Bill Pronzini - Bindlestiff

Shit, it looks stove in…

I put my hand back there: wet, pulpy. Jesus! I pulled the hand down and looked at it, and the fingers were stained with smears of blood; the artificial light made the stains look dark and unreal, like shadows clinging to my fingers.

My knees buckled again. One of the bulls caught hold of me, braced my body against his. “Easy, ’bo,” he said. “We’ll get you mixed up. You’ll be okay.”

“Can he walk?” the other one asked.

“If he can’t we’ll have to carry him to the first-aid station.”

I got a word out; it sounded thick and clotted like the blood on my head. “No…”

“Don’t try to talk. Frank, jump down and take his legs.”

“Police,” I said, “call the police.”

“Sure. After we get you a doctor.”

“No, the police. Quick. He’ll get away…”

“Who’ll get away?”

“Raymond. No, Dallmeyer.”

“Somebody must have robbed him,” the other one, Frank, said from outside. He was down on the ground now, looking up at me. “Goddamn jackrollers.”

“Listen,” I said, “you got to listen. Not robbery-murder. He killed Bradford.”

“Murder?” the bull holding me said.

“The police, call the police.”

“All right, we’ll call them. You let us take care of you first. Okay?”

“Yeah,” I said. “Okay.”

The hands shifted, slid around under my armpits. He lifted me, and Frank took hold of my legs, and they lowered me down out of the car. I could stand up all right, but Frank yelled, “Hey, you guys give me some help,” and pretty soon two other men were there and more hands were supporting me. The first bull jumped down. He had a handlebar mustache, the biggest one I’d ever seen; I found myself gawping at it.

“You boys take him to first-aid,” he said. “I’ll notify Buckner.”

The hands moved me away, half-carrying me. I had a confused impression of lights, rail cars, gleaming tracks, corrugated-iron buildings; of faces and orange hard hats and muttered voices. Then we were inside one of the buildings, and there was a cot, and they made me lie down on my stomach. Somebody said, “Holy Mother, will you look at that?” and somebody else said, “Get some antiseptic-quick.”

Sharp stinging pain.

I yelled-and blacked out again.

When I came out of it there was another light shining in my eyes-a pen-flash this time. I was still lying on the cot, turned on my side now with my right cheek against a pillow. The guy with the light was standing over me. “No, don’t close your eyes,” he said. “Keep looking at the light.”

“Doctor?”

“Yes. Do you feel nauseous?”

“A little.”

“Need to vomit?”

“No.”

“Can you see me clearly? Any double vision?”

“No. I can see you.”

“Do you know where you are?”

“Freight yards,” I said. My head still ached hellishly, but most of the disorientation seemed to be gone. I told him that. I told him my name, too, for good measure.

“Can you remember what happened to you?”

“Yeah,” I said, “I remember.”

He stepped back. “Let’s see if you can sit up.”

It took me a few seconds, but I managed it. The room swam a little at first, then settled into focus and stayed that way. There were three other men in it: the yard bull with the handlebar mustache, a thick-necked guy wearing one of the orange hard hats, and a heavyset, graying policeman in uniform.

The doctor put the light in my eyes again for a couple of seconds, switched it off. He was middle-aged and trim, the kind who probably played tennis as well as golf. “Mild nausea,” he said, to the others as well as to me. “Slight dilation of the right pupil. No apparent retrograde amnesia. Concussion, certainly, but it doesn’t appear to be any more serious than that.”

I said, “All the blood…”

“Skin lacerations. You have a bad bruise, too. I’ll have an X ray taken at the hospital to be sure the skull isn’t damaged.”

“Hospital?”

“Yes. For the X ray and to have your wounds treated properly.”

“What time is it?”

He frowned. The thick-necked guy took out a railroad pocket watch, looked at it, and said, “Quarter past ten.”

More than two hours since I’d had my run-in with Lester Raymond. Damn! “I can’t go to the hospital right now,” I said. I gestured toward the uniformed cop. “I need to talk to the police. It’s urgent.”

The four of them held a short conference. Then the doctor went away, still frowning; the yard bull went with him. But the thick-necked guy stayed.

The cop said, “I’m Sergeant Collins, Oroville police. This is Mr. Buckner, the night yardmaster here.”

“I’m a private investigator,” I said. “But I guess you know that by now.”

He nodded. “We looked at your ID. You’re the man who was in to see Sergeant Huddleston this afternoon, the one who turned up the kid thief.”

“Right. And that’s not all I turned up today.”

I told him the full story of Charles Bradford and Lester Raymond, everything I knew for certain and everything I had surmised. I left nothing out, including my ill-advised excursion to the museum tonight and the rationale for it and what had happened afterward. I also gave him Bradford’s pendant, which was still in my pocket.

He was not happy with any of it, but he didn’t openly condemn me for my actions. Like Huddleston, he was a professional; upholding the law was more important to him than anything else.

Buckner, however, looked shocked. “By Christ,” he said, “I can’t believe it. I’ve known Jim Dallmeyer for years. Hell, we played softball together…”

“I know him, too,” Collins said. “But maybe neither of us knows him or anybody else as well as we think we do.”

“I still can’t believe it.”

“Well, we’ll damn well check it out.” Collins looked at me. “You feel up to taking a ride?”

“Down to the police station?”

“The hospital first, then the station.”

“Whatever you say. But you’d better hurry. Raymond-Dallmeyer-has had better than two hours to go on the run again. He might have figured he finished me off in that boxcar, but with a triple homicide rap hanging over him, he can’t take the chance. He’ll be gone by the time you can get your men out to the museum.”

“We’ll see about that,” Collins said. “If he isn’t gone, if all of this is a load of crap…”

“Believe me, it’s not a load of crap.”

“For your sake, mister,” he said, “it better not be.”

A brace of uniformed patrolmen drove me to the hospital. Collins went elsewhere, presumably to the railroad museum to check out my story. The trim doctor was waiting for us when we arrived; he saw to it that I got my head x-rayed and partially shaved and bandaged. He seemed to prefer that I spend the night at the hospital, as a simple precaution, but he didn’t put up much of an argument when the patrolmen told him their orders were to take me to the police station. I did not put up any argument at all. I had had enough of hospitals to last me the rest of my life; just the few minutes I’d spent in this one made me twitchy, and I couldn’t wait to get out of it again.

When we came into the police station, the cop manning the desk-one I had never seen before-asked me if I wanted to make a telephone call. Meaning did I want to get in touch with my lawyer. I said no. I had no reason to want to do that-not yet, anyway. So they stuffed me into one of the holding cells and left me to do my waiting alone.

The doctor had given me some pain pills at the hospital; I had already taken two, but I swallowed another one dry and then lay down on the cot. Some of the ache in my head abated after awhile, but the drugs made me drowsy. I was hanging onto the edge of sleep when the desk cop showed up again and roused me and let me out.