Talk of The Town by Charles Williams Page B

possibly even one of the smaller sizes of buckshot.
    I thought about the first shot. He couldn’t have been over six feet behind me, and at that distance, with even a badly blown pattern, the stray pellet wouldn’t have scattered more than a fraction of an inch from the rest of the shot column. Another fraction of a second in getting my head down out of that opening and it would have exploded like a dropped water-melon. The reaction hit me. I was weak and shaky and had to sit down.
    I slumped back against the end of the seat and fumbled with a cigarette, but it was a mess before I could even get it into my mouth. I let it fall into the dust of the road beside the little tapping drops of red, and listened to the peaceful droning of an insect of some kind out in the timber. There was something chilling about the way they had outmaneuvered me. They had used the oldest con game formula in the world, and made me go for it like a greenhorn.
    They were good; they were so good they scared me. An anonymous tip that I could find the acid if I’d go out to that isolated place would have put me instantly on guard. I would have been suspicious, at least, and careful. But she hadn’t done it that way at all. The tip was something else, and I had demanded this part of it. I’d talked her into it against her will. And then she’d warned me about being followed. While he was already waiting for me there in that loft with his shotgun.
    These people were yokels?

7
    Dr. Morley dropped the shot pellet onto the white enamel surface of the table, and grunted. “Humph. Goose load.” He was a large, florid man with either a naturally bluff and hearty attitude or a chameleon-like adaptability in suiting the bedside manner to the patient. I was big, healthy, and relatively unhurt, so I was getting the he-man-to-he-man treatment, with overtones of gallows humor. “Sure wasn’t a quail hunter, was he?”
    “No,” I said. Maybe I would think of some funny stuff myself later on, when I quit hearing that gun go off just back of my head. “It was a double barrel,” I added, and winced a little as he swabbed the incision and started putting a dressing on it.
    “Oh.” He grinned. “Not much he can do with it, then.”
    Except make sure next time, I thought. I didn’t have any idea who he was or what he looked like. He could get behind me any time. The only thing I knew for certain was that I was no longer merely looking for an acid-throwing hoodlum who faced a few months in the County jail if he were caught. You didn’t treat a minor headache with brain surgery.
    “Better give me a tetanus booster,” I said. “I can’t remember when I had the last one, and that place was paved with manure.”
    “Oh, you’ve got to have a tetanus shot, all right,” he agreed with vast humor. “But first I want to do a little hem-stitching on that head. You’re not fussy about your hair-do, I hope?”
    “No,” I said. “Just so it’s still up there and not sprayed across the side of some dirty barn.”
    “Now you’re feeling better. I knew you would. You have any idea who he was or why he was after you?”
    “No,” I said.
    “I have to report it to the police, you know. Gunshot wound.”
    “Sure.” And while we were at it we could report it to the Garden Club and the nearest chapter of the Literary Society. We needed all the help we could get.
    I’d managed to get the bleeding pretty well stopped at the motel, and changed clothes before coming on into town in a cab. The receptionist in Dr. Graham’s office had said he was out on an emergency call, and recommended Morley, who was just down the hall. Their offices were in a sort of medical-dental warren occupying the second and third floors above a beauty shop and pharmacy near the east end of Springer. I looked at my watch and wished he’d hurry. It was almost four and I had to be back there to take Lane’s call at five. The local he’d shot into my scalp had taken effect now, and he