J. Jance - Day of the Dead

The spacious and solitary ranch house was coolly welcoming when he unlocked the front door and let himself inside. He had moved to The Flying C after Gayle’s mother died while Gayle stayed on in their El Encanto home. It was an arrangement that suited them, allowing both to maintain a public facade as a happily married couple while leaving them free to follow their individual pursuits.

Larry pulled a beer from the refrigerator under the wet bar and then settled into his recliner-a well-worn Stickley Morris chair-in the living room. He wondered sometimes what would happen when-not if-he was no longer able to live here on his own and look after things. Considering what lay beyond the locked basement door, his having household help-live-in or otherwise-was entirely out of the question. He maintained the parts of the house he used-the kitchen and living room as well as his bedroom and bath and the basement-in reasonably good order. As for the rest of the house? He shut the doors and left it alone.

In public Dr. Lawrence Stryker was often described as a man of action. Here, in the privacy of his own home-alone except for the presence of whatever girl awaited his attentions in the basement-he sometimes allowed himself to wallow in the past and to wonder what would have happened if he had never ventured down this path.

He never knew-Gayle never told him and he never asked-just how she had managed to entice Roseanne Orozco away from the hospital that Wednesday afternoon. It was clear Gayle had done so without being seen and without arousing any suspicion. Their carefully concocted alibis for the night Roseanne Orozco died proved to be unnecessary. No one from Law and Order or the Pima County Sheriff’s Department ever bothered asking either one of them about where they’d been or what they’d done.

What never failed to amaze Larry was how everything that had happened-the way his entire life had evolved-had grown out of a single misstep, one that had seemed entirely inconsequential at the time. He and the other young doctors on the reservation had regarded it as little more than a boyish prank, a well-deserved bonus for working at a dinky reservation hospital in the middle of Arizona’s godforsaken desert. All of them had been in on it together, the same way they all drank beer and played poker together-card poker, that is. This had been “poker” of another kind.

Whenever one of the girls from the high school-especially one of the good-looking ones-showed up as a patient in the hospital, whoever was in charge of her care would let the others know that the game was on. During evening rounds, the girl’s attending physician would administer a high dosage of a sedative-enough to put her under. Later on, one by one, the doctors would drop by her room and have a crack at her. To them it seemed like good clean fun.

The girl would wake up the next morning or after her surgery or procedure and go home none the wiser and no harm done. At least that was the way it was supposed to work-the way it had worked-for years.

AIDS wasn’t even a blip on the radar back then (Gayle’s brother, Winston, hadn’t died of AIDS until sometime during the mid-eighties), but Larry and the others had all, by mutual agreement, used condoms. They did it as much to protect themselves from whatever STDs the girls might be carrying as they did to protect the girls. But then came the night when Larry’s condom broke as he was screwing one of his own patients, a girl named Roseanne Orozco, who was due to be released the next day after being hospitalized for a ruptured appendix.

Larry felt the condom break the moment it happened, but he told no one. At first he thought everything would be okay-that he’d get away with it. Several times in the next weeks and months, Emma Orozco brought Roseanne back to the clinic complaining that her daughter wasn’t getting any better.

Roseanne was a good-looking but strange fifteen-year-old, who, as far as anyone at the hospital knew, never spoke to anyone. Suspecting the worst, Larry finally admitted Roseanne to the hospital for a whole battery of tests. A pregnancy test was the only one that turned out positive.

He wondered sometimes what would have happened to him if he hadn’t told Gayle that very afternoon as soon as he knew Roseanne’s test results. What if Gayle hadn’t taken matters into her own hands? No doubt he would no longer have a license to practice medicine, and he certainly wouldn’t have spent the last twenty-five years as one of Tucson’s most well-respected citizens. The aftermath of Roseanne Orozco’s murder changed him forever-and it changed Gayle as well.

In the months that followed, Gayle evolved into an entirely different person. He had known she was smart and ambitious, but now it seemed some previously unknown toggle switch had been moved to the “on” position. She was at him all the time. Sex had never before been an issue between them. Now it was.

Gayle would be waiting for him in the evenings when he came home from rounds. “Did you fuck anybody tonight?” She’d ask the question pleasantly enough, the same way she once might have inquired after his day, but they both knew there was far more to it than that.

Larry always told her no. As it turned out, that was the truth. In actual fact, Roseanne Orozco had cured Larry Stryker of abusing patients, but Gayle wasn’t buying it.

“Show me,” she’d say. “You may be passing it out across the street, but you’d by God better have plenty left for me when you get home.”

She’d take him to bed then, expecting him to perform-demanding that he perform-but the more she wanted, the less Larry could deliver. Then, after he’d done what he could, she’d drift off to sleep, and he’d lie in bed for hours, wakeful and yet aroused, wondering what was happening to him and imagining that sooner or later someone would catch on and come looking for them.

He got rid of the Camaro almost right away, within days of Roseanne’s murder. Worried that some hotshot detective might find lingering traces of blood on the floorboards and seats, Larry drained most of the oil out of the crankcase before taking off, at high speed, to drive into Tucson. Not unexpectedly, the engine overheated and caught fire just west of Three Points. The charred remains of the vehicle were hauled off to a junkyard, and the insurance company made good on Larry’s claim without so much as a raised eyebrow.

One day, Larry arranged to be in the hospital records room all by himself and he picked up Roseanne’s file. He got a rush out of carrying it from the room in front of God and everybody. The next time he and Gayle went to visit The Flying C, Roseanne Orozco’s complete medical history went into Calvin Madison’s burning barrel along with the rest of that day’s trash.

With those two sets of damning details out of the way, Larry expected things to get better, but as time passed, they grew steadily worse. Caught between alternating bouts of arousal and paralyzing fear, there were some scary moments when Larry thought he might lose his mind completely. By Easter break of the following year, Larry was convinced he was headed for a nervous breakdown. That was when Gayle decided they should go to Mexico for the weekend.

They flew to Mazatlan from Phoenix and checked into one of the nicest hotels on the beach. Gayle, who had learned fluent Spanish from the braceros and housemaids who had worked on The Flying C, told Larry she was going out shopping. Rather than accompany her, he chose to spend most of the day brooding in the bar-drinking tequila and chasing shots of Jose Cuervo with chilled bottles of Dos Equis. He was more than a little drunk when he finally returned to their room in the late afternoon.

Gayle, wearing only a terry-cloth wraparound, met him at the door. “I have a surprise for you,” she said, letting him into a room darkened by blackout curtains. “Come in and close your eyes.”