Odor of Violets, Baynard Kendrick [best short novels .txt] 📗

up splinters three inches from his ear. He hoisted his feet with a wrestler’s trick, planted them in the doctor’s stomach, and heaved the struggling man free. The hurtling body smashed into the nurse, slamming her against the wall.

Spud came to his feet like a rubber ball. Before the woman could raise the gun again, he hooked a left to her jaw. She sagged down unconscious to the floor. Spud snatched the automatic from her limp fingers and cracked the butt down twice on the doctor’s head. He ripped the covers from the helpless form, undid the belt, and jerked the interne’s trousers free, slipping them on over his own bare legs and tucking in the hospital gown. The doctor’s white coat followed. He took the key from the coat pocket and unlocked the door.

He pushed the switch, turning off the ceiling lights. Again the room was dim, lit only by the table lamp. Spud turned the knob and opened the door cautiously. He stuck out his head, reconnoitering the dimness of a narrow uncarpeted hall.

From the ventilator up in the corner of the room a gun popped with no more noise than a champagne cork being drawn. With a bullet in his back Spud sank slowly to his knees just as he stepped through the door.

CHAPTER XXII

1

OFFICERS SHERIDAN and Dietz of the Connecticut State Police had just turned their patrol car halfway between Bridgeport and the New York State line on the Merritt Parkway and headed north again when they got the call: —

“Watch out for black convertible coupé,” the radio announcer droned into the darkness of their car. “New York license N-0002. Better block the tollhouse if necessary to stop this car. Driver must be drunk. Outran patrol car at entrance to Parkway doing better than ninety-two.”

“Holy mackerel!” said Trooper Dietz. “Maybe if we step on it and head her toward New York City, we’ll be in time to see him go by. He’d outrun this crate of ours if he’s doing seventy-two. The last time I got her up to sixty-eight, she nearly threw a wheel.”

“What are you grousing about?” asked Sheridan. “We can always fire our guns at him and toot the siren.”

“Yes—if we see him,” said Dietz. “If he got up to ninety-two at the entrance to the Parkway, by the time he gets here he’ll be running a temperature of a hundred and four.”

He whirled the patrol car skillfully through a cutoff and backed it into a siding to wait for the prey.

“Maybe it’s Barney Oldfield trying out a new set of tires he wants to give his kids for Christmas,” Sheridan asserted with a sigh. “You remember last week when that guy—”

He broke off. Far up the road they heard a roar.

“Step on it,” he told Dietz. “You wouldn’t want New York State to pick up such a fine.”

“Hell,” said Dietz, “if I have to run him across the state line, he’ll be so far ahead the New York cops’ll never see him, and they’ll probably pinch me.”

He shot the patrol car out onto the Parkway with the siren pulled wide. The band of light that flashed before his eyes followed by a streak of black gave him the impression that somebody had suddenly drawn a paintbrush along the sky. Dietz coughed uneasily and jammed the accelerator to the floor.

“Don’t try to pass him,” Sheridan advised facetiously. “It’d be dangerous at this speed, particularly if he’s drunk.”

“I don’t think he’s drunk. I think he’s had a shot and he’s trying to fly.”

“Look out,” Sheridan warned. A sedan was pulled up at the side of the road.

“He missed her,” said Dietz as they flashed by. A distraught lady leaned from the automobile window waving her hands hysterically.

Warning signs reading “Slow” popped up and were gone. Ahead, the yellow lights of the tollhouse rushed to meet them. Dietz heaved a sigh of relief. Parked in wedge formation beyond the tollhouse, four other state cars were blocking the road efficiently.

Sheridan wiped sweat from his forehead and climbed out as Dietz braked down beside the New York coupé. A man in a felt slouch hat and a camel-hair coat was sitting behind the wheel.

He looked at Sheridan as though the officer were a bad oyster and said, “Good God! I paid my toll—why are you fellows bothering me?”

“There’s a fifty-mile speed limit on this parkway,” Sheridan began.

“Yes,” the man exclaimed impatiently, “and it’s too damn slow.” He reached down for the pocket of his car and Sheridan, ready to suspect anything, went after his gun.

“Don’t shoot,” said the man. “I’m Santa Claus, and I’m heading for a Christmas party for motherless orphans.”

“You’re heading for the cooler,” said Sheridan.

“That’s what you think.” The man opened his fist and laid his hand palm up on the side of the door.

“Nuts!” said Sheridan. “I wish you fellows would shoot off rockets.”

He turned around and called to the blockading cars. “It’s a Sewer Inspector, boys, from the WPA. Get out of his way and let him go by.”

The man at the wheel looked up into the rear-view mirror and with one hand went carefully to work on the shoulder of his camel-hair coat, brushing off imaginary snow.

2

The clerk behind the desk in the apartment hotel at Seventy-second and Riverside Drive looked up from working on his transcript just in time to see the man with slightly graying hair disappear behind the elevator door. The clerk sat idly chewing his pen, watching the elevator indicator ascend to the top floor.

“Who was that?” he asked when the boy came down again.

“Somebody calling on Captain Maclain.”

“In a pig’s ear it is! Why don’t you send people over to the desk when they come in? Captain Maclain’s away.”

“So’s my father, most of the time,” the elevator boy said disgustedly, “but my mother’s almost always there.”

“I can figure out without using mathematics,” said the clerk, “just what days your father was gone. Mr. Savage is out, too, and there’s nobody up