The Reckoning (15 page)

As foul a mood as he had been in, Royce derived pleasure from his drive downtown. It took him only a few stoplights to pick up the stick shift again and get used to the stop-on-a-dime brakes. Driving her (perversely, he’d given the car a male name but a female personality) was a sensual interplay between man and machine. He commanded, and she responded decisively with agility and ticket-threatening speed—a thoroughbred among the SUV draft horses.

A lot of the magic, too, was the way others on the road perceived him with envy, lust, hatred even. Royce McCulloch was somebody again. Cocky. A Big Swinging Dick.

The head rush, though, was fleeting, like the cozy warmth that comes from peeing down your own leg. By the time he cut into his parking lot, he was already fretting how he was going to extricate himself from Cliff and Monica, and keep his ass out of jail.

Andy, the lot attendant, gave him a hard time and offered a special monthly rate for two spaces.

“You’ll need ‘em for that pussy bait, so you can park it down the middle and not get the doors all banged up,” Andy said. “For an extra ten spot, I’ll make sure no birds shit on it.”

Royce told Andy he was a regular Rodney Dangerfield, set the alarm and walked to his office.

Royce wasn’t there long when the phone rang. He lifted the receiver off the hook and heard the moan of a distant wind.

Wind like that only blows from one place.

“Marvin?”

“Royce.”

The connection was congested with hisses and pops, and Royce pictured silver telephone wires singing across the prairie in his head. Singing across hell.

“You found her.”

“I’m in Sinclair, Royce. The town is dead. The refinery shut down years ago.”

“You found her,” he repeated.

“We need to talk, Royce. You weren’t altogether truthful with me. Who is Carly Anderton, really?”

Royce shivered from a cold sweat. Good question.

“But Carly…”

“Been dead more than ten years, some kind of medical accident. Was buried in the Sinclair cemetery, beside her parents.

All Royce could think to say was, “All right.”

“Funny thing, though.”

“What’s that?”

“Early May a couple years back some skinheads vandalized the cemetery, or at least that’s what the yokel cops here think. Knocked over tombstones. Deposited sheep entrails here and there. Spray-painted swastikas and satanic bullshit all over. And—”

“And what?”

“They took Carly’s remains. This isn’t about any loan, is it?”

Royce said, “Talk at you later,” and hung up the phone.

Royce pulled into the parking lot of Craig’s school, parked and idled among the Hondas, Fords and Toyotas.

The boy appeared, searching for the old Cavalier. Royce beeped and waved, then remembered Darth’s darkly tinted glass. He got out of the car and waved Craig over.

“Sweet! You borrowin’ this?”

Royce wasn’t sure how to respond and finally said, “No, it’s mine—ours. One of my clients, a dealership, had to liquidate its inventory fast.”

“Oh,” Craig said, seeming to accept the explanation.

He took Craig for a ride, let him rev the engine at stoplights and take the wheel on quiet side streets. They got on the Jones Falls Expressway for some racier showing-off. Craig, all wide-eyed, deemed Darth a “bomb,” better than a Land Rover, even. In just one day Royce managed to get himself off the kid’s shit list, and all it took was fifty bucks cash and a $75,000 German sports car.

They stopped for dinner at Taco Bell and Royce asked him if he still had his emergency stash.

“Sure do,” Craig said proudly, then proceeded to remove his right sneaker and white sock, where the money roll was hidden.

Royce laughed. “Good thinking.” He waited a few minutes before tackling another, more serious topic.

“Craig, how are you and your closet getting along?”

The boy reddened with embarrassment, and Royce knew he was on thin ice by asking, that perhaps he was about to lose all the ground he’d gained with his stepson.

“I don’t go in there much anymore,” Craig said sheepishly.

“That’s the way I used to feel about driving,” Royce quickly explained. “When my days got tough, I’d look forward to getting in my car, getting away from everybody and everything.”

Craig brightened. “Yeah. You just want to be by yourself sometimes. Hide out.”

“I hear you. But what I found out is that I couldn’t drive forever. Whatever was bugging me, I had to face it eventually.”

Craig nodded. “I know.”

They arrived home shortly before seven. Royce phoned Randy and Julie’s in Billings. He talked to Randy, asked him how it was going.

“She’s hangin’ in there, Royce. Having Les here has been a godsend.”

Royce talked to his wife. She sounded dry, all cried out.

“Jules should have done something about this earlier,” she said. “Metastasis may have set in—the spreading of the cancer cells. Tomorrow they’re doing a double mastectomy, going to take both of her breasts, and some affected lymph nodes.”

“Yeah,” Royce said heavily.

“They figure about a sixty percent chance.”

“Yeah.” Shitty odds. Fifty-fifty sounded a hell of a lot better.

“Are you and Craig all right?” She didn’t sound so angry with him anymore.

“Fine, just fine.”

He passed the phone to Craig. He asked how his Aunt Jules was and about his cousins before excitedly filling her in on the family’s new car.

“We went for a ride, mom. It was cool. Then we had tacos.”

“My, it sounds like you and Craig have finally bridged the generation gap,” Leslie told Royce after he’d gotten the phone back. “What’s this I hear about a new car? A Porsche?”

“I’ll explain it all to you when you get back. I promise. Right now, you’ve got other things on your mind.”

“Okay, Royce. We’re heading back to the hospital now. I want you two to take care. I miss you.”

“Me too,” he said quickly.

That night Royce popped two Valerian and dreamed about a strange pattern that might have been a still-life landscape had it not been for the almost imperceptible spasms from a web of fat-marbled filaments pulsing with parasitic life. Creeping, seething with a soft hiss as they corrupted a doomed host.

He awoke with a start, reached for Leslie and experienced that limbo loneliness that strikes from the heart of mournful dread. Royce went into the kitchen (checking in on Craig along the way) and had a glass of orange juice. It was three-fifteen. Snow was falling outside, and it dawned on him he didn’t have an ice scraper for Darth. Royce shivered, thinking about that nasty dream.

He’d actually seen them, the tumors in Julie’s breasts.

Royce, after going to the bathroom, went back to bed. When sleep finally came, the nightmare really began.

12

The News Isn’t Good

Cliff pawed through the promo notebook of Dr. Foglesong’s before-and-after reconstructive surgery photos and giggled.

“Gracious, some of these photos are downright horrible,” he said. “But I bet people would pay to see things like this. You could market it as
Monstrography
.”

They were sitting in the reception area of Dr. Foglesong’s surgery suite in Newport Beach, waiting for word that Carly had breezed through her implant surgery.

Cliff shifted in his chair, broke wind. “Sorry, blood fart.”

Royce shook his head in disgust, checked his Rolex for about the fourth time, and said, “I don’t know, Cliff. It’s taking a little longer than he said. Maybe I shouldn’t have made an issue of the size thing. Maybe Dr. Foglesong was right; thirty-eight C would be more aesthetically pleasing on Carly’s frame.”

Cliff shrugged, blew smoke rings, was sweating from all the speed he’d taken that morning.

He said, “Bullshit. You’re footin’ the bill, playin’ god. You want ‘em forty-four doubleDs? Then that’s what they should be. It’s taking longer because those kind of titties take some extra pumping up.”

Royce grinned, shaking his head. Cliff, what a card. He could joke at any time, any place. If he’d been in a Nazi concentration camp he would have been cracking wise right up to when the pellets dropped. It was also not true that Royce was footing the entire bill. Through Cliff’s largesse in the cocaine department, the good doctor had given Royce sort of a “dealer’s discount.” The boob job, including follow-up visits and pump-ups (if required), was costing Royce only three thousand, yet the doctor promised it would be of the same high quality as the jobs he’d done on many famous Hollywood actresses, models, exotic dancers and prostitutes.

“You look uptight, Royce.”

Royce rubbed his eyes, yawning. “I really gotta get back soon. Michael’s put a blowtorch up my ass. I can’t seem to please him anymore.”

“Well, you can always come to work for me.”

Royce laughed. “Yeah, sure. All the wages I can jam up my nose. Right? The problem with your company is that the prez samples too much of his own product.”

Royce saw by the hurt look on Cliff’s face that his friend wasn’t kidding about the job offer.

“Hey, Cliff,” he quickly added, grinning, “maybe working for you wouldn’t be half bad. You do offer good bennies.”

That brightened Cliff’s mood. He said, “Look, we get Carly home and all tucked in with her new boobies and we’re gonna party, enjoy some of the pipe. I’ve got Crazy Cat Kris on tap.”

He was about to tell Cliff he wanted no part of that airhead Kris when Dr. Foglesong, in spotless green surgical gown and cap, appeared at the reception desk. Royce stood and approached the plastic surgeon, but Foglesong gave him a “just one moment” gesture and picked up the phone.

“Yes, this is Dr. Foglesong calling about my SL. Five o’clock. Fine, thank you.”

The good doctor flashed brilliant white, even teeth at Royce in a practiced smile, and what with his fine, silver mane, taut skin and splendid tan, he exuded confidence and narcissistic well-being for a man in his fifties. It was hard to imagine him snorting some of Cliff’s junk.

He told Royce, “It’s going just fine. Just a few more minutes. I think you’ll be very pleased indeed.”

So they waited another fifteen minutes, Cliff waxing on about one of his schemes to his friend. What did he call it? Virtual reality adult entertainment? You paid for porno stars to come to your home and perform sex acts in front of you.

“What a mind,” Royce told his friend.

Cliff agreed. “Sometimes I scare myself. Tell me something, and tell me straight.”

Royce flinched, wary of what was to come. Cliff was his most dangerous when he was sincere. “What?” Royce snapped.

“You really gonna marry her? Carly I mean? Because she got this boob job?”

Royce relaxed, grinned. “We’ll see.”

Cliff giggled. “Yeah, that’s what I thought.”

“What can I say? I’m a shit.”

Close to three o’clock, Royce was starting to get really upset, more out of worry about getting back to the office than about Carly. It must have been going well for Foglesong to take time out to call the shop about his fucking Mercedes.

Foglesong came out again to make a quick, whispery phone call. This time, there were splotches of blood on his gown, which Royce took as a good sign, that the operation was over. The plastic surgeon gave Royce and Cliff a big smile and the high sign before retreating back to the OR.

“Probably lining up his mistress for tonight,” Cliff said, sneering.

Royce laughed. “Bet the bitch has the most perfect jugs in the world.”

Cliff heard the sirens first, his ears finely tuned to such SFX out of habit. The clinic door burst open and two paramedics rushed in carrying resuscitation gear and headed down the hall towards the OR.

“Fuck!” Cliff said, snapping the cigarette out of his mouth.

Royce and Cliff went chasing after them but didn’t get very far. Dr. Foglesong intercepted them, pulling Royce, in particular, over to one side. The doctor was sweating, his nose runny and red. He looked like shit.

“I’m afraid the news isn’t good,” he told Royce. “Cardiac arrest. She reacted to the Versed, the anesthetic. I wished she’d told me she had difficulties with sedation.”

Royce shoved Foglesong aside, went into the OR. On the table was Carly, IV tubes running out of her, her eyes strangely fluttering, face bluish, with two defibrillator paddles on her bloody, eviscerated chest.

One of the paramedics threw a switch and Carly convulsed with a muffled bang. The paramedic removed the paddles. Carly’s implants were in place but not yet sutured in—two large pouches of silicone stuffed into gill-like flaps of flesh. The new breasts, purple veined, dwarfed the woman’s frame, looked grotesquely too big.

44 DD
.

The paramedic struggled to apply the paddles to Carly’s plastiflesh chest without her hemorrhaging.

Bang
.

Royce choked, had to get out of there before he vomited. He went outside and Cliff went in.

“What the fuck happened?” Royce demanded of Foglesong, who had elected not to contribute his expertise to the emergency efforts. The doc was calmer now, with something of his old composure back.

“I think Carly just wasn’t honest with me,” he explained, sniffling. “If I’d only known about her sensitivity to anesthesia…”

Cliff came out into the hall and swung at Dr. Foglesong. The surgeon’s nose broke with a queasy snap, spraying blood on Royce’s white Oxford Cloth shirt.

“You fuck!” Cliff screamed at Foglesong.

Early the next morning, about two, Royce guzzled from a bottle of Tequila in Cliff’s living room, getting royally plastered. In the bedroom, Cliff was fucking Kris, the headboard slamming against the outside wall so that Royce could follow all the action whether he wanted to or not. This morning, he’d rather not.

Carly was comatose by the time they got her to the hospital. As it turned out, Dr. Foglesong had fucked up. The doc’s rinky-dink surgery room didn’t even have a cardiac monitor. An emergency room doctor speculated (off the record) to Royce that this is what happened:

Dr. Foglesong’s nurse-anesthetist (not a full-fledged anesthesiologist) couldn’t get an accurate reading on Carly’s vital signs because there was no cardiac monitor. So the nurse ended up giving too much anesthetic to Carly, who went into cardiac arrest.

Then, Foglesong, either because he thought he could revive Carly on his own or because he was powdered up, didn’t call the paramedics right away.

The oxygen shut off to Carly’s brain—hypoxia. And in four minutes the woman was brain-dead.

Now, at that very moment, Carly was in a deep coma, hooked up to a life-support machine, and Royce wondered whether the hospital officials had managed to get through to Sinclair, Wyoming.

They would need the permission of Carly’s folks to take her off life-support—pull the plug.

Well, Royce couldn’t do anything for her now. Admittedly, beyond the heartfelt agony of her impending death, he had also worried about some culpability in the tragedy. But Cliff had laid that fear to rest, explaining that he and Carly weren’t even common law married or anything.

“You’re in the clear,” Cliff had assured him.

The strangest revelation of the entire sorry mess was that Cliff actually cared about Carly, though the feeling certainly hadn’t been mutual. He, after all, had punched the doctor. He, after all, had cried like a baby all the way home from the hospital to Marina Del Ray. Hell, even Royce hadn’t cried yet. So distraught was Cliff, so eager was he to distract himself from the pain, he had heavily freebased (all the time screaming he was going to kill that “motherfucking butcher”), then called Kris to come assuage his wounded soul as only the blonde knew how. Royce hated it when Cliff freebased; it made the clown far more incendiary than did doing lines.