Prelude to a Scream (39 page)

Djell blinked rapidly, then squeezed his eyes shut and violently reopened them, as if he had seen a mirage.

“…right back in the slot you took my old one out of.”

Sibyl's eyes, so penetrating before, so alert, so bold, now dimmed and went introspective, focusing on some point between the tip of her nose and the hammer on the .45—infinity, perhaps?

“In exchange,” Stanley concluded, “for a job well done — that is to say, a job performed with absolutely no fuckups — you three will be free to walk out of here. I promise you a head start and, so, that much of a chance to disappear forever. Which you would be well-advised to do, because, as it stands, no matter what happens, there's no way the cops aren't going to find out about this place.”

Stanley tried to smile, but the right side of his face was numb. The smile came out looking like half a knocked-down figure eight; half of infinity.

“You're mad,” Djell whispered. “Completely mad.”

“Yep,” Stanley agreed. “I'm pissed, too.”

Chapter Twenty Nine

D
JELL AND
J
AIME PARKED THE GURNEY PARALLEL TO THE
operating table and then, at long last, Sibyl and Stanley lay down together.

Sibyl lay on her right side, on her gurney, and Stanley on his left side, on his operating table. They faced each other like lovers who'd pushed their twin beds together in a cheap motel room.

Djell and Jaime passed long strips of tape over Sibyl's ankles, her feet, her thighs, the trunk of her body, each beneath the gurney and back again. Stanley, too, was taped into place, with a couple of plastic sandbags braced against him to prevent his weight shifting during the operation. Two sandbags were carefully stacked under the elbow of his gun arm, to relieve the joint of its weight.

Stanley was still naked. He had been naked for some time, and might have caught the sniffles by now if it weren't for the large amount of narcotics he'd ingested, which made the blood hum beneath his skin like a dynamo pulsing electricity through the hull of a sinking ocean liner. Once Stanley was affixed to the table, Jaime thoughtfully covered his legs with a doubled clean sheet. Djell turned a crank below the table to elevate Stanley's right hip. Raised by the upholstered support, Stanley's nephrectomy scar, still not entirely healed, was plainly visible.

Jaime recommended a small intramuscular dose of Valium to both Stanley and Sibyl, to allow them to relax a little. Stanley permitted Sibyl to receive one, but balked at one for himself.

Having already silently promised to reserve Wednesday and Sunday mornings to attend Mass fingering his dead mother's rosary forever if the good Lord got him out of this one, Jaime smiled coyly.

“Aw,” he said. “Trust me.”

Stanley snarled.

Jaime wagged an admonishing finger. “Valium is a trade name for a generic tranquilizer called diazepam. C-16, H-13, C-1, I-1, N-2, O-1, give or take a little petroleum. It's often used as a sedative, but also in anticipation of the anxiety and tension contiguous with surgery. Not to mention, this was your idea.” He held up a hand. “Bear with me, please. Valium is also a muscle relaxant and anticonvulsant. You hear what I'm saying? You have any idea what muscle convulsions might do to, say, the gonadal artery at the wrong moment, not to mention your trigger finger?” He shook his head, made little clucking noises, and clasped his palms together. “It's really tight in the abdominal cavity. God's own menudo, each and every ingredient in its appointed place. Very purposeful. Very ergonomic. Nothing is wasted. Manny is a good doctor, and I'm no slouch either. But you need to be slightly tranquilized.” He upended the palms of his hands, “Try to help us out every chance you get.”

“I'm not here to help,” said Stanley. “I'm here to motivate.”

“An interesting distinction, and I take your point. Still,” Jaime cajoled, “have a dose. It can't hurt. It's not a sedative.” He indicated Sibyl, whom he'd already injected. “You see how she's reacted.”

Green eyes, wide open and staring at him.

Jaime held up the serum bottle and syringe. “Same supply hers came from, plus a clean needle. What service, huh?” The needle penetrated the pink rubber top of the jar with a squeak. He held the syringe to the light and watched the fluid descend its gradations. “Observe: about twice Sibyl's dose. A little Valium never put anybody asleep. With all that coke in you, you'll never know the difference. You probably already hear elevator music, and, sorry to disappoint you, but that's about it for special effects. Your surgeon here however will notice benedictions in your body. No spasms in delicate locations, for instance. I am your anesthesiologist. Trust me.”

Did he really say that? Again?

Jaime sighed. “A shame to waste it.” By way of a smile he showed some teeth. “Well?”

Stanley rolled his eyes toward Djell. “Let's leave it up to the guy with the vested interest.”

Djell was breathing heavily. Mastermind and surgeon, never had control so thoroughly eluded him. Whereas he would have liked to disassemble Stanley organ by organ without benefit of anesthetic, the gun taped in his wife's mouth tempered Djell's enthusiasm for vengeance. Just barely.

“Fifteen milligrams will do,” said Djell. “As Jaime says, Mr. — Mr. —.”

“Ahearn. You guys never remember your patients, do you?”

“Just the ones who don't pay their bills. As Jaime points out, it's a mild dose. Even so, it will relax you. Muscular and vascular spasm will be minimized, making my job easier. You might have noticed as we operated on — on…” Djell cleared his throat.

They all looked at Iris.

“I never got her name, either,” Djell admitted.

She was lying peacefully against the wall on a pile of quilted mover's blankets, as if asleep. The blankets happened to be cornflower blue, Iris' favorite color. Tubes connected her to two bags of fluids tacked to the wall. Her jet black hair covered half her face. Her shoulder rose and fell steadily with her anesthetized breathing. A huge wad of gauze soaked in rust-colored betadyne was taped above her upturned hip.

“Considine,” said Stanley. “Iris Considine.”

“She gave her all,” observed Jaime.

“Yes,” said Stanley. “She'll want to be discussing that.” He leveled his eyes at Jaime. “Let's not disappoint her.”

Djell got on with it. “You might have noticed that we occasionally paused the earlier procedure in order to allow spasms to pass. These spasms are caused by trauma to vital mechanisms. Drugs, including Valium, can alleviate only some of this trauma. We also administer anti-immune agents as well as antibiotics and a half-liter or so of blood.”

Jaime smirked. “Type O-Negative, I believe?”

Stanley scowled. Jaime glanced away.

Djell spoke automatically. If it was a speech he had given a thousand times Stanley couldn't imagine when or to whom, but he had a list of at least ten people Djell hadn't bothered to lecture on the finer points of nephrectomy.

“You've got at least as much at stake as I do, Djell.”

Djell nodded grimly.

“So let's do it your way.”

“Excellent,” said Jaime. He dabbed an alcohol swab at the inside of the elbow on Stanley's gun arm.

“Lopez!” said Djell sharply. “Don't act crazy. Not now.”

“Who, me?” said Jaime, looking up.

Djell closed his eyes. “I think,” he said quietly, “you can find a better site for the injection.”

Jaime looked at the inside of Stanley's elbow, where he was swabbing. Then his eye followed the forearm to his bracelet of tape, the checkered butt of the pistol, the two little powder burns that fanned away from the back corners of the breech, the serial number filed off the slide, the blistered bluing of the barrel where it entered Sibyl's mouth, the yoke of duct tape, her wide open green eyes above.

Even the cool Sibyl, now, had begun to sweat. A fine dew of perspiration spread evenly over her forehead like condensation on an untouched glass of beer.

Sure Sibyl was sweating, thought Stanley. It was unavoidable. It would be one thing to watch Jaime and Djell cut up lonesome drunks. But now her two clowns were about to effectively, if vicariously, cut on her. Whatever happened to Stanley in this surgery would be, as it were, automatically transferred to Sibyl.

What Djell had done to Ahearn and nearly a dozen others, he was more or less about to do to his own wife. She and Stanley had something besides mere larceny in common at last.

Along with the gun. They had the gun in common.

Intimately connected. At last.

They shared a third thing, too.

Sibyl and Stanley were going to live separately, or die together.

This was way beyond mere sex.

And yet, Stanley thought, lying there facing her, it was a lot like sex.

Her sinuses packed by cocaine, Sibyl sighed raggedly through the gun barrel—the straw connecting her lungs to the outside world—and closed her eyes.

Sleep, partner, Stanley caught himself thinking. Sleep while I keep watch over you, and maybe catch a late flick on TV…

Jaime found a vein behind Stanley's knee and injected the Valium. Then he touched a place on Stanley's back. “First,” he squeaked, “a local anesthetic. Subcutaneous. Little pinch.”

Stanley felt a little pinch, as the needle slid under his skin.

“Couple minutes to let that take effect.” Jaime withdrew the needle and swabbed the site.

Djell studied the dials on the portable perfusion machine, which was labeled as a Nephrolander FX. He and Jaime exchanged some technical information concerning temperature, procaine and heparin ratios, effluent clarity, titration, potassium radicals and so on, and made a few adjustments. Once satisfied, Djell went to the wall-mounted sink and began to scrub.

Stanley said nothing, but sweat was pouring through the pores of his gun hand like water through a saturated earthen dam. Sibyl had opened her eyes and begun to study him. He studied her, too. For the first time he noticed that her eyebrows were plucked. The right one, the downside one, concealed a small mole. His eye darted to her hairline. Sure enough, about a quarter inch behind her hairline another mole was visible, a fraction larger than the one in her eyebrow, but still quite small. Both were a flat umber, raised almost imperceptibly above the skin. He'd often noticed that moles and other beauty marks would favor one side of the body over the other. He thought of it as one of the odd characteristics that went along with the dichotomy between symmetry and asymmetry in the human body. Whereas lungs, kidneys, ovaries, not to mention ears, legs and eyes, occurred in symmetric pairs in the human animal, other parts, like the heart and appendix, occurred asymmetrically. He imagined that moles might occur on Sibyl's right side only; on the hollow between the Achilles tendon and the ankle, in the hollow behind the knee, in the hollow at the top of the inside of her thigh, hard by the perineum. One, perhaps, would occur on the small of her back, alongside the base of the spine.

He wondered if Djell had kissed them all, if that were a routine of their conjugal act. Or, if not Djell, then some attentive lover, present or past. He wondered if, by some mistake, Vince and Sturgeon had ever missed their rendezvous with Sibyl—or if, say, the chloral hydrate hadn't taken effect soon enough, or not at all, or if, perhaps, the intended victim had been more aggressive than most—whether she'd been forced to follow through with the sexual charade, to go all the way with her victim, and whether, in the course of this mistake, the drunken, lucky, doomed fool might have managed to brush with his lips or touch with the tip of his tongue so much as a single one of these delicate birthmarks.

It seemed to Stanley that he was witnessing in Sibyl's eyes a little struggle between her distaste for him and her instinct for survival. Something there was, no doubt, about the psychology of victimhood that attracted Sibyl to her prey as surely as the smell of mice attracts a cat.

It was a
natural
thing, as natural as yellow jackets using cement slurry to build a bullet-proof nest.

Stanley could see it in her eyes. Even now, completely at his mercy, she projected her need upon him like a picture upon a screen.

It wasn't a need for him, specifically. It was her need to survive—for which the first synonym, in her thesaurus, would be to
win
.

If sex was involved in the winning, well…

Sex was just a tool, like a row of tanks.

Surprise?

What did Stanley think sex was? Communication?
Special?

He could feel the pull of her. Worse, he began to feel something inside himself, some force he'd never realized or even acknowledged, as it stirred, rummaging among the empty cells of Stanley's monastery, looking for something.

Something to
give
to Sibyl.

A token of his… dedication.

This realization horrified him. Something somewhere inside him not only had learned absolutely nothing, but did not care. Something inside him yearned to yield to this woman, to this force in the guise of a woman, to hand over whatever it was she wanted. It didn't even care what she wanted. It just wanted to give it to her.

It was a sensation almost like… trust. Blind trust.

The realization filled him with loathing and revulsion and hatred—for himself at least as much as for Sibyl—and brought him as close as he'd yet come to pulling the trigger. He even pressed it sideways a little. If it went off, well.…

And then another layer of reality peeled away. It was like a wind lifting the tin roof off a house in silence, leaving the contents exposed within. Then the upper story is blown away, exposing the first floor. And finally the first floor too is gone, leaving the single resident in the roofless basement, cowering behind the water heater, barefoot. Naked. All protection, possession, comfort, concealment—gone.

But Stanley had another creature left in his basement.

Stanley wanted to live.