Operation Whiplash Page 6

  His head was cocked to one side like a bright-eyed bird’s. “This cash,” he said. “How much did you have in mind?”

  “Twenty thousand. Half in advance.”

  His face closed up like a furled umbrella. “Your delusions of grandeur had previously esscaped me.”

  “When you’re ready to take me seriously, I’ll tell you where to go to put your hand on the first ten thousand. In untraceable cash. You keep it and bring me back what’s hidden with it.”

  He still looked doubtful. “This hiding place. It iss near?”

  “No.”

  “Then I would have to invesst my time and money in this venture?”

  “You gambled when you left Karachi, Doc. And twenty thousand would set you up nicely in private practice.” I tried to think how to get through to him. “When you first saw me on the ward, what were the odds against our having a conversation like this?”

  “Asstronomical,” he admitted.

  “You’re still thinking of me like that. It’s a mistake.” I rose to my feet. “The cash will be there any time you give me the word you’d like to try for it.”

  His lips were pursed. “Thiss is illegal money?”

  I didn’t answer him. I opened his office door. “Don’t expect me to be turning verbal handsprings the next time you see me on the ward.” I shuffled out into the corridor in my role of slow-moving dimwit.

  Dr. Afzul followed me and used his key to let me back through the heavy glass door onto the ward and the untender mercies of its sadistic attendant, Spider Kern.

  I had already made up my mind that nothing lasts forever, especially Spider Kern.

  Dr. Afzul had me brought back to his office in a few days. When we were alone, I spoke before he could. “Scuttlebutt on the ward says you’re going to attend a convention of plastic surgeons in New York, Doc.”

  “That iss correct.”

  “In New York you’ll be near the money.”

  “So we’re back on that ssubject?”

  “We are. You’ll be within two hundred and twenty-five miles of it.”

  He tapped thoughtfully on his desk top with a pencil. “Tell me exactly what it iss you would haf me do.”

  “Hire a car in New York and drive to the spot I’ll tell you. It will take you about five hours. Dig up a sealed jar eighteen inches below the ground. Take out ten thousand dollars and bring me everything else.” Dr. Afzul was silent. “Does it make sense that I’d send you after nothing when I’ll still be here when you get back?”

  “No.” He hitched his chair forward in sudden determination. “Where iss this place?”

  “Guardian Angel Cemetery in Hillsboro, New Hampshire.” He wrote it down. “Drive in the front gate and follow the circular gravel road to the right. Turn left at the first intersection. The third headstone on the right will have the name Mallory on it. Twelve feet behind the stone you’ll find the jar.”

  “What iff the gate is locked?”

  “There’s no gate as such. Just an arched entranceway. The township has a newer cemetery but maintains the old one after a fashion.”

  Dr. Afzul leaned back in his chair. “I haf preliminary approval for your facial reconsstruction. I haf proposed that in the interessts of furthering my technique that I do a full-scale rebuilding job. If the money iss where you say it iss—”

  “It’s there, Doc.”

  “It will be a tedious and painful process,” he warned. “It will take a long time.”

  I refrained from stating the obvious. “What will the program be, Doc?”

  “A few quesstions first. You are a good healer, or perhaps a cut heals sslowly?”

  “I heal quickly.”

  He nodded. “I will take blood ssamples. You should know there is a choice in the type of graft possible. With the dermatone, a skin-slicing machine, we are able to cut extremely thin slices of skin from a wide area. The choice comes in the thickness of skin removed. We can take the top two layers, known as the epithelium and the deeper corium, which would consstitute a full-thickness graft. Or we can take a thinner slice including only half the corium, a partial-thickness graft.”

  “What’s the difference, Doc?”

  “All transsplants contract and change color after healing. The thicker the transplant, the less change, which iss important in connection with the face. Converssely, the thicker the transsplant the more difficulty in getting it to take permanently. A partial-thickness graft is sometimes more efficient though less essthetic.”

  I held out my stiffened hands to him, displaying the encrusted burn scars. “The hands are more important than the face, Doc. I was never a beauty. Couldn’t you do the hands first? That way we’d know about the way I heal before you get to the tough part of things.” I wanted all the healing time possible on my hands.

  “Your point hass merit,” Dr. Afzul acknowledged. “Except that in the case of the hands the procedure iss different. I will cut loose flaps of skin in your chest, known as pedicules, and inssert your hands inside until the skin of your chest grows to the back of your hands. Then a series of incissions will detach your hands from your chest while new skin is growing underneath. One hand at a time in this process, of course.”

  “What about the face?”

  “Two different techniques will be involved. For the forehead and the nose, I will probably peel flaps of skin down from your scalp, since you will have to wear a hair piece anyway. For the rest, mobile transsplants from the arms, back, and thighs. You should know that not everything we try will be successful. One thing I will tell you. Do not get burned again. What I do this time, no one can do a second time.”

  “How long will all this take?”

  “With trial and error, at least ten months. Perhaps longer.”

  He took the blood samples before I left his office.

  The next time I saw little Dr. Afzul he was wearing eighty-dollar English brogues, and I knew I was in business. He had me brought to his office again. “Have a nice time in New York, Doc?” I asked when the door was closed.

  He didn’t reply. Instead, he reached into a pocket of his hospital whites and handed me a folded-over wad of bills. I riffled it quickly. There was twenty-two hundred in hundred dollar bills. I put it in a pocket of my pajama-robe. “That’s not all that was in the jar, Doc,” I said.

  He shook his head. “I cannot give you the gun.”

  “We made a bargain,” I pressed him, although I had never really expected he would turn over the weapon.

  “When I left here, I wass still in doubt of the exisstence of the money, even,” he said. “Finding the gun with it raised serious quesstions. I am now concerned to what use you would put a new face.”

  “I don’t understand your morality, Doc. You took my money, but you don’t deliver.”

  “My morality iss my own affair,” he retorted, unruffled. “On the new face, I will deliver. On the gun, no. There is self-preservation to be considered. Your purpose can hardly be in doubt. You might be gone, but I would remain. And there would be inquiries. You will have to make up your mind that your new face will be worth your invesstment in me.”

  “Okay,” I shrugged it off. The gun would have helped, but the cash was next best. “When do we start?”

  “Tomorrow.”

  There was nothing excruciatingly painful about Dr. Afzul’s sophisticated techniques. Mostly it was the awkwardness and inconvenience of the flesh-to-flesh transfers that bugged me, plus the accompanying boring monotony. I spent a lot of time in bed because it was too much trouble to do anything else.

  Twice I thought we were finished, but little Dr. Afzul would have none of it. “I can increasse the degree of naturalness,” he said both times, and patiently began another complicated transplant. My own patience had just about unraveled.

  Dr. Afzul wouldn’t let me see the results of any of his efforts except those upon my hands which had healed nicely. “Better that you should see it all at once,” he insisted. “Luckily you have most of your eyelas
hes. A hairpiece you can buy, and eyebrows I can give you, after a fashion, but eyelashes gone are gone forever.”

  “When will the bandages come off for good?” I asked him on the day he assured me the final transplant had taken and we were in the last healing stage.

  “Ten days to two weeks,” he answered.

  I gave thought then to Spider Kern.

  I wanted to blow the joint after the surgery was completed but before my bandages were removed. That way no one would know what my new face looked like. Neither would I, for that matter, but I could wait.

  I’d laid a thousand of the money Dr. Azful brought me on Kern at the outset of the plastic surgery. I was buying immunity from his quaint little habits while I was healing. Even Rafe James, Kern’s ward-attendant partner, noticed the way Kern followed me into the shower with lighted cigarettes. “You really work out on the loony, don’t you, Spider?” he observed one day. “You’d think he was your mother-in-law.”

  “He shot up my buddy, Blaze Franklin,” Kern replied. “We used to be deppities together. Besides, this joker’s fakin’ it. I can tell.”

  “He’s a hell of a faker if he can take all those cigarette burns you’re handin’ out without showin’ nothing,” James said.

  The thousand I’d given Kern, in addition to buying me immunity, was intended to make him hungry for more. When Afzul told me we were close, I put myself in Kern’s way. “What’s on your mind?” he asked me.

  I almost smiled. A month previously, Spider Kern wouldn’t have admitted I had a mind. “I want a gun,” I told him.

  He blinked. He hadn’t expected anything that blunt. “Well, now you know that’s—” he began to bluster.

  “For five thousand dollars,” I cut him off.

  His lips pursed in a soundless whistle.

  I didn’t have five thousand dollars, but then I wasn’t going to get a gun from Spider Kern, either. Not while he knew anything about it. He wouldn’t get me a gun, but with his eye on the money he would pretend to get it.

  “When do you want it?” he asked me.

  I was pleased to see that the train of thought he’d been pursuing for himself was what I’d programmed for him. I touched my face. “When it’s finished,” I said. “In two weeks.”

  “Time enough. Okay, for five grand. C.O.D.”

  “C.O.D.,” I repeated.

  Kern approached me again ten days later. “You’ve got the cash?” he asked.

  “I’ll have it.” I didn’t want him thinking he could shake me down close to the deadline and find it on me.

  “No mistakes,” he warned.

  “There won’t be any.”

  “You’ve been puttin’ us on all this time, right?”

  “Would you be getting five grand if I hadn’t? But I wasn’t putting you on, Spider. You didn’t buy it.”

  “Goddam right I didn’t. When you plannin’ on handin’ over the money?”

  “When you deliver me to the main highway.”

  “Suits me fine,” he said. “I want you off the grounds when the blowoff comes.”

  “I’ll need clothes, shoes, and a hat. And the gun.”

  “Okay,” he said. “It works out. When we’re set, I’ll leave the stuff in the john for you to dress. We’ll walk out the ward door here together. I’ll take you down to the side door that leads out to the parkin’ lot. From there I’ll drive you to the highway in my car.”

  “Fine,” I pretended to agree. “I’ll be picking up the cash alongside the driveway between the hospital and the highway.” I stopped as though I’d said more than I intended.

  I could see him changing gears while he thought that one over. The critical moment for me would be when Spider Kern thought I had the cash in my hands. I was sure he intended to gun me down as an escapee at that moment.

  Kern was studying me. “You’re pretty sure of yourself? Pretty cool?”

  “I’m just leaving everything up to you.”

  He grunted and walked away from me.

  And so the double-con continued.

  All during the final week I paid close attention while Dr. Afzul rebandanged my head after each session in his office. There was less bandaging necessary each time. I would unbandage myself while he was making his preparations, and at night in bed I practiced unbandaging and rebandaging myself following Afzul’s pattern until I was sure I could do it alone.

  I still hadn’t seen myself. There was no mirror in the doctor’s office, and all my practicing was done in the dark. If Dr. Afzul ever noticed anything different in the arrangement of the bandages in his office mornings, he never said anything.

  “You’ll be getting a package in the mail one of these days with no return address on it,” I told him on the morning of what I intended to be my last day in the institution. “Don’t open it until you’re alone.”

  He knew what I meant. It would be the balance of the twenty thousand I’d promised him for the face job. I said it casually, as though it were something a long way in the future. But the little man may have had his own radar. For the first time in our assocation he went out of his office and left me alone in it. I improved the shining hour by helping myself to gauze, tape, and a makeup kit the doctor had explained would improve my appearance during the healing process.

  I would have liked to say goodbye to him when he came back, but I couldn’t trust him that far. He’d carried his share of the load. Now it was up to me. I’d already given Kern the word that tonight was the night. I’d watched Spider with his head together with his partner, Rafe James, and I knew that whatever Kern was planning for me, James had a part in it.

  I’d had a long time for contingency planning. Kern had said he’d drive me in his car to the point between the hospital and the highway, at which I would presumably hand over the five thousand. Kern would want James along, so that when the moment came no mistakes would be made in disposing of me.

  But James could hardly be waiting in Kern’s car. Even a supposed dimwit like me might reasonably be expected to balk at two-to-one odds at such a critical interval. That meant Rafe James in another car, following us.

  And the more I thought about it, the better I liked the idea.

  The final hour of waiting that night was the worst.

  A half-hour before I expected Kern’s signal for me to go to the men’s room, I got out of bed, lifted the hospital bed, and worked free the steel casters in each front leg. I stretched out on the bed again with fists balled around a caster in each hand, a precaution against Kern’s accelerating his intended double-cross.

  The signal finally came. I went into the men’s room and dressed in the clothing Kern had left for me. The jacket was too tight and the trousers too loose. I managed. I kept one hospital sock and put the two steel casters into it. I added a jumbo-sized bar of hospital soap and put the sock into a pocket.

  When I left the washroom, Kern was outside the door. “All set?” he asked. His voice sounded tense.

  I nodded. Kern led me to the ward door and unlocked it. We passed through. In the better light of the corridor I tried to locate a suspicious bulge on him that would pinpoint a weapon. I couldn’t see anything. It had to mean that Rafe James was carrying the armament.

  I was keyed up so high that Kern had the outside door unlocked and we were outside almost before I realized it. The night air felt warm and moist. It was my first breath untainted by hospital antiseptics in almost two years.

  Kern started to walk alongside the building, keeping on the grass. I knew he was headed for the parking lot where James would be waiting in another car. I took the loaded sock from my pocket. Before we reached the corner of the building, I smashed it as hard as I could behind Spider Kern’s right ear. He gave a kind of coughing grunt, stumbled, then pitched forward on his face.

  I shook a caster out of the sock and placed it in my hand with the long steel pin protruding between my fingers. I made a deep circle around the parking lot and came up behind the little cluster of employees’ automobiles.
I moved along the row until I saw a head silhouetted against the night sky.

  Noiselessly I approached the open window on the driver’s side. Rafe James was watching the corner of the building around which Spider Kern and I were supposed to appear. There was something bulky resting on James’s lap.

  I reached inside the window and jabbed the steel pin of the caster into the back of James’ neck, hard. “Don’t move!” I whispered. “Or I’ll shoot!”

  He stiffened, then froze.

  I reached down with my free hand and removed the bulky object from his lap. It was a sawed-off double-barreled shotgun. It was no longer and not much heavier than an old-time dueling pistol, but fifty times as lethal. I walked around the car and got in on the passenger’s side.

  “Drive out to the highway,” I directed James. He complied numbly. He was in a state of shock.

  I knew it was a mile to the highway. “Stop here,” I said when I judged we were nearly there. “Get out,” I said to James when he stopped the car. He started to whimper. “Out,” I repeated. He climbed out slowly while I matched his movements on the other side. James looked at the shotgun in my hands and started to run. He knew what he intended doing to me, and he expected the same treatment. He started zigzagging as he picked up speed. I couldn’t let him go to spread the alarm. I was already taking a chance upon how long Spider Kern would remain unconscious.

  I couldn’t wait. I didn’t know the load in the shotgun. At twenty yards I touched off the front trigger. Kerblamm-m-m! The shotgun charge picked up Rafe James bodily and rolled him down into the ditch. I looked up and down the road for headlights. There were none.

  I climbed down into the ditch for a look at James. Even with the unchoked, sawed-off barrel, he must have caught half the charge, and from the look of him the charge must have been buckshot. Rafe James was no longer a part of the problem.

  I went back to the car, removed my head bandages, then took a tube of facial makeup and squeezed a gob onto my palm. I rubbed it into my face and scalp. I had seen in the hospital how the paste dulled the gloss of pink new skin. I put the wide-brimmed hat on. It shadowed my face nicely.