Crow looked over to where Jerry Head sat slumped in the chair leafing through a magazine.
“Hey…Jerry…?”
The officer looked up. He was bleary with lack of sleep, but his eyes were still cop eyes. “Yeah?”
“You…you won’t fall asleep on me now, will you?”
For a moment Head looked surprised, and then a small compassionate smile formed on his lips. He sat up straighter in his chair. “Naw, man. I got your back. You get some sleep. I’ll be here for another hour and then we got one of your local boys, Eddie Oswald, coming on and he’ll sit with you until morning.”
Crow felt relieved. Head was big and tough, and Tow-Truck Eddie was even bigger and tougher. “Thanks, man.”
The morphine was taking him now and the edges of the room were getting hazy.
Before the darkness closed in entirely, Malcolm Crow did something he had not done since he’d been a little boy. He crossed himself and said a bedtime prayer. For himself…and for Val.
As he faded off to sleep he heard, or dreamed that he heard, a sweet guitar playing sad old blues. It comforted him, and the night passed.
Four floors below where Crow slept, in the basement morgue of the Pinelands College Teaching Hospital, the body of Karl Ruger lay in a plastic body bag on the stainless steel table in drawer number 14. The remains of Tony Macchio were three drawers to his left. Henry Guthrie was his direct right-hand neighbor. There were more drawers occupied at one time than at any time since a three-car pile up in Crestville the previous April.
The wall clock ticked the seconds slowly as 3:00 a.m. turned to 4:00.
Inside drawer number 14 Ruger’s body was still and cold. There was no blood moving through his veins. His lungs were collapsed, his heart as still and cold as a stone. His muscles, once so strong and deadly, were flaccid, and his brutal hands were limp.
Only his eyes were open. Wide and unblinking, staring up at the utter blackness of the inside of the drawer.
And waited.
