Pool_1

>> Your Wallet? <<

The night smelled of pine, creosote and wood chips. "Excuse me, are you doctor Wagner?" a simple enough question, but alone in an unlit parking lot, not what he wanted to hear unexpectedly from behind. Tightening his grasp on a grossly overstuffed portfolio which he was carrying, awful possibilities occurred to him for the very first time. Did someone from the meeting follow him out? A guarded slow half turn with a strained nod allowed that he had heard the question without committing a specific answer, "Sir?" "Aren't you forgetting something, doctor?" The doctor's free right hand began groping through his trench coat but his left arm remained tightly encircled around his documents. Beeper. Pen. Keys. Wallet? Wallet! "Oh goodness. My wallet." With embarrassment, the doctor turned toward his smiling savior, who was holding forth that missing item. "I can't imagine how I.." That was caught short by a sharp constriction suddenly around his neck from behind. Half spit and half words now choked in appeal for reason as the fellow with the wallet stepped back and observed with a detached frown. The attacker, despite his advantage of a successful surprise leap from darkness, seemed unable to finesse his misbehaving deadly wire off the doctor's collar and so, "sclhhhstttttop gak-kkkkkkkhelp kcchelchhlpp kchhhh.. chellschtop,.. " continued on. The far off labor of a train came and went as this spasmodic gurgling continued steadily on. But night sounds and gurgles of despiration were increasingly lost to the struggling grunts and ever more straining curses emanating from the assailant whose sickening work was not being made any easier by the doctor's wild flailing which bashed the thug repeatedly face-long into the car mirror. "Shit! Plfft. Cut that out, damn it! Owww. " His