“Reynaldo Flemm!”
The scrub nurse said: “I told you he looked familiar.”
Again Rudy asked: “Who? Reynaldo who?”
“That guy from the TV.”
“This has gone far enough,” Rudy declared, fighting panic. “You better … just get the hell out of my operating room.”
Willie pushed forward. “Ray, wake up! It’s me!”
“He can’t wake up, you asshole. He’s gassed to the gills. Now turn off that spotlight and get lost.”
The scope of the journalistic emergency struck Willie at once. Reynaldo was unconscious. Christina was gone. The tape was rolling. The batteries were running out.
Willie thought: It’s up to me now.
The baton microphone, Ray’s favorite, the one Willie was supposed to toss to him at the moment of ambush, was tucked in Willie’s left armpit. Grunting, contorting, shifting the weight of the Betacam on his shoulder, Willie was able to retrieve the mike with his right hand. In an uncanny imitation of Reynaldo Flemm, Willie thrust it toward the face of the surgeon.
Above the surgical mask, Rudy Graveline’s eyes grew wide and fearful. He stared at the microphone as if it were the barrel of a Mauser. From behind the metallic hulk of the minicam, the voice asked: “Did you kill Victoria Barletta?”
A bullet could not have struck Rudy Graveline as savagely as those words. His spine became rigid. The pupils of his eyes shrunk to pinpricks. His muscles cramped, one by one, starting in his toes. His right hand, the one that the held the cannula, the. one buried deep in the livid folds of Reynaldo Flemm’s freshly vacuumed tummy—his right hand twisted into a spastic nerveless talon.
With panic welling in her voice, the anesthetist said: “All right, that’s it!”
“Almost done,” the surgeon said hoarsely. “No, that’s enough!”
But Dr. Rudy Graveline was determined to finish the operation. To quit would be an admission of … something. Composure—that’s what they taught you at Harvard. Above all, a physician must be composed. In times of crisis, patients and staff relied on a surgeon to be cool, calm, and composed. Even if the man lying on the operating table turned out to be … Reynaldo Flemm, the notorious undercover TV reporter! That would explain the woozy babbling while he was going under—the jerkoff wasn’t talking about Victoria Principal, the actress. He was talking about Victoria Barletta, she of the fateful nose job.
The pain of the muscle cramps was so fierce that it brought viscous tears to Rudy Graveline’s eyes. He forced himself to continue. He lowered his right shoulder into the rhythm of the liposuction, back and forth in a lumberjack motion, harder and harder.
Again, the faceless voice from behind the TV camera: “Did you kill that girl?”
The black eye of the beast peered closer, revolving clockwise in its socket—Willie, remembering Ray’s instructions to zoom tight on Rudy’s face. The surgeon stomped on the suction pedal as if he were squashing a centipede. The motor thrummed. The tube twitched. The glass jar filled.
Time to stop.
Time to stop!
But Dr. Rudy Graveline did not stop.
He kept on poking and sucking … the long hungry snout of the mechanical anteater slurping through the pit of Reynaldo’s abdomen … down, down, down through the fascia and the muscle … snorkeling past the intestines, nipping at the transverse colon … down, down, down the magic anteater burrowed.
Until it glomped the aorta.
And the plastic tube coming out of Reynaldo’s naval suddenly turned bright red.
The jar at the other end turned red.
Even the doctor’s arm turned red.
Willie watched it all through the camera’s eye. The whole place, turning red.
31
The first thing Chemo bought with Rudy’s money was a portable phone for the Bonneville. No sooner was it out of the box than Maggie Gonzalez remarked, “This stupid toy is worth more than the car.”
Chemo said, “I need a private line. You’ll see.” They were driving back to the Holiday Inn after spending the morning at the office of Dr. George Ginger, the plastic surgeon. Maggie knew Dr. Ginger from the early days as one of Rudy’s more competent underlings at the Durkos Center. She trusted George’s skill and his discretion. He could be maddeningly slow, and he had terrible breath, but technically he was about as good as cosmetic surgeons come.