Officer Elvis by Gary Gusick Read Free Book Online Page B

ever happened. I don’t want to see this on YouTube or Facebook, or Twitter or any other Internet bullshit.”
    The doctor nodded. They were on the same page. The procedures and the fee would be off the books. There would be no records. And there would be the strictest confidentiality. That was the Swiss for you, as long as you paid up.
    “Wit zee utmost discretion,” the doctor said, sounding like a James Bond villain.
    It took four operations, just on his face. One for the cheekbones. Another to reconstruct his nose: lengthening it, and narrowing the bridge. The third operation was a chin implant. The fourth surgery reshaped his eyelids. Six months, spent mostly in bandages. Like a giant Q-tip.
    This was followed by the dental work. He had veneers specially designed to make sure his smile was the right smile. He had the dental work done in Switzerland, too. Easier that way. He supplied the reconstructive dentist with a photo, covering up everything but the smile. Same deal. Cash up front. No records.
    Getting the hair just right was almost as challenging and almost as expensive. The old him had straight, thinning red hair. His new self would need something totally different. It took three procedures and nearly forty grand to get the desired result. He did this to keep from having to wear a hairpiece. People could always spot those as fakes. Worse, he would have known it was fake. Now, a year later, his hair was dark brown and wavy.
    It was amazing to him that all these very respectable members of the medical community were willing to work off the books. No matter how much money somebody had they were always looking for a tax dodge, legal or otherwise.
    By the time the transformation was finished he’d spent almost every dollar he had, nearly four hundred grand. But it was worth it. The end result was as near to perfection as you could get.
    Now there was another project that consumed him, one only he could do. He’d made the plan. Soon, very soon, when the preparation was complete, the world would know that he was not a thing of the past, that he was here and now.
    As far as the clothing and the other finishing touches—he’d found all the right stuff—he’d save the last part of the makeover for the big reveal.
    Leaving the bathroom, he walked into his bedroom and stood in front of his bureau. He bowed his head before the shrine he had created. He raised his gaze adoringly to the face staring back at him from the mirror above the bureau. “It won’t be long,” he said. The face in the mirror smiled back, pleased with his efforts.

Chapter 7
The Sanctuary
    You didn’t need a road map or a GPS to find Mississippi’s most notorious meth dealer. “Go ten miles past Flowood on Highway 25. It’ll be on your right,” Shelby told Darla. “A white house. Three stories, six columns, and a five-acre fishing hole for a front yard. If there’s a pontoon boat out in the water, Hardy Lang will be the one that’s in it. Otherwise, knock on the front door hard as you can. Hardy has an aversion to bells. He lives alone and he sleeps odd hours.”
    The pontoon was on the water when Darla arrived and she saw Hardy was aboard, surrounded by a dozen water buckets. The buckets were filled with fish, which Hardy was dumping, a bucket at a time, into the muddy water.
    Darla parked her Prius at the bottom of the circular gravel driveway and walked to the landing in time to meet Hardy as he docked the pontoon.
    The drug kingpin was on the short side. Less than five five, Darla guessed. He was dressed in coveralls and had on a baseball hat with the initials HCH on the front. “Hardy’s a great one for self-promotion,” Shelby had told her. Hardy, whose actual age was sixty-one, appeared to be forty-five or seventy-five, depending on what part of him you looked at. His face was grizzled, deep-lined, and covered with white stubble. By contrast, his body was lean and sinewy, with wiry muscles and little body fat.
    Darla showed