The gun with which I was supposed to have forced him to drive me to the clinic was on the floor in the front of the ambulance.
A mile or so from the hospital, the attendant set off the screaming siren. It amused me to see cars scrambling out of my way.
I understood that when King Asazian had been driven from the airport to the hospital, every foot of highway and byway had been lined with policemen, patrol cars, motorcycles, and even a few helicopters. Of course we missed all of that. But the hospital itself was under heavy guard. There were police cars in front and rear, uniformed patrolmen and plainclothes men gathered about like flies on a sugar cube.
The cop at the gate stopped us. He recognized the’ attendant behind the wheel and thumbed us through without bothering to look at me. Two more cops at the entrance to the parking lot took a closer look.
“Do you have a light, officer?” I asked.
He lit my cigarette and motioned us through. We drove across the parking lot, down the ramp and under the medical center. On the way in I checked the location of the cream-colored Oldsmobile. It was a rented car driven in early by a visitor who had walked off and forgotten it. Some friend of Mr. Muruk’s.
It occurred to me that if something went wrong I might have difficulty driving away. But there was no reason for anything to go wrong. I didn’t intend that anything should.
“Okay,” the attendant said. I stabbed the first hypo needle into his arm and pressed the plunger. “Oh man. I want no spinal from you, Doc!” He then collapsed into what appeared to be blissful deep sleep. It seemed that ambulance drivers often goofed off in that seat for awhile when they drove in. Therefore, he probably wouldn’t be disturbed for awhile. If he were, he would be woozy, incoherent, and would effectively stall for time if I needed any.
I got out and walked through a door, down a shiny waxed floor toward the elevator, mentally retracing the floor plan in my mind. I didn’t want anyone seeing me hesitate about directions. A cop stood by the elevator ogling a nurse who walked down the hall toward me. The cop twisted his gaze from her to me with reluctance. But he seemed to grow more interested in me as I approached.
“Oh, nurse,” I said brusquely.
“Yes, Doctor?”
“Do me a favor, please.”
“Why of course, Doctor!”
“Drop by the X-ray room as soon as possible and tell that nincompoop in charge to facilitate my report on John Stanley’s broken foot charts.”
“John Stanley, doctor?”
“That’s right. John Stanley.”
“I’ll get right on that, Doctor.”
“Thank you, nurse.” I smiled, turned abruptly, elbowed the cop to one side. “Pardon me, officer. This is an emergency.”
The cop jumped aside and I stepped in and pressed the 3-button. A nurse wheeling a rubber table said, “Good evening, Doctor,” as I walked down the third floor hall, turned right and headed for room 304 in the private ward. The cop seated in front of the door watching me was the only one in the hall besides me at first. Then a nurse came out of a room at the farther end of the hall, turned and started toward me at a pace that would have done credit to a snail. I checked my watch and slowed down, seemed to be deep in medicative thoughts. The nurse finally passed me with a warm greeting and disappeared around the turn in the corridor.
I took the fountain pen from the breast pocket of my smock and stopped in front of the still-seated cop. He was young, did not appear to be particularly stupid. But the important thing was that he might have been given very strict orders about who was and who was not to be admitted. Also his auditory sense was probably good and might hear questionable noises coming from room 304.
“Good evening, officer,” I said, and started past him toward the door.
“Sorry, Doc. I got to check your ID card.”
I turned. “Seems there’s an emergency here — and in the absence of Dr. Kildare, I was called in.”
“Sorry,” he said, smiling, as I pointed the fountain pen and pressed the discharge button, shooting a lethal spray into his eyes, nose and mouth. He collapsed at once, out cold as if he had been blackjacked. I got him balanced on the chair as if he might have been dozing or very relaxed, with one arm pushed as a prop through the back of the chair.
Then I went into room 304, shut the door, and lunged straight for the bed to prevent King Asazian from pressing an alarm button.
But the inert outline under the white sheet made no movement at all, not at first. There was the bulge of his slight stomach, the perfect V outline of his slightly parted legs, the arms each of which extended straight down at either side and each seeming to be at the same time, two or three inches from his body. As I took the second hypodermic syringe from the case and placed the case on the bedtable, I thought of King Asazian as being already a corpse covered with a shroud.
The complete stiffness and symmetry of his outline, his utter stillness, suggested anything but a living breathing human being even in its most comatose state. But then the little, yellow, hairless head moved slightly. The lips, like a split walnut, writhed back over the white porcelain shine of artificial dentures. The top edge of the sheet which covered his chin fluttered like a vein as his breathing heightened.
His eyelids snapped open. His left eye, just the left, rolled around and fixed itself on me. It was steady. There was fear, but also a bright piercing anger. It was black and bright as a shard of polished dark glass. His mouth stayed open. I heard desperate quick expulsions of air, voiceless gusts. Evidently, I thought, his vocal cords had not yet been reconstituted. This was a decided advantage to me. I could work without fear of his warning outcries.
Then the old uncontrollable revulsion at the sight of human distortion and abnormality began to work on me. I fought it. I had to fight it only a few seconds; then I would be out of there. It began to boil and twist in my stomach.
Reluctantly, I grabbed the upper edge of the sheet, pulled it down, gripped the King’s left arm. It went taut, assumed the formidable consistency of coiling steel cable. I jammed the needle, heard the sharp sping running up into my fingers. The needle was bent.
I felt sweat burst out of my face as I grabbed up the third needle. It was also the last. Not only was it a neat sterile way of killing a man, but it might result in the hospital being blamed for negligence, or no cause for the King’s death being discerned. If there was no alarm, and I walked out and drove away without attracting any particular attention, they would find King Asazian dead, that was all. I had injected air-bubbles into his veins, plus, for good measure, a subtle poison hard to detect. The cop outside could make up any Story he wished.
The King’s arm snapped from my grasp. I made several attempts before again managing to obtain a close grip on the oddly smooth and shining forearm. Again plunged the needle down.
I stepped back. I felt a threat of panic. The needle was bent double, and there had been no penetration whatever of the King’s flesh.
That eye kept watching me, widening slightly, narrowing.
His neck was invisible behind a thick cast. Not the familiar plaster of paris and gauze cast, nor the sort of cradle arrangement that supports broken and cracked necks. It seemed to be of shiny chrome with a series of regularly spaced perforated squares.
I drew the knife from beneath my smock and the blade snapped free. I had agreed to kill him, but had not restricted myself as to method. I moved slowly toward him, watching that single glaring black and penetrating eye.
Suddenly his arm shot up and reached for a button on the side of a console box setting on the bed-table. I jumped, grabbed the arm, jerked it savagely down over the edge of the bed. The effort sent me stumbling back across the room. Horrified, I still held his arm in my hand.