Chicago Typewriter

13.

She lived, for a while. They extracted the bullet and she was healing, but she couldn't eat anymore. They kept her alive by dripping sugar water into her veins.

Chief Largo was back on his feet in a couple of days, but he wasn't the same. He began slobbering all over Millie and Ike. He even blubbered over Buster during visits to the jail. He looked me with accusing eyes. I figured out why: I would shortly be the star witness at the trial of Buster Largo. My testimony would keep him in jail a long time. Years and years, with nary an Egyptian cigarette to be had. Buster's youth would pass away to middle age before he saw the world without bars on the windows. He deserved every lonely minute of it.

I saw how the chief saw me, and I started looking for a transfer to someplace far away.

I spent a lot of time with Bianca in the hospital. I made sure she had Nightfire No. 2 and lipstick. She was unhappy, lying there. A blur of days passed. She grew thinner quickly.

One night, going to her room, I passed a doctor. He avoided my gaze. Bianca seemed about the same, but something had changed in her voice. Her tone still caressed the ear, velvety and mysterious, but she put her words together in a different order. She spoke in past tense. "I liked my life, you know, Drew. The men, the fast driving, the crazy ideas that were obviously stupid but I did them anyway for the kick."

I knew. She had told me a lot of stories.

"You're a sap for being so sentimental about me, you stubborn gumshoe," she said. But she said it with a smile, and I stroked her hair and smiled back. She let me kiss her, but the bittersweet, tender kisses weren't the storybook romance ones I planned. I didn't care. They were kisses. When she got sleepy, I tucked her in.

Next morning, the hospital called. She had died. She surprised the doctors, who thought she had weeks left. I didn't poke into the matter, but I had seen the guilty look on that doctor's face. If I were a doctor and the vixen with the perfume aura asked me for some pills, I know I'd give them to her.

Some blur of days later, as soon as I could function like a human being, I bought a Model T. I packed my comic book collection into it and headed for my next job. Some town that started with an "H." On the East Coast somewhere.