Operation Whiplash (5 page)

“Are you gonna talk to Deakin?” Jed pressed me.

“I don’t really think it’s necessary, Jed,” I temporized. “I believe you. I think.”

“You think!” he exclaimed in disgust. “You didn’t believe me about Lucille Grimes until she damn near got your ass waxed for you.”

“If Deakin never brought charges against Colisimo, how come so much of what you say is open knowledge?” I countered.

“It’s not open,” Jed returned. “But when a businessman in a small town loses not only his business but his home, an’ after sudden plastic surgery takes to livin’ in a shack down at the edge of the swamp, other businessmen take to askin’ a few questions. What I told you is what I siphoned off the bubblin’ pot. Nobody furnished any affidavits.”

I was wondering if I should follow Robin back to the Lazy Susan, assuming that was where she was going when she finished the breakfast I could see being served to her, and then confront her with this newly acquired information. But if she denied it, where did I go from there? And even if she admitted it, what was the connection to Hazel’s disappearing act? Having a syndicate boyfriend might impugn Robin’s good sense, but she wouldn’t be the first female to run in double harness with a bad apple.

The thought of Hazel reinforced my sense of frustration. I hadn’t been able to come up with anything that promised to help in locating her, and I was getting restless. Jed was still looking at me expectantly. “Oh, well. How do I find this Deakin?” I asked.

“That’s better,” Jed said with satisfaction. “I want you to hear it from him. You drive two miles east of town an’ watch for a roadside sign that says
BAIT AND TACKLE FOR RENT
. Deakin’s shack is hidden from the road, thirty yards along a dirt path.”

“Can I use your name if he doesn’t want to talk?”

I had asked the question as a formality, but Jed hesitated so long I took another look at him. “If you have to,” he said finally, but with reluctance. He looked and sounded defensive.

“You sound as though Colisimo was operating under the traffic light in the main square and everyone had better watch out.”

“All I know is that his goons weren’t around town for three-four years, an’ now here they are again,” Jed said doggedly. “Deakin will tell you they’re not pleasant playmates.”

“I won’t mention you, then,” I promised.

“No, I don’t want to hold you to that,” he insisted. “Play it by ear.” He forked an uneaten pancake onto a napkin. “Kaiser loves these things.”

We went out to the car where Kaiser proved him right. I was sure Robin Ford hadn’t seen me. “Are you going back to your office?” I asked Jed.

He looked at his watch. “Not till this afternoon. I’m havin’ a get-together with a couple at the other end of the county. Object: sale of real estate. Catch me at the office later. Or at the house. You know where it is?”

I shook my head and he told me how to find it. I dropped him off at his car before driving out to the swamp. The place he had described wasn’t hard to find; 2.1 miles on the odometer brought me to the
bait and tackle for rent
sign. I sat in the car and looked at it. Fifty yards beyond it was another sign:
airboat for hire.
My first time around in Hudson an airboat had played a very prominent part in my getting out of town alive.

I got out of the car after letting Kaiser out. The heat of the day was increasing steadily. Kaiser located the dirt path Jed had mentioned. After a glance over his shoulder to see that I was following, the shepherd trotted along it in front of me. The path led away from the two signs. Evidently neither was Casey Deakin’s operation.

My footsteps were muffled on the dusty earth. The only sounds were the occasional whizzing-past rush of a car on the road and the lapping of water at a dilapidated-looking wooden dock seen hazily through head-high weeds. In the distance buzzards wheeled in huge circles over some dead thing in the swamp.

The path rounded a corner and I found myself confronting a shack. It was such a decrepit-looking structure I couldn’t believe anyone would be living in it. Sagging, splintered boards were inadequately shielded from the Florida sun by strips of tarpaper which showed residual traces of bubbling-action from continual exposure. There was a dank odor that didn’t come entirely from the swamp.

Kaiser bounded into the center of the small scruffy-looking clearing. The dog advanced upon a dirt-encrusted caricature of a beach umbrella set up in a corner of the clearing over a broken-out, cane-bottomed chair which had one leg shorter than the others.

A man was sitting in the lopsided chair, watching me. Kaiser circled his chair rapidly, then returned to sit on his haunches where I was standing. The man wore a frowsy growth of gray beard, and the state of his hair indicated that a comb hadn’t touched it in days. His big frame appeared shrunken in its slumped posture in the tilted chair.

“Mr. Deakin?” I said tentatively, walking toward him. Kaiser moved forward with me.

“Used to be,” the man said in a high-pitched voice that creaked with disuse or a throat impairment.

At closer range I could see that something was wrong with his face. It was odd-shaped; out of symmetry. He’d had plastic surgery after a beating, but not enough. His eyes were the strangest thing about his broken face. Even while looking right at me they appeared to be fixed inwardly in meditative contemplation.

“I’d like to talk to you, Mr. Deakin.”

He cleared his throat heavily. “I don’t want any of what you’re sellin’, an’ couldn’t afford it if I did.” He folded his hands in his lap. His gaze appeared to be directed indifferently somewhere over my left shoulder.

I moved closer to him. He made no overt movement, but I detected an involuntary shrinking-back. A flash of apprehension in the eyes told the story graphically. Some men can take a physical beating and rebound, fueled by their rage and hatred. Others are never the same. I placed a hand on my face, calling Deakin’s attention to my plastic-surgery-repaired features. “I’ve been that route, too,” I assured him.

For a moment he appeared not to catch the implication. Then his eyes narrowed as though focusing upon me for the first time. “Hell of a fucking mess,” he said unexpectedly. “Not yours. Mine.” A hand rose from his lap and traced the outline of his misshapen face. “Ran out of money to put it back in shape properly. Wasn’t goin’ anyplace where anyone who mattered would see it, anyway.”

The momentary spark of interest seemed to die out. Deakin’s eyes reverted to their former passive, inward-looking state. His attitude suggested I was no longer present. I tried to capitalize upon the fractional breakthrough. “I wanted to ask you about a man named Colisimo,” I said.

His answer came quickly enough. “Never met him.” I thought that was all he was going to say, but he cleared his throat again. “Never met him,” he repeated in a stronger voice.

“But you met Mario Rubelli.”

There was no answer at all. Casey Deakin spat into the grass surrounding his ramshackle chair. The action appeared to be reflexive, one with no passion nor even much energy. Mentally Deakin had gone away again. I had promised Jed I wouldn’t use his name, but unless I could jar Deakin loose in some way, what was I doing there?

“Jed Raymond thought you could help me,” I continued after a moment’s self-debate.

The name roused Deakin, as I’d hoped. “Honest kid,” he said, his eyes returning from that inner far-distance. “But a kid,” he added. “Never talked to him about—” He didn’t finish it. His tone implied that if he hadn’t talked to Jed Raymond about what had happened to him he certainly wasn’t going to talk to a stranger.

There had to be some kind of handle that fit this man. “Rubelli worked you over,” I reminded him. “Wouldn’t you like to see something happen to him?”

Some responses are elemental.

Self-preservation.

Sex.

And revenge.

For an instant there was a feral gleam in Deakin’s sunken eyes. It evaporated, and Deakin shook his head. “Said they’d kill me if I talked,” he said in another of his foreshortened sentences. “Don’t see how it could help, anyway.”

“I’m looking for an angle,” I explained. “Any angle.”

“You’re a damn fool.” Once again his voice was unexpectedly stronger. “They’ll plow you under.”

“They plowed you under because you didn’t know who you were dealing with,” I suggested.

“God’s truth,” Casey Deakin agreed.

“If you had, you’d have handled it differently.”

“God’s truth,” he said again.

“Do you know a girl named Robin Ford?”

He was silent.

“Rubelli’s girl?”

Casey Deakin spat on the grass again. “She watched,” he said. I was surprised to see a wisp of a smile on the lumpy face. “Gave ’em all they could handle for a bit. Then—” He retreated into his own silent-screen horror movie.

I looked again at the man in the unbalanced chair. I could believe that he once had the capacity to give Rubelli’s goons, as Jed termed them, all they could handle for a bit. Even in its shrunken state Deakin’s physique suggested a former massivity. And a man doesn’t get to organize his own trucking company by acting like the mother superior of a convent.

“What’ve you got against Rubelli?” Deakin broke the silence that had fallen between us.

“I’m not sure,” I said.

I felt it was a weak answer, but Deakin nodded. “Never sure until it’s too late,” he responded. “Butter wouldn’t melt in their goddam mouths when they gave me the money to expand the business.” His tone was brooding. His gaze had slipped away from me, but it returned. “How’d you handle Rubelli if anything I told you fit your manifest? Run to the cops?”

Jed had said that Deakin had never filed a complaint. The police apparently couldn’t provide a solution for him. Even aside from the threats against his life, the trucking business provides a lot of situations for which legal authority will never be asked to supply solutions. “No cops,” I said. On a hunch, I unbuttoned my jacket and drew my Smith & Wesson 9mm. automatic from its Bianchi belt-holster. I showed the inanimate steel to Casey Deakin.

“Too quick,” he said. There was a deeper timbre in his voice. “Too good for him.”

I reholstered the automatic. “Sometimes quickness is ahead of both godliness and cleanliness,” I said with attempted lightness. “Didn’t you have papers protecting you from a Colisimo takeover?”

“Not at first. But Espada gave me a paper when he was sure he was dying.” Deakin grimaced, his lopsided features contorting grotesquely. “I was lyin’ on the floor of my office when Rubelli took it out of my safe an’ burned it. I never—”

“Espada?” I said, risking interrupting the flow. The sound of the name had vitalized me as though I’d been suddenly plugged into a 660-volt line.

“Lou Espada. I never held nothin’ against him,” Deakin continued. “He was just Colisimo’s money man. His front man. I had all my dealin’s with him. But after he was dead an’ Colisimo got out of the jug, Bolts sent Rubelli to take over. I hear they moved the business to Tampa now.”

Lou Espada. Hazel’s second husband had been a man named Lou Espada. And Hazel had confided to me once that despite her normal wifely curiosity Espada had gone to considerable trouble to keep her from learning the source of his considerable wealth. “Rubelli cashed in Espada, too, because Espada gave you the paper?” I asked.

“No, no,” Deakin replied impatiently. “Lou was dead of cancer before Rubelli ever came around. Lou knew he was dying and told me I’d need the paper after he was gone. Turned out I needed a hell of a lot more’n that.” Deakin was brooding again. “My own fault. Thought I could operate without ‘em. So they showed me.”

“What business was Espada in?”

“Monkey business. Oh, he had an office, an’ he bought an’ sold things. Stocks, bonds, leases, mortgages, businesses. But principally he was a moneylender.”

“Colisimo’s money?”

“Correct.” Deakin shuffled his feet, then sighed deeply. “How d’you think you’re gonna get to Rubelli?”

“Right this minute I don’t know.”

But I was going to get to him, of that I was sure. Rubelli was bound to have answers to questions I was interested in asking. Lou Espada’s name had added a whole new dimension to the puzzle in Hudson, Florida. As Espada’s widow, Hazel could be involved in a manner I hadn’t dreamed possible. “Thanks for your help,” I added.

Deakin waved my thanks away. He had turned inward again. In reliving his own situation he had neglected to inquire about mine. Or perhaps he simply didn’t care. In his half-shattered mind we were now partners, with Rubelli the target. “Give him an extra shot for me when you find him,” he rasped. “Preferably right up his asshole.” He sighed again, this time hungrily. “Sure wish you could bring him around here so I could watch you nail him to the cross.” A gleam of his former caution returned. “But you be goddam careful,” he warned.

“I’ll be in touch,” I said.

I whistled to Kaiser who was exploring the boat dock, and together we left the aura of decay that enveloped ex-trucker Casey Deakin and his dismal surroundings.

I wanted to confront Jed with this recent development, but it would have to wait until Jed concluded his real estate business. I drove back toward the cabin, stopping once to do my shopping. I was able to get everything except the machete.

Kaiser followed me into the cabin. I was looking around uncertainly for something to do to kill the necessary time until I could see Jed when Kaiser looked up at me and yawned hugely.

Before I knew it I found myself yawning back.

“Maybe you’ve got the right idea, boy,” I told the shepherd. My comparatively brief slumber on Hazel’s couch the night before hadn’t totally erased the weariness accumulated in two days on the road.

This time I made up the bed and crawled in.

In a minute Kaiser jumped up on the bed and joined me.

I drifted off with scrambled thoughts of Hazel, Lou Espada, and Casey Deakin flitting through my mind.

When I escaped from the prison hospital with my new face, I used to dream about the episode all the time. The dream always followed a set pattern; it was like unreeling a strip of film. Sometimes I knew it was a dream and still couldn’t seem to wake up. Later the dream came intermittently, and finally it became a once-in-a-while event.

It could have been the sight of Casey Deakin’s remade face that triggered my subconscious.

As always, the dream began with me sitting in the cubbyhole-sized office of Dr. Sher Afzul, a little Pakistani plastic surgeon recently attached to the prison hospital staff. Dr. Afzul had dark mahogany features, slick black hair, large brown eyes, and a pencil-line mustache. “I haf my sshare of curiossity,” he said to me, his Oxford-accented sibilants hissing like snakes. “For six months you haf been a vegetable, and now, without the knowledge of anyone else, you indicate you wish to speak to me.”

“Can you make me a new face, Doc?”

He leaned across his desk, put two fingers under my chin, and tilted my head back while he studied the ruin of my face. I had long since stopped looking into the mirror mornings at the lumpy scar tissue and disfiguring discolorations that extended down almost to my mouth.

“A strong constitution,” the little doctor commented. “Shock alone from extenssive burns like these would have killed many. But yes, I can make you a new face.” He picked up the thin tube of an aromatic-smelling cigarette he was smoking. “So you are not a vegetable,” he said slowly. “You are a conssumately clever actor?”

“How clever does a man have to be to play moron, Doc?”

He smiled. “And why am I favored now with the bright side of your ssparkling personality?”

“We’ve already covered that.”

He nodded. “I can give you a new face.”

“Correct. I’ll pay you for it.”

A slender eyebrow arched. “You will pay me for doing that for which the hosspital already pays me?”

“I’ll pay you additionally. I don’t want the standard quick-hurry-up job that will still leave me looking like a candidate for the lead role in a horror movie. I’ve heard the staff members say you’re good, Doc. How come you’re buried in a place like this?”

He smiled again. “Because I find that a prophet is without honor in countries other than his own, too. I was not without reputation in Karachi. There I was of the upper middle class. Here—” he spread his slender hands widely, “—I qualify for—for—what is the name of your poor mountain region?”

“Appalachia.”

“Appalachia,” he agreed. “I knew it would be difficult to establish myself, but not this difficult. It’s not easy for a foreign doctor to be accepted in your country. There must be an accepted length of residence and demonsstrated hospital training before the state examination can be taken. The red tape is very resstrictive.”

I glanced around the shabby office. “And they’re not exactly overwhelming you with facilities here.”

He held up his hands, then tapped himself on the forehead. “Here are my facilities. I need no other. When I first came to your country, I wass in Grace Hospital in New Orleans, one of your largest. Ssomeone wass always watching over my shoulder, though, checking me and ordering changes in my technique. I decided this would be better. Here no one cares what I do.”

“I care, Doc.”

“Yess, you will pay me. Except that I haf examined the circumstances of your presence here. You are indigent, ssir.”

“Only while I’m still inside the walls.”

“So? The file shows you have no assets, not even a record of employment.” The brown eyes were probing me. “The record, in fact, iss more remarkable for what it doesn’t show than what it does.”

“I want the best job you can give me. For cash.”

His head was cocked to one side like a bright-eyed bird’s. “This cash,” he said. “How much did you have in mind?”

“Twenty thousand. Half in advance.”

His face closed up like a furled umbrella. “Your delusions of grandeur had previously esscaped me.”

“When you’re ready to take me seriously, I’ll tell you where to go to put your hand on the first ten thousand. In untraceable cash. You keep it and bring me back what’s hidden with it.”

He still looked doubtful. “This hiding place. It iss near?”

“No.”

“Then I would have to invesst my time and money in this venture?”

“You gambled when you left Karachi, Doc. And twenty thousand would set you up nicely in private practice.” I tried to think how to get through to him. “When you first saw me on the ward, what were the odds against our having a conversation like this?”

“Asstronomical,” he admitted.

“You’re still thinking of me like that. It’s a mistake.” I rose to my feet. “The cash will be there any time you give me the word you’d like to try for it.”

His lips were pursed. “Thiss is illegal money?”

I didn’t answer him. I opened his office door. “Don’t expect me to be turning verbal handsprings the next time you see me on the ward.” I shuffled out into the corridor in my role of slow-moving dimwit.

Dr. Afzul followed me and used his key to let me back through the heavy glass door onto the ward and the untender mercies of its sadistic attendant, Spider Kern.

I had already made up my mind that nothing lasts forever, especially Spider Kern.

Dr. Afzul had me brought back to his office in a few days. When we were alone, I spoke before he could. “Scuttlebutt on the ward says you’re going to attend a convention of plastic surgeons in New York, Doc.”

“That iss correct.”

“In New York you’ll be near the money.”

“So we’re back on that ssubject?”

“We are. You’ll be within two hundred and twenty-five miles of it.”

He tapped thoughtfully on his desk top with a pencil. “Tell me exactly what it iss you would haf me do.”

“Hire a car in New York and drive to the spot I’ll tell you. It will take you about five hours. Dig up a sealed jar eighteen inches below the ground. Take out ten thousand dollars and bring me everything else.” Dr. Afzul was silent. “Does it make sense that I’d send you after nothing when I’ll still be here when you get back?”

“No.” He hitched his chair forward in sudden determination. “Where iss this place?”

“Guardian Angel Cemetery in Hillsboro, New Hampshire.” He wrote it down. “Drive in the front gate and follow the circular gravel road to the right. Turn left at the first intersection. The third headstone on the right will have the name Mallory on it. Twelve feet behind the stone you’ll find the jar.”

“What iff the gate is locked?”

“There’s no gate as such. Just an arched entranceway. The township has a newer cemetery but maintains the old one after a fashion.”

Dr. Afzul leaned back in his chair. “I haf preliminary approval for your facial reconsstruction. I haf proposed that in the interessts of furthering my technique that I do a full-scale rebuilding job. If the money iss where you say it iss—”

“It’s there, Doc.”

“It will be a tedious and painful process,” he warned. “It will take a long time.”

I refrained from stating the obvious. “What will the program be, Doc?”

“A few quesstions first. You are a good healer, or perhaps a cut heals sslowly?”

“I heal quickly.”

He nodded. “I will take blood ssamples. You should know there is a choice in the type of graft possible. With the dermatone, a skin-slicing machine, we are able to cut extremely thin slices of skin from a wide area. The choice comes in the thickness of skin removed. We can take the top two layers, known as the epithelium and the deeper corium, which would consstitute a full-thickness graft. Or we can take a thinner slice including only half the corium, a partial-thickness graft.”

“What’s the difference, Doc?”

“All transsplants contract and change color after healing. The thicker the transplant, the less change, which iss important in connection with the face. Converssely, the thicker the transsplant the more difficulty in getting it to take permanently. A partial-thickness graft is sometimes more efficient though less essthetic.”

I held out my stiffened hands to him, displaying the encrusted burn scars. “The hands are more important than the face, Doc. I was never a beauty. Couldn’t you do the hands first? That way we’d know about the way I heal before you get to the tough part of things.” I wanted all the healing time possible on my hands.

“Your point hass merit,” Dr. Afzul acknowledged. “Except that in the case of the hands the procedure iss different. I will cut loose flaps of skin in your chest, known as pedicules, and inssert your hands inside until the skin of your chest grows to the back of your hands. Then a series of incissions will detach your hands from your chest while new skin is growing underneath. One hand at a time in this process, of course.”

“What about the face?”

“Two different techniques will be involved. For the forehead and the nose, I will probably peel flaps of skin down from your scalp, since you will have to wear a hair piece anyway. For the rest, mobile transsplants from the arms, back, and thighs. You should know that not everything we try will be successful. One thing I will tell you. Do not get burned again. What I do this time, no one can do a second time.”

“How long will all this take?”

“With trial and error, at least ten months. Perhaps longer.”

He took the blood samples before I left his office.

The next time I saw little Dr. Afzul he was wearing eighty-dollar English brogues, and I knew I was in business. He had me brought to his office again. “Have a nice time in New York, Doc?” I asked when the door was closed.

He didn’t reply. Instead, he reached into a pocket of his hospital whites and handed me a folded-over wad of bills. I riffled it quickly. There was twenty-two hundred in hundred dollar bills. I put it in a pocket of my pajama-robe. “That’s not all that was in the jar, Doc,” I said.

He shook his head. “I cannot give you the gun.”

“We made a bargain,” I pressed him, although I had never really expected he would turn over the weapon.

“When I left here, I wass still in doubt of the exisstence of the money, even,” he said. “Finding the gun with it raised serious quesstions. I am now concerned to what use you would put a new face.”

“I don’t understand your morality, Doc. You took my money, but you don’t deliver.”

“My morality iss my own affair,” he retorted, unruffled. “On the new face, I will deliver. On the gun, no. There is self-preservation to be considered. Your purpose can hardly be in doubt. You might be gone, but I would remain. And there would be inquiries. You will have to make up your mind that your new face will be worth your invesstment in me.”

“Okay,” I shrugged it off. The gun would have helped, but the cash was next best. “When do we start?”

“Tomorrow.”

There was nothing excruciatingly painful about Dr. Afzul’s sophisticated techniques. Mostly it was the awkwardness and inconvenience of the flesh-to-flesh transfers that bugged me, plus the accompanying boring monotony. I spent a lot of time in bed because it was too much trouble to do anything else.

Twice I thought we were finished, but little Dr. Afzul would have none of it. “I can increasse the degree of naturalness,” he said both times, and patiently began another complicated transplant. My own patience had just about unraveled.

Dr. Afzul wouldn’t let me see the results of any of his efforts except those upon my hands which had healed nicely. “Better that you should see it all at once,” he insisted. “Luckily you have most of your eyelashes. A hairpiece you can buy, and eyebrows I can give you, after a fashion, but eyelashes gone are gone forever.”

“When will the bandages come off for good?” I asked him on the day he assured me the final transplant had taken and we were in the last healing stage.

“Ten days to two weeks,” he answered.

I gave thought then to Spider Kern.

I wanted to blow the joint after the surgery was completed but before my bandages were removed. That way no one would know what my new face looked like. Neither would I, for that matter, but I could wait.

I’d laid a thousand of the money Dr. Azful brought me on Kern at the outset of the plastic surgery. I was buying immunity from his quaint little habits while I was healing. Even Rafe James, Kern’s ward-attendant partner, noticed the way Kern followed me into the shower with lighted cigarettes. “You really work out on the loony, don’t you, Spider?” he observed one day. “You’d think he was your mother-in-law.”

“He shot up my buddy, Blaze Franklin,” Kern replied. “We used to be deppities together. Besides, this joker’s fakin’ it. I can tell.”

“He’s a hell of a faker if he can take all those cigarette burns you’re handin’ out without showin’ nothing,” James said.

The thousand I’d given Kern, in addition to buying me immunity, was intended to make him hungry for more. When Afzul told me we were close, I put myself in Kern’s way. “What’s on your mind?” he asked me.

I almost smiled. A month previously, Spider Kern wouldn’t have admitted I had a mind. “I want a gun,” I told him.

He blinked. He hadn’t expected anything that blunt. “Well, now you know that’s—” he began to bluster.

“For five thousand dollars,” I cut him off.

His lips pursed in a soundless whistle.

I didn’t have five thousand dollars, but then I wasn’t going to get a gun from Spider Kern, either. Not while he knew anything about it. He wouldn’t get me a gun, but with his eye on the money he would pretend to get it.

“When do you want it?” he asked me.

I was pleased to see that the train of thought he’d been pursuing for himself was what I’d programmed for him. I touched my face. “When it’s finished,” I said. “In two weeks.”

“Time enough. Okay, for five grand. C.O.D.”

“C.O.D.,” I repeated.

Kern approached me again ten days later. “You’ve got the cash?” he asked.

“I’ll have it.” I didn’t want him thinking he could shake me down close to the deadline and find it on me.

“No mistakes,” he warned.

“There won’t be any.”

“You’ve been puttin’ us on all this time, right?”

“Would you be getting five grand if I hadn’t? But I wasn’t putting
you
on, Spider. You didn’t buy it.”