“Damn right I said no.”
Rudy put down the prosthesis and said: “I wish you wouldn’t take that tone with me. I’m doing the best I can.”
“Oh, yeah.”
“Look, didn’t I advise you to see a specialist?”
“And didn’t I advise you, you’re crazy? The cops’ll be hunting all over.”
“All right,” Rudy said in a calming voice. “Let’s not argue.”
It had been three weeks since Chemo had shown up behind Whispering Palms on a blood-streaked water scooter—a vision that Dr. Rudy Graveline would carry with him for the rest of his life. It had happened during an afternoon consult with Mrs. Carla Crumworthy, heiress to the Crumworthy panty-shield fortune. She had come to complain about the collagen injections that Rudy Graveline had administered to give her full, sensual lips, which is just what every rheumatoid seventy-one-year-old woman needs. Mrs. Crumworthy had lamented that the results were nothing like she had hoped, that she now resembled one of those Ubangi tribal women from the National Geographic, the ones with the ceramic platters in their mouths. And, in truth, Dr. Rudy Graveline was concerned about what had happened because Mrs. Crumworthy’s lips had indeed grown bulbous and unwieldy and hard as cobblestones. As he examined her (keeping his doubts to himself), Rudy wondered if maybe he had injected too much collagen, or not enough, or if maybe he’d zapped it into the wrong spots. Whatever the cause, the result was undeniable: Mrs. Carla Crumworthy looked like a duck wearing mauve lipstick. A malpractice jury could have a ball with this one.
Dr. Graveline had been whisking through his trusty Rolodex, searching for a kind-hearted colleague, when Mrs. Crumworthy suddenly rose to her feet and shrieked. Pointing out the picture window toward Biscayne Bay, the old woman had blubbered in terror, her huge misshapen lips slapping together in wet percussion. Rudy had no idea what she was trying to say.
He spun around and looked out the window.
The yellow jet ski lay on its side, adrift in the bay. Somehow Chemo had dragged himself, soaking wet and stark naked, over the ledge of the seawall behind the clinic. He didn’t look well enough to be dead. His gray shoulders shivered violently in the sunshine, and his eyes flickered vaguely through puffy purple slits. Chemo swung the bloody stump to show Dr. Graveline what had happened to his left hand. He pointed gamely at the elastic wrist tourniquet that he had fashioned from his Jockey shorts, and Rudy would later concede that it had probably saved his life.
Mrs. Carla Crumworthy was quickly ushered to a private recovery suite and oversedated, while Rudy and two young assistant surgeons led Chemo to an operating room. The assistants argued that he belonged at a real trauma center in a real hospital, but Chemo adamantly refused. This left the doctors with no choice but to operate or let him bleed to death.
Gently discouraged from participating in the surgery, Rudy had been content to let the young fellows work unimpeded. He spent the time making idle conversation with the woozy Chemo, who had rejected a general anesthetic in favor of an old-fashioned intravenous jolt of Demerol.
Since that evening, Chemo’s post-op recovery had progressed swiftly and in relative luxury, with the entire staff of Whispering Palms instructed to accommodate his every wish. Rudy Graveline himself was exceedingly attentive, as he needed Chemo’s loyalty now more than ever. He had hoped that the killer’s spirits would improve at the prospect of reconstructing his abbreviated left arm.
“A new hand,” Rudy said, “would be a major step back to a normal life.”
“I never had a normal life,” Chemo pointed out. Sure, he would miss the hand, but he was more pissed off about losing the expensive wristwatch.
“What are my other options?” Chemo asked.
“What do you mean?”
“I mean, besides these things.” He waved his stump contemptuously at the artificial hands.
“Well,” Rudy said, “frankly, I’m out of ideas.” He gathered the prostheses from his desk and put them back in the box. “I told you this isn’t my field,” he said to Chemo.
“You keep trying to dump me off on some other surgeon, but it won’t work. It’s you or nobody.”