Ross Macdonald

 “You didn’t happen to shoot him yourself by any chance?” 

“You're very acute. Naturally I shot him. This is my getaway.”” 

I was merely asking. I couldn’t help noticing the blood on you.” 

He smiled with soft malice. His changeable mouth, both sensitive and brutal, tempted my fist the way a magnet tempts iron. He was big enough, and not too old, but he was a little ripe. I put my fist in my pocket and walked around to the other side of the car. 

I switched on the dome light. Tony Aquista was still blowing his sad small bubbles. His eyes were completely closed now. He was blind and deaf with the effort to hold onto life. The ambulance sighed in the road. 

I followed it on its return trip through the highway suburbs, past motels and cabins and trailer parks where soldiers and salesmen and tourists and migrant workers passed temporary nights with temporary bedmates. At a six-lane wye where two main roads converged, the ambulance turned off the highway to the left. 

I missed the green arrow and had to wait. The hospital was visible in the distance, a long white box of a building pierced with lights. Nearer the highway, the lighted screen of an outdoor theater, on which two men were beating each other to the rhythm of passionate music, rose against the night like a giant dream of violence. 

I found the ambulance entrance at the rear of the hospital. Its red electric sign spelled out EMERGENCY and cast a hellish glow on the oil-stained concrete driveway. Before I went in, I took a clean shirt out of my bag and put it on.