Sounding harried, confused, Tomlinson said, “I don’t know, Doc. I don’t know. Do you really believe that? Do you believe that moral responsibility can be mitigated? I don’t think I buy it. Spiritually, man, I don’t think I can allow myself to go on as if nothing happened. I took a human life! I think I have an obligation to let the legal system decide how I should be punished.”
When I put my arm over his shoulder, pulled him to me roughly, and said in a joking tone, “Let’s put it this way: If you try to turn yourself in to law enforcement, I won’t kill you, but I may try to slap a little sense into you,” my friend Tomlinson’s knees buckled for a moment, and he began to sob.
He’d reacted the same way not so long ago, the afternoon I’d given him papers that exonerated him from the crime he now knew that he’d committed.
RUNNING my boat fast across Hillsborough Bay now, Tampa behind me and the St. Pete skyline now off to my right, it was painful to think about Tomlinson. Painful to think that he seemed determined to carry out what he saw as a spiritual obligation to confess to that long-ago murder.
What a loss that would be to the marina. What a loss to everyone who knew the man—particularly to his best friend.
Oddly, though, about Pilar Fuentes, I now felt no sense of loss whatsoever. To have her perplexing behavior explained so rationally had, in the instant of my understanding it, purged me of all emotional sensations attached to her.
The woman I thought I knew did not exist. She was a fiction. Therefore, my history with her was also an illusion, and so no sensation of regret, or joy, or bitterness could be assigned.
It was the weirdest feeling. One moment, the Pilar I thought I’d cared for had existed in memory. The next moment, she’d been vaporized by the truth.
“She loves no one,” Tomlinson had said.
It was the saddest of phrases, but also freeing. In that instant, she disappeared from my past. In that way, at least, I could relate to Tomlinson. It was a little like having a block of memory wiped clean.
Dewey was still there with me, though. Thoughts of her remained, along with the deep, deep regret I now felt that I hadn’t recognized the truth about Pilar before I spoke the idiotic words that Dewey had overheard.
Off to my left were spoil islands, and the rectangular green mountain of phosphate spoil that marked Gibsonton. I slowed to 40 mph and cut in close to an island furred with pine and a few scraggly cabbage palms, before slowing to idle near a section of white beach that looked like it might have a creek near shore.
I checked my watch: 7:25 P.M. on a Friday, early May.
A little more than a half an hour before sunset.
So should I run up Bullfrog Creek, get closer to the trailer park, and risk meeting Prax Lourdes coming out? Or should I assume he was already sitting somewhere near the Sunshine Skyway, waiting for me to arrive by car?
Meeting him, I decided, might not be such a bad thing.
I pushed the throttle forward, jumping my skiff onto plane, and headed for the creek.
THIRTY
DR. Valerie Maria Santos remembered very little of what had happened late Thursday night, the night that she’d been abducted. The details failed to imprint on her brain because the perpetrator had nearly killed her accidentally, he was so freakishly strong, plus he knew almost nothing about administering ether as an anesthetic.
Dr. Valerie remembered being in Operating Room II—her favorite—and that she’d told the techs to play opera, loud.
That was standard. Dr. Valerie was well known for scheduling late surgeries—she was a night owl—and also for playing unusual music while she operated.
There was a brilliant thoracic surgeon in southwest Florida who required that AC/DC’s heavy metal rock be piped in through the surgical theater’s Bose speakers when he cut a chest. (Physicians who succeed in the esoteric fields of surgery are artists, after all, as well as technicians.) But Dr. Valerie’s musical selections—Peruvian flute, Cuban jazz, and now opera—were the favorite among the staff.
When Dr. Valerie operated—with her fast and gifted fingers, and with Bocelli’s “Our Prayer” echoing in the operating room—it was like attending church but at the same time watching a brilliant composer conduct her own symphony.
With opera as a backdrop, and charged with the sensation of playing accompanists to her solo genius, the nurses and techs, when finished, would sometimes leave the room and head to the lockers or lounge in tears. Dr. Valerie’s choice of music seemed an indicator of the famous woman’s intellect, as well as the empathy that the doctor invested in each and every patient.
The little woman really could perform magic, seemed to be able to make burned tissue rejoin itself and heal.
Lately, Dr. Valerie’s music of choice was exclusively opera. Almost always sung by Andrea Bocelli. But on Thursday night, the night she was abducted, her selection was Madama Butterfly—appropriate, considering not only what happened, but her own screwed-up romantic life.
She also remembered that the case was a skin transplant on a five-year-old who’d pulled a pot of boiling water off her mother’s stove. Dr. Valerie let her assistants do most of the close-needle work, which was increasingly common—spread the skills. It was a tiny patch of skin, and the little girl was going to be just fine.
Then the woman’s memory skipped, and she was downstairs in the female doctors’ locker room, standing at her locker, C-217, changing into her running clothes. Because it was a hot night and very late—close to midnight—she just wore shorts, a knit shirt, and a pair of well-worn New Balances.
She’d stopped in the doctors’ lounge—the business sections from half a dozen newspapers were spread everywhere; that’s all her colleagues seemed to read—and took a couple of bites from an apple, then chugged a bottle of water before heading out the hospital’s rear exit, past the little rose garden.
She’d dreaded going home. For years, she’d disliked spending time alone with her husband, Edward. But in the last few weeks, it was worse than ever because, she felt certain, he had finally found out about her two-year affair with a local nurse anesthetist.
Sooner or later, the man would confront her. It was inevitable. And when he did, Dr. Valerie had already decided, she was going to tell him the truth. Which meant divorce, and also meant headlines in the rag newspapers.
Ed had been staying up later than usual, sullen and moping, spoiling for a fight. She felt that Thursday might be the night.
That’s all she remembered until she was standing at the electronic gate outside their home. She had a good sweat going, was running in place as she typed in the combination, when from behind her, she heard a man’s deep voice say, “Dr. Valerie? Do you have time for a patient?”
She’d turned to see a huge man wearing a hospital gown, his face wrapped in gauze. There was the strong odor of ether on him.
“Do I know you?”
“Kinda. We’ve written some e-mails back and forth. Say—do you know anything about a skin condition called trig-eee-minal neur-al-gia? That’s a fuckin’ hard word to say.”
She remembered feeling a chill at the inappropriateness of his language; remembered backing away, but the damn gate was still locked.
“Yes,” she said, “I know about trigeminal neuralgia. It’s terrible. The pain can be even worse than the original burn. But I don’t discuss medicine away from my office. I’m sorry.”
She’d turned sideways and was trying to punch in the gate combination while still keeping an eye on the big man.
“What about those new anticonvulsion drugs? Someone told me they might work. Might take away some of the pain.”
The doctor’s steady hands were shaking. She couldn’t get the combination right!
“Yes, that’s true with the anticonvulsives. We’ve been getting excellent results. I’m very interested in your case, but I’ve got to go now. Call me at the office. We’ll talk about it.”
She heard the man say, “I’ll be damned. The fuckin’ boy is right aga
in!”
Because she loved children, she asked without even thinking about it, “What boy is that?”
The big man said, “The boy. The kid I wrote you about in the plane crash deal. The kid who’s gonna be my donor.” Talking as he stepped toward her, he lifted her as if she were no heavier than a pillow, the stink of ether suddenly overwhelming.
There were then a few blurry memories of lying on the bottom of a fast, open boat . . . and then of being sealed tight in darkness; cramped in a space no larger than a coffin . . . or a 50-gallon drum.
Terror.
Dr. Valerie Maria Santos remembered that.
I F she hadn’t been wearing her digital cross-trainer’s watch, the one with the heart monitor, the famous plastic surgeon wouldn’t have known that it was Friday morning close to noon when she awoke. She was in a steel room that was painted gray. There was the muffled rumble of an engine, and the room was rocking gently.
She was on a ship.
She lay on a cot, her arms and legs bound with duct tape. Fortunately, whoever had abducted her hadn’t also gagged her.
There was vomit on the cot, and on the floor of the boat.
The doctor was thirstier than she could ever remember being.
She called out weakly, “Hello? Can someone help me? I need help. Please.”
She called out a few more times over the next ten minutes before she heard a clanking at the door, and a hugely fat blond woman stepped into the room. The woman was wearing a baggy T-shirt, sweatstains at the armpits, and smoking a cigarette. Without taking the cigarette from her mouth, the woman shook a warning finger as she said, “You fancy little bitch, if you open your mouth one more time, make the slightest fucking sound or fuss, I’ll stick you back in that can and dump your ass overboard! I ’bout busted my ass getting that fancy microscope of yours into sick bay, so I ain’t in the mood to take your shit!”
Vicious. The woman meant it.
No one had ever talked to Dr. Valerie like that in her life.
“Please. Just some water. That’s all I want. Please.”
The big woman made a noise of disgust and came back a few minutes later with a liter bottle of water. The doctor’s arms were taped in front of her, so she could hold the bottle. She lifted it to her lips.
Still smoking, the woman watched her drink. The expression on her face was scary.
“Why are you doing this to me? Where are you taking me? I have money. I can pay.”
With startling agility, the big woman jumped across the room and slapped the bottle out of the doctor’s hands, hissing, “I told you not to make another sound! You say one more word, and I’ll lock the two of us in here. I’ll do you myself. How’d you like that, you fancy little bitch?”
When the woman was gone, door closed behind her, Dr. Valerie buried her face in the pillow and wept.
AT 6:15, Friday evening, the sound of the engine changed from a rumble to a vibrating roar, and the boat began to move. Dr. Valerie had dozed on and off through the day, feeling sick from the ether.
She was still thirsty, but felt stronger now.
With her teeth, she began to alternately chew at the tape on her hands and unwrap the tape that bound her ankles. Within half an hour, she was free.
But the door was locked from the outside. She considered pounding on the door, trying to get someone’s attention, but the fat woman so terrified her that she didn’t risk it.
There was nothing in the room to read, so the doctor began to pace. She continued to pace, her brain scanning frantically for a solution. Why was this happening? The woman had said something about her microscope being moved into the ship’s sick bay. What could that possibly mean?
Over and over again, Dr. Valerie went through her fragmented memories of the night before. Picturing what she could visualize of the man who had abducted her. Trying to recall his every word.
He’d said that he was a patient. Was he?
No. She became certain of that. She remembered her patients. She would have recognized something about him: his voice, his size, the rough language.
He’d also said they’d exchanged e-mails. But that wasn’t true either. She had so little free time that, aside from close friends, she seldom wrote to anyone.
There were a couple of exceptions: the Nigerian pre-med student that she was mentoring, and the Central American girl who’d been badly burned and who had the terrible, outlaw doctor as a physician. In fact, she’d written to Mary Perez the previous morning, offering more technical advice for the film script the poor girl was writing for her class at the University of Nicaragua.
Dr. Valerie’s name was signed to all of the correspondence they received on the web page, but her staff handled all that.
So, the answer was no. They had not exchanged e-mails. Yet, one of the few things she remembered clearly was that he’d said that he had e-mailed her about a boy. The boy who was his donor. Clearly, the boy was real—he’d apparently told the big man about the new anticonvulsion drugs. And the man had said something about a plane crash.
None of it made sense.
Valerie Santos was an articulate, brilliant woman and, like most overachievers, obsessive. She continued to pace, her mind scanning for some explanation, until the ship began to lift and roll too much, and she had to lie down on the cot.
That was around eight-thirty P.M.
At around nine, she stiffened, then leaped to her feet, whispering to herself, “Oh my God . . . oh my God. No! My surgical microscope?”
All the little pieces of the puzzle had suddenly drifted into place. Mary Perez’s screenplay had to do with a plane crash. The main character was a plastic surgeon who had to do a full facial transplant under Third World conditions. The donor was a boy who was supposedly beyond saving. The recipient was a very large man; a film star, in the girl’s script.
Pacing again, the doctor began to chew at her nails, desperate to find another explanation.
Oh God. No . . .
She couldn’t.
She hadn’t been e-mailing a girl named Mary. She’d been corresponding with her abductor. He was Mary Perez.
The last thing Dr. Valerie had written to him was:
My Dear Mary,
I am so proud of the progress you are making! Yes, as I wrote to you, after a full facial transplant, the recipient will look almost exactly like the donor, with the exception of eyes and teeth.
But there is one serious flaw in the premise for your script that you need to fix. No ethical surgeon would ever allow a living human being to be used as a donor for that procedure. Doesn’t matter if they think the boy in your script is sure to die. I certainly wouldn’t do it under any circumstances. Never!
No, the boy character must already be dead before the surgery begins. Something else: Under the conditions you are describing, he can have been dead for only an hour or two if his skin is still to be suitable for harvesting . . .
THIRTY-ONE
I tied my boat to an overhanging limb in a mosquito drainage, jammed the key in my pocket, and stepped off the bow onto the trampoline roots of red mangrove trees. I climbed through mangroves and then highland scrub toward the trailer park, keeping pace with the slowly lengthening shadows of new darkness.
It was close to nine P.M.
Soon, I could see lighted windows through the trees, people moving within: rows of illuminated rectangles embedded in shoebox files of larger aluminum rectangles, human theater going on within those small containers.
Inside one of the trailers, I saw what appeared to be a woman with an Abe Lincoln beard lean to hug a man with a massively fat face: sideshow exhibitors carrying out their lives; public people living privately, intimately, in this small, protected world.
The park was its own province of rich smells and unexpected sounds. Pork chops were frying in a pan, spaghetti was simmering in someone’s kitchen, there was a trash fire smoldering, and manure from the Indian elephant I’d seen earlier was somewhere nearby.
Once,
I stopped when I thought I heard the low, organic rumble of distant thunder. I stood and listened to the strange sound until my memories of Africa finally correctly identified the noise: There was a caged lion not far away, purring and grunting, trying to communicate with wild lions thirteen thousand miles away across the Atlantic.
At least, I hoped the lion was caged.
The trailer park had a one-lane asphalt street that circled through it. The street was lighted by occasional bare bulbs suspended beneath tin-can shades. I avoided the pools of light, and made my way to the circus wagon with its gaudy marquee that proclaimed that THE WORLD OF WONDERS awaited inside, including the bear with three eyes, and Dezi the Talking Wonder Dog.
Its windows were dimly lit, while the trailers around it seemed inhabited; normal.
Perhaps it was dimly lighted for a reason. I decided to check out the wagon my son had identified.
The street I was on was empty and quiet but for the lion’s low rumble and the distant barking of a dog. I gave it a moment, then slid into deeper shadows beside the wagon, and then around behind the wagon.
I touched my ear to the aluminum shell.
Silence.
Modular trailers aren’t built to be secure, and it didn’t take me long to find a window that I could jimmy. I was just pulling myself up into the window when my cellular phone began its silent, vibrating alert.
I stopped, took it out of my pocket, checked the caller I.D., and saw that it was Harris.
I wasn’t wearing the headset, so I held it to my ear and answered with a whispered, “Talk,” hoping he’d understand that I could not talk.
He did. With no more prompting, he said, “We’ve driven back and forth over the Skyway Bridge about nine times. I think he was waiting for a break in traffic. Finally, he had us throw both cases off the bridge. It was from one of the lower sections, maybe sixty feet down to the water, but I never got a clear look at who was down there. But we did make delivery. When your pal Kong asked about your package, the guy on the other end said that we’d make the exchange in a week or so, and that he’d be in touch.”
Tampa Burn Page 34
