Unwritten Laws 01(28)

Leaving her in Exam Three, Tom went to the front of the clinic, checked his shirt for blood, then opened the shuddering front door.

What he saw on the concrete steps was not the police, but three Klansmen he knew all too well. All were employees of Triton Battery. In front stood Frank Knox with his blazing eyes and military crew cut. Behind him stood a giant of a man named Glenn Morehouse, holding up the wiry frame of Sonny Thornfield, whose face was twisted in agony. Thornfield’s T-shirt was soaked with blood, and even in the weak light spilling from the doorway, Tom could see his left pant leg plastered to his swollen thigh, a belt fastened tight just above the knee. All three men were shivering in the cold.

“Evenin’, Doc,” said Frank Knox. “Your wife told us you was out on a house call, but she didn’t know where. We couldn’t go to the hospital with this, so we was gonna bust in and try to use your equipment. Then we saw your light.”

“Why can’t you go to the hospital?” Tom asked in the most ingenuous voice he could muster. “Did you rob a bank or something?”

Frank laughed. “Nah. This is nigger trouble. There’s too much FBI in town to risk the hospital. We got a doctor over in Brookhaven who helps us out sometimes—a morphine addict—but that’s too far for this. I’m worried the bullet nicked his femoral artery.”

Tom shook his head. “That leg would be much bigger, or he’d be dead. I’m surprised you didn’t call Dr. Lucas. He’s a surgeon, which is what it looks like you need.”

Knox snorted in contempt. “That son of a bitch don’t care about nothin’ but his bank balance. You think he’d get out of bed to help a workin’ man?”

“Well—”

“Frank can patch this leg,” Thornfield said through gritted teeth. “We just need the equipment.”

“I saw a lot of gunshot wounds in the Pacific,” Knox explained. “Even patched a couple myself. But I’d feel a hell of a lot better with a trained pair of hands on this.”

Tom bent and pretended to examine the wound by porch light, but he knew full well he was looking at Luther Davis’s handiwork. “How did this happen?”

“You don’t want to know, Doc,” Thornfield grunted.

“How ’bout we get off this porch?” Frank suggested. “Where you can take a better look?”

Before Tom could protest, all three men were inside the clinic, the door closed behind them. “Where you want us?” Frank asked.

Knox knew where the surgery was. Most of the Triton Battery men had been to the clinic for physicals, if nothing else. Tom was afraid that if they even went close to the surgery, Luther Davis would charge out and finish the work he’d started across the river.

“There’s an examining table in the room next to my private office,” Tom said, pointing. “Down there, to your right. Room one. Go on in there.”

While the men carried their comrade through the waiting room like exhausted soldiers, Tom walked back toward the surgery. “I’ll be right there,” he assured them. “I need some of Dr. Lucas’s instruments.”

“Go help him, Glenn,” Frank ordered.

“No, I’ve got it!” Tom called with a pounding heart, looking back to make sure he wasn’t being followed.

He hurried back to the surgery, flicked on the light, and held his finger to his lips. Luther was crouched in a fighting stance with his pistol, while Jimmy sat on the examining table, motionless as an ebony Buddha.

“It’s your Klan friends,” Tom whispered. He looked at Luther. “The one you shot’s bleeding like a hog.”

“Good,” Luther whispered, rising and pacing in the little room. “I’m gon’ have to kill them goddamn sons of bitches yet.”

“Stop taking the Lord’s name in vain,” Jimmy said mildly.

“You’re not killing anybody,” Tom said, blocking the big man’s path. “There’s three of them, and they’ve certainly armed themselves by now. You sit here and don’t move a muscle. If you make any noise, you’ll have klukkers all over you. And nobody wins a gunfight in a twelve-by-twelve room. I can tell you that from experience. Understood?”

After Luther nodded, Tom grabbed some instruments and went back to the room where he’d sent the Klansmen.

The next forty-five minutes were the tensest of his civilian life. All three Klansmen were accustomed to dealing with wounds, but their residual anger was palpable. Most alarming, they knew the identities of “both them niggers” who’d tried to “personally integrate the Flyway” that night. As Tom probed Sonny Thornfield’s leg for the .25 slug, Frank said, “What you doing up here at this hour, Doc? Your wife said you was on a house call.”