Prelude to a Scream (25 page)

And, while he watched, as if in slow motion, he saw Corrigan set his weight back on his heels. The guy looked ready to throw a
punch.
Corrigan
really was acting the worried step-father.

“I'm all through with trying to figure out what happened to me last month,” Stanley said, as carefully and evenly as possible. “I'm out. From now on, it's up to you.”

Corrigan narrowed his eyes.

“That's the truth,” Stanley emphasized. He gestured toward the photos. “Anyone can see I'm in over my head.”

Corrigan relaxed his shoulders.

Stanley studied the trace of blood on the side of his hand. It wouldn't prove to be much more of a cut than he might give himself shaving. Definitely not worth slugging a cop for. Nor getting slugged back.

Without a word, Corrigan headed for the door.

“One more thing,” Stanley said, as Corrigan crossed the threshold. “I just remembered something.”

Corrigan stopped without turning. “What's that?”

“MacIntosh told me that he and that guy Tommy ate a lot of pizzas together.”

Corrigan waited.

Stanley waited.

“So?” Corrigan growled.

Stanley shrugged. “That's it. You think it could be important?”

A knot rippled down the cord at the back of Corrigan's neck, like a rat swallowed by a snake.

He kicked the wheelchair out of his way and left.

Stanley stood just outside the circle of light in the shack, listening to the detective's footsteps cross the gravel roof.

Chapter Eighteen

S
TANLEY WENT TO BED AT DAWN AND SLEPT THE FITFUL SLEEP OF
the opiated mono-kidnoid. At eight the clock radio swelled into a bright racket of traffic reports until he aroused sufficiently to swat it into silence.

Getting out of the sweat-soaked sheets he pulled on some clothes and limped downstairs to make a call to an answering machine. Then he climbed back to the roof, took another pill, adjusted the timer on the radio, and went back to sleep. He repeated the drill at noon and three o'clock. With the six o'clock phone call he got to talk to a live person.

Bathing, he discovered eight or ten little flaps of skin where as many sutures had loose. After the shower he watched his hip in a mirror on the toilet tank while he snipped the dangling loops of thread with a toenail clipper, and pulled them out with a pair of needle-nose pliers.

It was the first time he'd actually studied the incision which, upon consideration, had the appearance of a lavender revision upon the white editorial of his neglected flesh.

Upstairs again and dressed, he sat on the roof in the wheelchair and watched the evening shadow of the city edge eastward over the Bay, while the espresso-maker forced steam through Safeway's cheapest. The three-star edition of the
Examiner
lay folded on the gravel. Poor Ted, he was thinking, as a few lights came on in Oakland. Where is Ted finding himself awake about now? If he is to be found awake at all, that is. Would it be a kidney they will have taken, leaving the guy unfortunate but alive? Or does the baleful demise of Giles MacIntosh presage a new order of predation and victimhood?

The
Examiner
made no mention of recent untoward nephrectomies. But, while unable to shoulder Bosnia off the front page, the MacIntosh case received 250 words toward the bottom of the Metro column, as a grisly unsolved crime with, unfortunately, no star-studded cocaine orgy attached. One could always hope.

So far as anyone knew, this particular outfit had killed nobody, until they killed Giles. They'd harvested nine kidneys and let their donors live. It seemed judicious, if miraculous. Murder attracts attention.

It also seemed judicious to expect that some day Green Eyes and her gang would snatch the wrong person off the street, somebody with a heart problem or epilepsy, somebody who would die from the chloral hydrate in Green Eyes' cocktail, or from an allergic reaction to the anesthesia, or from a jolt as the Dodge hit a pothole on the way to the park. How would such a gang look at this new development? As statistically inevitable? Tough luck? An embarrassment? A minor inconvenience? The cost of doing business?

Stanley poured a cup of coffee and thoughtfully added scalded milk until it attained the specific color of medium density fiberboard.

What if, he wondered, such a gang as this looked at Giles' death as a
windfall
.

Since Giles, apparently,
had
to die, they could harvest everything about him. A second kidney, two eyes, the liver. What else is recyclable? Gall bladder? Pancreas? Spleen? Heart…? Oh yeah. The heart.

Like a car with the motor ripped out, Corrigan had said.

What an outfit to work for. Make a mistake and you don't worry about getting fired, any more than you worry about getting bumped off: you worry about getting
harvested
.

Stanley set the saucepan back on the butane ring.

How many thousands of dollars worth of recyclable parts would there be in a healthy human body? Forty, sixty, eighty? A hundred thousand? Given a rare blood type or tissue match, maybe two hundred thousand dollars?

That's a lot of rent.

He settled into the wheelchair with the steaming cup of coffee.

So the temptation to go ahead and make a lot of money off a single victim must be large. But not so great as to be out of balance with, say, a certain well-known penalty for murder committed under special circumstances. Leaving people scattered around the parks of San Francisco missing their kidneys has its nuisance value, but it's not murder.

In the circumstance of Giles, the harvesters must have made the determination that, since they had to kill him, they might as well get paid for it.

The sun had set, pulling the day after it. But a half hour later the ultramarine sky above the Berkeley hills began to lighten, as the orange caustic of a large moon surfaced beyond them. The crown of the ridge cast a black shadow over the treeless blaze burned into its western slope by the great fire of 1991. Despite new construction, the path of the conflagration remained plainly visible, like an ominous brand on the flank of the summit.

He pulled a page of notepaper from the pocket of his shirt. Various bits of information were scrawled on it in pencil.

Cal DDT 301, new BMW — white

22 Parajito Terrace

Cal 1ELT036, brown Dodge Ram early '80s

Cabrini Carpet

4 digits on Mission St.

864+

Green Eyes; Brunette, Caucasian, 35ish — Sibyl

Vince: black, late 40s— early 50s;

jacket as car thief; stolen Jag—

White guy, 35–40 years ol—

Middle of 400 block Goettingen, even numbers

He studied this for a while. Then he retrieved a stamped envelope from a peanut butter jar half full of meager office supplies and wrote on it,
and placed the piece of notepaper inside without sealing it.

Lieut. Sean Corrigan

SFPD

500 Bryant St.

City

He was on his second cup of coffee when the door opened at the stair head. A light flooded a clutch of roof jacks sticking up out of the pea gravel of the composition roof, and a woman's voice said, “Thanks.” The door closed, the light went away.

Footsteps approached him in the dark.

“I'll bet this is the first time you've been in that chair since you left the hospital.”

“What makes you say that?”

She stood in the shadows beside the chair. “When you sit around all day you don't sweat so much.”

“It's just that I'm glad to see you.”

“You could do a little more than sweat.”

She leaned over and kissed him. Her tongue flicked against his teeth. Before she pulled away she nipped his lower lip and whispered, “How's the scar?”

Stanley was noncommittal.

“I like kissing a man who drinks coffee,” she said, standing up again. “It keeps me awake.”

“Did Corrigan send you?” said Stanley.

“On the contrary,” she laughed.

Stanley studied her eyes, gleaming in the moonlight. “Oh?”

“He warned me off you.”

“Did he say why?”

“Sure.”

“So? Why?”

“He said you were a loser.”

So she had come on her own. “So how come you're here?”

Her reply was a monotone, conspicuous for its lack of inflection. “I have bad taste in men.”

Deep down, Stanley agreed with that sentiment.

She changed the subject.

“How's the codeine?”

“Still some left.”

“I brought some more.”

“Hey. Thanks.”

“Don't get in a lather or anything. You like them?”

“They're just great. They make me feel like I'm flying a kite from the bottom of the Marianas Trench. And sometimes, when the effects are really strong, I think that I or perhaps more correctly that ecclesiastical part of me that's so hard to put my finger on, that
soul
, that
distillate of spiritual essence
, that
whatchamacallit
we all desperately seek to fulfill, is the actual kite itself.”

“Oh, my. No wonder they're regulated.”

“How do you think I got so wet?”

She laughed. Her laughter reminded Stanley of sparkling ice cubes spilling into a faceted beaker on a toothed rubber mat.

“Codeine never does that for me,” she pouted.

Stanley changed the subject. “How much does a new kidney cost, Iris?”

She didn't answer.

“Installed, I mean. Ten thousand? Twenty thousand?”

Still she said nothing.

“Come on, Iris. Tell me. I'm interested. I want to know how much it's going to cost me to stay alive.”

She shrugged, then nodded. “Sure. You could spend that.”

“You mean, if I had it to spend.”

“If you had it to spend.”

“Well I don't have it.”

“So you're a good argument for socializing medicine.”

“So great. While Congress is socializing medicine these little pebbles you see all over this roof are all going to grow hair.”

She smiled. “You're really cute.”

“Thanks.”

She smoothed his hair back from his forehead. “Is there anything I can do?”

Her touch felt good. He had to admit it. This in turn forced him to consider how wound up he was, how full of rage. Stanley wanted to turn his head against her hand, like a dog might do, and he resented it. The thing about being a loner is, there are these marvelously weak moments.

He persisted. “What's it take to remove a kidney?”

“Didn't Sims explain all this to you?”

“I was all doped up,” he groused. “And what the hell: doesn't a man get to obsess on his fate a little bit?”

She sighed and scratched him behind the ear. After a moment she gave that up and shrugged. “A scalpel. Anesthetic. Some gear to keep you breathing and your blood circulating while it's done. Sutures when it's finished.”

“What about blood transfusions and sanitation?”

“Blood would only be necessary in an emergency. A slip of the knife. Sepsis isn't a high priority because the kidneys are retroperitoneal — they're outside the sack that contains most of your vital organs.”

“Liver, heart — like that?”

“Like that.”

“How complicated is it?”

“As surgery goes it's very simple. There's three plumbing connections — the ureter, which comes from the bladder, and the renal artery and vein, through which blood makes the round trip from the heart.”

“That's all? Just three?”

“Three. After that there's only the connective tissue, which holds it in there. The bed of fat it sleeps in.”

“Is the process reversible?”

“Good question.”

“What's that mean?”

“Well, obviously it's done. But a transplant is ideally performed with both donor and recipient immediately to hand. There's two incisions, the removal, the installation, two closures.”

“So, let's say, incision, removal, and closure take place today. Then, let's say, an incision, installation, and closure take place at a later date. Next week, say, or next month. Would that make it more difficult? What about transportation…?”

“When Corrigan has solved this case,” she interrupted him pointedly, “we'll find out about all that stuff. You sure you don't want to make love?”

“Sure. I mean, later. Right now my libido's a kite in the Marianas Trench, and the rest of me wants to talk about kidneys.”

Iris sighed determinedly. “It's always more difficult to go in through old scar tissue. The longer you wait the harder the scar tissue becomes. But the larger problem is the quality of the original work. If the plumbing weren't properly terminated in the first operation, re-installation of a functional kidney becomes that much more difficult.”

“What about artificial parts? Plumbing, I mean.”

“You mean, like, cannulation?”

“What's that?”

“It's a kind of pasta.”

“Quit fucking around.”

“Oh. Aren't
we
serious.”

“Serious and humourless.”

“Well,” she pouted stubbornly, “it's not that far-fetched. Cannula and cannelloni have the same root in the Latin word for cane, reed, or hollow tube.”

“Jesus Christ, Iris.”

“I tell you this to make it easy for you to remember.”

Stanley scowled. “I guess it's always possible I'll forget.”

“Sure. Cannelloni are a tubular pasta, and cannula are plastic tubes used to replace sections of arteries or veins. The procedure is called cannulation. See?”

“They can do that?”

“Sure. One of my favorite stories of the medical profession involves a Glaswegian doctor. Everybody who worked at the hospital knew he was mad. A typical staff in-joke. His hygiene was such a mess it counted for nothing, the nurses practically had to keep him in diapers. But he was a brilliant surgeon, and the management let him carry on. He was particularly good at anastomosis and cannulation — sewing in bits of plastic tubing to veins or arteries at angles or end-to-end. Very meticulous, intense labor, but he just loved to put cannulae in place of ruined or even merely damaged vessels.”