And Heslip was suddenly a fighter again, not a man afraid another concussion would turn him into vegetable soup. Nine seconds had passed. He dropped his attaché case and charged.
The stompers looked up, startled. They ran. Heslip was smaller, faster, in superb shape as always. The first reached their car, parked at the corner with the motor running for a quick left uphill into Franklin no matter what the three-way traffic light said. The second shot a quick look back and ran into a parking meter. It spun him halfway around, so that a rock-hard left hook could smash into his short ribs.
“Gugnh!” he said in response to the hook.
It was his only comment for a number of hours, because he was hit eight times in the face before he could fall down. As the stolen car spun into Franklin and was gone, the man it had abandoned received a broken nose, a detached retina in the left eye, and lost three teeth. He swallowed a fourth tooth and got a hairline jaw fracture when his chin hit the pavement.
Dan Kearny dragged away the black detective, who was still clubbing vicious lefts and rights, a few moments later. Up in the deserted clerical offices, Giselle Marc was already phoning for an ambulance.
Five
Lincoln Way parallels Golden Gate Park from Arguello all the way to the ocean, serving as one edge of the area San Franciscans call the Sunset. On relatively few days, however, does Lincoln Way see the sun before noon, and on many days, loses it by four. When Ballard pulled aside the second-hand lace curtains of his bulbous living-room window, there was only a gray wall of fog instead of the broad cheerful green stretches of Golden Gate Park.
At 8:07 in the goddam morning.
He returned to the Salvation Army easy chair, which was the room’s main item of furniture, to sip from the cup of scalding coffee balanced on the arm. Coffee was almost the only thing culinary, apart from hamburgers, that Ballard did. He did it superbly. His coffee could have won prizes.
His reports were up to date; if he went in now, Kearny would come up with some shit detail for him to do. A flooring check. Return a car to a dealer. Shop some hunk of tin from the Florida Street storage lot for bids — after first starting it with jumper cables because the battery would be dead. Better skip-tracing at home.
He consulted the Yellow Pages open to HOSPITALS in his lap, then started dialing the phone. Seven hospitals later a female voice from Records said, “Yes, we have a Schilling, Robert.”
Ballard slammed an exultant fist into the chair arm. His half-full coffee cup fell off the other arm into the wastebasket. He left it there. He wanted that Duster.
Kaiser Hospital is set back from and above Geary Boulevard, giving patients whose rooms chance to face that way some nice views of the city. Ballard went in the Emergency entrance to thread his way to the front lobby, where a Visitor’s Aid lady smiled in false-toothed gentility from behind a table.
“Mr. Schilling is in room... ten-thirty. The elevators...”
Ballard had seen that one of the potted plants on her table had Bob Schilling written in a slanting feminine hand on its white envelope.
“That looks like it needs water. I could take it up—”
“How nice,” ticked the false teeth. “Please follow the yellow line on the tenth floor.”
Ballard and an elderly white couple shared the elevator with a young hip black orderly spaced out on dope or the euphoria of living.
“Hair between my toes, man,” he said to them. The elevator was inching along with the speed of a house being jacked up. “This elevator so slow I grow hair between my toes ridin’ it.”
“Does it tickle?”
His face contorted in a wheezy paroxysm of laughter. He slapped his thigh. “Neet!” he cried. “Jes’ spray it on an’ smoo-o-oth hair away!”
The elderly couple had punched nine when they had gotten on. They crowded off hastily at four. Ballard, at ten, began following the yellow line on the floor like Dorothy following the yellow-brick road. It took him around several corners and down hallways and along a glassed-in balcony overlooking a court. From this he edged through a sliding-glass door into room 1030.
Two of the beds held very old and approximately dead-looking patients. The one in the middle was occupied by a man in his mid-thirties who had thinning black hair awry across the forehead of a pale, sharp-featured face.
Ballard raised the droopy plant for inspection. “From the gang down at Avery Printing. It needs water.”
“Hey, that’s nice of them.”
He handed the card to Schilling and took the plant into the bathroom to run water into it at the sink. Bingo! It was the right Bob Schilling.
He emerged to find Schilling sitting up straighter against his mound of pillows with a sharp look on his face. “This ain’t from Avery Printing.”
“Where’s the Duster, Bob?”
The old man closest to the hall door, who had something dripping into him from a bottle suspended beside the bed, croaked, “How can a man sleep with everybody talking?”
“Shit, you sleep twenty hours a day the way it is,” said Schilling.
“I’ll ring for the nurse if you don’t stop your obscenities.”
“Shitshitshitshitshitshit. How’s that, you old bastard?”
The decrepit oldster on the other side began to moan.
“Where’s the Duster?” asked Ballard.
“Screw you. My name isn’t on the contract.”
“You’ll end up paying for it. Joanne will see to that.”
“Noisy bastards,” exclaimed the old man who didn’t like swearing.
The other old man quit groaning abruptly. He opened a pair of very blue eyes to regard Ballard with calm deliberation. He winked. He closed his eyes. He started to groan again.
“What’s his problem?” Ballard asked.
“I’d know?”
“What’s yours?”
“Hernia operation,” said Schilling.
Ballard grinned. “Strained a gut on her, huh?”
Schilling’s already pale face turned to skim milk. Good. Get him sore enough, he might spill something useful. Or strain another gut.
Then the humor of it struck Schilling too. He suddenly grinned. Ballard suddenly liked him.
“Christ, man, don’t make me laugh! Laughing and coughing... Say, if I give up the Duster, will Joanne get it back?”
“Only if she pays the three delinquent payments and the late charges and all of the charges we’ve run up looking for it.”
Schilling relaxed against the pillows again. ‘“Yeah. Okay. Me and Emma’s heading south, anyway, man. South of the border. Duster’s at the far end of St. Joe’s, where it dead-ends at Turk. The keys are under the floor mat on the driver’s side.”
“Thanks.” Ballard paused at the sliding door to the glassed-in balcony. “I hope Joanne doesn’t catch up with you.”
“No way. We’ll be long gone in two more days. I was hero of the floor this morning, man. Had the ward nurse and the doctor and the orderlies and the nurse’s aid in here just about applauding—”
“How come?”
“I took a piss.” Then he started to laugh. Very carefully.
That lying bitch at Avery Printing. White, she had said. The Duster was two-toned blue filmed with street dust from being parked a mere two blocks from the hospital for several days. Ballard found the keys and fired it up and pulled it out of the slot so he could drop his company car in.
The Duster went into the storage lot under the freeway; after Ballard had made out the condition report, he went into the DKA basement to phone the repossession in to the police in case Schilling should change his mind and report it stolen. It had happened before, often. Then he went upstairs to Clerical to report the repossession once again. Legal notices had to be sent, the client notified, the police report confirmed in writing.