When I turned my head to the right, I saw the threshold of the cold-holding chamber only eight feet beyond the Cadillac. I had an even closer view of Sandy’s highly polished black shoes and the cuffs of his navy-blue suit pants as he stood looking after the bald man with the gurney.
Behind Sandy, against the wall, was my father’s small suitcase. There had been nowhere nearby to conceal it, and if I had kept it with me, I wouldn’t have been able to move quickly enough or slip noiselessly under the hearse.
Apparently no one had noticed the suitcase yet. Maybe they would continue to overlook it.
The two orderlies — whom I could identify by their white shoes and white pants — rolled a second gurney out of the holding room. The wheels on this one did not squeak.
The first gurney, pushed by the bald man, reached the back of the white van. I heard him open the rear cargo doors on that vehicle.
One of the orderlies said to the other, “I better get upstairs before someone starts wondering what’s taking me so long.” He walked away, toward the far end of the garage.
The collapsible legs on the first gurney folded up with a hard clatter as the bald man shoved it into the back of his van.
Sandy opened the rear door on the hearse as the remaining orderly arrived with the second gurney. On this one, evidently, was another opaque vinyl bag containing the body of the nameless vagrant.
A sense of unreality overcame me — that I should find myself in these strange circumstances. I could almost believe that I had somehow fallen into a dream without first falling into sleep.
The cargo-hold doors on the van slammed shut. Turning my head to the left, I watched the bald man’s shoes as he approached the driver’s door.
The orderly would wait here to close the big roll-up after the two vehicles departed. If I stayed under the hearse, I would be discovered when Sandy drove away.
I didn’t know which of the two orderlies had remained behind, but it didn’t matter. I was relatively confident that I could get the better of either of the young men who had wheeled my father away from his deathbed.
If Sandy Kirk glanced at his rear-view mirror as he drove out of the garage, however, he might see me. Then I would have to contend with both him and the orderly.
The engine of the van turned over.
As Sandy and the orderly shoved the gurney into the back of the hearse, I eeled out from under that vehicle. My cap was knocked off. I snatched it up and, without daring to glance toward the rear of the hearse, crabbed eight feet to the open door of the cold-holding chamber.
Inside this bleak room, I scrambled to my feet and hid behind the door, pressing my back to the concrete wall.
No one in the garage cried out in alarm. Evidently I had not been seen.
I realized that I was holding my breath. I let it out with a long hiss between clenched teeth.
My light-stung eyes were watering. I blotted them on the backs of my hands.
Two walls were occupied by over-and-under rows of stainless-steel morgue drawers in which the air was even colder than in the holding chamber itself, where the temperature was low enough to make me shiver. Two cushionless wooden chairs stood to one side. The flooring was white porcelain tile with tight grout joints for easy cleaning if a body bag sprang a leak.
Again, there were overhead fluorescent tubes, too many of them, and I tugged my Mystery Train cap far down on my brow. Surprisingly, the sunglasses in my shirt pocket had not been broken. I shielded my eyes.
A percentage of ultraviolet radiation penetrates even a highly rated sunscreen. I had sustained more exposure to hard light in the past hour than during the entire previous year. Like the hoofbeats of a fearsome black horse, the perils of cumulative exposure thundered through my mind.
From beyond the open door, the van’s engine roared. The roar swiftly receded, fading to a grumble, and the grumble became a dying murmur.
The Cadillac hearse followed the van into the night. The big motorized garage door rolled down and met the sill with a solid blow that echoed through the hospital’s subterranean realms, and in its wake, the echo shook a trembling silence out of the concrete walls.
I tensed, balling my hands into fists.
Although he was surely still in the garage, the orderly made no sound. I imagined him, head cocked with curiosity, staring at my father’s suitcase.
A minute ago I had been sure that I could overpower this man. Now my confidence ebbed. Physically, I was more than his equal — but he might possess a ruthlessness that I did not.
I didn’t hear him approaching. He was on the other side of the open door, inches from me, and I became aware of him only because the rubber soles of his shoes squeaked on the porcelain tile when he crossed the threshold.
If he came all the way inside, a confrontation was inevitable. My nerves were coiled as tight as clockwork mainsprings.
After a disconcertingly long hesitation, the orderly switched off the lights. He pulled the door shut as he backed out of the room.
I heard him insert a key in the lock. The dead bolt snapped into place with a sound like the hammer of a heavy-caliber revolver driving the firing pin into an empty chamber.
I doubted that any corpses occupied the chilled morgue drawers. Mercy Hospital — in quiet Moonlight Bay — doesn’t crank out the dead at the frenetic pace with which the big institutions process them in the violence-ridden cities.
Even if breathless sleepers were nestled in all these stainless-steel bunks, however, I wasn’t nervous about being with them. I will one day be as dead as any resident of a graveyard — no doubt sooner than will other men of my age. The dead are merely the countrymen of my future.
I
Reluctant to move, I remained beside the door, my back against the wall. I half expected the orderly to return at any moment.
Finally I took off my sunglasses and slipped them into my shirt pocket again.
Although I stood in blackness, through my mind spun bright pinwheels of anxious speculation.
My father’s body was in the white van. Bound for a destination that I could not guess. In the custody of people whose motivations were utterly incomprehensible to me.
I couldn’t imagine any logical reason for this bizarre corpse swap — except that the cause of Dad’s death must not have been as straightforward as cancer. Yet if my father’s poor dead bones could somehow incriminate someone, why wouldn’t the guilty party let Sandy Kirk’s crematorium destroy the evidence?
Apparently they needed his body.
A cold dew had formed inside my clenched fists, and the back of my neck was damp.
The more I thought about the scene that I had witnessed in the garage, the less comfortable I felt in this lightless way station for the dead. These peculiar events stirred primitive fears so deep in my mind that I could not even discern their shape as they swam and circled in the murk.
A murdered hitchhiker would be cremated in my father’s place. But why kill a harmless vagrant for this purpose? Sandy could have filled the bronze memorial urn with ordinary wood ashes, and I would have been convinced that they were human. Besides, it was unlikely in the extreme that I would ever pry open the sealed urn once I received it — unlikelier still that I would submit the powdery contents for laboratory testing to determine their composition and true source.
My thoughts seemed tangled in a tightly woven mesh. I couldn’t thrash loose.
Shakily, I withdrew the lighter from my pocket. I hesitated, listening for furtive sounds on the far side of the locked door, and then I struck a flame.
I would not have been surprised to see an alabaster corpse silently risen from its steel sarcophagus, standing before me, face greasy with death and glimmering in the butane lambency, eyes wide but blind, mouth working to impart secrets but producing not even a whisper. No cadaver confronted me, but serpents of light and
