Prelude to a Scream (30 page)

Damn, thought Stanley. This is a woman to die for.

Give it a try
, a little voice cozened inside him.
Die for her: see if she cares
.

“Sibyl…,” repeated Helium Voice weakly. “If anything happened to you, I… We…”

Helium Voice couldn't countenance the thought.

The day something happens to her
, declared Stanley's inner voice,
is the day this operation is over
.

“Gun-shy she will never be,” declared the doctor proudly. He handed the pistol to Vince. “Yes, my little aster. The day something happens to you, is the day my
weltanschauung
goes up in flames like a Sioux tepee in December, 1890.”

“So,” said Green Eyes, jerking her chin toward Stanley. “Where's that leave this guy?”

They all looked down at Stanley.

“Leaves him on de flo',” said Vince.

Everybody laughed at Stanley.

“Get him up,” said the doctor.

Vince picked him up as easily as he might raise the lid off a saucepan.

The eye hurt.
Go for it
, a little voice prompted him.
Start early
.

“Look,” Stanley asserted, though he drooped from Vince's fist like a rain-drenched shirt. “Except that you're a bunch of perverts, I got nothing against you guys.”

“Do tell,” said Helium Voice.

“I do. I'm not here to bring this place down around your ears. If I'd wanted to do that, I would have told the cops what I know.”

“And, my amyloidosic friend,” said the doctor, setting and unsetting the safety on the pistol. “What is it, exactly, that you think you know?”

Stanley squinted his ruined eye at the doctor. “How about we start with Giles MacIntosh?”

The doctor frowned, and didn't reset the safety.

Vince and his white friend exchanged a look.

Helium Voice looked at Green Eyes.

Green Eyes watched Stanley.

Stanley looked at as many of them as he could. “He hacked that glitch in DonorWare right off the bat. It's amazing it went undetected as long as it did. Face it. If hadn't been me, or him, it —.”

“The fact is, Mister —.”

“Ahearn,” said Green Eyes. “You can call him Stanley.” She used his first name like she would her quirt.

Despite hating her, Stanley felt himself blush. He was flattered to hear, to see, his name on her lips. How abject was this going to get?

He tried to stick to his point. “The fact remains, I didn't go to the cops.”

“Suppose we believe that. Then what?”

“Then there's Ted Nichols. And Cabrini Carpet. And Chippendale O'Hare. Not to mention Parajito Terrace, Vince, Sibyl, and the good doctor here, who was educated in Germany, emigrated to the United States after the war, passed the California Medical boards, and, ultimately, lost his license for cutting on little children without due process. Or something like that.”

“What's that?” said the doctor, casually fitting the gun to Stanley's nose.

“I'm just making it up,” Stanley said hastily, turning away from the gun. “But it can't be that far off, either. The point is, I didn't tell the cops what I found out. Instead, I came here.” He looked from face to face. “To you.”

They waited.

“I need help,” said Stanley. “I need at least one new kidney. Or.…”

Still they waited.

“…Or I'm going to die.”

Silence.

Keep it up
, urged the little voice.
Negotiate. Give them something to think about. I'm okay you're okay. Don't stop now.

His mouth dried up, however, and the eye felt like a tuned drum head somebody was bouncing quarters off of.
Go go go
, insisted the little voice. Stanley cleared his throat. “I figured, if I was to ask you folks real nice, and promise never to go to the cops with what I know, maybe you'd give me the kidney I need to… to…”

“To quietly drink yourself to death.” Green Eyes said complacently.

“That's.…” Stanley began. He looked at her, looked away. Then he looked at her again. He'd forgotten that this crowd would know at least as much about him as they knew about Ted Nichols. “That's about the size of it,” he admitted, “though it's none of your business.”

Nobody spoke.

“I figured the gun might help you see things my way,” he added lamely.

Silence. Then Helium Voice, his ferrety eyes darting from face to face, could contain his mirth no longer. He giggled his helium giggle.

It might have been involuntary. He tried to choke it off. The silence returned, but only for a moment. Now giggles eddied after the silence as surely as seagulls following a laden trawler into port.

The laughter was contagious. Vince chuckled, low and mellifluous. The doctor joined in with his mechanical, percussive coughs. The white guy laughed, whooped, and then slapped his knee, like a rodeo cowboy whose bull has just been turned out of the chute.

Altogether, it was an unguarded moment. Even Sibyl, watching Stanley, allowed her lovely green eyes to sparkle behind their long lashes, and her nose to wrinkle, and finally her face to dissolve into a beautiful, becoming,
genuine
smile. In the general hilarity this smile quickly elided into an open-mouthed laugh. She modestly covered her mouth with one hand, while casting a covert glance in Stanley's direction. Seeing him staring at her, and her alone, she looked away, then back. She covered her mouth with both hands, but this could not conceal her amusement. She stooped her shoulders as if perhaps physical effort might contain this spontaneous jocundity. But finally, with an incredulous double take in Stanley's direction, she dissolved into helpless laughter.

This is good, Stanley thought hopefully. If a fellow can get them laughing, a fellow has a chance.

After a while the laughter died down. Once again, silence began to fill the corridor, interloped by the odd chuckle.

“So,” said the doctor, as disconcertingly sane as ever. He handed the .45 to the white guy who, despite this responsibility, could not stop smiling.

“Careful, Sturgeon,” the doctor said. “It's loaded.”

This remark provoked a new outburst of hilarity.

Vince still held Stanley by his collar, from behind. As the laughter died again the doctor stepped up to Stanley and, not unkindly, plucked at the lid of, not the rapidly swelling eye, but the uninjured one.

Stanley jerked his head away, like a horse refusing the bridle.

Vince grabbed Stanley's head by its hair.

“Now, now…” said the doctor, revealing a certain gleam in his own eye, its frigidity spreading like a skim of ice over the pinpoint pool of his stoned iris. By pinching the lashes between thumb and forefinger he succeeded in raising the lid on Stanley's unpunched eye. “Ah,” the doctor said, turning his head to peer within, his face inches from Stanley's. “Very good.” He released the lid and stepped back, leaving Stanley blinking amid a compounded reek of gun powder, rubbing alcohol, and semen.

The doctor nodded.

“We'll begin with the eye.”

Chapter Twenty Three

A
S THE LITTLE PROCESSION FOLLOWED THE NARROW-GAUGE
tracks down the hall, Doctor Djell admonished Vince.

“How many times have I told you,” he said, enumerating his fingers. “Don't hit them in the eyes, the kidneys, the spleen, the liver. Don't break their ribs either, because their lungs get punctured. Lungs are expensive.”

“But Doc,” whined Vince, “What's left?”

“Just administer him a concussion, like I showed you…”

Just explode
, the little voice said to Stanley.
That'll do it. The shrapnel will kill them all
. He flung his arms outward. His hands made a grab for the doctor's throat. He kicked somebody.

Vince expertly blocked Stanley from the doctor, as easily as anyone else might have restrained a child.

“Be careful,” said Djell, from behind Vince. “Don't let him hurt himself.”

“Lemme at a meaty vein,” said Helium Jaime.

“That's the idea,” said Djell. “Pre-op the monkey.”

Stanley unleashed a feeble kick to the side of the gurney, which still blocked the hall.

“Hey,” said the white guy. “That's an outpatient.”

“Well, Sturgeon?” said Djell. “Give a hand, there.”

Sturgeon caught one of Stanley's flailing arms and twisted it high up his back, until the wrist was between the shoulder blades.

“Can you turn that elbow outward?” Helium Jaime asked.

Sturgeon obliged, eliciting a yelp from Stanley.

“A few milligrams of fentanyl.” Djell suggested, watching disinterestedly as the three men pressed Stanley face-first into a wall. “Skip antibiotics, skip the anti-immune course.”

Sturgeon yanked the collar of Stanley's jacket backwards over his shoulders, pinning his arms to his side.

Vince showed Stanley the business end of a scalpel.

“Look at this,” said Sturgeon, disentangling the extra clip of bullets from Stanley's jacket.

“Loaded for bear, were we?” said Vince, as he used the scalpel to slit the jacket's sleeve to expose the inside of Stanley's elbow.

Jaime expressed a jet of fentanyl from his syringe onto the wall about a foot in front of Stanley's face.

“That's very professional,” said Sturgeon, admiring Vince's work with the scalpel.

“It's analgesic,” said Jaime to Stanley, as they both watched a thin rivulet of fentanyl run down the wall. “It's an opiate, too. You'll be conscious until we put you under, with no pain. I'm sure you're all jacked up about the humanitarian angle. Don't worry. You'll be docile as a New Age symphony.”

Stanley was getting weak in the knees.

“What about the enema?” inquired Sturgeon, his mouth emanating a foul odor an inch from Stanley's nose.

Djell smiled. “He'll never miss it.”

“Bummer,” said Sturgeon.

Upon feeling the sudden coolness of an alcohol swab on the inside of the exposed forearm, Stanley kicked feebly.

“Why anesthesiology's a specialty,” said Djell, observing Jaime swab the arm, “I'll never know.”

“It's just somebody else they can sell insurance to.” Jaime moved the needle aside as Stanley struggled. “Fucking Class Five insurance driving me bananas.”

“Something you know too too much about,” said Djell.

“Insurance?”

“Bananas.”

Vince laughed.

“I could miss with this and hurt you badly,” said Jaime, showing Stanley the hypodermic. “My insurance policy tells me so. So hold still.”

Stanley struggled more than ever.

“Save the isometrics.” Vince bumped the back of Stanley's head with the palm of his hand, bouncing Stanley's forehead off the tiled wall.

Through the stars that ringed his vision Stanley could see Sibyl standing behind Djell, watching them wrestle, with cool detachment. He caught her eye.
Come on, baby
, he thought as loud and stupid as he could think.
Get me out of this. We could make something out of ourselves, you and me
…

A sharp prick announced itself against the skin at the inside of his elbow, and the needle sheathed itself in the vein below.

…
Then I could kill you
.

“Ahhh…” said Sturgeon, watching with satisfaction as Stanley's type O-Negative plumed into the barrel of the syringe.

Stanley strained every fiber of his musculature, but could not move. The two gorillas held him to the wall and he twitched feebly there, like a moth webbed to a twig.

“Damn. You are good at that, Jaime,” Sturgeon whispered.

“Shit,” breathed Jaime, steadily depressing the plunger. “I used to lie in my bunk when I was in the Navy. The high seas would pitch that tin can like it was in the bathtub of an epileptic. First you'd see lightning and the undersides of thunderheads, then the porthole's rolled two fathoms under. Me, I'm in my bunk with one foot on the bulkhead, the other on the floor, banging the mainline with morphine sulfate, just for the practice. Force Ten's nothing to these hands. Steadier than what El Señor Malpractico has got going, over there…”

“Wait till you're my age,” Djell said, petulantly rubbing his abscess. “Then we'll see who's got shaky hands.”

Stanley watched Sibyl watching him. She was waiting for the drug to hit him. Stanley realized he'd seen this look before. And suddenly his memory recovered an image and slipped it into his mind as neatly as a slide slots into a projector.

It was late. Sibyl and Stanley stood in the shadowed living room of the bungalow on Goettingen Street. He was drunk. Not too drunk to note to what part of town she'd driven him. He'd expected Nob Hill. He got the Excelsior.

And not too drunk to recognize the tune she'd taken the trouble to cue up, on a portable boom-box type CD player, a common device, too common for its portability to be suspicious—but portable it was and suspicious it should have been. The tune was Chet Baker's cover of
Everything Happens to Me
.

Black cats creep across my path

until I'm almost mad

I must have roused the devil's wrath

cause all my luck is bad…

The ultimate in jazz-age self-pity, it could have been Stanley's theme song. A solipsism in a minor key; a chestnut of misfeasance, afloat in a Tom Collins. Grotesque, overstated, lyrically ham-fisted; yet in Baker's hands, everything happened to him, who spoke for Stanley. Artistic empathy. Existential squalor.

…I make a date for golf

and you can bet your life it rains

I try to give a party

and the guy upstairs complains…

He'd even sung along with it, what a sport, lamentably off-key. If she loved him, she wouldn't mind. And why shouldn't she love a lonely, self-indulgent drunk? He'd even flattered himself that she'd gone to the trouble to intuit his taste in music—the fool doubled down.

…I guess I'll go through life just

catchin' cold and missin' trains…

If he was drunk enough to suppose she played it just for him, he was right for the wrong reason. It was annoying and embarrassing and not a little disconcerting to have discovered that his pathetic psycho-portrait would be so obvious to such a beautiful predator, that she could handle him as easily as a bright kid handles a new video game.

Ev'ry-thing hap-pens to me-ee…

Ev'rything got poured into him, too. No food, of course, with a comely apology, having to do with a lack of interest in shopping, lately—too depressed, she admitted simply. Nothing solid to which a man might anchor his belly against the tsunami of intoxication that characterizes alcohol and chloral hydrate poisoning.

I never miss a thing

I've had the measles and the mumps

And every time I play an ace

my partner always trumps…

Besides, you don't want your patient to be eating solid food within twelve hours of his nephrectomy.

The copious liquor selection, of course, like the boom-box, she would always carry with her, from house to house, victim to victim. Normally plenty paranoid, he'd been too drunk to even cough up that preposterous an idea, let alone assess it. No blame there. Obviously, he'd prefer to believe that she wanted him strictly for his innate sex appeal. It would have been paranoid to think anything else.

…I guess I'm just a fool

who never looks before he jumps…

Sitting on the very comfortable couch, littered with fat down pillows covered in silk, he'd patted one of them with the handle of the little quirt. His way of saying he wasn't really into flagellation, but he'd settle for the missionary position. What an idiot. The prop department of this operation must be quite something to see in action, Vince and Sturgeon ranking with the best stage managers, their fealty to illusion up there with that of the highly skilled stagehands who can gaff a touring set for tonight's show in less time than it takes to say

Ev'ry-thing hap-pens to me-eee…

He'd been too drunk to notice her slip his dose of chloral hydrate with the ice into three ounces of whiskey, and too enamored to notice the modulation in taste of a brand of booze he'd been drinking every night without fail for three years…

And he'd been too drunk to remark upon, though not too drunk to remember, the curious way she'd begun to watch him after he'd swallowed about half the drink. She had watched him then the way she was watching him now, as if he were some kind of curious dinoflagellate her dishwasher had failed to scrub off the rim of the crystal punch bowl, a repellent life form, perhaps leaked down from the columbarium, onto which she had lavished a sixty-second jet of insecticide, whose toxicity guaranteed the dissolution of the nervous systems of anything from red-headed soldier ants to translucent scorpions; yet the creature languishes; and now, having a bit of time on her hands and a curious mind, she would watch it writhe until it died: unless the phone rang; unless the mundane interrupted the banal; or
vice versa
.

Green Eyes on her post-coital death watch. Her cheeks flushed with blood, her lips swollen and gleaming, her eyes emitting more light than they were collecting.

“Okay,” he heard Jaime's helium voice say, muffled by great chemical distances and an extraterrestrial wind. “He's a pussycat now.”

I'm a pussycat now
, Stanley thought to himself, watching himself watch her watch him.
Why don't you float on over here and transmogrify this whole deal into some kind of fantastic sex trip? Let's leave together. Sexodus? Because
, he endeavored to articulate the formula, whose words he'd always had trouble saying, the mantra he'd never been able to utter at the right time, never been able to say aloud at all,
because
, he'd always found it so hard to give tongue to it, he'd practically choked over giving it full throat, but he thought he might say it right now
because
they were the right words for her, and this is the right time, and this time he did it. He pulled it off. He mumbled:
Because
…
Because
…

“…I love you,” quite audibly.

Sibyl started. Shock and amusement vied for a holiday with the nerves and muscles beneath the surface of her face.

“Woo-ee,” said Vince, relaxing his grip on Stanley. “I got to try me a snootful of that stuff my own self.”

“Do you know,” piped up helium-voiced Jaime, “that one of my colleagues wanted to manufacture lollipops spiked with this fentanyl? For kids?”

“You shitting me,” said Vince.

“Git the fuck outta here, Jaime,” disparaged Sturgeon. “Lollifuckingpops.” He, too, had now relaxed his grip on Stanley, relaxed it enough so that it could no longer be called restraining, but not relaxed it entirely, so it could still be called supportive, so Stanley wouldn't sink to the floor like a suit falling off a hanger.

“It's true,” said Jaime proudly. “I have sucked the prototype.”

This elicited a number of catcalls.

“How come you leave the needle in, like that?” Sturgeon asked when the fun had died down.

“I just think it looks cool,” said Jaime. “Unbutton his shirt.”

They turned Stanley around, and Vince unceremoniously tore Stanley's shirt open. Its buttons ticked onto the floor.

“Pipe down, Help,” said Jaime. “I'm trying to get a heartbeat, here.”

“Who you calling Help?” bristled Vince.

“You,” Djell barked. “Shut up.”

I
could save you the trouble
, thought Stanley.
Heartbeat's all I can hear, in here. Ba-boom, ba-boom
… It was true. His heartbeats came to his ears like a stylus darts to the spindle at record's end.