— he's seen us-and what the fuck difference does it make? We're in it up to our tits now anyways, so you just shut your fuckin' pansy mouth!
Some big fuckin' help you've been anyways, so you just piss off! And you get me that fifty back, or your ass is fuckin' hamburger."
The receiver went down with a bang.
"He's such a worthless piece of shit, I don't know why ever "Shhhh!"
The low growl was no more than ten feet behind us.
"That's Brute," came a voice from inside the building.
None of us moved. None of them moved. The only sound was of the breathy, wet snarl, a pent-up animal rage gathering itself to explode. I turned my head slowly and saw it in the hazy moonlight. I knew they were usually trained to go for the neck, wrist, or groin, and I tried to decide which of those on me was expendable. I voted for wrist.
Focusing all my attention on the dog, I hadn't heard the movement inside the building, but 99 suddenly a man I took to be Glen Andrus appeared around the back corner of the wing.
"Brute, kill!" he shouted, which was less original than "Have the vapors, Patsy," but more useful for the owner's purposes under the circumstances.
The beast hurtled toward our idiotic pyramid, and Lyle's gun thundered a bright charge into the night, its impact sending the dog cartwheeling through the air away from us. Our pyramid collapsed at the same moment, and Glen Andrus charged around the back of the other wing toward the Pontiac. Lyle took off after him. Timmy and I rushed around the corner of the wing where McWhirter was tied up inside.
I collided with Duane Andrus as he exploded out the door, and the two of us bounced off the door frame and found ourselves rolling together across the soft, warm, shit-littered earth. I wrestled him onto his back and was about to throttle him-not necessarily fatally, though it could have happened-when his head came up and he clamped my left ear between his teeth. I worked my thumbs in hard against his esophagus. A continuous siren sounded inside my head and I heard a couple of sharp cracks that I thought might have been gunshots.
Andrus flailed at my lower back with his fists and bit harder with his teeth. Later, I could not remember feeling pain; there was just the sound, the shrieking of a siren a few inches outside my head, or a few inches inside it.
Timmy's hand hove into view. I knew that lovely a-little-too-well-manicured graceful thing with its soft blue veins as well as I knew my own. The hand was wrapped around a brick, which landed hard against Andrus's skull. He gagged, fell away from me, spit something bloody in my face, then lay moaning.
I stood up, felt sick, then squatted and lowered my head as Lyle came bounding around the corner of the building.
"You guys okay? I shot the other one in the ass. He's not going anywhere. Better call an ambulance."
McWhirter, whom Timmy had set free while I was tussling with Duane Andrus, staggered up to us, stooped and bent from having been tied up for eighteen hours.
He stammered, "They're not even cops! They're- they're worse."
"It can happen," Lyle said.
Timmy turned toward the kennels. "I'll call Bowman and the ambulance."
"You won't need to call anybody," I said, as the police helicopter roared into view above the woods off to the east. "But see if you can scare up a flashlight in there. I think I'm missing something."
Timmy was waiting when I was wheeled into my room at Albany Med. I was drugged up and didn't remember the conversation, but later he told me we had this exchange:
"I'll never leave you again," he said.
"I know, not for a minute. I was afraid of that."
"The doctor says you're going to be okay. He says it's back on. It'll look a little funny-not his words-but what the hell."
"Right. It'd be no fun for you trying to nibble at a hole in the side of my head."
"I told him that if the ear was too far gone, I knew where he could get hold of another spare appendage to sew onto your head in its place. When I said it, he didn't hoot with merriment."
"Plastic surgeons are not famous for their whimsicality. If they were, we'd all have faces like Valentino's. And cocks like Lyle's."
He laughed nervously and said, "In your left ear."
I said, "Yeah. Thank God."
"You'll be out of here in two days, the doctor told me. The bandage will come off in a week."
"Two days? No way. That might be too late."
"Too late for what?"
Most of all, I wanted my strength back then. So I didn't reply. I just shut my eyes, and slept.
Through the night, I dreamed over and over again about a conversation I'd had two nights earlier in the bar at the Albany Hilton. end user
24
I opened the bedside drawer and took out my watch, which a nurse or aide had thoughtfully left for me along with my wallet and keys.
It was ten-fifteen. It had to be morning, because the sun was blazing in at me yet again.
Tossing aside the thin sheet that covered me, I swung my legs over the side of the bed and let my feet touch the metal stool below as I pushed myself upright.
My head throbbed. I touched the bandage wrapped around my skull and the bulge of packing on the left side. I stood up, felt light-headed, blinked, and made the faintness go away. Holding on to the tubular sides of the other unoccupied bed in the room, I made my way to a narrow door. It was not the clothes closet, but I made use of the appliance therein nonetheless and then splashed tepid water on my face.
The clothes closet was behind the door next to the lavatory, but my clothes were not in it and I knew I was going nowhere in my hospital nightie with its little bow holding it together.
I removed the sheets from both beds and fashioned one into an East Indian dhoti, a kind of bulky loincloth, in the manner Timmy had once shown me. Whoever said nothing much tangible had ever come out of the Peace Corps was mistaken. Another sheet I wrapped around my waist skirt-fashion, and a third around my torso with a long flap hanging over my shoulder. I ripped the sewn-up end off a pillow case and made a crude skull cap to cover my bandages.
Snatching a long-stemmed plastic rose from the vase on the windowsill, I shuffled out into the corridor and down to the nurses' station.
"Hare Krishna," I said happily, and offered the rose.
"You people are not supposed to be up here! You're supposed to stay downstairs in the lobby, and you know it!"
I was ushered swiftly to the elevator.
Timmy, ever-dutiful peon to the tattered gentry in the legislature, was not in the apartment and evidently had gone to work. It was Monday morning.
I put on American clothes, had a quart of grapefruit juice and two bowls of Wheat Chex, and phoned Dot Fisher.
"Get your money back?"
"Oh, Don, yes, yes, I did! I'm so relieved, I can't begin to tell you. I have an appointment with Mr. Trefusis at three o'clock, and I'm going over there to Millpond and just dump the whole gosh-darn bag of money right on his desk. And, let me tell you, I've never looked forward to anything this much in all my days!"
"Mind if I tag along?"
"But you're in the hospital, aren't you? Fenton said you injured your ear fighting with those dreadful men."
"It wasn't serious," I said. "I let a doctor use my head as a darning egg for an hour last night, but now I'm practically good as new. I'll pick you up at two-thirty."
"Why, yes, as a matter of fact, that would be lovely. But I've got to run now, Don. Fenton's out 101 back holding a press conference."
"Sorry I'm missing it, but I'll catch it on the news tonight. I'm sure he's saying something quotable."
"Oh, he is, he is."
I reached Bowman at his office.
"Whozzis?" he snarled. The man hadn't had his weekend golf fix, or sleep.