Skin Tight

  Stranahan heard the Seacraft’s engines chewing up the marly bottom. The guy had missed the deep cut.

  Stranahan heard the big boat thud into the pilings at the west end of the house. He could hear the guy clunking around in the bow, grunting as he tried to tie it off against the tide, which was falling fast.

  Stranahan heard—and felt—the man hoist himself out of the boat and climb to the main deck of the house. He heard the man say: “Anybody home?”

  The man did not have a light step; the captain was right—he was a big one. By the vibrations of the plankboards, Stranahan charted the intruder’s movements.

  Finally the guy knocked on the door and said: “Hey! Hello there!”

  When no one answered, the guy just opened the door.

  He stood framed in the afternoon light, such as it was, and Stranahan got a pretty good look. The man had removed his sunglasses. As he peered into the dark house, his right hand went to the waist of his trousers.

  “State your business,” Stranahan said from the shadows.

  “Oh, hey!” The man stepped backward onto the deck, forfeiting his silhouette for detail. Stranahan did not recognize the face—an odd and lumpy one, skin stretched tightly over squared cheekbones. Also, the nose didn’t match the eyes and chin. Stranahan wondered if the guy had ever been in a bad car wreck.

  The man said: “I ran out of gas, and I was wondering if you had a couple gallons to get me back to the marina. I’ll be happy to pay.”

  “Sorry,” Stranahan said.

  The guy looked for the source of the voice, but he couldn’t see a damn thing in the shuttered-up house.

  “Hey, pal, you okay?”

  “Just fine,” Stranahan said.

  “Well, then, would you mind stepping out where I can see you?”

  With his left hand Stranahan grabbed the leg of a barstool and sent it skidding along the bare floor to no place in particular. He just wanted to see what the asshole would do, and he was not disappointed. The guy took a short-barreled pistol out of his pants and held it behind his back. Then he took two steps forward until he was completely inside the house. He took another slow step toward the spot where the broken barstool lay, only now he was holding the pistol in front of him.

  Stranahan, who had squeezed himself into a spot between the freezer and the pantry, had seen enough of the damn gun.

  “Over here,” he said to the stranger.

  And when the guy spun around to get a bead on where the voice was coming from, Mick Stranahan lunged out of the shadows and stabbed him straight through with a stuffed marlin head he had gotten off the wall.

  It was a fine blue marlin, maybe four hundred pounds, and whoever caught it had decided to mount only the head and shoulders, down to the spike of the dorsal. The trophy fish had come with the Venezuelan’s house and hung in the living room, where Stranahan had grown accustomed to its indigo stripes, its raging glass eyes, and its fearsome black sword. In a way it was a shame to mess it up, but Stranahan knew the BB gun would be useless against a real revolver.

  The taxidermied fish was not as heavy as Stranahan anticipated, but it was cumbersome; Stranahan concentrated on his aim as he charged the intruder. It paid off.

  The marlin’s bill split the man’s breastbone, tore his aorta, and severed his spine. He died before Stranahan got a chance to ask him any questions. The final puzzled look on the man’s face suggested that he was not expecting to be gored by a giant stuffed fish head.

  The intruder carried no identification, no wallet, no wedding ring; just the keys to a rented Thunderbird. Aboard the Seacraft, which was also rented, Stranahan found an Igloo cooler with two six-packs of Corona and a couple of cheap spinning rods that the killer had brought along just for looks.

  Stranahan heaved the body into the Seacraft and took the boat out into the Biscayne Channel. There he pushed the dead guy overboard, tossed the pistol into deep water, rinsed down the deck, dove off the stern, and swam back toward the stilt house. In fifteen minutes his knees hit the mud bank, and he waded the last seventy-five yards to the dock.

  That night there was no sunset to speak of, because of the dreary skies, but Stranahan sat on the deck anyway. As he stared out to the west, he tried to figure out who wanted him dead, and why. He considered this a priority.

  CHAPTER 2

  ON the fourth of January, the sun came out, and Dr. Rudy Graveline smiled. The sun was very good for business. It baked and fried and pitted the facial flesh, and seeded the pores with vile microscopic cancers that would eventually sprout and require excision. Dr. Rudy Graveline was a plastic surgeon, and he dearly loved to see the sun.

  He was in a fine mood, anyway, because it was January. In Florida, January is the heart of the winter tourist season and a bonanza time for cosmetic surgeons. Thousands of older men and women who flock down for the warm weather also use the occasion to improve their features. Tummy tucks, nose jobs, boob jobs, butt jobs, fat suctions, face-lifts, you name it. And they always beg for an appointment in January, so that the scars will be healed by the time they go back North in the spring.

  Dr. Rudy Graveline could not accommodate all the snow-birds, but he did his damnedest. All four surgical theaters at the Whispering Palms Spa were booked from dawn to dusk in January, February, and halfway into March. Most of the patients asked especially for Dr. Graveline, whose reputation greatly exceeded his talents. While Rudy usually farmed the cases out to the eight other plastic surgeons on staff, many patients got the impression that Dr. Graveline himself had performed their surgery. This is because Rudy would often come in and pat their wrinkled hands until they nodded off, blissfully, under the nitrous or I.V. Valium. At that point Rudy would turn them over to one of his younger and more competent protégés.

  Dr. Graveline saved himself for the richest patients. The regulars got cut on every winter, and Rudy counted on their business. He reassured his surgical hypochondriacs that there was nothing abnormal about having a fifth, sixth, or seventh blepharoplasty in as many years. Does it make you feel better about yourself? Rudy would ask them. Then it’s worth it, isn’t it? Of course it is.

  Such a patient was Madeleine Margaret Wilhoit, age sixty-nine, of North Palm Beach. In the course of their acquaintance, there was scarcely a square inch of Madeleine’s substantial physique that Dr. Rudy Graveline had not altered. Whatever he did and whatever he charged, Madeleine was always delighted. And she always came back the next year for more. Though Madeleine’s face reminded Dr. Graveline in many ways of a camel, he was fond of her. She was the kind of steady patient that offshore trust funds are made of.

  On January fourth, buoyed by the warm sunny drive to Whispering Palms, Rudy Graveline set about the task of repairing for the fifth, sixth, or seventh time (he couldn’t remember exactly) the upper eyelids of Madeleine Margaret Wilhoit. Given the dromedarian texture of the woman’s skin, the mission was doomed and Rudy knew it. Any cosmetic improvement would have to take place exclusively in Madeleine’s imagination, but Rudy (knowing she would be ecstatic) pressed on.

  Midway through the operation, the telephone on the wall let out two beeps. With a gowned elbow the operating-room nurse deftly punched the intercom box and told the caller that Dr. Graveline was in the middle of surgery and not available.

  “It’s fucking important, tell him,” said a sullen male voice, which Rudy instantly recognized.

  He asked the nurse and the anesthetist to leave the operating room for a few minutes. When they were gone, he said to the phone box: “Go ahead. This is me.”

  The phone call was made from a pay booth in Atlantic City, New Jersey, not that it would have mattered to Rudy. Jersey was all he knew, all he needed to know.

  “You want the report?” the man asked.

  “Of course.”

  “It went lousy.”

  Rudy sighed and stared down at the violet vectors he had inked around Madeleine’s eyes. “How lousy?” the surgeon said to the phone box.

  “The ultimat
e fucking lousy.”

  Rudy tried to imagine the face on the other end of the line, in New Jersey. In the old days he could guess a face by the voice on the phone. This particular voice sounded fat and lardy, with black curly eyebrows and mean dark eyes.

  “So what now?” the doctor asked.

  “Keep the other half of your money.”

  What a prince, Rudy thought.

  “What if I want you to try again?”

  “Fine by me.”

  “So what’ll that cost?”

  “Same,” said Curly Eyebrows. “Deal’s a deal.”

  “Can I think on it?”

  “Sure. I’ll call back tomorrow.”

  Rudy said, “It’s just that I didn’t count on any problems.”

  “The problem’s not yours. Anyway, this shit happens.”

  “I understand,” Dr. Graveline said.

  The man in New Jersey hung up, and Madeleine Margaret Wilhoit started to squirm. It occurred to Rudy that maybe the old bag wasn’t asleep after all, and that maybe she’d heard the whole conversation.

  “Madeleine?” he whispered in her ear.

  “Unngggh.”

  “Are you okay?”

  “Fine, Papa,” Madeleine drooled. “When do I get to ride in the sailboat?”

  Rudy Graveline smiled, then buzzed for the nurse and anesthetist to come back and help him finish the job.

  DURING his time at the State Attorney’s Office, Mick Stranahan had helped put many people in jail. Most of them were out now, even the murderers, due to a federal court order requiring the state of Florida to seasonally purge its overcrowded prisons. Stranahan accepted the fact that some of these ex-cons harbored bitterness against him, and that more than a few would be delighted to see him dead. For this reason, Stranahan was exceedingly cautious about visitors. He was not a paranoid person, but took a practical view of risk: When someone pulls a gun at your front door, there’s really no point to asking what he wants. The answer is obvious, and so is the solution.

  The gunman who came to the stilt house was the fifth person that Mick Stranahan had killed in his lifetime.

  The first two were North Vietnamese Army regulars who were laying trip wire for land mines near the town of Dak Mat Lop in the Central Highlands. Stranahan surprised the young soldiers by using his sidearm instead of his M-16, and by not missing. It happened during the second week of May 1969, when Stranahan was barely twenty years old.

  The third person he killed was a Miami holdup man named Thomas Henry Thomas, who made the mistake of sticking up a fried-chicken joint while Stranahan was standing in line for a nine-piece box of Extra Double Crispy. To supplement the paltry seventy-eight dollars he had grabbed from the cash register, Thomas Henry Thomas decided to confiscate the wallets and purses of each customer. It went rather smoothly until he came down the line to Mick Stranahan, who calmly took away Thomas Henry Thomas’s .38-caliber Charter Arms revolver and shot him twice in the right temporal lobe. In appreciation, the fried-chicken franchise presented Stranahan with three months’ worth of discount coupons and offered to put his likeness on every carton of Chicken Chunkettes sold during the month of December 1977. Being broke and savagely divorced, Stranahan took the coupons but declined the celebrity photo.

  The shooting of Thomas Henry Thomas (his obvious character flaws aside) was deemed serious enough to dissuade both the Miami and metropolitan Dade County police from hiring Mick Stranahan as an officer. His virulent refusal to take any routine psychological tests also militated against him. However, the State Attorney’s Office was in dire need of a streetwise investigator, and was delighted to hire a highly decorated war veteran, even at the relatively tender age of twenty-nine.

  The fourth and most important person that Mick Stranahan killed was a crooked Dade County judge named Raleigh Goomer. Judge Goomer’s specialty was shaking down defense lawyers in exchange for ridiculous bond reductions, which allowed dangerous felons to get out of jail and skip town. It was Stranahan who caught Judge Goomer at this game and arrested him taking a payoff at a strip joint near the Miami airport. On the trip to the jail, Judge Goomer apparently panicked, pulled a .22 somewhere out of his black nylon socks, and fired three shots at Mick Stranahan. Hit twice in the right thigh, Stranahan still managed to seize the gun, twist the barrel up the judge’s right nostril, and fire.

  A special prosecutor sent down from Tampa presented the case to the grand jury, and the grand jury agreed that the killing of Judge Raleigh Goomer was probably self-defense, though a point-blank nostril shot did seem extreme. Even though Stranahan was cleared, he obviously could no longer be employed by the State Attorney’s Office. Pressure for his dismissal came most intensely from other crooked judges, several of whom stated that they were afraid to have Mr. Stranahan testifying in their courtrooms.

  On June 7, 1988, Mick Stranahan resigned from the prosecutor’s staff. The press release called it early retirement, and disclosed that Stranahan would be receiving full disability compensation as a result of injuries suffered in the Goomer shooting. Stranahan wasn’t disabled at all, but his family connection with a notorious personal-injury lawyer was sufficient to terrify the county into paying him off. When Stranahan said he didn’t want the money, the county promptly doubled its offer and threw in a motorized wheelchair. Stranahan gave up.

  Not long afterward, he moved out to Stiltsville and made friends with the fish.

  A marine patrol boat pulled up to Mick Stranahan’s place at half-past noon. Stranahan was on the top deck, dropping a line for mangrove snappers down below.

  “Got a second?” asked the marine patrol officer, a sharp young Cuban named Luis Córdova. Stranahan liked him all right.

  “Come on up,” he said.

  Stranahan reeled in his bait and put the fishing rod down. He dumped four dead snappers out of the bucket and gutted them one at a time, tossing their creamy innards in the water.

  Córdova was talking about the body that had washed up on Cape Florida.

  “Rangers found it yesterday evening,” he said. “Lemon shark got the left foot.”

  “That happens,” Stranahan said, skinning one of the fish filets.

  “The M.E. says it was one hell of a stab wound.”

  “I’m gonna fry these up for sandwiches,” Stranahan said. “You interested in lunch?”

  Córdova shook his head. “No, Mick, there’s some jerks poaching lobster down at Boca Chita, so I gotta be on my way. Metro asked me to poke around out here, see if somebody saw anything. And since you’re the only one out here . . .”

  Stranahan glanced up from the fish-cleaning. “I don’t remember much going on yesterday,” he said. “Weather was piss-poor, that I know.”

  He tossed the fish skeletons, heads still attached, over the rail.

  “Well, Metro’s not all that excited,” Córdova said.

  “How come? Who’s the stiff?”

  “Name of Tony Traviola, wise guy. Jersey state police got a fat jacket on him. Tony the Eel, loan-collector type. Not a very nice man, from what I understand.”

  Stranahan said, “They think it’s a mob hit?”

  “I don’t know what they think.”

  Stranahan carried the filets into the house and ran them under the tap. He was careful with the water, since the tanks were low. Córdova accepted a glass of iced tea and stood next to Stranahan in the kitchen, watching him roll the filets in egg yolk and bread crumbs. Normally Stranahan preferred to be left alone when he cooked, but he didn’t want Luis Córdova to go just yet.

  “They found the guy’s boat, too,” the marine patrolman went on. “It was a rental out of Haulover. White Seacraft.”

  Stranahan said he hadn’t seen one of those lately.

  “Few specks of blood was all they found,” Córdova said. “Somebody cleaned it pretty good.”

  Stranahan laid the snapper filets in a half inch of oil in a frying pan. The stove didn’t seem to be working, so he got on his knees and checked the pilot light?
??dead, as usual. He put a match to it and, before long, the fish started to sizzle.

  Córdova sat down on one of the wicker barstools.

  “So why don’t they think it was the mob?” Stranahan asked.

  “I didn’t say they didn’t, Mick.”

  Stranahan smiled and opened a bottle of beer.

  Córdova shrugged. “They don’t tell me every little thing.”

  “First of all, they wouldn’t bring him all the way down to Florida to do it, would they, Luis? They got the exact same ocean up in Jersey. So Tony the Eel was already here on business.”

  “Makes sense.” Córdova nodded.

  “Second, why didn’t they just shoot him? Knives are for kids, not pros.”

  Córdova took the bait. “Wasn’t a knife,” he said. “It was too big, the M.E. said. More like a javelin.”

  “That’s not like the guineas.”

  “No,” Córdova agreed.

  Stranahan made three fish sandwiches and gave one to the marine patrolman, who had forgotten about going after the lobster poachers, if there ever were any.

  “The other weird thing,” he said through a mouthful of bread, “is the guy’s face.”

  “What about it?”

  “It didn’t match the mug shots, not even close. They made him through fingerprints and dentals, but when they got the mugs back from the FBI it looked like a different guy altogether. So Metro calls the Bureau and says you made a mistake, and they say the hell we did, that’s Tony Traviola. They go back and forth for about two hours until somebody has the brains to call the M.E.” Córdova stopped to gulp some iced tea; the fish was steaming in his cheeks.

  Stranahan said, “And?”

  “Plastic surgery.”