“Love that shotgun,” he said.
I got him into the roadster, his coat sopping now, my hands slick with his blood. I shut his door and went around and got behind the wheel. He was slumped in the seat, grunting with almost every breath. I got us rolling.
“Buck?” he said.
I shook a cigarette out of my pack and leaned forward to light it, steering with my forearms, then held it out to him but he turned away from it.
“Where’s he?” he said.
“He went down,” I said.
“Went down got caught or…went down got killed?”
“Killed.” The word brought up a surge of bile behind it and for a moment I thought I’d throw up. I swallowed and cleared my throat hard. My eyes burned. I said it again to prove I could. “They killed him is what I mean.”
I turned onto the Odessa highway and gave the roadster the gas. The road had been badly washboarded by heavy truck traffic and the shock absorbers took a beating as we jarred along. Russell moaned low.
“For sure?” he said.
“Sure looked it.”
“Looked it?”
“That’s right, man. Shit.”
I could feel him staring at me. I swerved around a sizable pothole only to run right over another with such impact it was a wonder the tire didn’t blow. Russell sucked a deep breath against the pain, then let it out in a long sigh.
By sunrise he was stitched and bandaged and full of drugs against pain and infection, asleep in the isolated house of a tall silver-haired surgeon named Gustafson. Many of the doctor’s patients were associates of Bubber Vicente, gunshot men in need of surgical repair who could not risk going to a hospital and piquing official curiosity about their wounds. Such emergencies usually came to Gustafson in the wee hours, as we had tonight.
According to Bubber, Gustafson had once had a prosperous practice in Dallas. But he’d gotten a socially prominent young woman in the family way, and because neither of them wanted to get married, he felt obliged to help her get shed of the problem. He attended to her in his office, but complications came up and he had to rush her to a hospital in order to save her life. “And like they say after a lynching,” Bubber said, “the jig was up.” Only the family’s wish to keep the scandal out of the newspapers saved him from prison, but he still lost his license. Ever since then he’d had to practice underground. In addition to the office he maintained in his Odessa house, he had one in Blackpatch—in Mona Holiday’s dance club—where he kept a well-trained nurse on daily duty and himself went three days a week. “He hates Blackpatch as much as everybody else,” Bubber said, “but it’s the last place in the world where anybody’s ever gonna ask to see his license, and he makes a steady dollar down there.” In addition to treating injured oil workers, he tended to the medical welfare of Mona’s girls, helping them stay free of venereal disease and pregnancy, and relieving them of either problem when preventive measures failed.
He had extracted six buckshot pellets from the area around Russell’s left shoulder blade and another six from the hamstring muscle of the same leg that got shot up in the war. Red-eyed and haggard by the time he was finished, Gustafson told me Russell would have to stay off the leg for a month and then need crutches for another couple of months before he could start getting by with a cane—which, he was sorry to say, he would probably need for the rest of his life. He said we could let Russell sleep for a little while longer but then we’d have to get him out of there. He couldn’t risk having fugitives in his house for very long. He gave me a bottle of pills to give Russell for the pain and then went back to bed.
While the doc had been attending to Russell, Bubber made a telephone call to an associate in Midland and asked him to get whatever information he could about the card game robbery. The associate called back sometime after sunrise, while I was drinking my umpteenth cup of coffee. He reported that a man named Loomis Mitchum, no record of previous arrests, was in the county jail under charges of armed robbery and assault in regard to a card game holdup. He’d first been taken to the hospital with a head wound—which proved to be nothing more than a bullet graze on the skull. He’d also had a couple of shotgun pellets in his shoulder. Neither wound serious enough to keep the cops from taking him to jail as soon as he’d been patched up. He’d probably go in front of a judge inside the next two weeks. The robbery was pretty much open-and-shut, but the money had been recovered at the scene. And an able lawyer could likely wiggle him out of the assault rap, especially since the only two persons Mitchum had injured were both known crooks and neither one was eager to press the matter in court. Warren Taos, who’d had his nose broken, was an ex-convict who’d done time for manslaughter, and Leo “Bad Dog” Richardson, who’d suffered a broken arm, was a bootlegger several times arrested but never yet convicted. All in all, the chances were good that Loomis Mitchum would get no more than eighteen months at the state road prison at Santa Rita—in Reagan County, about seventy miles from Fort Stockton—and draw parole in six.
“I’ll get him a lawyer who makes sure that’s how it goes,” Bubber told me.
I hadn’t realized the tightness of the grip I’d been keeping on myself until we got the news Buck was alive. Bubber must’ve read the relief on my face. He smiled and punched me on the arm and said, “Hell kid, we ought to know they can’t never hurt that uncle of yours by shooting him in his hard head.”
I tried to smile but could feel the bad job I did of it.
“I didn’t want to say nothing about it before,” Bubber said, “but it’s too bad he was the one holding the loot.”
Yes it was. And then I remembered the Wink money. It had been in Buck’s valise. And the valise had been under the front seat of the Model A.
Bubber winced when I told him.
Forty minutes later I was back in Midland, driving Bubber’s Chrysler up and down the streets, searching for the grocery store where I’d left the Ford, the town even more unfamiliar in all this daylight and heavy traffic. Fool, I kept thinking, fool. And then there the store was—and the Model A, right where I’d left it, only now there were other cars in the lot too. I’d been afraid it would be gone by now, towed away by the cops, that somebody would’ve called them to report a car with a bunch of bullet holes in it. Then again, the holes weren’t readily noticeable except up close, and people generally weren’t very observant, anyway. I turned into the lot and drew up next to the Model A, remembering now that I’d left the back passenger door wide open, telling myself somebody probably closed it as a favor, but feeling a hollowness in my gut.
The valise wasn’t there. Not under the seat stained dark with Russell’s blood, not in the trunk, not anywhere in the car. I went in the grocery and studied the bored-looking woman at the register, the freckled kid stocking the shelves, the chubby manager being harried by some woman about the poor quality of his produce. None of them had found the money—you could tell by looking at them. I went back out and stood on the glaring sidewalk and regarded the passing traffic.
Maybe somebody had seen us switch cars and then looked through the Model A the minute we were gone. Maybe that bum on the bench across the street hadn’t been asleep, or maybe some other tramp had come along. Maybe a cop had happened on the car and found the dough and was now making plans on how to spend it.