest.”
“We’ll rest the arm,” she said. “Maybe your other parts—maybe they could use some exercise.”
Lockwood laughed, and he loved the trill of her answering laughter. He had felt so euphoric and light-headed as Steven drove him out that he realized he hadn’t known what living had been up to meeting her. Not really. God, wouldn’t it be wonderful to have children? He pictured a stiff-backed son who looked like him and a beguiling daughter who looked like Myra. Would they have red hair like hers? A deep and new tingling emotion swept from Lockwood’s legs up into his chest. My God, what an adventure all this could be! Something new, children of his own!
With enormous excitement he arrived at the small cottage. Lockwood had insisted they stop at Jerold’s in Babylon where he could pick up fancy provisions: smoked turkey, vegetables like jewels they were so plump and ripe, half a dozen aged steaks, and an entire deep-dish apple pie.
As Steven got the bags from the trunk, Lockwood, favoring his right arm, eased himself out of the car. At the touch of his unwounded hand, the door of the cottage swung open. It hadn’t been latched. A bit alarmed, Lockwood pushed it all the way open with his index finger.
“Myra?” he shouted.
Silence. She had probably gone to the store. She would be back in a minute and hadn’t bothered to lock up.
Lockwood stepped in the house and turned toward the living room.
Although he could sense there was no one in the house, it was so still, something made him call again, “Myra!”
Complete stillness. He shivered as he crossed the threshold of the living room.
There lay the naked body of a female on the sofa—half on, half off—her back to him, as if she were hugging the sofa to keep herself from sliding off onto the floor. Naked. No clothes. Lockwood started and took a half-step back. The woman looked stiff and odd-postured. Lockwood wanted to move forward, he wanted to run back out to the car and go to another house, but he was frozen. Red hair.
Red hair that fell below her shoulders.
But it couldn’t be. The world spun.
No one else in the world had red hair like Myra’s.
Was this a game?
Lockwood felt himself reeling. Any minute now Myra was going to jump up and tell him the name of this game, and he would rush to explain that any second now Steven would burst in with all these bags of groceries and she should put something, his coat, to cover her—
“Hey, Lockwood, where do you want all thes—”
Lockwood vaguely heard the bags of groceries hit the floor.
“Jesus Christ!” Steven said. “What’s happened here?”
Lockwood couldn’t take his eyes off the neat black hole on her temple just to the base of Myra’s red hair. The neat trickle of blood that led from it. As if somebody had held her by her long red hair and put the circle of the barrel of the gun next to her head and pulied the trigger.
“I can’t do it, Hook.”
“Yes, you can!”
“No, I can’t,” Brannigan insisted.
“Well, I can! Just leave me alone with him and this stuff, and I’ll get it out of him.”
“You’re upset.”
“Yeah. You guessed it.”
Brannigan looked around the hospital conference room for help, but the bare white walls gave him none. “He couldn’t have done it, Hook. He was here and out like a light the whole time it happened.”
“But he knows, Jimbo. He knows. He knows who the hell did it. She was going to build another bombsight.”
“They wouldn’t do something like that—would they?”
“I didn’t think so either. She kept trying to tell me they would.”
Lockwood paced around the conference table, and then back. Brannigan smoked his cigarette and watched the younger man. Lockwood searched for some way to get Brannigan over to his side. He had never felt so agitated in his life, so full of jerky movements. He wanted to do something, and that something was to throttle somebody.
“Sit down, Hook.”
“I can’t.”
“I know you can’t. Don’t you see what’s going on with yourself?”
“What do you mean? I got to find—”
“Hey. Sit down.”
Lockwood continued to pace about. “See, we’ve run up blind alleys everywhere. These guys are no ordinary thieves, they—”
Brannigan roared. “Sit down, Lockwood! Stop that goddamn pacing!”
Lockwood stopped and looked at him. “Hey, I don’t have to take any guff from you, Brannigan. The woman I wanted to marry is dead. And why? Because she knew how to design a piece of military hardware? We’re not at war with any of these jerks.”
“When you do sit down, sooner or later, you’re going to have it fall on you, Hook. Grief. You’re going like crazy to keep away from it. What’s his face—your sidekick Steven—told me about you driving in here with that arm of yours—”
“Forget my arm!”
Brannigan punched out his cigarette. “You want me tc lock you up to stop you?”
“You can’t do that!”
“No, I can’t, but I will.”
They glared at each other. The door opened behind them, and they turned.
“Manners,” Brannigan said.
“Yeah, what happened to Miss Rodman?”
Brannigan threw a thumb at Lockwood. “He found her. They had a thing going. Now he wants to give this new’ drug to Braunschweiger.”
“New drug?”
“Penta-something that the doc says will maybe wake him up and give us a chance to find out who killed the girl and who’s got this thing you guys are after.”
“New drug, huh?”
“The doctors won’t use it,” Lockwood said. “Their ethics. This guy is the ringleader of a gang that shoots an innocent woman in cold blood, and they have ethics.”
Manners picked up the phone and dialed a number. “Put me through to the director,” he said, and this was something he had to say another three times before, from the way he straightened, Lockwood figured he was talking to the director.
By way of making up, Brannigan shoved the package of Camels over the surface of the conference table to Lockwood, who took one and shook one out for Brannigan. Lockwood lit both. They only heard snatches from Manners, whose back was turned to them.
“Yes, sir. Hummmm, I’d say Governors Island would do fine. No, that’s not New York City jurisdiction. Right, sir. I understand, sir. Don’t worry about a thing.”
Finally, Manners hung up. He took a cigarette from the pack on the conference table without asking and lit up.
“What are you up to, Manners?” Brannigan asked. The big Irish cop looked wary, as if he knew Manners was about to practice a bit of sleight of hand on him.
“I want to move my prisoner to Governors Island, Lieutenant.”
Brannigan thought about it. “He’s under New York City arrest. Murder. Weapons charge. Resisting arrest.”
“I can get a federal court order.”
Brannigan looked at him for several seconds, took another drag, and contemplated the smoke as he expelled it.
“You could?”
“I could.”
“It’s that big?”
“It’s that big.”
“And you got doctors out there who’ll give him the drug?”
“They’ll do what they’re told.”
Brannigan shrugged. “I got no love for the man, and I’m told he probably won’t make it. It don’t seem right to me is all.”
“Nobody said it was the right thing to do,” Lockwood said. “I can’t bring her back, but I want the guy who did it.”
“I look at it as saving London and Washington from a possible bombing, and sacrificing the half-gone life of an international thief,” Manners said. “That trade doesn’t bother me at all. I’ll see you guys.” He turned t
o go.
“Hey, wait a minute,” Lockwood said. “I’m going with you.”
“’Fraid not, Bill. This is strictly government work now.”
“How about Myra’s death, her murderer? Whose work is that?”
Manners looked from Lockwood to Brannigan and back again. “I suppose Suffolk County’s. Not mine.”
“Well, it’s mine.”
Manners shook his head. “No, Bill.”
“How’d you like a certified check from Transatlantic Underwriters to Northstar? In twelve hours?”
“Certified check? How?”
“If this guy testifies that he took the bombsight, it’s going to go a long way toward establishing that an outside party did take the bombsight.”
“What will go all the way?”
Lockwood stepped up to Manners. “Letting me ask him a couple questions about who might have been assigned to do her in.”
“Assigned?”
“Sure. They want to make sure that not even a copy of this prototype is rebuilt.”
“Then Greer and his chief engineers could be in the same danger.”
“Yes, of course! Haven’t you seen this?”
“No, why didn’t you tell me?”
Brannigan cut in. “Because he’s been all cut up by Miss Rodman’s death. He’s not thinking straight, Manners.”
Manners looked from one to the other of them. He walked to the phone and dialed and barked into it, “Give me Greg. Greg! Listen carefully. This Rodman thing—it may be the beginning of a wholesale slaughter of the top engineering brass at Northstar. Put bodyguards on them and do it right now. Drop everything else but the search for the bombsight, you got that?” He slammed down the phone.
“Okay, Lockwood. With your certified check you’ve bought yourself a place on the team. Heaven help you if a word of this leaks to anyone.”
Lockwood grinned. “Let’s go, smart-shot.”
Chapter 16
“Strap him, Edwards,” the doctor said.
The resident looked at the doctor in a puzzled way. “But Dr. Sayers, he’s in no condition to move.”
“He will be,” the doctor said. He pulled a little table closer to him on which lay several ampules and half a dozen syringes. To Guy Manners, Dr. Sayers said, “We’re going to use Acquacordant as well as Pentathon. Not only should he talk—follow suggestions, really—but it will pump adrenalin out of the adrenal glands.”