Scars on the Face of God
Page 29
“Yeah, fine, I’ll think about the DNA. Maybe we can pay for more extensive testing, but…”
The “but.” Philo completed her thought, didn’t share it: But if I do, I might lose him.
“What the hell, Philo. Yeah, okay, we’ll think about it,” she repeated, trying to convince herself. Then, with her bitch back on: “That EMT you were talking to, he’s one of them.” She sucked on her unlit Camel, expelled nonexistent smoke and flicked invisible ashes.
“Grace, please,” Philo said, “a little less chatter on conspiracies today.”
“Ambulance companies chasing people who aren’t quite dead yet, Philo. That’s who he works for.”
“Isn’t that the whole ambulance idea?”
She ignored the comment. “Some of their patients make it, some don’t. Some of the EMTs contact that Frankenstein prick Andelmo to let him know what’s coming in, then maybe even dial down their service a little to hasten the inevitable. A for-profit transplant specialist. Andelmo’s the ringleader.”
One thing that was true about this surgeon, who was affiliated with a few Philadelphia hospitals, was he was in a ton of trouble, with the press already convicting him in the court of public opinion. Made public were a number of malpractice lawsuits; patients getting routine procedures who had died on his table. For one, an appendectomy, for another, a gallbladder—both patients, coincidentally, organ and tissue donors. Andelmo had questionable associations with influential people in need of all sorts of transplants—wealthy people and celebrities—who suddenly got them. All of it remained innuendo until a criminal case could be made. Something the Philadelphia DA was apparently pursuing.
“Lose the ‘Frankenstein’ BS, Grace,” Philo said. “It stopped being funny after the first ten times I heard it.”
Hank, from the back seat: “What Philo said, honey. Give it a rest, please.”
Grace narrowed her eyes at her husband, then she caved. “Only because you said please, doll.”
Dr. Francisco X. Andelmo, Grace’s “zombie” doc, was a neurological surgeon in his early fifties, with positions in two Philadelphia hospitals plus other hospital relationships south of the border. That was the extent of what Philo knew about him. Good guy, bad guy, Philo didn’t know, didn’t care, and had no reason to think he ever would. But to Grace he was the antichrist.
Philo put up with Grace’s conservative rants from the beginning, and he wouldn’t stop now. She’d been a good sport about playing through her disease, a hardship factor that upped her standing in his eyes a thousandfold. Plus, she, too, was on one of those transplant lists the celebrities and wealthy people seemed to bypass, so it wasn’t like she didn’t know what she was talking about. But her “in general, if it walks like a duck rants” and her in-particular attitude toward government overreach, had begun to grate on him.
Philo balled up his sloppy sandwich wrapper and found an empty paper bag for it. “You check the messaging service to see what else we’ve got for today, Grace?”
“A Philly cop car. It’s in this neighborhood, three blocks up. A perp accident, in the perp seat.” She tucked her Camel away into a blouse pocket, watched outside as Patrick took his Pat’s Steaks buddies through some well-executed, straight-outta-Compton special goodbye handshakes.
Red flag language for Philo: perp mess in a cop car. Police lawsuits had surfaced around the country, cops suing their cities for having contracted hepatitis and HIV from contaminated crime scenes. One outcome of the legal actions was increased work for the crime-scene cleaning industry, cops not wanting to contract diseases, cities not wanting to settle lawsuits if they did.
“Grace, if this is a few cops tuning up a perp, call them the hell back and tell them to clean up their own mess.”
“Relax. The guy threw a tantrum in the back seat, took a dump, horked up his lunch, then pounded his head against the glass. PCP, maybe meth, bath salts, maybe all of it, the cops weren’t sure.”
Her fingers returned to her blouse pocket, retrieved the Camel she’d given up a minute earlier. She reinserted it into her mouth and went through the motions again. “You need to cut the cops some slack, Philo, the crap they put up with. Hank, honey”—she reached back, tapped her husband on his knee—“this squad-car thing, you and I are up. Would you mind handling it for me, doll? I’m just not in the mood.”
Hank leaned in next to her in her seat, concerned. “Grace, honey, you think maybe you should—”
“I need to just not do this next job is all I need to do, sweetie, so relax.” She cupped his cheek. His eyes welled; she swiped at a tear with her thumb. “Just not feeling it now. I’ll be fine, love, just…It’ll all be fine.”
Two minutes down Passyunk, then a left onto Washington. Philo parked in front of the cop car, an unmarked Chevy Impala, a detective’s car, so he felt better about it. Less chance there’d been any funny business in the back seat. The rear doors were ajar, and they could see some of the perp’s brown and pinkish redecoration efforts caked onto an inside door panel.
Philo and Grace answered texts, and Patrick stayed connected to an online game app. Hank worked the job, the blood, the feces, and the puke all as promised, and no doubt sweat and tears also, but it was all apparently perp-initiated. Except for the tears part, where a depressed Hank, working alone, was also a contributor.
HIDING AMONG THE DEAD: Chapter 3
Kaipo Mawpaw lifted the cha siu bao with her chopsticks, admiring its dense texture. Stuffed inside the soft bread-bun was diced barbecued pork tenderloin mixed with Cantonese sauces, the last dim sum of her five-course meal. On Oahu this dish was called manapua, which meant “delicious pork thing.” Kaipo took a tentative, inquisitive bite, then she took a less dainty bite to finish it. She devoured the second bun with gusto. She placed her chopsticks on the table, poured herself more tea.
The Happy Empress Cantonese Restaurant dining room was tiny, only seven café tables, each decorated with a wine-red tablecloth, a burning yellow candle, and two white cloth napkins, but its take-out business was robust. The stream of customers was constant, passing behind the drapes that hid the glassed-in hallway.
Tonight she was one of only two dining room patrons. At a second table an elderly Asian man tossed toothless smiles and furtive glances her way between slurps of soup and hearty bites into large, meat-filled dumplings, the food no match for his hardened gums. The smile was respectful, not leering—she knew the difference—and wasn’t meant to elicit conversation, was offered instead only in reverence to her wholesome, natural Polynesian beauty. For Kaipo this was refreshing, and so dissimilar to the usual reception she got whenever she met friends for drinks, from trolling men or curious women, all looking for a change in their partners short-term, to someone a bit more…formidable. Kaipo oozed femininity yet was not a shrinking violet. At five ten, her well-proportioned femininity was far from a shrinking anything.
The male waiter delivered the check then bowed once before retreating to the kitchen. No charge, with our compliments, it read at bottom, which was how all her checks read at this restaurant for the few years she’d frequented it, coincident with the same number of years she’d spent on the mainland. The free meals were not a privilege she abused. She ate here only once a week, on Thursdays, the day her clandestine employer had requested. It was a visit that meant, on occasion, a few subsequent days and nights would be busy, with her doing what they wanted her to do and getting paid handsomely to do it. With her dinner check came a handful of after-dinner peppermints and one very special fortune cookie. Dipped in chocolate and absent any cellophane, she would enjoy the fortune cookie dessert first.
She pushed her hair back over her shoulder, cracked the cookie open with a fork, the milk-chocolate encasing it not fully hardened. When she pulled it apart, the soft chocolate made the pieces stringy, like chocolate saltwater taffy; the dessert couldn’t be any fresher than this. Inside, the tan strip of paper bore her fortune. She lifted it to her nose to savor its fragrance, strawberry, its
lettering red and glistening, further enhancing the aroma. She flattened it against the tablecloth to view the message.
The words on the small strip were in cursive, handwritten with decent penmanship. She read the instructions, then she fed the paper into her mouth and ate it, too. Its wafered texture was sweet and fruity and as edible as the scent suggested.
She raised her attention from the dessert plate. The old Asian man had put aside the ripped cellophane from a standard pre-packaged fortune cookie that accompanied his dinner, his gaze now moving from her empty plate to her hands to her face, his gumming of his cookie slow, ponderous. To her, his apprehension looked like fear, and this fear might mean he knew something about her, her connections, maybe her avocation. Or somehow maybe he knew the instructions that were in her fortune cookie. To her, he was suddenly now, sadly, a danger.
She told herself he was old and his life was behind him, to ease her conscience about what she would now need to do to him.
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Author’s Note
The Devil’s Bible, also known as Codex Gigas or “The Giant Book,” contains the Old and New Testaments of the Holy Bible in pre-Vulgate Latin as well as other extensive religious writings of the first and early second millennium. The thirteenth-century manuscript was written as a penance in Podlazice, Bohemia, by a Benedictine monk who, according to legend, finished it in a single night by summoning the Devil to help him. It is currently on display in the Royal Library of Sweden.
Acknowledgments
Terry, my put-upon wife, sacrificing mother, reluctant muse, and former social worker extraordinaire. Laurie Pascale, my first reader. The original Rebel Writers of Buck County: Jeanne Denault, Dave Jarret, Marie Lamba, Damian McNicholl, and John Wirebach. The many members of the Bucks County Writers Workshop chaired by Don Swaim, published novelist and former host of CBS Radio’s Book Beat. Special thanks to novelist/short story writer Grace Marcus, whose insightful critiques left creative marks on this novel right up through the final page. St. Vincent’s Home in the Tacony section of Philadelphia, PA, an icon. An orphanage in its previous life, St. Vincent’s provided significant inspiration for this novel. Author Jonathan Harr, whose outstanding non-fiction offering A Civil Action gave me insight to the sometimes hazardous by-products of the leather tanning process. NYT bestselling and multiple Bram Stoker Award-winning novelist Jonathan Maberry, who made sure I received the spoils from a horror contest held by a non-profit writer’s organization that, sadly, had already closed its doors. Any errors found within this novel are entirely the author’s.
About the Author
“The thing I write will be the thing I write.”
Chris wouldn’t trade his northeast Philly upbringing of street sports played on blacktop and concrete, fistfights, brick and stone row houses, and twelve years of well-intentioned Catholic school discipline for a Philadelphia minute (think New York minute but more fickle and less forgiving). Chris has had some lengthy stops as an adult in Michigan and Connecticut, and he thinks Pittsburgh is a great city even though some of his fictional characters do not. He still does most of his own stunts, and he once passed for Chip Douglas of My Three Sons TV fame on a Wildwood, NJ boardwalk. He's a member of International Thriller Writers, and his work has been recognized by the National Writers Association, the Writers Room of Bucks County (PA), and the Maryland Writers Association. He likes the pie more than the turkey.