Powder Burn - Carl Hiaasen [8]
He had covered perhaps half the distance to the carnage when the passenger noticed him.
A split-second subconscious image impressed itself, like a Polaroid, on Meadows as he ran. The passenger was tall and burly. He wore aviator’s sunglasses. The face was oval and cruel, with pronounced ridges above the eye and prominent black brows.
The passenger raised his gun with a casual flick. He fired once.
Meadows hadn’t the time to recognize the danger, nor did he recognize the searing, angry blow that snapped his right leg from under him and sent him, in an uncontrolled slow-motion pirouette, sprawling onto the hot asphalt.
He did not hear the screams when they came. He did not sense the fresh wind that announced the squall. And he did not feel the rain that consumed the orphaned ice cream and sent probing red rivulets coursing through the gutter.
Chapter 2
“YOU ARE a lucky man.” The voice came from the end of a long tunnel. Meadows, lying on white sheets in a white room, peered up through the voice at the swarthy man behind it.
“Why am I lucky?”
“The bullet just tore away some flesh. If it had hit the bone, you really would have been in deep shit. That was an Ingram he hit you with, a submachine, real nasty. You should have seen what it did to those two guys in the car.”
“Who are you?”
“My name’s Nelson.”
“Doctor?”
“Cop.”
With an effort, Meadows hiked himself higher on the pillows. The movement sent an arc of pain along his right side, but it also chased some of the cotton candy from his head.
Two men stood by the bed, one tall and blond and muscular, the other shorter, leaner and darker. “That’s Pincus,” the dark man said, pointing. “My partner.” The blond man wore the first crew cut Meadows had seen in years.
“Good afternoon, Mr. Meadows. We would like a few minutes if you feel up to it, sir,” said Pincus.
Meadows didn’t feel like much of anything. He knew where he was. He knew his wound was more painful than serious. The big-busted nurse had told him that, had urged him to eat a lunch he didn’t want and then had left him. He had lain there a long time, drowsing in the sunshine like an old man, seeking without much success to rearrange jumbled swatches of memory into a coherent beginning, middle and end. He had been shot, and now he was in the hospital. That seemed plain enough. He did not ask about Sandy and little Jessica; he didn’t have to. That much he remembered with a terrible clarity that would ache for the rest of his life.
The tall cop, Pincus, unexpectedly proffered a thin white envelope.
“This is your property. Would you sign the receipt, please?”
Startled, Meadows scrawled his name on a form the police officer supported on his notebook. He peeled open the envelope and inverted it. Four soiled twenty-dollar bills drifted onto his chest. Meadows stared at them dully.
“You had just withdrawn a hundred dollars from the bank when you were shot,” Pincus said. “This is all we could find.”
The dark cop laughed.
“You’ll never see the other twenty. Somebody grabbed it off the street,” he said. “And if it was me, I’d take about half of what’s left and buy a bottle of whiskey for that big black dude.”
“Arthur?” He knew someone had come running, had knelt over him, stayed with him, but through the haze of pain he had not been able to see who. So it had been Arthur.
“He had the bleeding pretty well controlled by the time the ambulance got there. If he hadn’t been so quick, it could have been a lot worse,” Nelson said.
Meadows winced.
“Do you want me to call the nurse?”
“No, I’m all right.”
Smoke from the fat cigar wreathed the policeman’s face. It nibbled at his mustache, poked at deep-set eyes and fingered his long black hair. He was a Latino, Meadows concluded, almost certainly Cuban. You had to tell by looking. His English was perfect.
“Sorry, not supposed to smoke in here,” Nelson said with