by Crumb, Kit
“Yeah, that’s him, Michael Lambrosco. Thinks he’s a real stud.”
Rosie watched as Michael worked like a jackhammer.
“See what I mean? Not just that he’s over the top but he’s messed up the scene. Look how he’s grabbing her hair, that’s not called for.”
He turned to Rosie. “Thank God she was oiled up. She must have known who her partner was going to be.”
“Thanks for the ride,” Michael said over his shoulder as he stepped from the scene.
“Hey fuck you,” she said, and stomped off the set. She pulled on her terrycloth robe, and confronted Von Seagram. “See what that son-of-a-bitch did to me? He coulda torn me up and that sure as fucking hell weren’t in my script. I’m outta here.”
She turned and walked away without giving him a chance to respond.
When Von Seagram looked over for Rosie’s response, she was gone. He looked down at the clipboard she’d been holding, and at a harshly scrawled message she’d left on the storyboard.
“You see that? Absolutely no gratitude,” Michael said shaking his head in mock concern. “Hey I hope you got the shot.”
“Give it a rest Michael, Rosie wants to see you in her trailer ASAP,” Von Seagram said.
Michael walked from the set, pulled on a terrycloth robe, paused to tighten it, then knocked on the trailer door. He was surprised to see the owner of the company answer the door in a similar robe.
“Ah, hey Miss Rehnquist. Von Seagram said you wanted to see me.”
“Yeah, thanks for coming so soon.” Rosie stepped back, inviting Michael to come in. “Can I offer you some coffee? Sorry I don’t have anything stronger.”
“Nah. That’s ok. I’m good.”
“Michael, let me get right to the point. You don’t stick to the script and I’m losing girls because of you,” Rosie said, as she set the little box she’d been holding on the coffee table.
“Well maybe I’m a little more then they can handle, if you know what I mean.”
Rosie retained her best stone face. “Oh, I’m not sure I know what you mean.”
Michael gave a silly grin. “Well, you know I’m Italian, right?” He gave a little thrust with his hips.
“Ok you’re Italian,” she said, keeping the blank look on her face.
“Like I said, maybe I’m more then they can handle.”
That was Rosie’s cue. She walked up to Michael and untied his robe. He never saw the syringe she held against her left wrist.
“Let’s just take a look.” She stood staring at his growing erection, letting her own robe fall off her shoulders. With Michael fully distracted, she reached out with her right hand as if to pull him into an embrace and thrust the needle deep into his neck.
Michael convulsed several times.
“You just scared the shit out of me, baby,” Rosie said, jabbing a second needle deep, filling the vein with pure heroin. “That’s for all the girls, you bastard.”
Michael’s eyes grew wide then slowly closed.
Chapter Fourteen
The vintage ambulance sped along the Oregon I-5 corridor north from Medford. No sirens, just a simple blue light spinning to keep the police away. If pulled over, all their papers were up to date and indicating the transport of an organ. Besides, police rarely pull over a speeding ambulance.
Derrick looked over at Hubble. If there was ever a man of few words, it was Hubble. He rarely said anything beyond what was needed. Derrick didn’t trust him.
He loosened his seat harness; it would be a long drive to Exit 40, which would take them to the coast and the town of Denton. He slid his hips out so he could slump into the seat and closed his eyes—not to sleep, but to try and figure out how he had gone from a respected anesthesiologist working at a clinic designated for donor organ extraction, to a murderer.
Simms, a doctor no one seemed to have heard of, had originally recruited him out of his internship at Medford General. It was to be a prestigious and lucrative position working in a private clinic. He was to assist, in his capacity as anesthesiologist, with the removal of organs from donors. He was told that some went directly to recipients, others to universities.
He opened his eyes and looked back over at Hubble, seat harness pulled tight, hands on the steering wheel precisely at twelve and three, back pressed into the seat, speed at exactly eighty-five miles an hour. Anal son-of-a-bitch.
Derrick closed his eyes again. He remembered how less than a week into his new job Hubble had been waiting to talk to him out side OR 13, after a heart extraction.
“Derrick I need a word. In my office in fifteen minutes.”
That was it, no greeting, no reason why, nothing.
He stared at Hubble knowing the man wouldn’t so much as turn his head. He always figured Hubble deserved his tiny office, bare of anything that might identify who he was, dominated by a large wooden desk framed by dark wood-paneled walls without so much as a picture frame.
When he walked in, Hubble was busy writing on a yellow legal pad. He looked up from whatever he was working on and smiled, the first smile he had seen from the man.
“Have a seat Derrick. I have someone I’d like you to meet.”
Derrick turned in his chair, scooting it a little to one side to see who was coming through the door. A stunning, statuesque brunette with breasts he couldn’t ignore entered. He’d only seen the person who hired him once, but Rosie Rehnquist wasn’t someone you easily forgot. She walked directly to where Hubble had been sitting, leaned over the desk and extended her hand. “Derrick, right?” She looked over at Hubble as if for conformation. “I’m Rosie Rehnquist.”
He stood and took her hand. “Pleased to meet you.”
“Have a seat and relax, I want to make sure you understand the nature of our business here at L & L.”
He looked from Rosie to Hubble, who was sitting on the edge of the desk. “I understand perfectly.”
Rosie smiled, running a thumb inside her blouse to adjust her bra strap. “Actually, I don’t think you do, and that’s why I’m here.”
As if on cue Hubble walked around and shut the door, then leaned against it. Derrick craned his neck to see where he’d gone, then looked back at Rosie.
“I’ll come right to the point,” Rosie paused, studying Derrick’s features. “L & L sells organs to the highest bidder through the black market.”
Derrick, concerned with the welfare of his patients, said, “What happens to the donors?”
“They die. But understand that because of your services as anesthesiologist they feel no pain.”
He was still trying to get his mind around what Rosie was saying. “What happens to the bodies?”
Rosie gave Derrick a weak smile. “Do you realize that what I’ve told you makes you an accomplice, and what you decide to do with this information will determine what we do with you?”
Derrick didn’t move, didn’t say a word.
“If you put in with us you’ll get rich, and if not, well.” Rosie gave a shrug, tilted her head and held her hands out at her sides.
Derrick smiled. “Being wealthy doesn’t seem so bad to me.”
Rosie sighed and Hubble returned to his place on the edge of the desk. “Great,” Rosie said. “In the days ahead you’ll be filled in on every aspect of L & L.”
Derrick continued sitting as Rosie and Hubble left the office, saying that he just needed some time alone.
The image of the meeting with Rosie and Hubble began to fade as the motion of the ambulance gently rocked him to sleep.
He was suddenly jolted awake, forcefully pulled forward against his seat harness. His eyes flew open and he was instantly alert. He watched as a doe and two fawns leapt from the shoulder of the road into some overgrowth. Hubble quickly brought the ambulance back to speed.
“Rest stop two miles ahead, you need to go?”
“No, I’m fine.”
“You having any problems with the extraction?” Hubble asked.
“You mean the murder? No, the guy probably had it coming. When I was brought into this, Simms assured me that all organs were extracted under clinical conditions. That if it was a live donor, it was my job to make sure they didn’t feel a thing. The guy who used to own that liver suffered, and that was anything but a clinical situation.”
Hubble didn’t say a word but glanced his way. Derrick began to wonder if he’d said too much but relaxed when Hubble focused back on the road.
But then Hubble said, “You know what we do. Sometimes people don’t understand. We can’t take the risk that some guilty individual will go to the police. I can only say that this guy was a doctor who should have been assisting Simms but changed his mind.”
“I see,” Derrick said. “So if I objected to our little extraction, as you so nicely put it, I could end up a donor?”
Hubble gave Derrick another glance. “Not likely, you’re too valuable to the company. Besides, your face is on hundreds of taped extractions, and I think Rosie actually likes you.”
Fat chance. He’d only met her twice and she didn’t seem to remember him. Derrick sat back into the seat, tightened his harness and closed his eyes. In a mater of minutes he was fast asleep.
He dreamed he was fully aroused lying on his bed. A woman walked into the room and began to undress. The more clothes she removed, the longer her hair became until all her clothes lay on the floor and her hair was down to her knees. As she leaned over to climb onto the bed, her hair dragged. The woman paused next to him, on her knees. Reaching around, she pulled her hair to one side as if she was going to fasten it out of the way. To Derrick’s horror, when she moved her hair, it revealed a hole in her side where her liver should have been. Then she leaned in for a kiss. Derrick couldn’t take his eyes off the hole in her side, and all the time she kept coming closer.
“Derrick!” The voice shattered his sleep. Hubble shoved him, hard. “Wake up.”
Derrick awoke with a jolt, suddenly aware of his surroundings. By the time he finally got the image of the nude woman with the hole in her side out of his head, Hubble was out of the cab, standing at the passenger side window with the ice chest in his hand.
“C’mon, we’ve got to get this into the walk-in.”
Derrick unfastened his harness and climbed out of the ambulance. “I’m coming.”
They entered through the rear of the clinic, went up the hall, turned into the second door on the right and walked to the back of the office where they stopped in front of a large, black door. Hubble turned and handed the ice chest to Derrick, took a key from his pocket, opened the big door and stared in. In the center of the room, he saw a body bag laying on a gurney. It was obviously occupied.
“Looks like a trip to the mine,” Hubble said.
When Simms purchased the property for his mansion and the clinic, he discovered an old mine less then a mile from the building site. It was Rosie’s idea to wire it up and install a giant walk-in cooler in one of the side tunnels. As often as three or four times a week, Derrick and Hubble would come to the clinic to retrieve a body and take it to the mine.
Hubble took the ice chest from Derrick and placed it on a shelf. The two men carried the body bag to the ambulance and drove to the end of the pavement where they placed it on what looked like a golf cart converted into a tiny pick-up with treads. Derrick closed his eyes as they drove into the mine; he hated what came next.
Hubble was already out of the little cart. “C’mon, I can’t do this by myself.”
Derrick reached under his seat, put on the leather gloves he found there and walked around to where Hubble was waiting.
“Jeez’ man, why do we have to take the body out of the bag every time?”
“For the same reason they don’t leave bodies in the bag at the morgue—off gassing. The goddamn bag would explode,”
Hubble threw a paper mask designed to cover the nose and mouth at Derrick. “No more questions! Now put on your goddamn mask and let’s get going.”
The two struggled to slip the semi-rigid corpse of a young female out of the body bag. Hubble held the ankles; Derrick placed a hand under each shoulder. He tried not to look at the body. Most of the women looked like they were asleep, the same way they looked under anesthetic. He liked to look at their breasts; something he’d never admit to anyone.
He could always determine which organ was missing by the location of the scar. The real shock had come when one of the bodies was a young woman he’d had sex with up at the mansion shortly after he was hired. They never told him where the bodies came from, only that they were donors.
The two waddled under the awkward weight of the dead woman, around the cart and through the low entrance to a small room. Hubble slid his foot around the floor at the entrance until he found the button that turned on the spotlights that lit up the tiny room.
Derrick never got used to the gruesome sight of all the bodies. Mostly women, stacked like so much cordwood.
The near constant 68 degrees of the mine combined with the 38 degrees of the open cooler slowed the decay process, so it was easy to spot the bodies that had been down the longest. Something caught Derrick’s attention. Some of the women had their hair tied back and several of the bodies were on the floor. Hubble saw Derrick staring.
He bent to grab the ankles of one of the corpses on the floor. “They must have fallen, give me a hand,” Hubble said.
As they lifted the body, Derrick noticed tiny puckered craters in the fine dust that covered the stone floor, water drops. He looked at the ceiling, but there was no sign of moisture. “What the fuck…?” he said under his breath.
He looked across at Hubble whose eyes were glued to the body. Derrick felt sick.
Chapter Fifteen
Hubble listened to the director’s report on his cell phone as he drove back down the coast, heading for the cutoff that would take him to I-5 South, and back to Medford. He’d left Derrick behind to assist with a couple of surgeries. Just as well, Rosie needed him to pick up a body.
“Simms was here and said that I had two hours to finish the shoot with her, stormed out, then called and said he had to head back up north. Said to call you,” Von Seagram was saying to Hubble.
“Get to the point,” Hubble said.
“Yeah, well, like I was saying, this doll, what’s her name, Crystal, is a loose cannon. Seems she confided in a set director that this was her last day, that she was going to go to the mansion, get her friend and go back home.”
“What’d you do, hit on her?” Hubble couldn’t resist pressing the temperamental director’s buttons. “Seagram if you’re moving drugs through these girls or fucking them on the side — goddamn, you know we have to keep them clean.”
The director’s indignant voice shrilled in Hubble’s ear, made all the more high pitched by the cell phone.
“Hey, fuck you! I’m trying to tell you that this bitch is quitting.”
“Where is she now?”
“Heading down the hill. File says she’s staying at the Motel Two, Room 209.”
Hubble slammed the clamshell cell phone shut, abruptly hanging up on the director. Laughing, he tossed it on the passenger seat. God I love this job, he thought.
Von Seagram starred at his phone for a minute then slammed the handset into the cradle.
“Fuck’n’ hung up on me. Director of the goddamn film and he hangs up on me. Hubble, you’re a prick.”
* * *
Hubble arrived at Rosie Rehnquist’s trailer and lightly knocked on her door. “It’s Hubble.”
She opened the door just a crack. Hubble stepped in and quickly shut the door when he saw what appeared to be a bo
dy covered with a blanket on the floor. He bent over and lifted the cover. Michael’s robe was open and a partly bandaged hole was oozing fluid. “I thought you said he overdosed in his trailer.”
“I’m saving you a trip up the coast. You look like shit, when was the last time you slept?”
He kept looking down at the corpse. “Couple a days. How did you make the extraction?”
Rosie ran a thumb inside her blouse, adjusting her bra. “The set doctor was a surgeon before becoming an alcoholic.”
Hubble let the blanket drop, and moved to the rear of the trailer. “What are you going to tell Simms? And what am I supposed to do with the body?”
“Leave Simms to me.”
Hubble shook his head, still looking at the covered corpse.
“Hey, no more questions. Take him up to the old quarry in the foothills. You can sleep here tonight and grab the blonde the first thing in the morning.”
Rosie slammed out of the little trailer and walked across the lot to the office.
“What do you mean you have a liver? You were supposed to deliver the Italian for extraction, remember?” Simms said
Rosie held the phone away from her ear, and could still hear Simms.
“Hey, you aren’t the only surgeon. I just saved you a trip and Clouse-hours in surgery.”
“Tell me you didn’t use that drunken quack you keep up there. This isn’t Fanny Farmer buying a liver for her sick father. We’re dealing with some very well connected, very nasty folks.”
Rosie felt the blood drain from her face as she hung up the phone.
Chapter Sixteen
Crystal leaned on a false wall just off the set, waiting for her cue. The man across the room, crouching and just out of camera angle, pointed at her. Stepping into the room, she began to take off her clothes, weaving her hips from left to right as she pulled her panties down. One of the male stars walked in already nude and began to fondle her breasts as he led her to bed. Without hesitation, he rolled on top of her.
“Cut!” yelled the director. Then out came a guy holding a clapboard with the scene and the take number.