“Doc, this is a big mistake. Local is no good.”
“I’ve got a guy in mind,” Dr. Graveline said.
“A Cuban, right? Crazy fuckin’ Cuban, I knew it.”
“No, he’s not a Cuban.”
“One of my people?”
“No,” Rudy said. “He’s by himself.”
Again Curly Eyebrows laughed. “Nobody is by himself, Doc. Nobody in this business.”
“This one is different,” Rudy said. Different wasn’t the word for it. “Anyway, I just wanted to let you know, so you wouldn’t send anybody else.”
“Suit yourself.”
“And I’m sorry about the other fellow.”
“Don’t bring up that shit, hear? You’re on one of those cellular phones, I can tell. I hate them things, Doc, they ain’t safe. They give off all kinds of fucked-up microwaves, anybody can listen in.”
Dr. Graveline said, “I don’t think so.”
“Yeah, well, I read where people can listen on their blenders and hair dryers and shit. Pick up everything you say.”
The football player’s wife was brushing on fresh makeup, using the vanity mirror on the back of the sun visor.
The man in Jersey said: “Your luck, some broad’s pickin’ us up on her electric dildo. Every word.”
“Talk to you later,” Rudy said.
“One piece of advice,” said Curly Eyebrows. “This guy you lined up for the job, don’t tell him your life story. I mean it, Doc. Give him the name, the address, the dough, and that’s it.”
“Oh, I can trust him,” Dr. Graveline said.
“Like hell,” laughed the man in New Jersey, and hung up.
The football player’s wife flipped the sun visor up, closed her compact, and said, “Business?”
“Yes, I dabble in real estate.” Rudy zipped up his pants. “I’ve decided to go with a Miami broker.”
The woman shrugged. She noticed her pink bikini panties on the floormat, and quickly put them in her purse. They were ruined; the doctor had chewed a hole in them.
“Can I drive your car back to the office?” she asked.
“No,” said Rudy Graveline. He got out and walked around to the driver’s side. The football player’s wife slid across the seat, and Rudy got in.
“I almost forgot,” the woman said, fingering the place on her jaw, “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.