My brain began to clear, and it was full dawn soon and the blackness was gone. I lay there, awake now, with only a fuzziness disturbing the clarity of my thoughts, my eyes squeezed tightly shut and my hands pulled into fists at my sides. I knew I was in bed, in a hospital; there were the faint odors of ether and disinfectant and floor wax-institutional smells-pushing away the quiet apple scent of the woman, and knowing this, my body took on a stiffness, a rigidity, and images tried to push their way into my mind. I fought them, I fought them desperately, because they were carefully buried images of things I had seen in field hospitals in the South Pacific, and I knew that if I allowed them to return they would bring the panic and the terrible fear with them. I fought them, and I won, and they retreated. The confrontation left me gasping for breath. I closed my mouth and willed normalcy to my lungs.
I listened. There was a faint, faraway ticking that would be a wall clock, perhaps, and the sounds of hospital activity muted by thick walls, and now the scraping of a chair, and now a muffled cough, and now nothing.
I opened my eyes.
My vision was clear, except for lingering, shimmering pulses of light at the periphery of it. I was looking at a big man in a white hospital smock, with big capable hands and gold-rimmed spectacles and a neat salt-and-pepper mustache. He was smiling, a tired and wan smile, standing just beyond the tubular gray rail at the foot of the bed on which I lay. The walls of the room behind him were a pale green, with an off-white ceiling, and there was a white table with a stainless-steel water carafe and some plastic cups on it.
I looked at the doctor, blinking a little. I said in a calm, clear voice-my voice, “Am I dying?”
“No,” he answered gravely, “you’re not dying.”
I grasped that with my mind, and clung to it, and I saw in his eyes that it was the truth. The quiescence, so tenuous before, now became firm and complete; there would be no more panic. I said, “My belly …”
“A nasty cut, but not deep enough to have done much damage. You lost a lot of blood, and it took twenty-seven stitches to close you up, but you’ll be all right.”
“I thought … I thought my entrails were …”
“Shock,” the doctor said, with a small, understanding nod. “It magnifies things out of proportion. You’re not badly hurt, you can believe that.”
I let my mind focus on the pain in my stomach now, and it was still dull and vaguely pulsing. They would have used Novocaine as a local anaesthetic, and given me some kind of pain-killer, too, which would account for the fuzziness at the fringes of my thinking; the pain perhaps would be stronger later, but I would be able to tolerate it, knowing that I was not dying.
I swallowed into a parched throat, and raised one of my hands off the bedclothes to touch my forehead just over my right eye, where the pain in my head seemed to be centered. I encountered a bandage, with a sensitive lump beneath it. I said, “How did I get this?”
The doctor moistened his lips, and his eyes shifted to my right. For the first time since I had come completely awake, I realized that there were other people in the room. I turned my head on the pillow.
A slender, doe-eyed young nurse stood near the window, auburn hair tucked under one of those little newspaper-sailboat white hats. Her face was solemn and very dedicated, and she would have soft hands and an apple scent about her. In a hard metal chair pulled back from the bed, a very fat man in a dark brown worsted suit sat with his hands flat on his knees. He had shiny black eyes, like smooth Greek olives, and they were watching me with no expression other than a kind of resigned weariness. His mouth was thick and sleepy-looking, and there was a ponderousness to the set of his shoulders, the tilt of his head; but I had worked with cops of one kind and another for a long time, and I knew that that was what he was, and I knew as well that he was not half as soft and sleepy as he appeared or pretended to be.
He shifted a little on his chair and looked at the doctor and the nurse. They left the room immediately, wordlessly. The fat man said to me, “You got the lump when your car went off the road. Steering wheel or windshield. It could have been worse, but you only sideswiped a couple of eucalyptus and nosed into a ditch.” He spoke softly and carefully, as if weighing each sentence before putting voice to it.
I said, “Who are you?”
“My name is Donleavy. I’m with the District Attorney’s Office of San Mateo County.”
I looked at the identification he produced, and moved my head on the pillow in careful acknowledgment. Special investigator. Well, he wouldn’t be here if it was just the knife wound in my stomach, I thought-or even if they had only found the dead man by the sandstone rock. But he would have come out, all right, if the authorities had wind of the kidnapping.
Donleavy was watching me think. After a time he said, “Mr. Martinetti is waiting at his home just now, with my partner. If you were wondering whether you should say anything.”
“How did you find out?”
“You told us,” Donleavy said. “Indirectly.”
I just looked at him.
“Man who lives in the house near where you went off the road heard the crash and went out to investigate. He called the hospital here-Peninsula Emergency, if you’re interested-and they sent an ambulance. You were delirious when it arrived, kept repeating the name Martinetti and something about a kidnapping and murder and the money being gone. The attendants passed it on to the staff here when they brought you in, and they relayed it to us.
I took a long, slow breath, remembering the shouting I had done in the half-world of returning consciousness. “What time is it now?” I asked Donleavy.
“Just past five A.M.”
“Has the boy been released yet?”
“No.”
“Any word?”
“No.”
“Oh Christ,” I said softly.
“Yeah,” Donleavy said. “You want to tell me what happened at the drop last night?”
“Do you know the location?”
“Martinetti told us.”
“You found the dead man, then.”
“Uh-huh. Stabbed in the back, below the right kidney, and cut up deep under the breastbone.”
“Who was he?”
“A guy named Paul Lockridge,” Donleavy said. “You want to answer some of my questions now?”
“Oh,” I said. “I’m sorry.”
“Sure.”
I told him what had happened, exactly as I remembered it, going over it again to make sure I had left nothing out.
Donleavy said, “And you never saw the guy’s face?”
“No. It all happened too fast.”
“Did he say anything at any time?”
“No.”
“Can you remember anything about him?”
“He wore some kind of long coat.”
“What kind?”
“I couldn’t tell.”
“Is that all?”
“I’m afraid so.”
He sighed. “How do you figure it?”
“I hadn’t thought that far.”
“Well, think that far now.”
I pushed it around for several seconds, but my head ached, and I let it go finally and said, “It looks like a double-cross. Two in on the snatch instead of one, and as soon as the money was dropped the killer pulled a knife on this Lockridge. But he wasn’t accurate in the dark and the fog, and he just wounded him with the first thrust, in the back. Lockridge screamed and turned and the killer stabbed him under the breastbone, and then I came down in time to get myself cut.”
“That’s the way it looks, all right,” Donleavy said.
“I hope that’s not exactly the way it is.”
“Why?”
“The boy should have been released by now,” I said. “If he was going to be released at all.”