Skin Tight by Carl Hiaason

Author:Carl Hiaason
Language: eng
Format: epub

Stranahan knocked repeatedly on the door to Maggie Gonzalez’s room, but no one answered. Maggie was in bed, coasting through a codeine dreamland with a brand-new face that she had not yet seen. The sound of Mick Stranahan’s knocking was but a muffled drumbeat in her delicious pharmaceutical fog, and Maggie paid it no attention. It would be hours before the drumming returned, and by then she would be conscious enough to stumble toward the door.

Her big mistake had been to call Dr. Rudy Graveline four days earlier when she had gotten the message on her machine in Miami. Curiosity had triumphed over common sense; Maggie had been dying for an update on the Stranahan situation. She needed to stay close to Rudy, but not too close. It was a dicey act. She wanted the doctor to believe that they were on the same side, his side. She also wanted to keep the expense money coming.

The phone call, though, had been peculiar. At first Dr. Graveline had seemed relieved to hear her voice. But the more questions Maggie had asked—about Stranahan, the TV people, the money situation—the more remote the doctor had become, his voice getting tighter and colder on the other end. Finally Rudy had said that something had come up in the office, could he call her right back? Certainly, Maggie had said and—stupidly, it turned out—had given Rudy the phone number at the hotel. Days later the doctor still had not called back, and Maggie wondered why in the hell he had tried to reach her in the first place.

The answer was simple.

On the thirteenth of February, the man known as Chemo got off a Pan Am flight from Miami to New York. He wore a dusty broad-brimmed hat pulled down tightly to shadow his igneous face, a calfskin golf-bag cover snapped over his left arm to conceal the prosthesis, a pea-green woolen overcoat to protect against the winter wind, and heavy rubber-soled shoes to combat the famous New York City slush. He also had in his possession a Rapala fishing knife, the phone number of a man in Queens who would sell him a gun, and a slip of prescription paper on which were written these words in Dr. Rudy Graveline’s spastic scrawl: “Plaza Hotel, Rm. 966.”

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