Skin Tight (21 page)

Who had probably put it together.

So Chemo anticipated a fight. Screw the element of surprise; the damn jet scooter was as loud as a Harley. Stranahan could hear him coming two miles away.

But where was he?

Chemo circled the stilt house slowly, eventually riding the curl of his own wake. The windows were down, the door shut. No sign of life, except for a pair of ratty-looking gulls on the roof.

A thin smile of understanding came to his lips. Of course—the man was waiting inside. A little ambush action.

Chemo coasted the Jet Ski up to the dock and stepped off lightly. He took the Ingram off his shoulder and held it in front of him as he went up the stairs, thinking: Where's the logical place for Stranahan to be waiting? In a corner, of course.

He was pleased to find that the wooden deck went around Stranahan's entire house. Walking cautiously on storklike legs, Chemo approached the southwest corner first. Calmly he fired one shot, waist level, through the wall. He repeated the same procedure at each of the other corners, then sat on the rail of the deck and waited. When nothing happened after three minutes, he walked up to the front door and fired twice more.

Then he went in.

 

 

CHRISTINA
Marks was not aware that Stranahan had been hit until she felt something warm on her bare arm. She opened her mouth to scream but Stranahan covered it with his hand and motioned for her to be quiet. She saw that his eyes were watering from the pain of the bullet wound. He removed his hand from her mouth and pointed at his left shoulder. Christina nodded but didn't look.

They heard three more gunshots, each in a different part of the house. Then came a silence that lasted a few agonizing minutes. Finally Stranahan rose to his feet with the shotgun cradled in his right arm. The left side of his body was numb and wet with blood; in the twilight of the shuttered house, he looked two-tone.

From the floor Christina watched him move. He pressed his back to the wall and edged toward the front of the house. The next shots made Christina shut her eyes. When she opened them, she saw two perfect holes through the front door; twin sunbeams, sharp as lasers, perforated the shadows. Beneath the light shafts, Mick Stranahan lay prone on his belly, elbows braced on the wooden floor. He was aiming at the front door when Chemo opened it.

Stranahan's shotgun was a Remington 1100, a semiautomatic twelve-gauge, an excellent bird gun that holds up to five shells. Later, when Stranahan measured the distance from the door to where he had lain, he would marvel at how any human being with two good eyes could miss a seven-foot target at a distance of only nineteen feet four inches. The fact that Stranahan was bleeding to death at the time was not, in his view, a mitigating excuse.

In truth, it was the shock of the intruder's appearance that had caused Stranahan to hesitate—the sight of this gaunt, pellucid, frizzle-haired freak with a moonscape face that could stop a freight train.

So Stranahan had stared for a nanosecond when he should have squeezed the trigger. For someone who looked so sickly, Chemo moved deceptively fast. As he dove out of the doorway, the first blast from the Remington sprinkled its rain of birdshot into the bay.

“Shit,” Stranahan said, struggling to his feet. On his way toward the door he slipped on his own blood and went down again, his right cheek slamming hard on the floor; this, just as Chemo craned around the corner and fired a messy burst from the Ingram. Rolling in a sticky mess, Stranahan shot back.

Chemo slammed the door from the outside, plunging the house into darkness once more.

Stranahan heard the man running on the outside deck, following the apron around the house. Stranahan took aim through the walls. He imagined that the man was a rising quail, and he led accordingly. The first blast tore a softball-sized hole in the wall of the living room. The second punched out the shutter in the kitchen. The third and final shot was followed by a grunt and a splash outside.

“Christina!” Stranahan shouted. “Quick, help me up.”

But when she got there, biting back tears, crawling on bare knees, he had already passed out.

 

 

CHEMO
landed on his back in the water. He kicked his legs just to make sure he wasn't paralyzed; other than a few splinters in his scalp, he seemed to be fine. He figured that the birdshot must have missed him, that the concussion so close to his head was what threw him off balance.

Instinctively he held the Ingram high out of the water with his right hand, and paddled furiously with his left. He knew he had to make it under cover of the house before Stranahan came out; otherwise he'd be a sitting duck. Chemo saw that the machine gun was dripping, so he figured it must have gotten dunked in the fall. Would it still fire? And how many rounds were left? He had lost count.

These were his concerns as he made for the pilings beneath the stilt house. Progress was maddeningly slow; by paddling with only one hand, Chemo tended to move himself in a frothy circle. In frustration he paddled more frenetically, a tactic that decreased the perimeter of his route but brought him no closer to safety. He expected at any second to see Stranahan burst onto the deck with the shotgun.

Beneath Chemo there appeared in the water a long gray-blue shadow, which hung there as if frozen in glass. It was Stranahan's silent companion, Liza, awakened from its afternoon siesta by the wild commotion.

A barracuda this age is a creature of sublime instinct and flawless precision, an eating machine more calculating and efficient than any shark in the ocean. Over time the great barracuda had come to associate human activity with feeding; its impulses had been tuned by Stranahan's evening pinfish ritual. As Chemo struggled in the shadows, the barracuda was on full alert, its cold eyes trained upward in anticipation. The blue-veined legs that kicked impotently at its head, the spastic thrashing—these posed no threat.

Something else had caught its attention: the familiar rhythmic glint of stunned prey on the water's surface. The barracuda struck with primitive abandon, streaking up from the deep, slashing, then boring back toward the pilings.

There, beneath the house, the great fish flared its crimson gills in a darkening sulk. What it had mistaken for an easy meal of silver pinfish turned out to be no such thing, and the barracuda spit ignominiously through its fangs.

It was a testimony to sturdy Swiss craftsmanship that the Heuer diving watch was still ticking when it came to rest on the bottom. Its stainless silver and gold links glistened against Chemo's pale severed hand, which reached up from the turtle grass like some lost piece of mannequin.

ON
Washington Avenue there was a small shop that sold artificial limbs. Dr. Rudy Graveline went there on his lunch hour and purchased four different models of prosthetic hands. He paid cash and made sure to get a receipt.

Later, back at Whispering Palms, he arranged the artificial hands in an attractive row on the top of his onyx desk.

“What about this one?” he asked Chemo.

“It's a beaut,” Chemo said trenchantly, “except I've already got one on
that
arm.”

“Sorry.” Rudy Graveline picked up another. “Then look here—state-of-the-art technology. Four weeks of therapy, you can deal blackjack with this baby.”

“Wrong color,” Chemo remarked.

Rudy glanced at the artificial hand and thought: Of course it's the wrong color, they're
all
the wrong damn color. “It's a tough match,” the doctor said. “I looked for the palest one they had.”

“I hate them all,” Chemo said. “Why does it have to be a hand, anyway?”

“You didn't like the mechanical hooks,” Rudy Graveline reminded him. “Talk about advanced, you could load a gun, even type with those things. But you said no.”

“Damn right I said no.”

Rudy put down the prosthesis and said: “I wish you wouldn't take that tone with me. I'm doing the best I can.”

“Oh, yeah.”

“Look, didn't I advise you to see a specialist?”

“And didn't I advise you, you're crazy? The cops'll be hunting all over.”

“All right,” Rudy said in a calming voice. “Let's not argue.”

It had been three weeks since Chemo had shown up behind Whispering Palms on a blood-streaked water scooter—a vision that Dr. Rudy Graveline would carry with him for the rest of his life. It had happened during an afternoon consult with Mrs. Carla Crumworthy, heiress to the Crumworthy panty-shield fortune. She had come to complain about the collagen injections that Rudy Graveline had administered to give her full, sensual lips, which is just what every rheumatoid seventy-one-year-old woman needs. Mrs. Crumworthy had lamented that the results were nothing like she had hoped, that she now resembled one of those Ubangi tribal women from the
National Geographic,
the ones with the ceramic platters in their mouths. And, in truth, Dr. Rudy Graveline was concerned about what had happened because Mrs. Crumworthy's lips had indeed grown bulbous and unwieldy and hard as cobblestones. As he examined her (keeping his doubts to himself), Rudy wondered if maybe he had injected too much collagen, or not enough, or if maybe he'd zapped it into the wrong spots. Whatever the cause, the result was undeniable: Mrs. Carla Crumworthy looked like a duck wearing mauve lipstick. A malpractice jury could have a ball with this one.

Dr. Graveline had been whisking through his trusty Rolodex, searching for a kindhearted colleague, when Mrs. Crumworthy suddenly rose to her feet and shrieked. Pointing out the picture window toward Biscayne Bay, the old woman had blubbered in terror, her huge misshapen lips slapping together in wet percussion. Rudy had no idea what she was trying to say.

He spun around and looked out the window.

The yellow Jet Ski lay on its side, adrift in the bay. Somehow Chemo had dragged himself, soaking wet and stark naked, over the ledge of the seawall behind the clinic. He didn't look well enough to be dead. His gray shoulders shivered violently in the sunshine, and his eyes flickered vaguely through puffy purple slits. Chemo swung the bloody stump to show Dr. Graveline what had happened to his left hand. He pointed gamely at the elastic wrist tourniquet that he had fashioned from his Jockey shorts, and Rudy would later concede that it had probably saved his life.

Mrs. Carla Crumworthy was quickly ushered to a private recovery suite and oversedated, while Rudy and two young assistant surgeons led Chemo to an operating room. The assistants argued that he belonged at a real trauma center in a real hospital, but Chemo adamantly refused. This left the doctors with no choice but to operate or let him bleed to death.

Gently discouraged from participating in the surgery, Rudy had been content to let the young fellows work unimpeded. He spent the time making idle conversation with the woozy Chemo, who had rejected a general anesthetic in favor of an old-fashioned intravenous jolt of Demerol.

Since that evening, Chemo's post-op recovery had progressed swiftly and in relative luxury, with the entire staff of Whispering Palms instructed to accommodate his every wish. Rudy Graveline himself was exceedingly attentive, as he needed Chemo's loyalty now more than ever. He had hoped that the killer's spirits would improve at the prospect of reconstructing his abbreviated left arm.

“A new hand,” Rudy said, “would be a major step back to a normal life.”

“I never had a normal life,” Chemo pointed out. Sure, he would miss the hand, but he was more pissed off about losing the expensive wristwatch.

“What are my other options?” Chemo asked.

“What do you mean?”

“I mean, besides these things.” He waved his stump contemptuously at the artificial hands.

“Well,” Rudy said, “frankly, I'm out of ideas.” He gathered the prostheses from his desk and put them back in the box. “I told you this isn't my field,” he said to Chemo.

“You keep trying to dump me off on some other surgeon, but it won't work. It's you or nobody.”

“I appreciate your confidence,” Rudy said. He leaned forward in his chair and put on his glasses. “Can I ask, what's that on your face?”

Chemo said, “It's Wite-Out.”

After a careful pause, Dr. Graveline said, “Can I ask—”

“I might go out to the club later. I wanted to cover up these darn patches.”

Out of pity Rudy had agreed to dermabrade several more one-inch squares along Chemo's chin.

“You covered them with Wite-Out?”

Chemo said, “Your secretary loaned me a bottle. The color's just right.”

Rudy cleared his throat. “It's not so good for your skin. Please, let me prescribe a mild cosmetic ointment.”

“Forget it,” said Chemo. “This'll do fine. Now what about a new thing for my arm?” With his right hand he gestured at the bandaged limb.

Rudy folded his hands in his lap, a relaxed gesture that damn near exuded professional confidence. “As I said before, we've gone over most of the conventional options.”

Chemo said, “I don't like therapy. I want something easy to use, something practical.”

“I see,” said Rudy Graveline.

“And durable, too.”

“Of course.”

“Also, I don't want people to stare.”

Rudy thought: Beautiful. A seven-foot, one-handed geek with Wite-Out painted on his face, and he's worried about people staring.

“So what do you think?” Chemo pressed.

“I think,” said Rudy Graveline, “we've got to use our imaginations.”

 

 

DETECTIVE
John Murdock bent his squat, porky frame over the rail of the hospital bed and said, “Wake up, fuckwad.”