“I almost forgot,” the woman said, fingering the place on herjaw, “about my scar.”
“A cinch,” the doctor said. “We can do it under local anesthetic, make it smooth as silk.”
The football player’s wife smiled. “Really?”
“Oh sure, it’s easy,” Rudy said, steering the Jaguar back on the highway. “But I was wondering about something else… “
“Yes?”
“You won’t mind some friendly professional advice?”
“Of course not.” The woman’s voice held an edge of concern.
“Well, I couldn’t help but notice,” Dr. Graveline said, “when we were making love… “
“Yes?”
Without taking his eyes off the road, he reached down and patted her hip. “You could use a little suction around the saddlebags.”
The football player’s wife turned away and blinked.
“Please don’t be embarrassed,” the doctor said. “This is my specialty, after all. Believe me, darling, I’ve got an eye for perfection, and you’re only an inch or two away.”
She took a little breath and said, “Around the thighs?”
“That’s all.”
“How much would it cost?”, she asked with a trace of a sniffle.
Rudy Graveline smiled warmly and passed her a monogrammed handkerchief. “Less than you think,” he said.
The cabin cruiser with the camera crew came back again, anchored in the same place. Stranahan sighed and spit hard into the tide. He was in no mood for this.
He was standing on the dock with a spinning rod in his hands, catching pinfish from around the pilings of the stilt house. Suspended motionless in the gin-clear water below was a dark blue log, or so it would have appeared to the average tourist. The log measured about five feet long and, when properly motivated, could streak through the water at about sixty knots to make a kill. Teeth were the trademark of the Great Barracuda, and the monster specimen that Mick Stranahan called Liza had once left thirteen needle-sharp incisors in a large plastic mullet that some moron had trolled through the Biscayne Channel. Since that episode the barracuda had more or less camped beneath Stranahan’s place. Every afternoon he went out and caught for its supper a few dollar-sized pinfish, which he tossed off the dock, and which the barracuda devoured in lightning flashes that churned the water and sent the mangrove snappers diving for cover. Liza’s teeth had long since grown back.
Because of his preoccupation with the camera boat, Mick Stranahan allowed the last pinfish to stay on the line longer than he should have. It tugged back and forth, sparkling just below the surface until the barracuda ran out of patience. Before Stranahan could react, the big fish rocketed from under the stilt house and severed the majority of the pinfish as cleanly as a scalpel; a quivering pair of fish lips was all that remained on Stranahan’s hook.
“Nice shot,” he mumbled and stored the rod away.
He climbed into the skiff and motored off the flat, toward the cabin cruiser. The photographer immediately put down the video camera; Stranahan could see him conferring with the rest of the crew. There was a brief and clumsy attempt to raise the anchor, followed by the sound of the boat’s engine whining impotently in the way that cold outboards do. Finally the crew gave up and just waited for the big man in the skiff, who by now was within hailing distance.
A stocky man with a lacquered helmet of black hair and a stiff bottlebrush mustache stood on the transom of the boat and shouted, “Ahoy there!”
Stranahan cut the motor and let the skiff coast up to the cabin cruiser. He tied off on a deck cleat, stood up, and said, “Did I hear you right? Did you actually say ahoy?”
The man with the mustache nodded uneasily.
“Where did you learn that, watching pirate movies? Jesus Christ, I can’t believe you said that. Ahoy there! Give me a break.” Stranahan was really aggravated. He jumped into the bigger boat and said, “Which one of you assholes is Reynaldo Flemm? Let me guess; it’s Captain Blood here.”
The stocky man with the mustache puffed out his chest and said, “Watch it, pal!”-which took a certain amount of courage, since Mick Stranahan was holding a stainless-steel tarpon gaff in his right hand. Flemm’s crew-an overweight cameraman and an athletic young woman in blue jeans-kept one eye on their precious equipment and the other on the stranger with the steel hook.
Stranahan said, “Why have you been taking my picture?”
“For a story,” Flemm said. “For television.”
“W hat’s the story?”
“I’m not at liberty to say.”
Stranahan frowned. “What’s it got to do with Vicky Barletta?”
Reynaldo Flemm shook his head. “In due time, Mr. Stranahan. When we’re ready to do the interview.”
Stranahan said, “I’m ready to do the interview now.”
Flemm smiled in a superior way. “Sorry.”
Stranahan slipped the tarpon gaff between Reynaldo Flemm’s legs and gave a little jerk. The tip of the blade not only poked through Reynaldo Flemm’s Banana Republic trousers, but also through his thirty-dollar bikini underpants (flamenco red), which he had purchased at a boutique in Coconut Grove. The cold point of the gaff came to rest on Reynaldo Flemm’s scrotum, and at this frightful instant the air rushed from his intestinal tract with a sharp noise that seemed to punctuate Mick Stranahan’s request.
“The interview,” he said again to Flemm, who nodded energetically.
But words escaped the television celebrity. Try as he might, Flemm could only burble in clipped phrases. Fear, and the absence of cue cards, had robbed him of cogent conversation.
The young woman in blue jeans stepped forward from the cabin of the boat and said, “Please, Mr. Stranahan, we didn’t mean to intrude.”
“Of course you did.”
“My name is Christina Marks. I’m the producer of this segment.”
“Segment of what?” Stranahan asked.
“Of the Reynaldo Flemm show. In Your Face. You must have seenit.”
“Never.”
For Reynaldo, Stranahan knew, this was worse than a gaff in the balls.
“Come on,” Christina Marks said.
“Honest,” Stranahan said. “You see a TV dish over on my house?”
“Well, no.”
“There you go. Now, what’s this all about? And hurry it up, your man here looks like his legs are cramping.”
Indeed, Reynaldo Flemm was shaking on his tiptoes. Stranahan eased the gaff down just a notch or two.
Christina Marks said: “Do you know a nurse named Maggie Gonzalez?”
“Nope,” Stranahan said.
“A reyou sure?”
“Give me a hint.”
“She worked at the Durkos Medical Center.”
“Okay, now I remember.” He had taken her statement the day after Victoria Barletta had vanished. Timmy Gavigan had done the doctor, while Stranahan had taken the nurse. He had scanned the affidavits in the State Attorney’s file that morning.
“You sure about the last name?” Stranahan asked.
“Sorry-Gonzalez is her married name. Back then it was Orestes.”
“So let’s have the rest.”
“About a month ago, in New York, she came to us.”
“To me,” croaked Reynaldo Flemm.
“Shut up,” said Stranahan.
Christina Marks went on: “She said she had some important information about the Barletta case. She indicated she was willing to talk on camera.”
“To me,” Flemm said, before Stranahan tweaked him once more with the tarpon gaff.
“But first,” Christina Marks said, “she said she had to speak to you, Mr. Stranahan.” ‘“About what?”
“All she said was that she needed to talk to you first, because you could do something about it. And don’t ask me about what, because I don’t know. We gave her six hundred bucks, put her on a plane to Florida, and never saw her again. She was supposed to be back two weeks ago last Monday.” Christina Marks put her hands in her pockets. “That’s all there is. We came down here to look for Maggie Gonzalez, and you’re the best lead we had.”
Stranahan removed the gaff from Reynaldo Flemm’s crotch and tossed it into the bow of his skiff. Almost instantly, Flemm leapt from the stern and bolted for the cabin. “Get tape of that fucker,” he cried at the cameraman, “so we can prosecute his fat ass!”