Carl Hiaasen - Skin Tight

“My place.”

“That house? No fucking way.”

“ Fraid so.”

The car phone started sliding again. Chemo groped frantically for it, and the Bonneville began to weave off the road. Maggie reached over and steadied the wheel.

Chemo got a grip on the receiver and snarled into it: “You hear what I said? No way am I going back to that damn stilt house.”

“Yes, you are. You’ll be getting another call with more information.”

“Tell me now!”

“I can’t,” Stranahan said.

“I’ll kill the Marks girl, I swear.”

“You’re not quite that stupid, are you?”

The hot flush of anger made Chemo’s face sting even worse. He said, “We’ll talk about this later. What time you gonna call?”

“Oh, not me,” Mick Stranahan said. “I won’t be the one calling back.”

“Then who?” Chemo demanded.

But the line had gone dead.

Willie played the videotape for his friend at WTVJ, the NBC affiliate in Miami. Willie’s friend was sufficiently impressed by the blood on his shirt to let him use one of the editing rooms. “You gotta see this,” Willie said.

He punched the tape into the machine and sat back to chew on his knuckles. He felt like an orphan. No Christina, no Reynaldo. He knew he should call New York, but he didn’t know what to say or who to tell.

Willie’s friend, who was a local news producer, pointed to the monitor. “Where’s that?” he asked.

“Surgery clinic over in Bal Harbour. That’s the waiting room.”

The friend said. “You were portable?”

“Right. Solo the whole way.”

“So where’s Flemm? That doesn’t look like him.”

“No, that’s somebody else.” The monitor showed an operating room where a tall bald doctor was hunched over a chubby female patient. The bald doctor was gesticulating angrily at the camera and barking for a nurse to call the authorities. “I don’t know who that was,” Willie said. “Wrong room.”

“Now you’re back in the hallway, walking. People are yelling, covering their faces.”

“Yeah, but here it comes,” Willie said, leaning forward. “Bingo. That’s Ray on the table.”

“Jeez, what’re they doing?”

“I don’t know.”

“It looks like a goddamn Caesarean

Willie said, “Yeah, but it was supposed to be a nose job.”

“Good!”

The audio portion of the tape grew louder.

“Yeah, that’s him!”

“Who? That’s Ray?”

“ Reynaldo Flemm.”

“I toldyou he looked familiar. “

“ Who? Reynaldo who?”

“That guyfromfrom the TV. “

“This has gone far enough… “

When the frame filled with Reynaldo Flemm’s gaping muzzled face, Willie’s friend hit the Pause button and said, “Fucker never looked better.”

“You know him?”

“I knew him back from Philadelphia. Back when he was still Ray Fleming.”

“You’re kidding,” Willie said.

“No, man, that’s his real name. Raymond Fleming. Then he got on this bi-ethnic kick… ‘Reynaldo Flemm’-half Latin, half Eastern bloc. Told everybody in the business that his mother was a Cuban refugee and his father was with the Yugoslavian resistance. Shit, I laugh about it but that’s when his career really took off.”

Willie said, “Romania. What he told me, his old man was with the Romanian underground.”

“His old man sold Whirlpools in Larchmont, I know for a fact. Let’s see the rest.”

Willie pressed the Fast Forward and squeaked the tape past the part when he confronted Dr. Rudy Graveline about Victoria Barletta; he didn’t want his producer friend to hear the dead woman’s name, on the off chance that the story could be salvaged. Willie slowed the tape to normal speed just as he zoomed in on the doctor’s quavering eyes.

“Boris Karloff,” said Willie’s friend.

“Watch.”

The camera angle widened to show Rudy Graveline feverishly toiling over Reynaldo’s belly. Then came a mist of blood, and one of the nurses began shouting for the surgeon to stop.

“ Geez,” said Willie’s friend, looking slightly queasy. “What’s happening?”

The doctor abruptly wheeled from the operating table to confront the camera directly. In his bloody right hand was a wicked-looking instrument connected to a long plastic tube. The device was making an audible slurp-slurp noise.

“ Your turn, fat boy!”

Willie’s friend gestured at the monitor and said: “He called you fat boy?”

“Watch!”

On the screen, the surgeon lunged forward with the pointy slurp-slurping device. There was a cry, a dull clunk. Then the picture got jerky and went gray.

Willie pressed the Stop button. “I hauled ass,” he explained to his friend. “He came at me with that sucking… thing, so Itook off.”

“Don’t blame you, man. But what about Ray?”

Willie took the videotape out of the editing console. “That’s what’s got me scared. I get in the van and take off, right? Stop at the nearest phone booth and call this clinic. Whispering Palms is the name.”

“Yeah, I’ve heard ofit.”

“So I call. Don’t say who I am. I ask about Reynaldo Flemm. I say he’s my brother. I’m s’posed to pick him up after the operation. Ask can I come by and get him. Nurse gets on the line and wants to know what’s going on. She wants to know how come Ray was using a phony name when he checks in at the place. Johnny Tiger, some shit like that. I tell her I haven’t got the faintest-maybe he was embarrassed, didn’t want his nose job to turn up in the gossip columns. Then she says, well, he’s not here. She says the doctor, this Rudy Graveline, the nurse says he drove Ray to Mount Sinai. She says she’s not allowed to say anything more on the phone. So I haul ass over to Emergency at Sinai and guess what? No Ray anywhere. Fact there’s nothing but strokes and heart attacks. No Reynaldo Flemm!”

Willie’s friend said, “This is too fucking weird. Even for Miami.”

“Best part is, now I gotta call New York and break the news.”

“Oh, man.”

Willie said, “Maybe I’ll ship the tape first.”

“Might as well,” agreed the producer. “What about Ray? Think he’sall right?”

“No,” said Willie. “You want the truth, I’d be fucking amazed if he was all right.”

The nurses had wanted to call 911, but Rudy Graveline had said no, there wasn’t time. I’ll take him myself, Rudy had said. He had run to the parking lot (stopping only at the front desk to pick up Reynaldo’s $15,000), got the Jag and pulled up at the staff entrance.

Back in the operating suite, the anesthetist had said: “Everything’s going flat.”

“Then hurry, goddammit!”

They had gotten Reynaldo on a gurney and wheeled him to Rudy’s car and bundled him in the passenger seat. The scrub nurse even tried to hook up the safety belt.

“Oh, forget it,” Rudy had said.

“Butit’sa law.”

“Go back to work!” Rudy had commanded. The Jaguar had peeled rubber on its way out.

Naturally he had no intention of driving to Mount Sinai Hospital. What was the point? Rudy glanced at the man in the passenger seat and still did not recognize him from television. True, Reynaldo Flemm was not at his telegenic best. His eyes were half-closed, his mouth was half-open, and his skin was the color ofbad veal.

He was also exsanguinating all over Rudy’s fine leather seats and burled walnut door panels. “Great,” Rudy muttered. “What else.” As the surgeon sped south on Alton Road, he took out the portable telephone and called his brother’s tree company.

“George Graveline, please. It’s an emergency.”

“ Uh, he’s not here.”