Randy White - Tampa Burn

But the door was locked from the outside. She considered pounding on the door, trying to get someone’s attention, but the fat woman so terrified her that she didn’t risk it.

There was nothing in the room to read, so the doctor began to pace. She continued to pace, her brain scanning frantically for a solution. Why was this happening? The woman had said something about her microscope being moved into the ship’s sick bay. What could that possibly mean?

Over and over again, Dr. Valerie went through her fragmented memories of the night before. Picturing what she could visualize of the man who had abducted her. Trying to recall his every word.

He’d said that he was a patient. Was he?

No. She became certain of that. She remembered her patients. She would have recognized something about him: his voice, his size, the rough language.

He’d also said they’d exchanged e-mails. But that wasn’t true either. She had so little free time that, aside from close friends, she seldom wrote to anyone.

There were a couple of exceptions: the Nigerian pre-med student that she was mentoring, and the Central American girl who’d been badly burned and who had the terrible, outlaw doctor as a physician. In fact, she’d written to Mary Perez the previous morning, offering more technical advice for the film script the poor girl was writing for her class at the University of Nicaragua.

Dr. Valerie’s name was signed to all of the correspondence they received on the web page, but her staff handled all that.

So, the answer was no. They had not exchanged e-mails. Yet, one of the few things she remembered clearly was that he’d said that he had e-mailed her about a boy. The boy who was his donor. Clearly, the boy was real-he’d apparently told the big man about the new anticonvulsion drugs. And the man had said something about a plane crash.

None of it made sense.

Valerie Santos was an articulate, brilliant woman and, like most overachievers, obsessive. She continued to pace, her mind scanning for some explanation, until the ship began to lift and roll too much, and she had to lie down on the cot.

That was around eight-thirty P.M.

At around nine, she stiffened, then leaped to her feet, whispering to herself, “Oh my God… oh my God. No! My surgical microscope?”

All the little pieces of the puzzle had suddenly drifted into place. Mary Perez’s screenplay had to do with a plane crash. The main character was a plastic surgeon who had to do a full facial transplant under Third World conditions. The donor was a boy who was supposedly beyond saving. The recipient was a very large man; a film star, in the girl’s script.

Pacing again, the doctor began to chew at her nails, desperate to find another explanation.

Oh God. No…

She couldn’t.

She hadn’t been e-mailing a girl named Mary. She’d been corresponding with her abductor. He was Mary Perez.

The last thing Dr. Valerie had written to him was: My Dear Mary, I am so proud of the progress you are making! Yes, as I wrote to you, after a full facial transplant, the recipient will look almost exactly like the donor, with the exception of eyes and teeth. But there is one serious flaw in the premise for your script that you need to fix. No ethical surgeon would ever allow a living human being to be used as a donor for that procedure. Doesn’t matter if they think the boy in your script is sure to die. I certainly wouldn’t do it under any circumstances. Never! No, the boy character must already be dead before the surgery begins. Something else: Under the conditions you are describing, he can have been dead for only an hour or two if his skin is still to be suitable for harvesting…

I tied my boat to an overhanging limb in a mosquito drainage, jammed the key in my pocket, and stepped off the bow onto the trampoline roots of red mangrove trees. I climbed through mangroves and then highland scrub toward the trailer park, keeping pace with the slowly lengthening shadows of new darkness.

It was close to nine P.M.

Soon, I could see lighted windows through the trees, people moving within: rows of illuminated rectangles embedded in shoebox files of larger aluminum rectangles, human theater going on within those small containers.

Inside one of the trailers, I saw what appeared to be a woman with an Abe Lincoln beard lean to hug a man with a massively fat face: sideshow exhibitors carrying out their lives; public people living privately, intimately, in this small, protected world.

The park was its own province of rich smells and unexpected sounds. Pork chops were frying in a pan, spaghetti was simmering in someone’s kitchen, there was a trash fire smoldering, and manure from the Indian elephant I’d seen earlier was somewhere nearby.

Once, I stopped when I thought I heard the low, organic rumble of distant thunder. I stood and listened to the strange sound until my memories of Africa finally correctly identified the noise: There was a caged lion not far away, purring and grunting, trying to communicate with wild lions thirteen thousand miles away across the Atlantic.

At least, I hoped the lion was caged.

The trailer park had a one-lane asphalt street that circled through it. The street was lighted by occasional bare bulbs suspended beneath tin-can shades. I avoided the pools of light, and made my way to the circus wagon with its gaudy marquee that proclaimed that THE WORLD OF WONDERS awaited inside, including the bear with three eyes, and Dezi the Talking Wonder Dog.

Its windows were dimly lit, while the trailers around it seemed inhabited; normal.

Perhaps it was dimly lighted for a reason. I decided to check out the wagon my son had identified.

The street I was on was empty and quiet but for the lion’s low rumble and the distant barking of a dog. I gave it a moment, then slid into deeper shadows beside the wagon, and then around behind the wagon.

I touched my ear to the aluminum shell.

Silence.

Modular trailers aren’t built to be secure, and it didn’t take me long to find a window that I could jimmy. I was just pulling myself up into the window when my cellular phone began its silent, vibrating alert.

I stopped, took it out of my pocket, checked the caller I.D., and saw that it was Harris.

I wasn’t wearing the headset, so I held it to my ear and answered with a whispered, “Talk,” hoping he’d understand that I could not talk.

He did. With no more prompting, he said, “We’ve driven back and forth over the Skyway Bridge about nine times. I think he was waiting for a break in traffic. Finally, he had us throw both cases off the bridge. It was from one of the lower sections, maybe sixty feet down to the water, but I never got a clear look at who was down there. But we did make delivery. When your pal Kong asked about your package, the guy on the other end said that we’d make the exchange in a week or so, and that he’d be in touch.”

I doubted that Lourdes ever expected to release my son, but I didn’t respond.

After a few long moments of silence, Harris said, “If you’re in trouble, hit any key three times. The cavalry will be on its way.”

I whispered, “I’m fine,” then cleared the phone.

I pulled myself through the window into a small room that had an elevated stage, and various show props stacked in the corners. I took out the tiny tactical aluminum penlight I’d brought, but didn’t use it because there was enough peripheral light to see. The wall behind me was covered with a mural depicting a white dog wearing a professorial mortarboard and holding a microphone.

Hello, Dezi.

The trailer had a barnyard smell. Not dirty, but of livestock, straw, grain, and paint. Judging from the smell, the freak bear, apparently, was a real live animal. That meant there would be a cage.