Gary Brandner - Walkers

Glen stood for a moment looking at the fallen man. Then he dropped the poker into the grass and rushed to the fence, where Joana still crouched, her fingers laced through the wire. He gently freed her hands and pulled them away from the fence. He knelt beside her and held her close against his chest.

"Are you hurt?" he asked in a whisper.

"No, he didn't get to me. You, darling?"

"A bump on the head. I'm all right."

And then the tears came.

The people who had run onto the scene moved in and edged cautiously closer to the man lying in the weeds. Others came over to join Glen and Joana.

"What happened?" somebody said.

"I saw it all from my bedroom window," somebody else answered. "That big guy there was like a maniac. He kept going after the girl. The other guy tried to stop him, but he just kept coming. He kept taking those shots to the head like they were nothing."

"Jesus, look at his head."

"There's nothing left on top."

"How did he stand up as long as he did?"

"He was a maniac. Really freaked out."

A man knelt on the grass where Glen was holding Joana. "Are you two all right?"

"Yeah," Glen managed. "We're okay." He nodded his head toward the crumpled body of the big man. "What about that one?"

"He's finished."

Glen groaned softly.

"Hey, don't worry, you couldn't help it. Enough of us saw what happened. There was nothing else you could have done."

A police siren wailed in the distance and grew steadily louder.

Dr. Hovde sat on a metal stool in his examination room facing his patient, Mrs. Helen Ingalls. She perched on the edge of the table, holding her right arm gingerly out in front of her.

"It hurts from about here," she pointed to a spot on her lower triceps, "all the way through the elbow and down to my forearm."

The doctor passed his fingers lightly along the woman's arm. There was no swelling, no discoloration. He applied a little pressure.

"Ouch," she said.

Dr. Hovde nodded, satisfied.

"It hurts especially when I serve," she said, "and when I have to reach for a backhand."

"It looks like you have a classic case of tennis elbow," Hovde said. "How long have you been playing the game?"

"Twenty years, for Christ's sake."

"Have you made any changes in your game lately?"

Mrs. Ingalls gave an embarassed shrug. "Well, I have been trying to improve my serve. I mean, with the little pitty-pat delivery I've been using, I'm a sitting duck for a winner off the return. Don has been making excuses to get out of being my partner in doubles."

Dr. Hovde shook his head at the folly of a man and wife teaming up to play tennis. He said, "What kind of a change did you make in your serve?"

"The thing is, I've been watching Martina Navratilova, and she really powders the ball. I'm trying to serve more the way she does it, and I've only just started getting results."

"I'll bet," Hovde said. "And one of the results you're getting is the tennis elbow. Remember, Helen, Martina Navratilova is a professional. She is also six inches taller than you, at least forty pounds heavier, and she's left-handed. I suggest you pick somebody else to model your new serve after. In the meantime, go back to pitty-pat."

Helen Ingalls frowned. She was an attractive fortyish woman with tied-back blonde hair and crinkly blue eyes. "Don isn't going to like it."

"Let him play with Martina. If you take a couple of aspirins before you play and wear an elastic brace, it will cut down on the pain, but that's all I can do for you except to tell you to forget the cannonball serve."

Mrs. Ingalls sighed and pulled on her jacket. "I'll think it over."

Dr. Hovde left the examination room and walked back to his office in the renovated old house. He went into the washroom and scrubbed his hands at the sink. Out on his desk the telephone buzzed. He dried his hands and walked back to pick it up.

"Yes, Carol?"

"There's a Dr. Breedlove calling."

Dr. Hovde was instantly alert when he heard the pathologist's name. "I'll talk to him."

The line clicked and Hovde said, "Hello, Kermit?"

"Hi, Warren. You busy?"

"No more so than usual. What's up?"

"A customer came in downstairs last night that you might be interested in."

A knot clenched in Hovde's stomach. "Who is it?"

"Name's Edward Frankovich."

Hovde ran the name through his mental file.

Nothing clicked. "I don't know the name," he said.

"It's not him, it's the place where he died. A house up on Beachwood Drive. The girl who lives there is Joana Raitt."

"Joana? Is she all right?"

"As far as I know. Just the same, there are some peculiar things about Frankovich's death that I thought you'd be interested in."

"For instance?"

"For instance, the guy seems to have died twice."

There was a moment of silence on the wire before Hovde replied. "Are you going to be around there for a while?"

"Where else would I be?"

"I'll be down as soon as I can. I want to talk to you about this."

Dr. Hovde hung up the phone and sat for a moment pulling on his lower lip. He badly wanted a cigarette. He picked up the receiver again and buzzed the receptionist. "What do we have going for the rest of the afternoon, Carol?" he asked.

The receptionist ran down the list of patients scheduled for afternoon appointments, and their respective complaints. The more urgent cases Hovde arranged to send to a colleague who had a clinic just a block away. The others he told Carol to reschedule wherever possible for later dates.

Dr. Hovde changed from the white jacket into his old tweed and slipped out the back door, leaving Carol to deal with the patients in the waiting room.

It was most unprofessional behavior, he told himself sternly, but the circumstances were extraordinary. The message from Dr. Breedlove had triggered all sorts of unpleasant thoughts, but Hovde forced himself to draw no conclusions until he had all the facts.

It was two o'clock when he pulled into the doctors' parking lot at the West Los Angeles Receiving Hospital. He jogged to the Emergency entrance, nodded to the doctors he knew on the ward there, and rode the elevator down to the sub-basement.

The chill of the air crawled in through his clothes as it always did down here. It was an unnatural cold, the cold of a place that has never been warm. The cold of death. Dr. Hovde hurried past the row of refrigerated drawers to the pathology lab.

Kermit Breedlove sat at a battered old desk in one corner of the room. His chair was tilted back, his long legs stretched out with the feet propped on a pulled-out lower drawer. He was reading a paperback Western. The ever-present toothpick jiggled in a corner of his mouth.

On one of the autopsy tables lay a human form covered with a sheet. Dr. Hovde judged it to be a man, six feet five or six feet six, and about 240 pounds.

"Hello, Kermit," Hovde said. He gestured at the sheeted body. "This the one you told me about?"

Dr. Breedlove turned down a page comer and laid the paperback aside. "That's him." He got up and ambled over to the table where he stood beside Hovde. "I opened him up this morning and found some mighty interesting things inside."

"Can we have a look at him?"

"Sure." The pathologist grasped the sheet at the top of the table. Then he hesitated and said in a tone that was more serious than his usual offhand banter. "This is a bad one, Warren."

Hovde nodded his understanding and stood back to watch while Breedlove peeled away the sheet.

The body was a big man, thick through the waist and powerfully muscled at the chest and shoulders. The Y-shaped autopsy incision across the chest and abdomen had been closed and stitched together. All these details Hovde took in on his second and third impressions. All he could look at when the sheet was stripped away was the man's head. It was battered and crushed like a rotten melon. The face was all askew. All traces of blood had been washed away, and the splintered skull was clearly visible through the lacerated scalp. The brain, Hovde could see, must have bulged through half a dozen fissures before it was removed for the autopsy.