"Anything else?"
"There's a trail of blood on the floor, leading to the bathroom."
"That robber crawled in there during the gunfight," Martin said. "Where he threatened you with the .45. So you killed him with the old revolver."
"The old revolver has not been fired."
Martin ignored him.
"You are more seriously injured than you think you are," he said. "You will require immediate emergency medical treatment. I am going to summon an ambulance from the Military Hospital, which is nearby. You will be treated and placed under protective custody. I doubt if the Polic?a Federal can gain entrance to you in the hospital, but if they somehow manage toI really don't know how cooperative el Coronel Savia-Gonzalez will be in this; he is not an admirer of your fatheryou will refuse to answer any of their questions without a lawyer."
"The .44-40 hasn't been fired," Clete repeated. "The bullets in the bodies are .45 ACP, not .44-40."
"Your professionalism, Teniente, is returning," Martin said approvingly. He went to the desk and picked up both pistols. He went into the bathroom and pressed the .45 against the right hand of the man with the bullet hole in his forehead, then stood up. He took the Colt .44-40 revolver, fired two cartridges into the body, then went to the body of the man in the bedroom and fired two cartridges into his body. Finally he walked to the desk and fired two cartridges into the wall, one next to the bathroom door, the other through one of the closed blinds.
Then he laid both pistols back on the table.
"The revolver has less recoil than the automatic," he observed calmly. "I would have thought the reverse."
A few seconds later, puffing from the exertion of running up the stairs, Comandante Habanzo rushed into the room with a .32 ACP Colt automatic in his hand.
"What are you doing with that?" Martin asked.
"I heard shots."
"You heard a car backfiring," Martin said. "Habanzo, do you remember offhand the number of the Military Hospital?"
"No, mi Coronel."
"Presumably, you have it written down somewhere?"
S?, mi Coronel," Habanzo said, more than a little awkwardly stuffing his small automatic back into its shoulder holster and then producing a notebook.
[FOUR]
Room 305
Dr. Cosine Argerich Military Hospital
Calle Luis Maria Campos
Buenos Aires
0205 20 December 1942
Siren screaming, the ambulance, a 1937 Ford station wagon, pulled up to the emergency entrance of the hospital. The driver and his assistant jumped out, walked quickly to the rear, opened the doors, and pulled out the stretcher holding First Lieutenant Cletus Howell Frade, USMCR, under a thick wool blanket.
He raised his head. A gurney was being hastily wheeled to the station wagon under the supervision of a very large and stern-faced nurse. He was moved, none too gently, from the stretcher onto the gurney. The wool blanket from the ambulance was jerked off and replaced by a thinner cotton cover.
The gurney was then wheeled into the hospital, now accompanied by a man in a business suit, who made little effort to hide the .45 automatic he carried, riding high on his hip.
The gurney was rolled onto an elevator. It rose (three floors, Clete guessed) and stopped. It was then rolled down a corridor and into an operating room, which made Clete more than a little nervous.
He was transferred to an operating table. Its cold stainless steel was cool against his back and buttocks. A short, unpleasant-looking, mustachioed doctor in a white jacket bent over him, pried his eyelids apart, and shined a small flashlight in his eyes.
"I'm all right, Doctor," Clete said.
The doctor ignored him. He made a sweeping gesture with his hands, and the nurse snatched the thin hospital blanket away and then pulled off his boxer shorts.
Jesus Christ!
As the nurse wrapped a blood-pressure collar around his arm, the doctor applied a stethoscope to his chest and then his throat. She gave him a sharp shove so he would roll onto his side; and a moment later, he felt the annoying and humiliating insertion of an anal thermometer. He watched as someone dropped his bloody shorts into a stainless-steel tray.
The anal thermometer was finally removed, his temperature announced orally, and then repeated by a woman in hospital whites holding a clipboard.
He was moved back onto his back. His blood-pressure reading was announced orally, repeated by the woman with the clipboard, and then the large nurse inserted a needle in his left arm to draw blood.
That completed, the doctor made another sweeping gesture with his hand. And the nurse, using what looked like a miniature spatula, began scraping his body.
Martin said that was probably brain tissue.
He felt slightly nauseous when she carefully scraped the brain tissue off the first spatula with a second one. The tissue was dropped into a second stainless-steel tray.
He was then given two sponge baths, first with water, then with alcohol. His face, chest, and legs stung uncomfortably. And when he moved his left leg, the large nurse firmly pushed it down against the operating table.
His chest stung, and he put his hand to it. Her hand grabbed his.
"I itch, goddamn it, take your hand off!"
She did not. There was a test of arm strength.
"Let him," the doctor said.
He scratched, and was sorry he did; he felt a sharp pain.
A tray of instruments appeared. The doctor took a scalpel in one hand and a ferocious-looking set of tweezers in the other. Starting at Clete's forehead, he began to remove tiny pieces of tile, dropping each piece into still another stainless-steel tray.
There is a moral in this,Clete thought, wincing at the pain: When you shoot someone in the forehead, be sure of your backstop.
He smiled at his own wit. The doctor smiled, very insincerely, back at him.
Jesus Christ, you must be losing your marbles. You killed a man, and that's nothing to smile about. Not only killed him, shot him in cold blood. Well, maybe not cold blood. You were pretty goddamned pissed after seeing what they did to Se?ora Pellano. But the bottom line is you killed a defenseless man.
He closed his eyes and kept them closed until he sensed the doctor stand up after he finished working his way down his body with the scalpel and tweezers.
The large nurse then appeared with a stainless-steel bowl and what looked like a small paintbrush. She carefully wiped each small wound with an alcohol towelit stung painfully. And then she painted each wound with the purple substance that was in the stainless-steel bowlit stung even more painfully.
The doctor looked down at him once more.
"Thank you, Doctor," Clete said.
The doctor ignored him and disappeared.
The large nurse nudged him again, and he slid off the operating table back onto the gurney. The thin cotton blanket was once more draped over him, and the gurney was wheeled out of the operating room and down the corridor.
The man with the barely concealed .45 marched alongside.
"Wait!" he ordered curtly.
"I have inspected the room, Sir," another man said.
The man with the .45 grunted, and went into a room to conduct his own inspection. He came back out, carrying a telephone.
"You inspected the room, did you?"
The second man looked sheepish. The man with the .45 shook his head at him in tolerant disgust, then motioned for the gurney attendant to push Clete into the room.