Working on her own face in the mirror was so damn hard, she'd thought maybe if she experimented on Tran, tried a few things, she could get a little control over her hands and things would go easier in the future.
Tran was willing. He was never pushy or shy like most men. If Pepper wanted to do something, fine, he'd go along no matter what it was. Not like the boys she was used to dating, guys who always had to be in control. She wasn't sure how old Tran was. Maybe a few years younger than she, maybe thirty years older. In bed Tran was as limber as boiled linguini, double-jointed, maybe even triple. The things he could do, Christ, a regular contortionist.
"When you finish, I will kiss you all over with my new lips."
Pepper laughed. She was never sure if Tran was trying to be funny or not, but he made her laugh a lot. She couldn't even tell if he was smiling or scowling. Reading his face was like trying to read a turtle's. His mouth hardly moved, even when he talked.
"Do you find me inscrutable, Pepper?"
"What?"
"Inscrutable," Tran said. "It is how Westerners sometimes characterize Asians."
"No," Pepper said. "I find you very scrutable."
Tran laughed and tilted his head for a kiss.
"Shall we have sex again now?"
"No," Pepper said. "I'm sore. No sex until tomorrow. At least."
"Soar, like a bird?" Tran smiled. His English was as good as hers. Maybe better. He'd learned it in school, then got a lot of practice using it during the war.
"Sore like hurt," Pepper said.
"I will make you soar like a bird. We can fly together to the moon."
Pepper laughed again.
"If you marry me, pretty Pepper, I'll make you laugh every day. Every hour."
"I'm not marrying you, Tran. I got my sights set on something else."
She finished filling in his lips, wiped off a couple of smeared places, then she started on his eyes.
"You want to marry the doctor. I know. Have blond children."
"Yes, that's right. Lots of blond children."
"The doctor's a bad man. He kills people."
"Hey," Pepper said. "He's doing it 'cause you're paying him to.
"I'm paying him to develop the drug, not to kill people."
"He doesn't mean to kill them. He's trying to do good. It just doesn't always turn out right."
"If you marry me, I'll make you a rich woman. I'll buy you all the blond children you want. I know where to get them cheap."
"You're not my type."
"And what's your type?"
"I like blond hair, blue eyes, the way the doctor dresses."
"Blond is just a color. I have money, charm, an education. That's more important than color, don't you think?"
"I like blond."
"You think I'm ugly? You don't like Oriental men?"
"You're very handsome, Tran. Just hold still, don't blink till I finish this."
Tran watched Pepper in the mirror as she brushed on the metallic eyeshadow, a champagne color with mossy-green highlights.
"You think if you put these colors on your face, the doctor will marry you?"
"I'm not some dimwit. I don't think that. No. I'm just trying to catch up, is all. I didn't have a mother or sisters showing me how this makeup stuff works. No girlfriends. Just boys, and generally they don't know eyeshadow from mullet chum. So I'm educating myself, that's all."
"I like you the way you are, right out of the shower."
"Aren't you sweet." She stepped back and peered at Tran's eyes. She'd drawn the eyeshadow out too wide. He looked like some kind of bird you'd see on a travel show.
"Anyway, it's the women I'm worried about, Tran, not the men. The wives of the other doctors, like the ones I used to talk to over at the hospital. Bunch of snooty ladies. But if I'm going to be Bean's wife, I'm going to have to entertain those ladies and their husbands, and go over to their houses and talk to them at parties, formal dinners. Women notice this makeup shit. They judge you. They whisper about you if you're using the wrong colors. Putting on your blush too heavy. Women will eat you alive, Tran, if your nails clash with your lips. So I damn well gotta get this right."
Pepper worked in silence, dabbing the eyeshadow back into shape. She reshaped Tran's eyebrows with her liner pencil, gave them a thicker look. Then went to work on his lashes, coiling them out, lengthening them with her teensy Estee Lauder mascara comb.
She stepped back from him, turned him away from the mirror toward the window light.
"How do I look? Good enough to eat?"
"You look ridiculous."
Tran examined himself in the mirror.
"Yes," he said. "I look like a drag queen with a terminal disease."
Tran's hair was so short and close to his skull, it looked painted on. He had a very good body. Trim and limber. The sex was the best she'd ever had. He'd found some places on her body she'd never known existed. He knew how to turn her inside out. Tran swung away from the mirror and stared at her.
"Maybe you should try painting the doctor's face, see how good he looks."
"He'd never sit still for something like that."
"That's my point exactly. I'm good to you. The doctor isn't."
"It's no use," she said. "I'll never learn this stuff."
Tran turned on the water in the sink and scooped up a handful and started rubbing his face clean. Pepper stared out the window at the women lying around the pool. Even from that far away she could see that most of them knew more about the fine art of makeup than she ever would.
Tran was staring at her when she looked back. He shook his head.
"I don't like Dr. Bean Wilson."
"You're just jealous, Tran."
"I saved his life in Vietnam, and this is how he repays me."
"You didn't save his life. You were the enemy."
"No, no. I worked with the South Vietnamese. I was assigned to Bean Wilson, helping him with his translations. When he was injured, I was the one who found him. I carried him back up the hill during an artillery barrage. I won a medal for it. And now this is how Bean treats me. Brings me all this way with promises. Arranges for my company to loan him money for his project, but refuses to discuss the details of his experiments. Tries to conceal from me that he is killing people."
"You saved Bean Wilson's life?"
"That's a true story, yes. He was bleeding to death."
"Wow. You were a war hero."
"But I will tell you this much. If that man fucks up one more time, he's finished. No more money, no more work. I'll go back to Vietnam. Deal's off. My people are not happy with all the fuckups."
"He's getting close. Don't worry about it."
"One more fuckup, I'm going home. You should know this, Pepper. The next one works, or I'm going back."
"You like Key West. What's your hurry?"
"Key West is okay. But the doctor has already spent a great deal of cash. Next time or else."
"Oh, it'll work next time. He's just got to get the proportions of the ingredients right."
"You got more habanero?"
"I got one more in my purse, I think."
"Rub it on me. I have a pain in my weenie."
Pepper had taught him the word. She'd told him weenie was the dirtiest utterance in the English language. Right up there with motherfuck. Tran had a weakness for dirty words.
Pepper followed Tran back into the bedroom. He lay his body lengthwise across the bed, his heavy penis flopping across his left thigh.
Pepper got the #15 scalpel and the last habanero out of her purse. She stood over Tran and watched his expression tense as she cut the chili in two and then stooped over him to smear one half, then the other, up and down the length of his organ.
"You're so good, Pepper," he said, his eyes beginning to water. "I'll marry you and make you a very rich girl. Give you rich blond babies. All the babies you want. Take you back to my country, you'll be a queen there. Big tall woman like you."
"I'm spoken for
."
"I'll take care of you. You can buy all the lip liner you want. Every color on earth."
She rubbed the chili up and back, up and back, careful to smear the acid juice onto the soft round head, giving him pain and soothing him at the same time. That miraculous power of chili peppers.
Tran closed his eyes and moaned.
***
Bean was gripping the steering wheel fiercely with both hands, his arms locked straight, shoving his back hard against the seat like an astronaut struggling against staggering g-forces. He stared directly ahead out the windshield. In front of the Jet Ski shop the girl was sitting at a picnic table. She was staring at the car, not sure what she'd just seen. Some radical new form of Key West perversity. A few feet away the traffic clamored along Roosevelt. It was a bright, airless day. A few whiskery clouds were crawling up the western sky.
"What was that? A seizure?"
Bean filled his lungs slowly. His voice was hoarse.
"That, Thorn, was a little telegram from hell. It goes by the incredible misnomer 'phantom pain.' "
"You lost your leg in the war?"
Bean turned his head and looked at Thorn.
"Both legs."
"Jesus, I'm sorry. I didn't know."
"How would you?"
Bean gave a rueful chuckle and swept a hand through his hair.
"I get angry or upset, it seems to set off an episode."
"Christ, it scared the shit out of me."
"It's the only damn thing that works, having somebody rub my prosthesis. It's crazy. Makes no logical sense, I know. But it works. Fools the brain somehow."
"Phantom pain. I don't know anything about it."
"You will," Bean said. "Everybody in the clinic has it to some degree or another. Amputees, paraplegics. You'll be the only one that doesn't."
"Oh, joy."
The blond girl sitting at the picnic table was talking to a guy with long tangled hair and a bedroll roped to his back. Just hitched into town. He was rolling her a smoke, smiling, talking. The girl brushed her bangs off her forehead and listened to his rap.
Bean bent forward to pick up the ignition key from the floor. And he stayed down there, craning his head up to peer at the underside of the dash.
"What the hell?"
Thorn twisted forward and saw the row of silver toggle switches Bean was looking at.
Bean nudged one of them and a small electric motor sounded and the rear of the hearse began to tilt upward. Thorn slid a few inches forward on the leather seat, then caught himself with a hand against the glove box.
"Goddamn, Pepper," Bean said. "Redneck bitch."
Bean flipped the switch again, and with a groan of gears the car leveled back out. He tried another toggle and the front end of that big car suddenly launched a yard up into the air and slammed back down.
"Holy shit!"
"That idiot," Bean said. "That fucking cracker."
Thorn looked over at the two drifters who'd been watching from the safety of the picnic table. They were on their feet now, getting the hell back up the highway. Key West was turning out to be a little too weird for fainthearted folks like them.
CHAPTER 15
"I know what's going on, Monica. I figured it out. About the dolphins."
Saturday noonish, Roy Everly was hovering over her desk in a red, green, and yellow flowered shirt. Enough material to cover two couches. White tennis shorts and a pair of unlaced work boots without socks. The other four members of the Key Largo News staff had stopped what they were doing to listen. Minnie Johnson, the owner and official grande dame of gossip for the island; Jimmy Bob Johnson, her gay son, the managing editor; and Sally and Steve Marcus, the husband-and-wife reporting team who regularly reminded anyone who'd listen that they were way too professional for such a small-town rag. Monica could imagine the headlines next week, ROY EVERLY SEEN WEARING SHIRT. A major scoop by Key Largo standards.
"I'm really not interested, Roy. I'm sorry, but I'm not the person you should be talking to."
"I'm interested," Sally Marcus said.
"Fuck you, lady."
"What!"
Roy swung toward the Marcuses.
"You goddamn people—a bunch of leeches and hyenas. Fucking journalists, you write ten words, five of them are lies, the other five are factually wrong. If Jesus Christ gave you an interview you'd find some way to make him sound like a goddamn moron or else a crook. So just stay the fuck away from me."
"Hey," Steve Marcus said. "Who the hell do you think you are?"
"Maybe we should go outside, Roy," Monica said.
Monica led Roy around the Marcuses' desk to the front door. She smiled back at their matching scowls.
"Want to borrow my steno pad, Monica?" called Jimmy Bob.
She shut the door behind them and Roy followed her over to the picnic table in the shade of a jacaranda. The traffic boomed on US 1, people squealing in and out of the Winn-Dixie shopping center across the road. Monica looked over at the small white Key Largo News building and saw Minnie peering out her office window as if she were going to attempt some lipreading.
"I know why they tortured the dolphins before they killed them."
"Sit down, Roy. Relax."
"I didn't know who else to tell."
"Have you been drinking, Roy?"
"I've been at the computer for the last two days, running through databases, posting queries on bulletin boards all over the Internet, shooting E-mail to people I know. This morning, I put it all together. I haven't had time for a goddamn drink."
Steve Marcus came out the front door and glanced over, shook out a cigarette, lit it, and blew his first plume of smoke in their direction.
"It's about endorphins," Roy said. "The spines, the brains, the torture. It's all about endorphins."
"Slow down, Roy. Please. I'll listen. You can walk me through it. But calm down."
Roy took a deep breath and straddled the wooden bench across from her. He bowed his head and ran his finger through the groove of a heart someone had gouged into the wood long ago. Two sets of initials linked inside the heart.
"I kept going over and over it. Spines and brains. Torture. It didn't make any sense. The torture sounds like crazies. The mess they made, all that hacking and slicing, blood everywhere, that looks like somebody was high on drugs, some kind of fucking maniac. But that was all a cover. The hacking came first. Then cutting them into small pieces came after they were finished."
"How do you know that?"
"Whoever killed my dolphins knew exactly what they were doing, exactly what they wanted. It's not easy breaking open the cranial cavity of a dolphin. And they had to do some very careful, very precise surgery to get the entire spinal column out."
Monica's gaze strayed across the highway. Mothers and their children rolling shopping carts across the asphalt lot toward the grocery. The weekly errands, the endless cycle of routine. A world anchored in comforting regularity.
"Dolphins produce endorphins just like people do," Roy said.
"Endorphins. The runner's high."
"Runner's high, yeah. Endorphins are the body's pain suppression chemical. You hammer a thumb, the adrenal gland secretes some into the bloodstream. You keep hammering the same thumb, more endorphins spurt out. That's what the fuckers were doing. They were torturing the dolphins, cutting on them, hurting them so they'd produce maximum quantities of endorphins. Much more potent than human beta-endorphin. Same chemical structure up to a point, but much more powerful. It's because the average dolphin is exposed to a lot more pain second by second, day after day, than human beings are. They need a better pain suppression system. From what I've read so far, human beta-endorphin versus dolphin's is like the difference between aspirin and morphine."
"I don't see it, Roy. Somebody mutilated the dolphins, why does it have to be about endorphins, of all things?"
"Because they took the spines and brains. The two body parts that would be saturated in endorphins after the animals w
ere tortured. That's the connection."
"That's quite a leap."
"The more they cut, the more endorphins produced. They cut, they wait, they cut some more, then when they're pretty sure they've maxed out, they kill the animals and remove the spines and brains. I've talked to people, Monica. People I've met on the 'Net, on the phone, experts, people that've spent their whole lives studying dolphins. I've thrown out this scenario and asked what possible logical connection there could be between torture and brains and spines. Everyone is stumped. I get nothing but silence for the last couple of days, then some fifteen-year-old kid in Seattle E-mails me, he's figured it out. Just that one word in his message. Endorphins. And bang, I knew he was right. That's the only thing that makes any sense."
"What about random chaos?"
"This wasn't random."
"Just because they took the brains and spines?"
"No," Roy said. He stared over at Steve Marcus. The man had finished his cigarette but was still standing on the porch, glaring in their direction.
"Go on, Roy."
"It's happened before. This same exact situation. Three times before. Once up in Orlando, one time in north Florida, a little dolphin center near Jacksonville, and once over in St. Pete. Somebody broke into their dolphin tanks, tortured and killed a few dolphins, harvested their spines and brains. Chopped them up in pieces afterward. Identical scenario."
The sun was printing the shadow of Monica's head on the table. She looked down at it, her dark other half. The side of her that had wanted to go on another road trip, take another stab at reinventing herself. The side she probably should have listened to.
"Where'd you find all this out? About the other dolphins."
"Database," he said. "All the newspapers and magazines in America. I did a word search, typed in dolphin plus slaughter and those three articles popped up. I got on the phone, called the places, talked to a couple of the owners. Two went out of business right after it happened, the other one finally got hold of some cast-off navy dolphins and that place is up and running again. All of them said the same thing. Tortured and killed."
"Why hasn't anybody else seen the same pattern?"
"Who would? And even if they did, who would care?"
Red Sky At Night (Thorn Series Book 6) Page 14
