Free Operation Whiplash by Dan J. Marlowe Page A

week I paid close attention while Dr. Afzul rebandanged my head after each session in his office. There was less bandaging necessary each time. I would unbandage myself while he was making his preparations, and at night in bed I practiced unbandaging and rebandaging myself following Afzul’s pattern until I was sure I could do it alone.
    I still hadn’t seen myself. There was no mirror in the doctor’s office, and all my practicing was done in the dark. If Dr. Afzul ever noticed anything different in the arrangement of the bandages in his office mornings, he never said anything.
    “You’ll be getting a package in the mail one of these days with no return address on it,” I told him on the morning of what I intended to be my last day in the institution. “Don’t open it until you’re alone.”
    He knew what I meant. It would be the balance of the twenty thousand I’d promised him for the face job. I said it casually, as though it were something a long way in the future. But the little man may have had his own radar. For the first time in our assocation he went out of his office and left me alone in it. I improved the shining hour by helping myself to gauze, tape, and a makeup kit the doctor had explained would improve my appearance during the healing process.
    I would have liked to say goodbye to him when he came back, but I couldn’t trust him that far. He’d carried his share of the load. Now it was up to me. I’d already given Kern the word that tonight was the night. I’d watched Spider with his head together with his partner, Rafe James, and I knew that whatever Kern was planning for me, James had a part in it.
    I’d had a long time for contingency planning. Kern had said he’d drive me in his car to the point between the hospital and the highway, at which I would presumably hand over the five thousand. Kern would want James along, so that when the moment came no mistakes would be made in disposing of me.
    But James could hardly be waiting in Kern’s car. Even a supposed dimwit like me might reasonably be expected to balk at two-to-one odds at such a critical interval. That meant Rafe James in another car, following us.
    And the more I thought about it, the better I liked the idea.
    The final hour of waiting that night was the worst.
    A half-hour before I expected Kern’s signal for me to go to the men’s room, I got out of bed, lifted the hospital bed, and worked free the steel casters in each front leg. I stretched out on the bed again with fists balled around a caster in each hand, a precaution against Kern’s accelerating his intended double-cross.
    The signal finally came. I went into the men’s room and dressed in the clothing Kern had left for me. The jacket was too tight and the trousers too loose. I managed. I kept one hospital sock and put the two steel casters into it. I added a jumbo-sized bar of hospital soap and put the sock into a pocket.
    When I left the washroom, Kern was outside the door. “All set?” he asked. His voice sounded tense.
    I nodded. Kern led me to the ward door and unlocked it. We passed through. In the better light of the corridor I tried to locate a suspicious bulge on him that would pinpoint a weapon. I couldn’t see anything. It had to mean that Rafe James was carrying the armament.
    I was keyed up so high that Kern had the outside door unlocked and we were outside almost before I realized it. The night air felt warm and moist. It was my first breath untainted by hospital antiseptics in almost two years.
    Kern started to walk alongside the building, keeping on the grass. I knew he was headed for the parking lot where James would be waiting in another car. I took the loaded sock from my pocket. Before we reached the corner of the building, I smashed it as hard as I could behind Spider Kern’s right ear. He gave a kind of coughing grunt, stumbled, then pitched forward on his face.
    I shook a caster out of the sock and placed it in my hand with the long steel pin