Slocum 394 : Slocum and the Fool's Errand (9781101545980) (5 page)

“Mark's a proud man,” the doctor said. “That's why he didn't ask you to stay. So I'm asking.”

“Appreciate the vote of confidence, Doc, but you shouldn't let one rough night rattle you so much. Once word spreads about what happened to Bill and his boys once they got here, I doubt any gunman will be too quick to visit this town anytime soon.”

Since verbal brawls were obviously his preferred arena, Bower steeled himself for another round. “Yes, but isn't it plausible that there may be friends or associates of this man from Oklahoma that remain unaccounted for?”

“I'm not even sure if he is from Oklahoma.”

“Then why on earth would he attach that to his name?”

Slocum had never been so grateful to hear a piercing scream as he was when one such noise ripped down Main Street since it was loud enough to distract the doctor and end the increasingly maddening conversation. Unfortunately, whoever was doing the screaming seemed to be headed straight for Bower's office.

Doc Bower finished up Slocum's stitches in a rush. The job wasn't perfect and it sure as hell wasn't painless, but the wound was closed and the needle was removed from his flesh. “Here,” the doctor said while tossing some bandages at him. “Since you fancy yourself a field surgeon, perhaps you could dress that arm in my stead. It seems I have another patient on the way.”

“Sure thing, Doc.”

Slocum wrapped the bandages around his arm, and by the time he was tying them off, the source of all that screaming staggered into the large windowed front door of the office. Not through the door. Into it. His height was difficult to determine because he was hunched over so badly, but he couldn't have been any taller than Slocum. Judging by the way he gripped the front of his body and staggered repeatedly into the door like a bird flopping into a freshly cleaned window, he seemed to have been knocked in the head. He may have been shot in the stomach, although there wasn't quite enough blood to fit that bill. When Doc Bower tried to open his office door while the wounded man repeatedly pushed it shut in his attempts to get inside, it put on a show that was amusing enough for Slocum to sit down and watch for a while.

“For heaven's sake,” Bower sighed. “Step back.”

“I'm hurt! Need a damn doctor!” the man outside wailed.

“I am a doctor.”

“Then let me in!”

“Step back, I implore you.”

“But I need to get
in
!”

Slocum couldn't help chuckling. All that was missing was a piano accompaniment.

Finally, Bower timed an attempt so he could open the door after the man outside bounced off it. For a finale, he managed to clip the man in the side of the face with the edge of the door when the bloody fellow tried to rush inside. After catching the frantic man, the doctor looked over to Slocum with a stern glare that proved he knew exactly how amused he was. Either that, or Slocum had accidentally laughed louder than he'd intended.

“You should probably get a door that opens in,” Slocum offered.

“I didn't build the place,” Bower snapped.

After taking a breath, the man from outside sobbed, “Yeah. Fix yer door!”

Biting back his retort to those comments, Bower asked, “What happened to you, sir?”

Now that the man was standing beside Bower, Slocum could see he was a bit shorter than the doctor, which made him a few inches shorter than him. A thick mop of tan hair was snarled with everything from dust to bits of dead leaves, and the beard covering the lower half of his face obviously hadn't been tended in weeks. Slocum wasn't the sort who normally took notice of the color of a man's eyes, but it was hard to miss the huge, cloudy green orbs embedded in this one's panicked face as he let out another wailing scream.

“Take a breath,” the doctor said.

The man drew a breath and screamed again.

“You'll have to calm down, sir,” Bower said.

The man hollered.

“Sir!”

Another scream.

Slocum stepped forward and swung a quick backhand that caught the screaming man in the face. It was so fast and so unexpected that it silenced the wounded fellow as well as the doctor trying to tend to him.

“Go ahead, Doc,” Slocum said as he sat back down.

Still stunned by the display, Bower straightened the spectacles on his nose and said, “Yes, well, let's take a look at what we're dealing with here.”

The wounded man was still simpering as Bower peeled his arms away from where they were clenched around his torso. Instead of a stomach wound or anything on his body, the source of the blood was the man's right hand. When the doctor tried to get a closer look, the man looked as if he was going to start wailing again. One quick glance in Slocum's direction nipped that idea in the bud and he choked down a shuddering breath.

“Were you shot?” Bower asked. “There's been a lot of that going around, you know.”

His lame attempt at a joke didn't come close to making a dent in the wounded man's panic. Slocum was reminded of a little boy who'd cut his finger and couldn't settle down enough to get a single word out. Of course, when the man finally extended his right arm to show his hand to the doctor, it was clear that he suffered from a lot more than a cut.

“Oh my,” Bower said. He stretched a hand back toward Slocum and said, “Hand me a towel, please.”

It took a few seconds for Slocum to turn and find the small cabinet stocked with towels, washcloths, and bandages. By the time he picked up some linens and turned back around to hand them to the doctor, he could see even more of what had brought the man into Bower's office. The man's hand was slick with blood that covered it like a thick coat of wet paint. As far as he could tell, the only finger that was still intact was the smallest one. The other three had been ripped off to leave thin stumps of varying lengths. The thumb seemed to be all there, but was covered with too much blood for him to be certain. Slocum was no stranger to gruesome sights, but this one was enough to give him a moment's pause. As for the doctor, he became calmer as more of the grievous injury was revealed.

“I see three fingers have been partially severed,” Bower said. “Can you feel this?”

When the doctor touched each stump, the man reacted as if he'd been prodded with a red-hot poker. “Hell yes, I can feel that!”

“Well, it would be worse if you couldn't feel anything in those extremities,” Bower said while taking a towel from Slocum. “How long ago did the injury occur?”

The man was having trouble making more than a few unintelligible sounds. His face looked more like a chalky mask beneath several layers of dust and whiskers.

“Sir. Tell me your name.”

“J . . . Jack.”

“Jack?”

“Jack Halsey.”

“Pleased to meet you, Mr. Halsey. I'm Dr. Bower. Take a breath and sit still while I clean this wound. John, get me some water, won't you?”

“Sure, Doc.”

“You'll have to sit still, Jack, if you want me to tend to this.”

“And you'll have to just do yer damn job,” Jack replied. “Make sure I don't die from this hand bleedin' out and stop flappin' yer damn gums!”

“I know it hurts, but—”

Jack attempted to reach across his body with his left hand to pull the pistol from a holster strapped around his waist. That movement was enough to twist the hand in Bower's grasp, which sent another wave of pain through his entire body.

“Am I going to have to ask my friend here to restrain you?” Bower asked.

Slocum had returned with a basin of water, and Jack looked up at him as if he were staring into the face of the devil himself. Twitching in the spot where he'd been backhanded a little while ago, Jack meekly replied, “No sir.”

“Good. Now sit still and let me do my job. I think it'd be prudent for you to be relieved of your weapon. John's going to take it from you and you're going to let him.”

Jack did as he was told, making certain to keep his eyes on Slocum.

After lifting the gun from Jack's holster, Slocum walked over to set it on a table at the far end of the room. It was a rusted old .44, and it looked as if it had been pieced together from bits of other guns that had been left in a scrap pile. Considering the sorry state of the weapon, he would have hated to see the pieces that Jack had left behind. “What happened to your hand?” Slocum asked as he approached the doctor and his newest patient. “Were you foolish enough to pull the trigger of that piece of shit gun you're carrying?”

In short order, Bower washed away enough of the blood to get a clearer look at Jack's hand. The first two fingers had been torn off messily above the knuckle. Half of the third finger remained, and it seemed the tip of his thumb had been sheared as well. As he'd deduced earlier, the little finger was unscathed.

“I'll have you know I made that pistol!” Jack said.

“Oh, I think I figured that much out for myself.”

Wringing out the bloody cloth he was using, Bower dipped it into the water and continued dabbing at Jack's hand. “How did this happen?”

“I was attacked by wolves.”

Bower stopped what he was doing and waited. When no more of an explanation seemed to be coming, he asked, “Are you joking?”

“No, I'm not joking.”

Slocum leaned in to get a look at the fingers. Now that they'd been on display for so long, the sight of them wasn't nearly so unsettling. The flesh was shredded and the skin was torn. Nubs of bone protruding from the skinny stumps were splintered and jagged. “Looks about right to me.”

“Well, thank you for your approval, asshole.”

“Manners,” Bower reminded his patient.

Since the doctor still had a hold of his savaged hand, Jack choked down whatever other foul names he had in mind for Slocum. “It was wolves,” he said. When he looked down at his hand, he paled even more and forced himself to look over at the office's front window. A few locals stood there, gazing inside. Although they'd been anxious to see what had become of the man who'd run screaming down the street, the two old ladies and a man in his forties were in no hurry to stay once they caught sight of Jack's hand.

“Sure it was more than one wolf?” Slocum asked.

“What difference does that make?”

“First of all, you're in pretty good shape even if only one wolf got a hold of you. Second, now's not exactly the time for you to be lying about what happened. Save the impressive stories for the ladies.”

“I'll have to agree,” Bower said. “It could make a big difference if there were anything like toxic substances involved or—”

“Wolves ain't toxic enough for ya?” Jack growled.

“More than one?” Slocum asked.

Through gritted teeth, Jack replied, “Just one got me, but it was part of a pack.”

Before the other two could lock horns again, Bower said, “That's good enough for me. I've got plenty of work to do and need to get to it.”

“Do you need any help, Doc?”

“No!” Jack said. “That one already struck me once.”

“Because you deserved it,” Bower was quick to say. Jack started to slump over as he finally lost the last bit of color in his face. When he passed out, Slocum had rushed around in time to catch him.

“Where should I take him?” Slocum asked.

“To that bed over there,” the doctor replied while pointing to a bed that butted against a cabinet containing what looked to be a wide array of surgical instruments.

“You got any rope?”

Thinking back to the previous night, Bower didn't so much as chuckle at the joke. “Just hold him down, if you would. I'd like to do as much work as possible while he's out, but it would only make things worse if he came to at the wrong moment.”

“Sure thing.”

The next few hours went by quickly and Slocum was too preoccupied to keep an accurate count of how many had passed. No matter what problem he may have had with the doctor regarding his mannerisms or conversational ability, Slocum couldn't fault the man's professional skills. Bower cleaned up Jack's hand until it was cleaner than the rest of him and then got to work on the fingers.

One by one, the roughest sections of skin were trimmed away and what remained looked less like something that had been gnawed on by a wild animal. At one point, Jack stirred. Slocum held him down, but didn't have to do that for long because the doctor took that opportunity to file down a sharp splinter of protruding bone. His movements were quick and efficient, but caused enough pain to send the wounded man back into unconsciousness.

“Almost done,” Bower said.

“Good. I think I've seen enough doctoring to last me for a good, long while.”

“I wouldn't have pegged you for the squeamish sort.”

“Not squeamish, Doc. I've just had my fill.”

Glancing over at the table where Jack's gun rested, Bower asked, “So do you think this man is dangerous?”

“I don't think you need to worry about someone who can't keep their hands out of a wolf's mouth,” Slocum replied.

“He strikes me as something more than some unlucky vagrant. He is armed, after all.”

“Most everyone is.”

“So he strikes you as a stable man?”

“I didn't say that,” Slocum clarified. “I just meant that most everybody who rides on their own from one town to another carries a gun.”

“In case you haven't noticed, this town has been getting more than its share of armed visitors lately. Do you think this could be one of the men associated with that Oklahoma person?”