Body Parts (Rye & Claire 1) (15 page)

“Take your hand away and let me see,” Claire said, looking at his eye first from one angle then from another.

Somehow, as she peered at his
eye, the covers managed to get pulled down to his ankles. But Rye,
fully distracted by her nude presence, didn’t seem to notice. Suddenly
the ice slid from her hand into his lap. Claire yipped with laughter, as
she bounced off the bed and ran from the room, leaving Rye moaning with
the shock of something so cold in such a hot spot.

Chapter Twenty-Five

The parking lot at Pier 39
was
one of the few along the tourist wharf in San Francisco that wasn‘t
closed off or chained at night. And because the Alcatraz cruise boats
moored somewhere else, at night the wharf was empty. There was nothing
to vandalize. What was left of an active pier was directly in line with
the entrance. To the left of the entrance stretched a wide walkway
cordoned off with cement-filled poles three feet high. The wall of the
next pier was to the right. There was only one way out of Pier 39—the
same way you came in.

A huge SUV rumbled into the
lot, made a U-turn, which put the passenger side of the vehicle next to
the line of cement filled poles, and turned off its lights. Moments
later, at exactly midnight, a black and silver BMW pulled into the lot
facing the opposite direction of the SUV, so that the driver’s sides
faced each other but were several car lengths apart.

The driver’s side door of the
SUV opened and a massive figure stepped out, not so much tall as broad
of shoulder and narrow of hip. He stood with a briefcase in his left
hand, his right behind his back, fingers wrapped around the handle of a
snub nose .38.

The interior dome light of
the BMW came on, the door opened and a pair of long, sinuous legs poured
out of the car and on to the pavement. The woman who owned them stood
nearly six feet tall. In her right hand, she held a set of car keys. Her
sultry voice was calm and even.

“Its in the trunk,” Rosie
Rehnquist said. She hated making good on Simms’s promises; Hubble had
come up with a liver just in time.

“That’s fine, let’s get it together,” the massive figure said.

As he approached, Rosie
nearly lost her composure; his presence was palpable. About two feet
away he stopped and extended a beefy hand.

“Name’s Bill Rocklin. I can’t thank you enough.”

“Yeah, sure. Let’s make the trade, I’ve got to be on the road,” Rosie said, not taking his hand.

At the shortness of her
response, Rocklin dropped his right hand back to the holstered pistol.
He walked with Rosie to the back of the BMW. When she placed the key in
the trunk lock, he stepped slightly behind her, his hand tightening on
the handle of the .38.

Rosie turned her back to the
open trunk, blocking the opening to prevent Rocklin from getting to its
contents. She always did transactions person to person, and was used to
dealing in dark parking lots at midnight. But the recipient was usually
someone she’d set up. The fact that Simms had arranged this worried
her. Who was this guy? The people who took possession of the organs were
rarely the ones who needed them, and were in general unaccustomed to
the odd locations and late hours necessary when dealing with the black
market. This guy, Rocklin, was too relaxed. Rosie was used to people
asking her stupid inane questions they’d adapted from bad television
shows.

Bill Rocklin acted as though he’d done plenty of transactions like this.

He placed the metal briefcase
on the rear fender of the BMW, popped the latches and tilted the open
case at an angle so Rosie could see the money inside. She reached over
and took the briefcase, snapping it shut, stepping out of the way so
Rocklin could reach the box.

Without lifting the cardboard
box out of the trunk, he opened the flaps, reached in and fumbled with
the clasps of the ice chest.

“This the liver?” Rocklin said.

Rosie turned, looking into
the trunk where Rocklin was attempting to open the lid. “Don’t open that
you fool,” Rosie shrieked, then catching herself. “Sorry, it’s just
that if you open the chest you’ll expose the organ and it’ll be
contaminated. Your doctor will want to make sure that it’s only opened
in a sterile environment.”

Rocklin grew more suspicious
by the minute. He couldn’t understand why she was so insistent that he
not open the chest, it wasn’t like he was going to take it out and hold
it. He just wanted to look at it. How could looking contaminate?

“How do I get hold of you if there’s a problem?” Rocklin asked.

Rosie stood facing him, holding the money filled briefcase at her side, under her arm.

“Maybe you don’t understand,
Mr. Rocklin. This is a black market product,” Rosie said. “We’re here in
a deserted parking lot at midnight because some people consider the
selling of a body part to the highest bidder not only unethical, but
illegal. I thought you understood that.”

Rocklin didn’t respond, but
simply turned away to lift the box out of the trunk, picking it up as
though it was weightless. Turning, he stepped around Rosie and strode
back to the SUV without looking back. He didn’t like her much; didn’t
really care for harsh people, especially harsh women.

Rosie wasted no time. The
sudden silence from this thug had totally unnerved her. With a last
glance at the SUV, she threw the briefcase onto the passenger’s seat of
the BMW, climbed behind the wheel, slammed the door and hung a tight
U-turn out of the parking lot.

As Rocklin approached the SUV, the driver slowly lowered his window.

“Everything go OK, Rock? I heard some yelling,” the driver said.

“Guess so. Just one real
up-tight bitch, that’s all.” Rocklin opened the rear passenger door,
leaned in and placed the ice chest in a child carrier seat, strapping it
in. “Let’s get straight home, Vince. I wanna get this to the doc as
soon as possible.”

He shut the door, walked around to the front passenger side and climbed in next to the driver.

“Man, Vince, I sure hope this liver does the trick. I hate to see the old man suffer.”

Rosie was across the Golden
Gate and on the freeway headed north before she finally relaxed and
stopped looking in her rearview mirror. Reaching across to the
briefcase, she released the two latches, lifted the lid, looked inside,
and sighed.

Chapter Twenty-Six

Rye left the car rental desk at lax
with
the keys to a Ford Taurus and a memory of a time during college when he
and a group of friends had driven to Los Angeles seeking the baser side
of tinsel town, and found it.

The label on the video tape
read Los Angeles, California, but it hadn’t given an address. Once Rye
left the airport, he headed for downtown Hollywood, attempting to take
the same route he and his friends had taken nearly thirty years earlier
in their search for sin and debauchery. The only thing that seemed
familiar was Grauman’s Chinese Theatre. He knew he was in the right
area, however, when the buildings were made of brick instead of glass
and stucco, the streets narrowed and the women on the sidewalk weren’t
wearing as much. As a matter of fact, they weren’t wearing much of
anything. He kept his windows up, doors locked. On the passenger seat,
he had a clipboard with a blank sheet of paper, a street map and a page
torn from the yellow pages listing adult bookstores in the area.

When he pulled into the
parking lot in front of “Adult Books and More,” he began to wish he’d
gotten his car from “Rent-a-Wreck.” With a pencil, he scratched off the
listing on the yellow page.

The front door was metal with
a steel cage bolted over it. He had to reach through a hole in the cage
to get to the doorknob. Once inside, Rye tried not to look around; at
age fifty-three there was nothing in the store that he hadn’t seen,
heard of, or read about. It was just that it was all so openly
displayed. Just to the right as he entered was a counter with the cash
register, manned by a muscular black man who looked like he could have
had a night job as a bouncer.

Rye turned to face the desk.

“Hi.”

He waited until the clerk looked up. There was no verbal response, just intense eye contact.

“You ever hear of a company called Lewd and Lascivious?”

“Yeah, we got all their tapes
along the back wall,” he said, pointing as though he wasn’t sure that
Rye could find the back wall.

“Actually, I’m interested in the company.”

The clerk didn’t let Rye finish. “Can’t help you.”

Rye was out the door and
relieved to be back in the Taurus with the doors locked. It wasn’t that
there was anything dangerous in the store, even the guy behind the
counter with the tight shirt and bulging muscles didn’t seem all that
menacing. He put the feeling behind him, started the engine, backed out
of the parking lot and headed down the street. He scanned the
storefronts looking for a store called the “Doll House,” already
wondering if Paul was right, that a lot of girls get in over their heads
in the pornography business and there was nothing he or anyone else
could do. What if this girl was already dead, or wasn’t even working for
Lewd and Lascivious any more and had gone home—wherever that was.

He spotted the “Doll House”
sign before he reached the parking lot. How could anyone miss it? It had
an inflatable sex doll nailed on it.

Garbage lay strewn about the
parking lot, mainly fast food containers with a couple of empty condom
packages here and there. Even the asphalt was stained. When Rye pulled
into the lot, the tires crunched over something; he parked at the far
end so he wouldn’t have to step in whatever it was when he got out.

The front of the building
housing the store looked like an extension of the parking lot. The brick
was a patchwork of graffiti. What appeared to have been the only window
had two plywood sheets covering the space with the word “pussy”
spray-painted in giant letters. Even the little window in the door was
blacked out. The place looked closed.

He hadn’t turned the engine
off and was ready to move on, when the door opened and a young couple
walked out. The “manboy” was massaging the woman’s barley covered
breasts in total seriousness while she never stopped laughing. Rye sat
and watched them walk down the street. Then he remembered something Paul
had said. When you’re in a bad part of town, get in your car, get out,
but never just sit there. He’d never asked why, but it seemed to make
sense now.

The front door was solid wood
but felt like it was about to fall of its hinges. This time the cash
register and its guardian were against the back wall. He was greeted by
the top of a shaved head slumped in a captain’s chair, nose buried in a
novel.

He left out the greeting
this time and got right to the point. “You ever hear of the company Lewd
and Lascivious?” He stepped back at what he saw next.

“What, you never seen a woman with a shaved head?”

It wasn’t just the shaved
head, but the deep facial pockmarks and breasts that could have rested
on the counter as she spoke that took him by surprise. Rye was chagrined
that his reaction was so obvious. As an EMT he had to keep a stone
face, especially when telling an accident victim the extent of an
injury.

He swallowed once. “Ever hear the name Lewd and Lascivious,” he repeated?

“Heard of them, yeah. Rumor is that only girls squeaky clean are hired, then never seen again.”

Suddenly Rye had the impression that he was being visually undressed, but shook off the feeling.

“You ever know any of the girls trying to get hired?”

The woman seemed to be
fiddling with the buttons running down the middle of her blouse; Rye
tried not to look at what she was doing and kept his eyes on her
forehead.

“Lots, but they weren’t
squeaky clean and they never got hired. They said all they asked in the
interview was about smoking, drinking and drugs.”

Rye couldn’t pinpoint it, but she was making serious eye contact and something about her presence had softened.

“Hey if you’re looking for work, I got a camera in the back.”

Before Rye could respond, the
woman pulled her blouse open at the middle, her two breasts cascaded
like twin avalanches onto the counter. “How’d you like to run it between
these babies?”

His jaw must have dropped because she began to laugh.

He couldn’t help but look.
“Ah, no thanks.” He didn’t run to the door, but he didn’t walk either.
He must have looked like a total fool.

When he got back to the
Taurus, he didn’t lay rubber but was sure that his tires kicked up some
of the fast food trash as he peeled out. He crept along the road,
looking down at the page torn out of the phone book, groaning at the
site of twelve more listings to go. At least he’d gotten confirmation
that Lewd and Lascivious was in the area. Somehow he just couldn’t go
back and ask for details.

He noted that the storefronts
and general neighborhood seemed a little cleaner as the addresses grew
larger. The pawnshop and antique store he passed both looked well kept.
It was a warm day, they both had their doors open and there was fully
clothed foot traffic along the sidewalk. He almost turned into a used
bookstore by mistake, and made a mental note to swing back later if he
had the time.

There it was, next to a
boarded-up storefront. He was relieved to see that the sign was a modest
black and white, simply reading “Adult Books,” and that the parking lot
looked clean.

He took a deep breath. When
he walked through the polished steel and glass door, he thought he might
have entered the wrong store. The door swung smoothly, closing with a
quiet swoosh behind him. He was startled when greeted by a detached
voice.

“Hello, can I help you find anything?”

Rye did a quick scan and from
some noises, determined the voice was coming from the far right corner,
but decided to wait for the source of the voice to reveal itself.