Prelude to a Scream (36 page)

“Why, my sweet, I cough it up for you most regularly.”

“Ah,” cooed Jaime, “geriatric
amour
.”

“Shut up,” said Djell.

“I know why she gave it up,” Jaime prattled on.

“Why?” asked Sibyl.

“He's good in the sack.”

“Who, him?” Sibyl laughed. “Don't make me laugh.”

Stanley stared at her.

For the first time, Sibyl's eyes lacked the gleam of superiority he'd always detected in them before. A shadow had appeared in them. A tincture of uncertainty. They reflected ugliness.

“Adrenal vein, Sibyl,” said Djell impatiently. “Adrenal. Heads up, please.”

Sibyl handed Djell a hemostat in whose jaws was clamped a pre-threaded needle.

After a while Djell announced he was freeing the renal vein.

A little while after that, Jaime dutifully narrated that Djell had started in on the adrenal gland, dissecting it away from the upper pole of the kidney and its attendant arterial structures, a matter of delicacy and finesse.

Stanley helped himself to two more lines.

As he was inhaling his second line a drop of blood appeared on the crystalline pile, fallen from the soaked gauze over his ruined eye. After a moment he caught himself staring, as its red stain spread through the white powder.

He jerked his head up, his hand training the pistol barrel. Jaime was watching him, and could not suppress a grin. “Surgery is exhausting,” he suggested. “It makes you soooo sleepy…”

Stanley could barely hear him. Some kind of aortal roar had co-opted his sense of hearing. He shook his head like a wet dog. Drops of blood spiraled onto the metal surface of the gurney.

“Hurry the fuck up,” he growled.

“Right, right,” Djell said without looking up. “Hurry the surgery and fuck it up. Surgery costs money. Everybody's in a rush. And who pays in the end? The patient.”

“Well,” put in Jaime. “This isn't exactly brain surgery, here.”

“Piss off, Lopez.”

“No,” said Jaime mildly, glancing at a tube. “Diuresis is just about right.”

“Could use an arteriogram, here,” muttered Djell.

“Oh, listen to him,” Jaime said, addressing Stanley. “A hundred nephrectomies, nearly all of them illegal, and he wants lab results. Why don't you run upstairs and get them for us?”

All of them
, thought Stanley, amazed.
One hundred…?

“In a better world,” said Djell, “this wouldn't be illegal.”

“No, no,” said Jaime. “They'd give you a medal shaped like a BMW.”

“Turgor,” said Djell.

“Looks okay to me,” said Sibyl.

“Why not ask me?” Jaime whined.

“Single vein, single artery,” observed Sibyl.

“Spasm subsided,” said Jaime.

“We're getting there,” said Djell. “Ready for perfusion?”

Jaime made motions toward a sink-like device at the foot of the table. The machine was on casters, with cables and tubes trailing after it.

Jaime said to Stanley, who was watching him warily, “I gotta do this.”

“What is it?”

“It's a perfusion machine. To keep the kidney viable.
Your
kidney.”

Stanley pursed his lips vaguely. He looked like a man getting off a plane in Nome who's almost remembered he left his stove on in Tallahassee.

“Vince was in charge of it,” Jaime explained sadly. “Before he.…” Jaime cleared his throat. “Now I'll have to handle it.”

Stanley nodded his agreement. But he was becoming seriously disoriented, now leaning over the gurney for support, using both hands to keep the pistol trained on the surgical team.

Jaime rolled the machine around the table, next to Djell.

“Heparin.”

“And now…,” Jaime said to Stanley.

“This shit's not working,” Stanley snarled.

“Have some more already,” said Jaime. “You've a lot of negativity to overcome.”

“What's in this stuff?” Stanley demanded. “I'm passing out.” He drew a bead on the anesthesiologist. “Fix it. Fix it or I kill everybody, starting with…” his voice faltered, “with… you.”

They just waited, watching him.

Stanley side-armed the scalpel at Jaime, left-handed, with all the strength he could muster.

“Ow,
shit!
” Though it glanced harmlessly off his upper arm before he could react otherwise, Jaime, screamed and spun, ducked and hugged himself as if the tool had gone right through him, before it hit the radio and clattered to the floor.

Nobody moved. Jaime half crouched behind the operating table, looking around desperately for a place to hide.

“Don't make me get violent,” said Stanley. “Reverse this chemical.”

“Oh, dear,” whined Jaime. “Oh dear oh dear oh dear.”

“Jaime,” said Djell, raising an eye toward Stanley. He pointed a hip toward the anesthesiologist. “Here.”

“And bring back the scalpel.”

Cringing and crouching, Jaime retrieved the scalpel and scuttled around the end of the operating table, muttering to himself. “That was the right pocket. Should it have been the left? I can never remember whether it's right or left… Oh my god,” he shook his head with great exaggeration, nearly weeping with hysteria. “That was the heroinnnn.…”

He plunged his hand into Djell's left trouser pocket, waving the scalpel with the other, an irrational expression on his face. The surgeon winced. Stanley had the impression that Jaime had pinched him viciously. Djell twisted away, but not before Jaime had extracted a second package. It, too, looked like powdered sugar or flour, wrapped in a clear plastic cylinder about the size of a polish hot dog. If it was cocaine, it was close to an ounce of it.

“As salaam Alikum,” Jaime said timorously. Lowering his head and raising the ounce with the scalpel above his head, bowing, he approached the wheeled gurney. “With all due apologies, I bring you the contents of the left, that is to say, the correct, pocket.…” He glanced up. “It's a mistake we make often around here.”

He was ridiculous, and he was serious. This was an apology. They'd tried to drug Stanley so they could kill him. They had drugged him. They'd almost gotten away with it.

And now this guy was sincerely apologizing to him for their failure.

Stanley struggled with his temper. And his fear. He'd never seen anybody push the edge of destruction like this. He'd never even heard of it.

Jaime gently laid the ounce with the scalpel on the gurney, stooped low to the floor, and backed all the way around the foot of the operating table to his anesthesia post.

Stanley fiercely scalpeled the baggie and dipped a moistened fingertip into its contents. Jaime watched hungrily as he cautiously scrubbed a gum with the powdered finger.

“That's the stuff, eh boss?”

“If it isn't,” said Stanley, his good eyelid drooping toward his raised upper lip, “you're dead.” He sounded like somebody trying to have a conversation while flossing.

Jaime nodded happily.

The drug did, indeed, seem to be the real stuff. This powder was pink, shot through with large, flat flakes, and instantly numbed his gum. A couple of two-inch lines of this stuff in his face wouldn't counteract the effects of the heroin; rather it would collaborate with it on a metabolic concerto. It would also wake him up, numb his face, make him paranoid, encourage the grinding of enamel off his molars, and, in general, affect what passes for “high” among coke snorters, a notoriously discerning race.

It was in the nick of time, too. Stanley's head was nodding like a late-summer sunflower on its stalk, his eyes were closing, and he was ceasing to care, even as he tried to speak.

“Speedball, huh,” said Stanley stupidly. He awkwardly raked a couple of fat lines of the new product onto the stainless steel with the edge of the scalpel.

“To quote the septic bard—,” Jaime began.

“If I pass out,” Stanley managed to interrupt, flattening the gun on the table so that it was aimed toward Jaime, “it's going to be in an empty room, spiritually speaking.”

He lowered his face to the pile and inhaled the first line, flakes and all, and growled aloud.

“Could it be that our fair captor's sensibilities are impaired?” Jaime whispered loudly.

“Jaime,” said Sibyl, not laughing. “That was a stupid thing to do. Shut the fuck up.”

“You sew that nice nurse up,” said Stanley, looking sideways at them with his good eye, the bandaged socket not three inches from the surface of the gurney. “Then we'll shoot it out.”

The cocaine did wake him up—although, he knew, it would take more and more, at shorter and shorter intervals, to keep him that way.

But to keep him paranoid?

No problem.

Jaime shook his head. “This is getting expensive.”

“Try to save me some,” Djell nodded. “I'm intrinsic to this nightmare, yet I'm fading.”

Stanley came up from his second line and looked at the surgical team, tears flooding out of his good eye. As usual, Sibyl was watching him, as was Jaime.

And Stanley's thought was, would Green Eyes dime her own husband to save her skin?

He winked at her.

She winked back.

Stanley felt a distant uptick in penile blood flow.

And his next thought after that was, how could he have doubted her?

This is perfect
, said a little voice.
First these people try to gut you, then they try to lay you low with junk, and all you can think about is sex. Each thought is stupider than the one that came before it.

Jaime caught the exchange of winks. Though excitable, he didn't miss much. But for the first time he looked truly out of sorts.

Stanley couldn't let them kill Iris. He owed her that much. For the Get-Well Bear, he forgave her. Not to mention the new kidney, if things got that far, which betokened total redemption. But after all, what did he really owe her?

No answering argument was to be found or heard; the barroom of Stanley's soul was deserted.

That's great, thought Stanley. Get a nice little psychosis going and what happens? Nobody sticks around to appreciate it.

All these thoughts paraded before Stanley as if he were their proud father, home from three years at sea.

He was entertaining the illusion of lucid thought.

Picky bastard, aren't I, thought Stanley. So I must away under steam of my own counsel. And my own counsel declares I owe Iris that much. She won't see it that way, of course. Not at first. In fact, she'll probably try to kill me. Well, at least I'll still be alive to kill. There. That makes perfect sense. I can piss her off, but if I'm dead, what good is it going to do her? Besides, if
freshness
of scar really is her thing, she is about to be in high cotton. She can lick its reflection in a mirror.

No way I'm going to lick it for her. I'm stubborn that way.

As it had healed, his nephrectomy scar had diminished in scarlingual magnetism. But perhaps the renewed sex appeal of Stanley's freshly scooped eye-socket might appease her resentment. Given that, at any moment, he was prepared to blast Green Eyes to kingdom come; and given that, basically, he was a moral relativist, mostly innocent of the baser malefactions, a victim merely trying to cope; and given that Iris herself had killed on his behalf; given these things, he could probably make do with Iris and her violet eyes, her ebony hair, her predilection for a freshly scarred loser, he meant lover, and she with him. One in a million finds one in a second million. A match made in a stochastic maelstrom. Besides, she had a job. And a car. She probably had a couple of IRAs, the 401-K, social security, good benefits…

But, he was really thinking, his mind adrift like a holed barge, if he could get Green Eyes into the sack… Just once… Maybe before Iris wakes up.…

Well, if not
in the sack
, maybe
on the gurney
.…

Green Eyes, whom he hadn't
had
.

Who
owed him big
…

The doctor's wife. The wife of the man who'd stolen his kidney, to insult him by thus taking his wife, right in front of him, would be a greater revenge than Stanley had dared hope.

Those eyes.

Watching me. Always watching me.

He looked at the two piles of drugs.

There might be enough stuff here to get them all through it.

“Elevating…,” Djell announced.

“The man is an artist,” said Jaime. “A fucking artist.”