Guns
- Автор: Хантер Эван
- Год: 1976
- Язык: английский
- Год: Random House
- ISBN: 978-0-394-40679-4
- Жанр: Криминальные детективы
Электронная книга - «Guns». Краткое содержание книги:
But more important than that, they will also find in the glove compartment an automobile registration for the Pinto, and it will be made out to one Jack William Wyatt. And if there were any good prints on the gun Jocko dropped in the liquor store last night, and if the New York fuzz got a make on him from the F.B.I. files, why then, a teletype went out describing Jack William Wyatt, alias Jocko Wyatt, alias Jockstrap Wyatt, as he was known in Texas prisons. And if the New Jersey cops are on the ball, then they will know at once that they’ve got hold of the wife of a man who held up a liquor store and was an accomplice in the crime of murder. It does not take Sherlock Holmes to look at a driver’s license. Jeanine Wyatt, it says on her license, they will have looked at her license long before they searched the car. If they can’t make a connection from that alone, then they are in the wrong business, they should give up law enforcement and begin selling storms and screens.
He figures she’s in trouble.
He does not give a damn. He hopes in fact that they will find Jocko’s body and nail her for the murder and lock her up and throw away the key. He does not want to run into her ever again. He can still remember her laugh, and it makes him shiver now. Up ahead, he sees a phone booth on the side of the road.
He has to get help for his arm.
The doctor who opens the door looks a lot younger than he sounded on the telephone. His name is Emory Hughes. He has coal-black hair and brown eyes. He is perhaps forty, forty-five years old and he looks like a tennis player or a skier. Colley wouldn’t know a tennis player or a skier if he woke up in bed with one at Wimbledon or St. Moritz, but he’s seen actors pretending to be tennis players or skiers on television, and this doctor, this Emory Hughes, looks like one of those actors. Usually the actors drink beer afterwards. The beers are interchangeable. Colley can never remember which beer the actors are drinking after they get off the squash court or the sailboat, or after they finish climbing the mountain or jumping out of an airplane without a parachute. He wonders if Dr. Emory Hughes drinks beer. He wonders if Dr. Emory Hughes is an actor pretending to be a doctor, the way he himself is an armed robber named Nicholas Donato pretending to be a tourist named Steve Casatelli. He has chosen the name Casatelli because he is sure that when he talks he sounds Italian. Carter Hewlitt from New Canaan, Connecticut, once told him that the minute he opens his mouth his heritage is immediately apparent. Those were her exact words. That was before she fucked up on the getaway that time. He has chosen the name Steve only because he likes that name, always wished his mother had named him Steven instead of Nicholas. Or Stephen with a p-h, that would have been just as good.
“Mr. Castelli,” the doctor says, getting the name wrong. You give somebody a name ends in a, i or o, they immediately pronounce it wrong.
“Casatelli,” Colley says, correcting him, and wondering suddenly if the mispronunciation was a trap. Does the good doctor suspect that this man here with the gnawed arm is not indeed a tourist traveling through the Garden State of New Jersey, but is instead an armed robber who knocked off a diner five miles south of here at twelve noon?
“Excuse me,” the doctor says, and smiles. “Let’s take a look at that arm, shall we? This way, please.”
He follows the doctor through the waiting room and into an examination room. The office is part of a white clapboard house with a white picket fence. Somewhere in the house Colley can hear a baseball game on television. In the back yard there’s the sound of children lauging. The doctor watches him as he takes off the plaid jacket. The jacket is winter-weight and the sleeves are a little too long for Colley. He wonders if the doctor is noticing this. Sunlight slants through the curtained window. In a glass-fronted cabinet on the wall opposite, scalpels gleam.
“Would you sit up here, please?” the doctor says, and Colley gets onto the examination table. There is not much blood on the pillowcase he wrapped around his arm. The doctor removes it gingerly, and says “Mmm” when he sees the wound. There is blood caked all over the wound, it looks worse now than it did just after the dog quit gnawing on it. The doctor goes to a cabinet and takes a squeeze-bottle from it, and then wets a piece of gauze and gently soaps out the wound. As he works, it begins to look a little better. There is some fresh blood, but just a little, and he wipes this away and studies the tom flesh and the teeth marks on the arm where the skin has not been ripped.
“Where’d this happen?” the doctor asks.
“Down the road,” Colley says.
“Big dog?”
“Police dog,” Colley says, and then says, “German shepherd, a German shepherd.”
“Mmm,” the doctor says. “Where’s the dog now?”
“Dead,” Colley says. “I killed him.”
“Mmm,” the doctor says.
“Am I going to need stitches?”
“Not with this kind of injury,” the doctor says. “Animal bites, human bites, we leave the wound open. No sutures,” he says, and smiles suddenly, looking more like a tennis player than ever. “Don’t worry, Mr. Casatelli,” he says, getting the name right this time and patting Colley’s shoulder reassuringly.
He opens a drawer in the cabinet and searches among a clutter of drug samples, and comes up with a small tube. “This is just an antibiotic,” he says, and unscrews the black cap and squeezes the ointment onto a gauze bandage. He puts the bandage over the wound, and then takes out a roll of gauze and begins wrapping the arm.
Colley is beginning to feel better. He likes the way this doctor handles himself, and he also feels very comfortable here in the examination room, with sunlight slanting through the window and children laughing in the back yard and a baseball game going on television. It is like he is in a relative’s house. It is like he is a kid again, and he cut his finger visiting one of his relatives, and an uncle or somebody is taking care of it.
But as the doctor bandages the arm, he begins telling Colley about rabies, scaring him half to death. He tells Colley he does not wish to alarm him, and then he starts giving him the symptoms, starting with a pain in the scarred arm, the arm will have healed over by then. This will be about forty days from now, it takes about forty days for the virus to incubate, it is different with a face bite or a leg bite. Colley doesn’t want to hear it. He is beginning to sweat as the doctor tells him that if he has rabies, and he certainly doesn’t want to alarm Colley, why, then the symptoms will start with a pain in the scarred arm, and he’ll also have a headache, and he’ll feel generally lousy, and he won’t have any appetite, and there’ll be vomiting, and restlessness, and apprehension, and he’ll have difficulty swallowing. Later on there’ll be mucus in his mouth and he’ll be breathing hard and talking fast, and eventually he’ll go into convulsions at the slightest stimulus and will suffer delirium and maniacal attacks, until finally, on the third or fourth day of the acute phase, he’ll go into paralysis, coma, and finally death.
The doctor is finished bandaging the arm now. He goes to another drawer, the place is full of drawers, and he takes out a hypodermic and a vial. He pierces the top of the vial with the needle, fills the syringe, and says very briefly, “Tetanus toxoid.” He rubs a little cotton ball saturated with alcohol onto the biceps of Colley’s arm, and then gives him the shot so Colley can’t even feel it. Colley nods.
“Okay?” the doctor says.
“Yes, fine.”
“Is that cheek bothering you?”
“No, it’s... I bruised it when the dog attacked me.”
“I wish I knew if that dog were rabid,” the doctor says, getting back to the goddamn gruesome subject of rabies.