Max Collins - Scratch Fever

“I should get you to a hospital,” he said. “I should get you to an emergency room.”

“How can you do that?” she said. “They’ll want to know how it happened. I don’t know what this is about, but I know you. And I know this isn’t something you’ll want the police or anybody in on.”

He scratched his head and said, “Right. Burns on the feet are dangerous, though. You need a doctor.”

“Sara’s boyfriend is a doctor.”

“Sara? At the club?”

“Right.”

“Will he keep his mouth shut? Will he make a post-midnight house call?”

“He’s a married doctor. He’ll do anything Sara asks him.”

“Good. What’s Sara’s number?”

“It’s in the back of the phonebook.”

“I want you to stay with her for a few days.”

“Where will you be?”

“I don’t know yet. I don’t know what this is about, either.”

He got up to go to the kitchen to call Sara.

“Did you know those two men?” Sherry asked.

He turned and looked at her. For all she’d been through, she looked terrific, sitting there in a short black nightie, soaking her feet.

“Yeah,” he said. “A couple of guys who work for Hines.”

“Hines. Isn’t he connected?”

“Yeah, Hines is Family. That bothers me. I haven’t had any Family trouble for a long time.”

“You going to talk to Hines?”

“He’s out of town. And anyway, those two were Family, out of Chicago, before they got assigned to Hines. They could’ve got their orders from somebody other than Hines. With Hines out of town, that almost seems likely.”

“You’ve got Family friends.”

“There’s Felix, that lawyer I always dealt with. But if I call him, he’ll lie to me, if I’m on the shit list again. I don’t know. I think I’m going to have to go out and knock heads together and see what’s going on.”

He went to the kitchen.

“Nolan!” she called out

He came back out and said. “What?”

“I almost forgot. There’s a message for you on the answer machine. A long one.”

“Oh?”

“It’s from that friend of yours.”

“Jon?”

“Yes. It sounded like he was in trouble. Maybe this has something to do with that.”

But before she had finished her sentence, Nolan was in the kitchen playing the message. He listened to it twice.

He came back talking to himself, saying, “Julie, alive? If so, how is she connected to anybody Family? I don’t get it.” Then, to Sherry: “Did those guys hear that message? Did they get that out of you?”

“No,” she said. “I kept thinking they’d want to know, if they’d known to ask. But they didn’t ask, and I was happy to keep it from them.”

“Good girl.”

“You missed your deadline, you know. You were supposed to go after your friend if you got home by twelve-thirty.”

“Well, I didn’t. And he isn’t here yet, so I’m going after him anyway. It’s my only lead.”

“Did you call Sara?”

“Not yet. Listen. Tell her nothing. Nothing about how you got the burns. Nothing about the shooting. I’ll let her know I’ll make it right by her, for helping, no questions asked. Then I’ll have to bandage your feet up, best I can, till her doctor friend can apply proper dressings at her place.”

“Okay.”

“Then I got to bury something in the woods, and I’m off.”

“You mean that guy downstairs? Sally? You killed him?”

“Yeah, I killed him. But I don’t mean him. I’ll dump him someplace. He doesn’t rate a burial. I’m talking about my dog.”

JON CAME TO.

He knew three things immediately: he was in the back seat of a car, on his side; it was dark, so it wasn’t morning yet, or anyway the sun wasn’t up; and his head ached so bad, his eyes hurt.

He sat up; it took some doing, but he sat up. His hands were behind him, and he could feel the cold steel of handcuffs; his legs were bound at the ankles with thick, heavily knotted rope, like the handiwork of a very ambitious, sadistic Boy Scout.

Or Girl Scout.

He looked out the window to the left. The dyke, Ron, black leather jacket, ducktail, and all, was standing in an arrogant slouch, listening to Julie talk.

Julie.

She was still wearing the white outfit, but the tinted glasses were gone, an affectation she presumably dropped during more private moments. She was gesturing as she spoke, and occasionally she would reach out and touch Ron’s face, casually.

The two of them were standing in the midst of a big open graveled area, a parking lot. This car Jon was in the back of was one of only two cars parked in it The other one was a low-slung sportscar, a Porsche, Jon thought, the color of which he couldn’t make out — something light pastel — and the owner had to be Julie.

Behind them was a building that appeared to be an old brick warehouse, but there was a neon sign, which wasn’t on, over a covered entryway, indicating it had been converted into something else. A restaurant or a club, maybe. He couldn’t tell, exactly; he couldn’t really see that well.

He tried to make out what they were saying, but it was muffled; they were a good twenty feet away. He pressed his ear to the glass of the car window and listened. He began to pick up some of the conversation.

“Just hold onto him for me,” Julie was saying.

“You want him to disappear forever, he can,” the dyke said.

“Not yet. In a day or two, maybe.”

“It don’t matter to me. I’d soon cut his throat as look at him.”

A sick feeling swept over Jon — not nausea: hopelessness. A physical sense of hopelessness.

Then he didn’t hear anything. He took his ear away from the glass and looked out the window, and Julie and the dyke were kissing. There was a full moon tonight, but it didn’t lend much romance to the scene, the way Jon saw it.

Then the big sandy-haired guy with glasses, the Incredible Hulk guy, came out of the warehouse, and Julie and Ron broke it up; Julie walked to meet the guy, and the dyke just stood there, hands on her butt, looking sullen. Julie and the guy talked for what seemed forever and was maybe five minutes.

How the fuck could she be alive , anyway?

He and Nolan had driven to Ft. Madison and seen the twisted, burnt wreckage of the car she’d been in. Or was supposed to have been in. Didn’t make sense.

But what did make sense, where Julie was concerned? The only thing you could count on was she’d use her looks to manipulate those around her. Like she had with that poor dead bastard Rigley, the Port City bank president.

She’d put him up to it They didn’t know it at first but it became obvious as soon as she came into it. Rigley could never have done it on his own.

Rigley had come into the Pier, about a year ago, and announced to Nolan that he recognized him as one of the men who had held his bank up two years before. Rigley then blackmailed Nolan, and Jon, into helping him rob his own bank, to cover up an embezzlement The robbery had gone off without a hitch, but when it came to making the split at Rigley’s cottage on the Cedar River, he and his beautician girlfriend, Julie, put a double-cross in motion.

But at the last minute, the banker panicked, and when Julie fired a shotgun meant for Nolan, Rigley got in front of the blast. Nolan dove for the girl, but she swung the now-empty shotgun around and whacked him in the head, and he went down.

Jon was under the dead banker. He pushed the corpse off and grabbed for the girl’s arm as she fled, but she caught him in the gut with the gunstock, and then again on the back of the neck, when he doubled over.

Moments later he came to, grabbed his .38 from off the floor, and went out after her.