“Yeah, yeah, I read the note.”
“So, you’re waiting to hear my demands.”
“No,” said Stranahan, “I waiting to hear you sing the fucking aria from Madams Butterfly … Of course I want to hear your demands.”
“Christ, you’re in a shitty mood.”
“I can barely hear you,” Stanahan complained. “Don’t tell me you got one of those yuppie Mattel car phones.”
“It’s a Panasonic,” Chemo said, sharply.
Maggie looked over at him with an impatient expression, as if to say: Get on with it.
As he braked for a stop light, the phone slipped from Chemo’s ear. He took his good hand off the wheel to grab for it.
“Hell!” The receiver was gooey with the antibiotic ointment from his cheeks.
Stranahan’s voice cracked through the static. “Now what’s the matter?”
“Nothing. Not a damn thing.” Chemo carefully propped the receiver on his shoulder. “Look, here’s the deal. You want to see your lady friend alive, meet me at the marina at midnight tonight.”
“Fuck you.”
“Huh?”
“That means no, Funny Face. No marina. I know what you want and you can have it. Me for her, right?”
“Right.” Chemo figured there was no sense trying to bullshit this guy.
“It’s a deal,” Stranahan said, “but I’m not going anywhere. You come to me.”
“Where are you now?”
“I’m at a pay phone on Bayshore Drive, but I won’t be here long.”
Impatiently Chemo said, “So where’s the meet?”
“My place.”
“That house? No fucking way.”
“Fraid so.”
The car phone started sliding again. Chemo groped frantically for it, and the Bonneville began to weave off the road. Maggie reached over and steadied the wheel.
Chemo got a grip on the receiver and snarled into it: “You hear what I said? No way am I going back to that damn stilt house.”
“Yes, you are. You’ll be getting another call with more information.”
“Tell me now!”
“I can’t,” Stranahan said.
“I’ll kill the Marks girl, I swear.”
“You’re not quite that stupid, are you?”
The hot flush of anger made Chemo’s face sting even worse. He said, “We’ll talk about this later. What time you gonna call?”
“Oh, not me,” Mick Stranahan said. “I won’t be the one calling back.”
“Then who?” Chemo demanded.
But the line had gone dead.
Willie played the videotape for his friend at WTVJ, the NBC affiliate in Miami. Willie’s friend was sufficiently impressed by the blood on his shirt to let him use one of the editing rooms. “You gotta see this,” Willie said.
He punched the tape into the machine and sat back to chew on his knuckles. He felt like an orphan. No Christina, no Reynaldo. He knew he should call New York, but he didn’t know what to say or who to tell.
Willie’s friend, who was a local news producer, pointed to the monitor. “Where’s that?” he asked.
“Surgery clinic over in Bal Harbour. That’s the waiting room.”
The friend said. “You were portable?”
“Right. Solo the whole way.”
“So where’s Flemm? That doesn’t look like him.”
“No, that’s somebody else.” The monitor showed an operating room where a tall bald doctor was hunched over a chubby female patient. The bald doctor was gesticulating angrily at the camera and barking for a nurse to call the authorities. “I don’t know who that was,” Willie said. “Wrong room.”
“Now you’re back in the hallway, walking. People are yelling, covering their faces.”
“Yeah, but here it comes,” Willie said, leaning forward. “Bingo. That’s Ray on the table.”
“Jeez, what’re they doing?”
“I don’t know.”
“It looks like a goddamn Caesarean
Willie said, “Yeah, but it was supposed to be a nose job.”
“Good!”
The audio portion of the tape grew louder.
“Yeah, that’s him!”
“Who? That’s Ray?”
“Reynaldo Flemm.”
“I told you he looked familiar. “
“Who? Reynaldo who?”
“That guy from from the TV. “
“This has gone far enough … “
When the frame filled with Reynaldo Flemm’s gaping muzzled face, Willie’s friend hit the Pause button and said, “Fucker never looked better.”
“You know him?”
“I knew him back from Philadelphia. Back when he was still Ray Fleming.”
“You’re kidding,” Willie said.
“No, man, that’s his real name. Raymond Fleming. Then he got on this bi-ethnic kick … ‘Reynaldo Flemm’—half Latin, half Eastern bloc. Told everybody in the business that his mother was a Cuban refugee and his father was with the Yugoslavian resistance. Shit, I laugh about it but that’s when his career really took off.”