Prelude to a Scream (17 page)

“Special? Well, I—.”

“I want to tongue the entire length of it! The entire length of your scar. Please, Stanley. After that… anything… anything you like. Please… your scar… I'll do anything for you, Stanley. May I…?”

“Well… well, hell yes, Iris,” Stanley whispered. “Go for the scar.” Her tongue tickled the purpling tissue, as billed. It tingled. It felt… delicious.

You know what I really like
, Stanley thought to himself, relaxing against the thick cushions of the sofa.

You know what's my favorite
…?

Later, she said, “I have a surprise for you.”

“Another one?”

“Let me get it.”

She went away in the darkness and came back, pushing a wave of incense before her. “Here.”

“What is it?”

“It's a bear.”

“What?”

“It's a
special
bear.”

Stanley maneuvered it in the gloom. It was a bear all right, stuffed, about six inches high, crafted in a sitting position. A fuzzy brown stuffed bear.

“Ah…what's so special about it?”

“It's a Get-Well Bear.”

“You're kidding.”

She wasn't. “And it's just for you.”

“Oh, well, thanks.”

She observed, “You can't see what it's holding.”

“What? No, I… I'm not even looking at it.”

“Look. In his little paws.”

“It's a he?”

She struck the green lighter.

“See it now?”

“It's a flower.”

“No, silly. It's an aster.”

Stanley stared at it. It was an aster, all right. A purple aster.

“Is this some kind of bad joke?”

Even in the dark, he could see that she blushed deeply. “No, Stanley,” she said. “It's a good aster. Not like that bad one we found sewn to you.”

“A good aster…”

“Yes,” she nodded. “A healing aster. Presented to you especially by Mr. Get-Well Bear. Mr. Get-Well Bear and his healing aster are going to make you all better.”

He could see that she was completely sincere.

“Soon,” she added, snuggling against him. “Get well soon.”

Bartender
, said the inner voice, deep in the tavern of Stanley's brain.
Hit me again.

Chapter Twelve

I
T TOOK A MONTH.

Fong's part, however, was accomplished overnight. Using Giles MacIntosh's name and password, Fong penetrated DonorNet immediately. The computer answered his call, accepted
foment
as a password, and i
nvited him in. Except that it was good practice to figure where the files were kept and what they were called, Fong was almost bored. Within a couple of hours he had gotten the software available on the host computer to do everything for him, and had the information Stanley needed. On the way out Fong's evening was brightened by a browse through some interesting names, addresses and statistics in a file called
PROSTIT.OOT
.

DonorNet responded to Stanley's sieve with the names of twelve healthy, single, heterosexual, drinking men in San Francisco with type O-Negative blood.

Fong's search of the
Chronicle
and
Examiner
databases on CompuServe yielded nine notices of kidney predation.

Six names were on both the DonorNet and newspaper lists.

Chronologically, the six duplicate cases succeeded the three previous incidents.

One of the duplicates was Stanley Clarke Ahearn.

Though the newspaper articles made no mention of blood types, Stanley had little doubt he had stumbled onto at least one of the means by which the thieves selected their victims. This left him with three avenues of approach.

First, he could canvass every bar in the city looking for a woman who liked to drink a Tom Collins and always carried a lime.

Stanley rejected this approach because of its obvious needle-in-haystack type of, uh, fruitlessness.

Had he been a cop, Stanley figured, he might have taken apart the Center for Sexual Diseases, department by department. No personnel or file would escape intense scrutiny. He would put everybody in the place under the bright light, one at a time, from the janitor to the philanthropist who put up the matching funds. Simultaneously he would have looked into the company that wrote and maintained DonorWare for the DonorNet, as well as the agencies involved with the collection and distribution of data on donors and sexual diseases and hangnails, too. Sooner or later a thread would emerge, and that thread would lead, eventually, to the Organ-ization.

If he merely wanted to
solve the crime
,
all he needed to do was mention his discovery to Corrigan and wait.

Stanley rejected this approach as well. Of resources or time, he had little or none. And though there was an element of revenge in his quest, Stanley wasn't interested in how organs were being pirated, let alone who was doing it. Stanley was interested in a new kidney.

This left him the third approach, which he pursued.

He cross-indexed and eliminated the newspaper victims from the list of blood O-Negative clients. This left him with a list of six potential victims.

On a hunch, he eliminated four names because they were homeless, divorced, or inhabited the income bracket known as “below poverty line.”

This left him with two names. He studied the available data. Both were single. Both made a living. Both listed “no close kin.” Much of their data closely matched Stanley's. Single, employed, O-Negative, without immediate family.

He decided to have a look at them.

That's all it took. One look at the owner of the first name sent him to the second. Guy No. 1: a thirty-three year-old research economist at a bank. He wore a suit with suspenders five days a week, worked out at a health club three times a week, drove a brand new Saab Turbo convertible, owned his own home in the upper Haight, windsurfed at Crissy Field three evenings a week, and rented a garage off Capra Way in the Marina to store the windsurfing gear and a Harley Sportster he never rode anymore, but whose mere ownership kept him in touch with his inner fool. He had season tickets to the opera, cultivated five or six girlfriends all of whom earned as much or more money than he did; he wore a two-hundred-and-fifty-dollar pair of gold-rimmed eyeglasses when he read
The Wall Street Journal
, Barron's, Fortune, and a $ 1500-per-annum investor's newsletter called
Red Smith's Guide
,
as well as everything published in hardback on the subject of personal growth as measured by money. He was never late. When at home for the weekend he wore the same pair of jeans he'd been able to get into for nine years, which gave Stanley pause for a thoughtful pat on the paunch, but the guy was never home on the weekends because he divided his leisure time between heli-skiing in the Canadian Rockies, alumni meetings at Stanford, and various girlfriend-owned time-share condos at Maui, Cabo San Lucas, and Stinson Beach.

And the man never, ever went to a bar unless there was a business deal in it, in which case he drank a bottled water he always carried with him.

One look at him was enough. Early the morning after staying up all night pondering Fong's data, Stanley parked the pickup in a bus zone across Frederick Street from Guy No. 1's address and waited. At 7:45 the guy and a blonde, both in business suits, with briefcases and wet hair, tripped briskly down the steep, fog-dampened steps of the guy's recently-painted Victorian. She opened the door of a year-old BMW nuzzled up behind the Saab, and sat into the safety harness. She started the engine, closed the door, powered down the driver's window, and leaned out to administer an adios with her lips. Before the kiss could become anything other than a technicality, the Beamer's telephone wheedled. From thirty yards up the street Stanley heard her say she had to go, even as she answered the phone. She backed out of the driveway, aimed the machine toward the financial district, and floored it. The BMW launched down Frederick Street and took the corner at Shrader without regard for the stop sign, its phone propped on its driver's shoulder even as she checked her makeup in the mirror on the back of the sun-visor.

Guy No. 1 stood in the driveway and watched her go, the front panels of his linen jacket drawn back under his forearms, the chamois forks of his duck galluses showing, his hands in the front pockets of his pressed linen pants, looking exactly like a man thinking about nuclear physics while waiting for his golden retriever to take a shit.

Guy No. 1 walked back up his driveway, pausing to pick up a cigarette-end someone had thrown there, and continued past his car to drop the butt into a trash can. As Guy No. 1 drove the Saab away—also aimed at the financial district, though his phone hadn't yet begun to ring—Stanley was already laying in the coordinates for Guy No. 2.

The second address was over a dry cleaner on Cortland in Bernal Heights. At 4:30 that same afternoon, Stanley was waiting for the 24 Divisadero to finish dispensing people so he could park in the bus zone when he saw a guy coming home from work. Guy No. 2 this guy had to be. He wore a blue and black checked flannel shirt with a black quilted insulated lining and gum-soled tan work boots. There would be white athletic socks inside the work boots and an ardent case of athlete's foot inside the socks. He carried a red and white insulated lunch tote with a tattered brown sweater, splotched white with dried joint compound, draped through its handle. His worn tee shirt was powdered white with sheetrock dust. So were his jeans. Their left rear pocket was ripped at the upper left-hand corner from clipping and unclipping a measuring tape all day long, eight hours a day, five days a week, 2,000 hours a year or for the life of the jeans or their wearer, whichever came first. He hadn't shaved in several days, and he was too old to be hanging sheetrock. Younger guys who hadn't hurt their backs yet would be giving him a run for his money. He'd already had a couple of drinks and anybody who hung sheetrock for a living, so far as Stanley was concerned, deserved theirs. Despite the drinks Guy No. 2 was walking gingerly His work troubled his back, stiffened his hands, numbed his mind; but he worked hard so he could live alone, peaceful and unmolested, upstairs over a dry cleaner. Even from across the street Stanley could see that the man's cheeks were puffy from insomnia and drink. His nose was a little bulbous, his hair hadn't been cut lately, he was pushing forty, and that paunch straining the tee shirt would only be getting bigger, ultimately aggravating his back problem.

If he survived his forthcoming kidney operation, that is.

His name was Ted.

Ted Nichols crossed the street, went into a grocery on the corner next to the bus zone, and emerged from the grocery a few minutes later with a brown paper bag. The paper bag had the familiar rectilinear bulge at its bottom and the familiar red and yellow plastic sack protruding from its mouth: two six-packs topped by a family-sized bag of potato chips. Salt and alcohol, hops and starch; it's surprising how much of the nutrition that a guy like No. 2 needs to survive is contained in these two products. Hops and alcohol relax the back muscles. The mind as well. A man who sweats all day wants salt and carbohydrates. A man who works all day likes to hear the crisp crepitations of the humidity-free bag, the demolishing crunches of the three mouthfuls he stuffs the moment he has entered his apartment, before doing anything else, even before turning on the television, standing over the opened bag in his kitchenette, a familiar grammar damply punctuated by the pleasurable little explosion of the top torn off the first cold can of beer.

Was Stanley intimately familiar with the
genus
containing the species of Guy No. 2, or what?

Stanley could presume Ted wouldn't be going out tonight. It was early in the week, and Ted had his two six-packs, his chips, his television. Once his shoes came off he'd be lucky to desert the chair long enough even to bathe. If Ted planned carefully, he'd only have to get out of the chair to piss, the first time at beer 1.5, and once subsequently for each additional can. He might grab a quick shower on the way to bed, but equally, he might pass out in the chair. If Ted made it to bed in time to saw off a straight eight—less two for insomnia—it was because he hadn't passed out in his chair with a beer in his hand, the television on, his shoes and the light off, the flickering room slowly filling with the reek of his feet, the dank odor of beer, and crescendos of snoring and canned laughter. His blood-sugar, or a headache, or a particularly prolonged broadcast scream, would drag him awake in the wee hours, and maybe then he'd curl up in the quilt his mother bought off a Winnebago Indian in Wisconsin in 1946. But if the routine went like that he wouldn't bathe. Only if he went to bed at nine or nine-thirty would he turn off the set and take the shower. Between the sheets at that last moment of consciousness, and at only that moment, he always wished to be clean.

Ted Nichols wouldn't be going anywhere tonight, Stanley thought, watching the flickering blue corner window above the storefront laundry. But the next time Ted heads for a bar, I'll be right behind him.

Friday night, most likely.

Stanley blinked twice and looked down the street. The 24 bus was laboring up the hill from Bayshore, loaded with people coming home from work. A woman pushed a stroller toward him along the sidewalk. An old man in a limp fedora sat in a plastic chair in a doorway, his palms on his knees and his eyes shut against the evening light.

Stanley watched the side mirror. In it, two young men talked animatedly. Beyond them a car parallel-parked, beyond the car a guy locked the door of an appliance store. The woman pushed her baby carriage out of one side of the mirror's frame and into the other.

Who were they? What did they look like?

They were here. One or more of these people worked for them. Could he spot them? They looked just like anybody else, right? Regular people? They were motivated just like everybody else— right? They stole kidneys because they wanted a bigger television? Because the rent went up? Because their guns required pricey silver bullets? Because they wanted to continue to breathe the perpetually fresh, blue, salttanged, increasingly expensive air of San Francisco instead of the stale, brown, tangibly thick, if cheaper, effluent that passed for air in most of the rest of the world?

Oh, well. That's understandable.

These renal bandits are people, just like me, thought Stanley. When he found them, they would prove to be just plain folks.

Whether he could spot them or not, Stanley wasn't the only person on this street waiting for Ted Nichols to drink one too many in the wrong bar at the wrong time. Somebody else was waiting for Ted.

And Stanley was waiting for them.

He looked forward again, through the windshield. He had one advantage over whomever else waited for Ted. Even though “they” presumably knew what they were doing, and even though Stanley certainly had no idea what he was doing, “they” didn't know yet that, while “they” were waiting for Ted, Stanley was waiting for them.

He might get to observe their whole operation, unnoticed.

He swallowed one of the medicinal pills, of the type he might have to take every night for the rest of his life.

He watched Ted's flickering blue window.

This had to be the guy.

That night, Stanley almost quit drinking.