Free Operation Whiplash by Dan J. Marlowe

“Luckily you have most of your eyelashes. A hairpiece you can buy, and eyebrows I can give you, after a fashion, but eyelashes gone are gone forever.”
    “When will the bandages come off for good?” I asked him on the day he assured me the final transplant had taken and we were in the last healing stage.
    “Ten days to two weeks,” he answered.
    I gave thought then to Spider Kern.
    I wanted to blow the joint after the surgery was completed but before my bandages were removed. That way no one would know what my new face looked like. Neither would I, for that matter, but I could wait.
    I’d laid a thousand of the money Dr. Azful brought me on Kern at the outset of the plastic surgery. I was buying immunity from his quaint little habits while I was healing. Even Rafe James, Kern’s ward-attendant partner, noticed the way Kern followed me into the shower with lighted cigarettes. “You really work out on the loony, don’t you, Spider?” he observed one day. “You’d think he was your mother-in-law.”
    “He shot up my buddy, Blaze Franklin,” Kern replied. “We used to be deppities together. Besides, this joker’s fakin’ it. I can tell.”
    “He’s a hell of a faker if he can take all those cigarette burns you’re handin’ out without showin’ nothing,” James said.
    The thousand I’d given Kern, in addition to buying me immunity, was intended to make him hungry for more. When Afzul told me we were close, I put myself in Kern’s way. “What’s on your mind?” he asked me.
    I almost smiled. A month previously, Spider Kern wouldn’t have admitted I had a mind. “I want a gun,” I told him.
    He blinked. He hadn’t expected anything that blunt. “Well, now you know that’s—” he began to bluster.
    “For five thousand dollars,” I cut him off.
    His lips pursed in a soundless whistle.
    I didn’t have five thousand dollars, but then I wasn’t going to get a gun from Spider Kern, either. Not while he knew anything about it. He wouldn’t get me a gun, but with his eye on the money he would pretend to get it.
    “When do you want it?” he asked me.
    I was pleased to see that the train of thought he’d been pursuing for himself was what I’d programmed for him. I touched my face. “When it’s finished,” I said. “In two weeks.”
    “Time enough. Okay, for five grand. C.O.D.”
    “C.O.D.,” I repeated.
    Kern approached me again ten days later. “You’ve got the cash?” he asked.
    “I’ll have it.” I didn’t want him thinking he could shake me down close to the deadline and find it on me.
    “No mistakes,” he warned.
    “There won’t be any.”
    “You’ve been puttin’ us on all this time, right?”
    “Would you be getting five grand if I hadn’t? But I wasn’t putting
you
on, Spider. You didn’t buy it.”
    “Goddam right I didn’t. When you plannin’ on handin’ over the money?”
    “When you deliver me to the main highway.”
    “Suits me fine,” he said. “I want you off the grounds when the blowoff comes.”
    “I’ll need clothes, shoes, and a hat. And the gun.”
    “Okay,” he said. “It works out. When we’re set, I’ll leave the stuff in the john for you to dress. We’ll walk out the ward door here together. I’ll take you down to the side door that leads out to the parkin’ lot. From there I’ll drive you to the highway in my car.”
    “Fine,” I pretended to agree. “I’ll be picking up the cash alongside the driveway between the hospital and the highway.” I stopped as though I’d said more than I intended.
    I could see him changing gears while he thought that one over. The critical moment for me would be when Spider Kern thought I had the cash in my hands. I was sure he intended to gun me down as an escapee at that moment.
    Kern was studying me. “You’re pretty sure of yourself? Pretty cool?”
    “I’m just leaving everything up to you.”
    He grunted and walked away from me.
    And so the double-con continued.
    All during the final