Skin Tight (44 page)

“Wow,” said Kipper Garth.

“What'd I tell you?”

“I had no idea.”

“You can let go now,” Mrs. Nordstrom said.

“Just a second.”

But one second turned into ten seconds, and ten seconds turned into thirty, which was plenty of time for John Nordstrom to enter the house and size up the scene. Without a word he loaded up the wicker
cesta
and hurled a goatskin jai-alai ball at the slimy lawyer who was feeling up his wife. The first shot sailed wide to the left and shattered a jalousie window. The second shot dimpled the arm of the love seat with a flat
thunk.
It was then that Kipper Garth released his grip on Marie Nordstrom's astoundingly stalwart breasts and made a vain break for the back door. Whether the lawyer fully comprehended his ethical crisis or fled on sheer animal instinct would never be known. John Nordstrom's third and final jai-alai shot struck the occipital seam of Kipper Garth's skull. He was unconscious by the time his silvery head smacked the floor.

“Ha!” Nordstrom exclaimed.

“I take it you got the job,” said his wife.

 

 

WILLIE
the cameraman said they had two ways to go: they could crash the place or sneak one in.

Reynaldo Flemm said: “Crash it.”

“Think of the timing,” Willie said. “The timing's got to be flawless. We've never tried anything like this.” Willie was leaning toward trying a hidden camera.

Reynaldo said: “Crash it. There's no security, it's a goddamn medical clinic. Who's gonna stop you, the nurse?”

Willie said he didn't like the plan—too many holes. “What if the guy makes a run for it? What if he calls the police?”

Reynaldo said: “Where's he gonna go, Willie? That's the beauty of this thing. The sonofabitch can't run away, and he knows it. Not with the tape rolling. They got laws.”

“Jesus,” Willie said, “I don't like it. We've got to have a signal, you and me.”

“Don't worry,” Reynaldo said, “we'll have a signal.”

“But what about the interview?” Willie asked. It was another way of bringing up Christina Marks.

“I wrote my own questions,” Reynaldo said sharply. “Ball busters, too. You just wait.”

“Okay,” Willie said. “I'll be ready.”

“Seven sharp,” Reynaldo said. “I can't believe you're so nervous—this isn't the Crips and Bloods, man, it's a candyass doctor. He'll go to pieces, I guarantee it. True confessions, you just wait.”

“Seven sharp,” Willie said. “See you then.”

After the cameraman had gone, Reynaldo Flemm called the Whispering Palms Spa and Surgery Center to confirm the appointment for Johnny LeTigre. To his surprise, the secretary put him through directly to Dr. Graveline.

“We still on for tomorrow morning?”

“Certainly,” the surgeon said. He sounded distracted, subdued. “Remember: Nothing to eat or drink after midnight.”

“Right.”

“I thought we'd start with the rhinoplasty and go on to the liposuction.”

“Fine by me,” said Reynaldo Flemm. That's exactly how he had planned it, the nose job first.

“Mr. LeTigre, I had a question regarding the fee . . .”

“Fifteen thousand is what we agreed on.”

“Correct,” said Rudy Graveline, “but I just wanted to make sure—you said something about cash?”

“Yeah, that's right. I got cash.”

“And you'll have it with you tomorrow?”

“You bet.” Reynaldo couldn't believe this jerk. Probably grosses two million a year, and here he is drooling over a lousy fifteen grand. It was true what they said about doctors being such cheap bastards.

“Anything else I need to remember?”

“Just take plenty of fluids,” Rudy said mechanically, “but nothing after midnight.”

“I'll be a good boy,” Reynaldo Flemm promised. “See you tomorrow.”

THE
wind kicked up overnight, whistled through the planks of the house, slapped the shutters against the walls. Mick Stranahan climbed naked to the roof and lay down with the shotgun at his right side. The bay was noisy and black, hissing through the pilings beneath the house. Above, the clouds rolled past in churning gray clots, celestial dust devils tumbling across a low sky. As always, Stranahan lay facing away from the city, where the halogen crime lights stained an otherwise lovely horizon. On nights such as this, Stranahan regarded the city as a malignancy and its sickly orange aura as a vast misty bubble of pustular gas. The downtown skyline, which had seemed to sprout overnight in a burst of civic priapism, struck Stranahan as a crass but impressive prop, an elaborate movie set. Half the new Miami skyscrapers had been built with coke money and existed largely as an inside joke, a mirage to please the banks and the Internal Revenue Service and the chamber of commerce. Everyone liked to say that the skyline was a monument to local prosperity, but Stranahan recognized it as a tribute to the anonymous genius of Latin American money launderers. In any case, it was nothing he wished to contemplate from the top of his stilt house. Nor was the view south of downtown any kinder, a throbbing congealment from Coconut Grove to the Gables to South Miami and beyond. Looking westward on a clearer evening, Stranahan would have fixed on the newest coastal landmark: a sheer ten-story cliff of refuse known as Mount Trash-more. Having run out of rural locations in which to conceal its waste, Dade County had erected a towering fetid landfill along the shore of Biscayne Bay. Stranahan could not decide which sight was more offensive, the city skyline or the mountain of garbage. The turkey buzzards, equally ambivalent, commuted regularly from one site to the other.

Stranahan was always grateful for a clean ocean breeze. He sprawled on the eastern slope of the roof, facing the Atlantic. A DC-10 took off from Miami International and passed over Stiltsville, rattling the windmill on Stranahan's house. He wondered what it would be like to wake up and find the city vaporized, the skies clear and silent, the shoreline lush and virginal! He would have loved to live here at the turn of the century, when nature owned the upper hand.

The cool wind tickled the hair on his chest and legs. Stranahan tasted salt on his lips and closed his eyes. One of his ex-wives, he couldn't remember which, had told him he ought to move to Alaska and become a hermit. You're such an old grump, she had said, not even the grizzly bears'd put up with you. Now Stranahan recalled which wife had said this: Donna, his second. She had eventually grown tired of all his negativity. Every big city has crime, she had said. Every big city has corruption. Look at New York, she had said. Look at Chicago. Those are great goddamn cities, Mick, you gotta admit. Like so many cocktail waitresses, Donna steadfastly refused to give up on humanity. She believed that the good people of the world outnumbered the bad, and she got the tips to prove it. After the divorce, she had enrolled in night school and earned her Florida real estate license; Stranahan had heard she'd moved to Jacksonville and was going great guns in the waterfront condo market. Bleakly it occurred to him that all his former wives (even Chloe, who had nailed a CPA for a husband) had gone on to greater achievements after the divorce. It was as if being married to Stranahan had made each of them realize how much of the real world they were missing.

He thought of Christina Marks. How did he get mixed up with such a serious woman? Unlike the others he had loved and married, Christina avidly pursued that which was evil and squalid and polluted. Her job was to expose it. There was not a wisp of true innocence about her, not a trace of cheery waitress-type optimism . . . yet something powerful attracted him. Maybe because she slogged through the same moral swamps. Crooked cops, crooked lawyers, crooked doctors, crooked ex-wives, even crooked tree trimmers—these were the spawn of the city bog.

Stranahan's fingers found the stock of the shotgun, and he moved it closer. Soon he fell asleep, and he dreamed that Victoria Barletta was alive. He dreamed that he met her one night in the Rathskellar on the University of Miami campus. She was working behind the bar, wearing a pink butterfly bandage across the bridge of her nose. Stranahan ordered a beer and a cheeseburger medium, and asked her if she wanted to get married. She said sure.

 

 

THE
boat woke him up. It was a familiar yellow skiff with a big outboard. Stranahan saw it a mile away, trimmed up, running the flats. He smiled—the bonefish guide, his friend. With all the low dirty clouds it was difficult to estimate the time, but Stranahan figured the sun had been up no more than two hours. He dropped from the roof, stowed the Remington inside the house, and pulled on a pair of jeans so as not to startle the guide's customers, who were quite a pair. The man was sixty-five, maybe older, obese and gray, with skin like rice parchment; the woman was twenty-five tops, tall, dark blond, wearing bright coral lip gloss and a gold choker necklace.

The guide climbed up to the stilt house and said, “Mick, take a good look. Fucking lipstick on a day like this.”

From the skiff, tied up below, Stranahan could hear the couple arguing about the weather. The woman wanted to go back, since there wasn't any sun for a decent tan. The old man said no, he'd paid his money and by God they would fish.

Stranahan said to his friend, “You've got the patience of Job.”

The guide shook his head. “A killer mortgage is what I've got. Here, this is for you.”

It was an envelope with Stranahan's name printed in block letters on the outside. “Woman with two black eyes told me to give it to you,” the guide said. “Cuban girl, not bad looking, either. She offered me a hundred bucks.”

“Hope you took it.”

“I held out for two,” the guide said.

Stranahan folded the envelope in half and tucked it in the back pocket of his jeans.

The guide said, “You in some trouble?”

“Just business.”

“Mick, you don't have a business.”

Stranahan grinned darkly. “True enough.” He knew what his friend was thinking: Single guy, cozy house on the water, a good boat for fishing, a monthly disability check from the state—how could anybody fuck up a sweet deal like that?

“I heard some asshole shot hell out of the place.”

“Yeah.” Stranahan pointed to a sheet of fresh plywood on the door. The plywood covered two of Chemo's bullet holes. “I've got to get some red paint,” Stranahan said.

The guide said, “Forget the house, what about your shoulder?”

“It's fine,” Stranahan said.

“Don't worry, it was Luis who told me.”

“No problem. You want some coffee?”

“Naw.” The bonefish guide jerked a thumb in the direction of his skiff. “This old fart, he's on the board of some steel company up North. That's his secretary.”

“God bless him.”

The guide said, “Last time they went fishing, I swear, she strips off the bottom of her bathing suit. Not the top, Mick, the bottom part. All day long, flashing her bush in my face. Said she was trying to bleach out her pubes. Here I'm poling like a maniac after these goddamn fish, and she's turning somersaults in front of the boat, trying to keep her bush in the sun.”

Stranahan said, “I don't know how you put up with it.”

“So today there's no sunshine and of course she's throwin' a fit. Meanwhile the old fart says all he wants is a world-record bonefish on fly. That's all. Mick, I'm too old for this shit.” The guide pulled on his cap so tightly that it crimped the tops of his ears. Lugubriously he descended the stairs to the dock.

“Good luck,” Stranahan said. Under the circumstances, it sounded ridiculous.

The guide untied the yellow skiff and hopped in. Before starting the engine, he looked up at Stranahan and said, “I'll be out here tomorrow, even if the weather's bad. The next day, too.”

Stranahan nodded; it was good to know. “Thanks, Captain,” he said.

After the skiff was gone, Stranahan returned to the top of the house and took the envelope out of his pocket. He opened it calmly because he knew what it was and who it was from. He'd been waiting for it.

The message read:
We've got your girlfriend. No cops!

And it gave a telephone number.

Mick Stranahan memorized the number, crumpled the paper, and tossed it off the roof into the milky waves. “Somebody's been watching too much television,” he said.

 

 

THAT
afternoon, Mick Stranahan received another disturbing message. It was delivered by Luis Córdova, the young marine patrol officer. He gave Stranahan a lift by boat from Stiltsville to the Crandon Marina, where Stranahan got a cab to his sister Kate's house in Gables-by-the-Sea.

Sergeant Al García was fidgeting on the front terrace. Over his JCPenney suit he was wearing what appeared to be an authentic London Fog trenchcoat. Stranahan knew that García was upset because he was smoking those damn Camels again. Even before Stranahan could finish paying the cabbie, García was charging down the driveway, blue smoke streaming from his nostrils like one of those cartoon bulls.

“So,” the detective said, “Luis fill you in?”

Stranahan said yes, he knew that Kipper Garth had been gravely injured in a domestic dispute.

García blocked his path up the drive. “By a client, Mick. Imagine that.”

“I didn't know the client, Al.”

“Name of Nordstrom, John Nordstrom.” García was working the sodden nub of the Camel the same way he worked the cigars, from one side of his mouth to the other. Stranahan found it extremely distracting.