Dangerous Encounter, page 13
"Hurry. Quick now, before I switch off the lights. There's been an attempted break-and-enter here: a robbery, that's what the Tebbows must think when they get back. Give me a minute. I'll wipe off our fingerprints on the door. Hurry, Fritz. That's it ... club him down. Not too hard. He's valuable property."
I must have shouted I'd kill Gormerly and I meant it. I meant it with all my heart, with Mugsy shot dead behind us, and myself discovering Gormerly was the driver of the car that had forced Vicki off the road that night, those years ago. It blew up in me like fire.
But Gormerly overpowered me. He muffled me with his hands. He struck me to my knees. The house tilted. A door banged against my head. Cement steps rapped against my ribs. The night howled around me.
I had a half-stunned knowledge of being bundled along the driveway by Gormerly and of being thrown into the rear seat of a large enclosed auto. Gormerly plumped down next to me. My breath strangled in me and then I slid off somewhere, down, down into a deepening darkness, with a huge roaring of blood beating in my ears.
I came to enough to notice when Hodges drove into the broad six-lane width of Santa Ana, going north toward Colfax Springs. Gormerly gave me a shake to awaken me. I then heard Hodges' flat voice, speaking to me from the front seat:
"Albin! Can you hear me? Shake him again, Fritz."
"He hears you, Doc."
"If you give us more trouble, I shan't mind if Fritz has to break an arm or if necessary we'll do what was done to stop that mad dog when it tried to attack Fritz. It's immaterial to me whether you arrive at my hospital as a casualty or not."
After five or six more minutes of going along Santa Ana I was aware of Hodges turning off the highway, up into the wooded hospital grounds. He drove through a dark and clammy fog, the way lit badly by a few lights spaced along the grounds. The car continued around to the rear wing of the old two-storied stuccoed building that Hodges had put up a quarter of a century ago as a private hospital at a time when hospitals were in much scarcer quantity than now. The car stopped. Hodges got out. "Fritz, what's delaying you?"
"I don't dare unloose Durango enough to git him or me out. Git Roy to help."
"Can't a man your size handle a man less than a hundred and fifty pounds?"
"If I let go of him, to start gitting us out, hell try to bite again."
"Nonsense." Then I heard Hodges' voice go louder as if he had thrust his head inside the car for a closer look at us. "Fritz, what've you done to him? Is he unconcious?"
"I had to bash him a couple times. Where's Roy?"
Hodges swore at Gormerly and then said to get me out, quick. I let myself go limp as though stunned when Gormerly pulled me from the car and threw me over a shoulder like a bag of potatoes; he carried me up into the first-floor entrance. Hodges preceded us, switching on lights. It was as though I were being lugged in all over again from a roadside ditch, smashed up and in great pain, and I felt the continuing shock of having discovered that this execrable man, from whose shoulder my head and shoulders dangled down his back, my legs down his front, had driven the vehicle that forced Vicki off the road. As soon as I had the chance and thought Gormerly was enough off guard I succeeded in delivering him a kick between his own legs. It caught Gormerly by surprise. He dropped me.
I scrambled up off the floor, but lost a good couple of seconds while getting my bearings before gathering myself to make a dash for the exit. I was too slow. Once again Hodges whipped out his revolver.
"Stay where you are. This wing's been closed off for the last year. I've only two bed patients in the entire hospital. They won't hear you: they're at the front. Gormerly-stand up. Get over here. Get this man upstairs."
"Doc, he kicked me in the balls. I can't hardly walk."
Hodges spoke to me in a cold passion, warning me to take care.
"What exactly do you want of me?"
"I want what Laurel Turner gave you at quitting time."
“The silver dollar?"
"Oh, that," Hodges said. "No. Keep it as a souvenir. I want what you carried out in your own person.. .."
Hodges turned. As he did, I saw a small rosy man in a white orderly's uniform advancing toward us from the far 'end of the corridor. "Oh, there, Roy," Hodges called, "Give us a hand." Then he said to me, "Fix your eyepatch, can't you?"
I restored it over the eye.
I offered no resistance when Gormerly seized on to me. "With the muscular little orderly on my other side, the two of them propelled me up the stairs after Hodges along the littered and unswept floor of a second-story corridor.
"In here," said Hodges.
They hustled me into a four-bed ward with a lavatory on one side, a wall phone, three unmade beds and a fourth made up without sheets, only blankets, near a narrow window where outside in the darkness light from the room reflected on a rusty iron grill of fire escape. What really captured my attention was in the middle of the room: a fluoroscope nearly as high as the ceiling. Then they threw me upon the bed. They strapped me down. They pulled up the metal sides of the bed and left me trussed up like a chicken. I heard Gormerly ask, "Where's Laurel? Why ain't she in here, helpin'?"
Hodges said, carelessly, she was downstairs and would be up soon enough, obviously not caring whether I heard him or not. So I spoke up. I said he was making a great mistake, asking him if he didn't know I'd stop at nothing to see him ruined and disgraced? Big talk. Empty talk and he knew it.
"Albin, look here," Hodges said, kindly enough. "I'm in debt over my head. I'm on the edge of going smash. Everything I've ever worked for will be lost and I'm growing too old to continue much longer as a surgeon even if I wanted to continue. Men I've known, caught in as intolerable a position as I'm being pushed into, would be so sickened and disgusted they'd say good-bye to this kind of a world-they'd kill themselves. I don't mind admitting I've thought of that as a simple and positive solution-"
From one side Gormerly said, "Now, Doc." Hodges glanced at him and then told me, more vigorously, "But I'm not throwing in the sponge quite that easily. The big hospitals that've been built, along with the huge medical clinics in Palo Alto and Menlo Park-and all over this area, by God-they've beaten me to my knees. I've lost all my employee medical-service contracts except two to the big clinics. I now run this establishment with only myself, a day physician, three day nurses, a night matron, Frieda Gormerly, Fritz, and Roy here. We've only two bed patients. They're both in the front wing on the downstairs floor. All this I tell you, to tell you you can shout but no one will hear you. Either you decided to cooperate with me as someone I had every reason to trust-as someone who won't forget I once saved his life by my skill as a surgeon-"
"The insurance company paid over five thousand dollars for your skill as a surgeon," I said. "What I won't forget, ever, is that you told people I was brought here drunk after driving into a ditch and causing my wife's death. I wasn't even at the wheel that night Ask Gormerly why my wife was forced off the road. Ask him, Yvor. Ask him!"
Hodges stopped back from my bed. I saw his face momentarily fall slack. His eyes struck around questioningly at Gormerly. Then, once more, Hodge's own face hardened. He squared up his shoulders as with a renewed purpose and energy. Nodding curtly to Gormerly to follow him, he passed out of the room. They left me in there with Roy, a little orange-haired manikin of an orderly no more than five feet tall, with the shoulders of a miniature bull.
= 2 =
I was left alone with Roy for fifteen to twenty minutes. I had the time to start thinking all over again about what Hodges had told me downstairs-that I had carried out of SMC's high-security building in my own person, not on my own person, what he wanted from me. The following thought that came to me was such a monstrous one that at first I shied off from accepting my own reasoning.
With a stricken feeling I took myself back in memory to quitting time at SMC when I'd walked into Laurel Turner's dispensary. I'd been very much on guard. On the bulletin board outside the dispensary I'd previously read about the huge Czechoslovakian spy capsule, and I was keyed up and on the alert in case Laurel tried to give me a large capsule to swallow. Instead, she'd only given me a Rennilin tranquilizer. Again I could see it: a little blue and white capsule, much smaller than a man's finger joint.
But a most disquieting question now pricked at me. Why couldn’t a length of hair-fine photo-wire easily be coiled inside a capsule even the size of one of those blue and white Rennilin capsules? My stomach contracted. No, I thought to myself. Wait a minute. I hadn't swallowed that first capsule. Marcia! With a shock of pure terror I recalled, yes! it was Marcia who had rushed into dispensary and had popped the capsule down her throat.
"Easy there, chum," Roy said, throwing his stub of cigarette on the floor. "You can't break those leather straps."
"Let me loose!"
"Can't. Dr. Hodges’ll be back in a few minutes." "What's in this for you?"
Roy lit another cigarette and grinned, not answering. I moved my head away from the sight of him. I thought to myself, Hold on! When did Marcia swallow the capsule? A little after four, today. All right. Say she's got a twenty-four-hour margin. All right, again. If you go and tell Hodges, no, I never swallowed it, Marcia Herrera walked in the dispensary when Laurel was out, and to tease me took it out of my fingers and popped it down her own throat, well, what will Hodges do? Marcia's home by now. Old man Herrera must be over seventy. That brother of hers won't be there. At least I haven't seen him since I got back from Mexico. Sure as hell, Hodges will pack Gormerly up to the Herreras' after Marcia. Say nothing to Hodges. Nothing. Stall for time. You know Marcia won't let you down. Come midnight, she'll be phoning Harry Weymouth to tell him everything you told her. More than that, she knew Hodges had walked up the driveway to see you at the wrong house. She'll have Harry bringing the sheriffs men here to the hospital and on Hodges' neck within another two hours. So hold on. Stand on the burning deck, eating peanuts by the peck. Stall for time. Two hours only. Then get Marcia off on the double to the Stanford Medical Center where they've got the finest X-ray equipment on the Coast...
I was trying to sight across my chest at my watch, where my arm was strapped, when Laurel came in. She carried a pan of hot water and disinfectant to the bed and I saw she was in her white nurse's uniform. Roy moved over to help her. They didn't unstrap me or try to remove my torn coat. But Roy unbuttoned my shirt. Laurel wiped off my face, adjusted the patch, and then cleaned down along my chest, where I'd leaked my own blood; and she used an astringent that smarted to stop more bleeding from a cut on my cheek and another at the corner of my mouth. Hodges returned, now wearing a white physician's jacket. He was followed by Gormerly, who pushed in one of those padded examining tables.
Drawing up a chair by the bed, Hodges sat down, straddling out his legs. Then with a kick of his legs, getting himself set forward on the edge of the chair, again he exploded in a tirade against the big hospitals built during the last decade or so in Santa Clara County, along with the growth of the enormous medical clinics to take care of the thousands of families pouring into the county to find jobs in the expanding electronics and aerospace industries. He was a man, I realized, obsessed by the changing times, grown bitter, and perhaps also trying to justify his actions to me by blaming his own decline and financial ruin upon the industrialization of the valley.
Where once he could hire physicians for eight to ten thousand a year, he said savagely, now any young internist milk-fresh from his medical training asked from twenty to forty thousand a year and got it at the big factory clinics. He couldn't go against that kind of competition-running assembly lines for patients. He hit his fists together. "I tell you," he said in a heated tone, "instead of blowing my head off and going down to defeat, by God, why shouldn't I get my chance at some of the money others have grabbed out of government contracts? I've a few people here who trust me-Laurel, Fritz, Roy, and Fritz's sister. They're helping me. They know I'm a gentleman. I've promised they'll never get into difficulties if by any bad chance my plans go wrong. Neither would you, Albin. I'm in this to win or lose-but no one else backing me will ever risk any chance of trouble, I promise you-"
"Yvor-" Laurel interrupted him far more gently than I'd heard her speak to anyone before. "Yvor, we haven't too much time, have we?"
Pushing out his legs from the chair, Hodges stared at her, and then as though brought back to a more immediate purpose he told me in a much cooler tone of voice:
"It's this way. Last fall I began looking around to discover how I could profit as so many others have from the billions the government's pouring into throwing hardware up into the sky. I'm very capable with my hands, you know-most surgeons are. I'd heard of a spy capsule a Czech chemist made ten or fifteen years ago. Let me show my version-" From his side pocket he produced a little blue and white capsule I recognized as similar to one of those blue and white Rennilin capsules I'd seen this afternoon in Laurel's dispensary.
"Watch this." Taking the capsule between his thumb and forefinger he rubbed his thumbnail against it. For me, it was like watching a small beetle's wing case open and sprout two fragile little wings of plastic. Pressing the capsule together again, Hodges shoved it into his pocket. "It's of plastic with plastic-spring extrusions secured by micro-bits of plain fish glue-organic glue. The one I showed you is the first I made, to experiment with. Understand?"
I understood only too well; I was ahead of him. I couldn't speak for a moment.
"You swallowed the second capsule I made," Hodges explained. "After swallowing it, at about four-thirty this afternoon I believe, soon afterwards your intestinal juices digested the micro-spot of glue, releasing the extrusions to dig themselves into the membranes lining your intestinal tract."
I managed to ask him if the photostat tacked up on Laurel's bulletin board, warning SMC employees of the Czech capsule the size of a horse pill, hadn't been put there as a red herring for me? Hodges, damn him, laughed. "My boy, exactly. Laurel pulled down the photostat before she left the building. A matter of psychology, like giving you a silver dollar."
The thought of that little plastic capsule of Hodges', pronged like a horned beetle and now inside Marcia's delicate inner membranes, started a kind of uncontrollable jerking in my own legs as if I was a dead frog touched with an electric wire.
Bending over me, Hodges said in his cool flat voice, "If you'd completely observed Laurel's instructions after she paid you the thousand dollars, we'd have saved all this botch of draggin you here. You were to remain in the phone booth. Fritz would have been irresistibly seized by an impulse to shoot at those confounded pigeons. He's shot at them before. As a matter of fact, he was fined once. He'd have fired harmless twenty-two pellets, by accident--striking one of your legs. You'd have been wrathful, yes. But wouldn't you have permitted him to run you to my hospital? Most certainly. However, you scampered away. By George, that upset all our plans!"
"Tell me-why did you thumb me, Yvor? Why?"
"Why? Assuming all had gone according to plan, once we had you here and X-rayed you," Hodges said, "if I had told you we'd better place you on the operating table to correct the adhesions the X-ray showed, would you have objected? No, sir. We'd have run you in here, operated, my piece of goods safely out of you, and you never knowing anything about it. As it is, there'll be only a small incision. You'll be up and walking in three days. It's less than an appendicitis operation."
"After I'm up, what happens when I blow the whistle on you? Or are you going to silence me by finishing me as you did the Doberman?"
"You don't seem to think so very clearly, my boy. You'll risk finishing your own father if you don't go in with us."
"My father? Pop? What the hell do you mean?"
"Turn me in and he's turned in, that's what I mean. At my suggestion, some months ago he bought a thousand shares in Wently and Phillips Electronics, I flew back to Washington. It was my final try at asking the National Health Institute to give me my hospital a small grant after the millions they've given other hospitals on the peninsula. No, my hospital can't meet standards. Refused. I saw Dick-your father used to be a patient of mine, remember? He asked me about the electronic plants out here. I told him Wently and Phillips, with their shares now down almost to nothing, might eventually be as good a speculative gamble as Varian Associates were half a dozen years ago..."
Stocky and powerful, Hodges stood, with his blue Irish gaze thoughtfully upon me. "If the Pentagon ever believes you've helped fish out specifications from one electronics center to sell to another one," Hodges said deliberately, "one in which your own father had previously bought shares cheaply, I ask you-where would that leave your father and his army career?"
"Pop would never do such a thing!"
"Innocently, mind you, he would and he did. Your father asked me for a good speculation because he knows I know the standing of most of the electronic plants around here. Once I retrieve that small piece of goods Laurel gave you, in five months to a year the shares your father bought at fifty cents a share ought to jump to fifteen, twenty, or even twenty-five dollars. We'll all be knee-deep in honey and clover the rest of our lives-you, too, if you'll be sensible."
Upon that, Hodges abruptly left the bed. He glanced at his watch. He gave orders. Gormerly began fiddling with the dials of the fluoroscope in the middle of the room. With Hodges watching, Roy unstrapped me and removed my torn coat and shirt. Laurel wiped off my body down to my waist with a towel. I shivered in the cold room. I heard a humming sound from the fluoroscope. Gormerly spoke over his shoulder. "O.K., Doc. Any time."
= 3 =
Very professional about it, Laurel took my arm while Hodges explained I was to step on the platform of the machine and stand erect as he ran the fluoroscope screen up and down. I took a step or so along with Laurel and immediately balked as the thought struck me that a fluoroscope examination would show up the fact that I wasn't the one who'd swallowed Hodges' capsule.
Hodges said, "It won't hurt you."
