Prelude to a Scream (44 page)

And like the last time, the sight embarrassed him.

“Oh yes,” Iris said dreamily, “one more detail. Do you remember the night you called Fong from my apartment?”

Stanley couldn't remember anything anymore.

“You asked him to search a newspaper database for cashiered surgeons or doctors — people who had lost their licenses to practice?”

Stanley's lower jaw quivered.

“Well,” she continued, “you had something there. Fong eventually turned up one Dr. Manfred E. Djell. I say eventually because, while you had asked Fong to search back a couple of years, it was just last week that it occurred to him to extend the range of the search as far back as the database would go, which is just over ten years. And there your boy was. The very same unpleasant Dr. Djell who so recently perished in the Chippendale O'Hare Mortuary massacre. He lost his license about eight years ago. There were multiple minor infractions — such as writing illegal prescriptions — and an interesting felony for which he wasn't prosecuted because nobody would testify. You had quite a good hunch, there. But do you know what his specialty was?”

Stanley's teeth had begun to chatter.

“Of course not. Well, he practiced SRS,” she said. “Even his legitimate specialty was shady.”

SRS? What the hell did that mean? Stupid, Reliable, and Sober? Was Djell a detox specialist?
Probably not
. Stanley kind of wanted to know. He kind of didn't, too. But a certain monocular data-trickle from the badly-lit room was distracting his mind.

Iris told him. “It stands for Sex-Reassignment Surgery.”

Stanley built a very dumb look on his face. Despite the morphine he was getting a headache.

“Fong told me to be sure to tell you as soon as I caught up with you, at the funeral home. But what with one thing and another, I forgot. No sooner than I got the gun in my hand and regained my composure, however, I remembered. So I had the good Dr. Djell do a little work,” she finished cheerfully, “before I shot him.”

They both considered his pelvis.

There were bandages there, along with the catheter.

His head began, ever so perceptibly, to wave back and forth on its stalk like a plastic ball with a painted face atop a steel spring glued to the back shelf of an automobile that's just come to a gentle halt. He made a noise, too, in his throat. It sounded like a tree frog caught between wet asphalt and a gumboot.

“You want a little more light?” Iris asked him tenderly.

Stanley moved his head slightly to one side, then to the other, leaving it in each position for no more than a few seconds. His teeth clacked audibly.

“Yes,” she said complacently. “I had them do a little more work.”

A tear welled out of the duct of the one eye that remained in Stanley's head.

“They tried to defend you.” She laughed. “They called it an outrage. Men.… They called it a waste of time and talent, too. They were sure you wouldn't appreciate it.” She shook her head. “You're all alike. Indefensible. Some men, of course,” she added, raising a pinky toward the gauze and tape at the base of his abdomen, “are more alike than others.”

The tree frog in Stanley's throat made a feeble, final protest.

“This is only Phase One. The complete deal can proceed only in stages, separated by time. This fact actually helped Jaime and Djell kid themselves into thinking I might let them live long enough to finish the job, once they got started. Wrong.” She shook her head. “You don't have that kind of time.”

She placed both her hands down there and gradually worked the tube loose. To Stanley it felt as if someone somewhere were boning a fish. A fish that may once have been a real good friend of his.

The catheter removed and dropped into the rubber disposal bin, she made no effort to cover him up. Nor did he. They sat for a while, quietly sharing his abjection.

“Trim,” Iris said thoughtfully. “That's what Jaime called it.”

Stanley cocked his head as if to see her, but could not take his eye off the compelling object of its contemplation — or, truthfully and worse — the non-object. If he had looked at Iris he might have seen that, in the dark air of the little room, her two violet eyes had narrowed into the twin punctures of a snakebite.

“He called it trim.”

She rounded one hand in the air a few inches over the wound as if she were smoothing the hair over the forehead of a dog.

“Slang for the female genitalia, in some parts of Chicago.”

“Oh,” Stanley said after a while. But it sounded merely like a parting of his dry lips.

“Evocative term, isn't it?”

But his lips weren't dry. Bile leaked from their corners and trickled over his chin.

“Leave him enough to aim with, I told them. But I think they cut it a tad close. What do you think?”

It was late at night. With all the cutbacks, the hospital was only able to maintain a skeleton staff. Shananne wasn't even on the third floor at the time. She and Floyd were having coffee in the dispensary, two stories above. Everybody else was asleep. Or half dead.

Only Iris heard Stanley scream.

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ALSO BY JIM NISBET AVAILABLE FROM THE OVERLOOK PRESS

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