Body Parts (Rye & Claire 1) (9 page)

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 body 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.

“Scene 12, take two.” He
brought the clapper down, which made a strange knocking sound, and
Crystal started undressing all over again.

“Cut!” The guy stepped out with the clapboard again. And again it made a weird knocking sound.

Cut, knock and she was undressing again, and again, and again, until she was ready to scream. Then she did.

Crystal opened her eyes to a lop-sided view of the clock on her bedside stand. It read 7:00 a.m. in glowing green numbers.

“Shit.”

She was never an early riser
and although the dream had been upsetting, the fact was Jan hadn’t
called. The phone still lay next to her pillow. Trance-like, she made
her way to the bathroom where she started the little coffee machine on
the counter by the sink. As it began to percolate, she thought she heard
a knocking. She splashed water on her face, then headed back to the
night stand to get the envelope containing Jan’s bio that she would take
to the police.