Apricot brandy Read Online Free PDF Page B

him. Wondering suddenly if his own long career here could really be nearing its end? “I’m going to check your time-slip very closely this month— I want to see plenty of overtime billed there.”
    “Oh, Doctor.” She flapped a deprecating hand at him and withdrew.
    The sound of a distant door closing announced her exit, then silence filled the building. Harst murmured to his mini-recorder, completing his observations on his subject’s severe thoracic damage which included the penetration of the pericardium and the heart itself by the ends of two of the crushed ribs. That had been a harrowing moment, pulling into the rear lot, with Jack’s body-bag in plain sight in the bed of Marty’s truck, and finding the station was like a kicked anthill. The meat wagon and three sheriff’s patrol cars, deputies standing around talking, EMTs rolling bodies inside. Marty parked a short way off and advanced aggressively, keeping them away from his truck. But when he’d talked to the responding officer— Bud “Burly” Babcock, looking very ill at ease to encounter his Assistant Chief Deputy here at this hour— Marty found the situation was going to be marvelously manageable.
    Pursuing Sheriff’s Department policy of letting no immigrant agricultural workers pass unscrutinized, Babcock had “initiated a pursuit” when the van failed to pull over for a tail-light violation. He indicated that he “might have fired a warning shot” just before the van hit the tree.
    “You might have fired a warning shot? Let me see your sidearm.”
    “I did fire one, sir. I already reloaded. I was, ah, confused after the crash.”
    Marty let just the right rectum-puckering pause go by. “Are you telling me this, Babcock, because you think we might find a bullet in one of these men?”
    “Sir, I fired in the air , I shot way high, I know — ”
    “Shut up. Just shut up.” Marty pantomimed deliberation, letting the moron’s balls contract a few more notches. “Have you filed your report?”
    “No sir.” Already the ox was feeling a stir of hope.
    “I want it on my desk first thing in the morning. Leave the warning shot out. If we don’t find anything in these bodies, we’ll leave it that way.”
    “Thank you, sir. I just— ”
    “Just shut up. Leave us what ID you’ve got on these guys and all of you get out of my sight. And Babcock, even if this blows over, I’m not going to forget it. I’m going to be thinking it over and thinking you over.”
    So, when they were gone, Harst and Marty had installed Jack Fox in one of the freezer-drawers and locked it. And all day today, through the last ten hours, the doctor had felt Jack’s secret presence in that freezer drawer, a hidden gravitational center around which his thoughts had orbited during his toil on the Pakistanis. Their dark bodies had seemed unreal, like phantoms, compared to the reality of Jack Fox hidden so near.
    As he loosely sutured the thoracic flaps and turned his subject over on the stainless steel table, positioning the throat on the pillow-block to present the back of the neck, Harst imagined Jack to be sardonically smiling. Jack had been familiar with certain small chicaneries the doctor had practiced here, for their mutual benefit, over the years… .
    This fellow had been the van’s driver and, yes, he had what looked very much like a bullet entry on the cervical spine. When the scalpel had flensed away a bit of muscle, voila . The third cervical vertebra was shattered and more than half ablated. Plainly the work of a bullet. He murmured into his recorder: “Laceration of the neck and damage to the cervical vertebrae consistent with impact injuries sustained in the collision.”
    He clicked off the recorder and stood sharing an ironic after-silence with Jack. Very soon now, when Carver came down here, the doctor would see Jack again— for the last time in his life. His tears flowed once more.
    Eyes blurred, he opened the Pakistani’s drawer, picked him