“Sweet blessed Jesus!”
Steve didn’t hear any of it. He was already halfway into the hole, bringing a cliff of mud with him as he slid into the open grave.
The grave should have been empty, dammit. The dreamweaver was locked in his fortress of solitude with the dream. Both Aprils were there. They were locked in the basement, dammit, and the hole should have been empty!
But it wasn’t. It was full, at least by half. Full of water from a sprinkler head Steve had damaged while digging the grave.
But the sprinklers hadn’t been on then. They had come on later. At four o’clock in the morning. And then the water had turned the grave into a swimming pool.
“Royce!” the undertaker exclaimed. “Oh my God! Royce!”
Floating in the dirty brown water, facedown with a pink silk shroud bubbling up around his shoulders, was a fat little man dressed in Ben Davis work clothes.
The umpire. Steve got a grip on the man, flipped him over, and checked his pupils. Jesus. The umpire must have managed to crawl over here just a few minutes before Kellogg’s arrival. Crawling blind with his head bashed in and he had slipped down the muddy embankment and then couldn’t escape because the walls of the grave were slick mud and he was little and round and operating with a bashed-in skull.
What a tough little bastard. He must have been floundering in the grave while Steve questioned Kellogg. All the time trying to get out. It was a wonder they hadn’t heard him splashing around, doing the Australian Crawl.
I should have let the jerk take me up to his office, Steve thought. I should have moved the patrol car. A few more minutes and nature would have taken care of everything for me.
The thought hit him hard, like a slap. Steve was suddenly shivering, and it wasn’t just from the cold water in the grave.
He glanced at Kellogg. The man’s eyes were big and round, like the shiny face of his gold wristwatch.
“Is he going to be all right?” Kellogg asked.
As if on cue, Royce Lewis coughed and a thin trickle of water spilled over his fluttering purple lips.
7:46 A.M.
“Control, this is 66Lincoln3,” Steve said, thumbing the extender mike on his handpack radio. “I’ve got a 10- 53 at Skyview Memorial Lawn. Request fire and ambulance. Code 3. We’ve got a white male down, approximately sixty-five years of age.”
Control acknowledged the call. Three minutes later, Steve heard the siren. Knowing that the cool wail was the calm before the real storm, Steve radioed Control and asked that the sergeant on duty roll by; he wanted to do everything by the numbers, just in case something nasty came up later.
Another minute passed before the ambulance arrived, screaming down the twisting blacktop that snaked through the cemetery, wig-wag lights blinking in steady rhythm. Steve thumbed the extender mike. “Control. 66Lincoln3. Ambulance is on scene. Cancel fire.”
The ambulance screeched to a halt as Steve finished speaking. One of the paramedics headed for Royce Lewis, and the other came to Steve. “What you got for us?” the paramedic asked, but the words didn’t catch Steve’s attention. He was watching the other paramedic work on Royce Lewis. The caretaker had vomited up a bellyful of water before the ambulance arrived, and now he wasn’t doing much at all. But he was breathing, and that simple fact made Steve uneasy.
“Steve? You okay, Steve?”
The sound of his name brought him around. “Yeah…I’m okay Gary,” Steve said, thankful that he remembered the young paramedic’s name. “We’ve got a weird one.”
A few feet away, the other paramedic went about his business, checking Royce Lewis’s pulse and respiration. Gary’s partner was named Bob. Now Steve remembered. Bob…his last name something that started with a Z, something you didn’t hear every day.
Gary clicked a ballpoint pen, oblivious to his partner, intent on his own duties. “What can you tell me?”
“Guy was facedown in that grave over there,” Steve explained. “Grave’s full of water and he wasn’t practicing the backstroke. I got him out. Just in time, I think. He vomited a bunch of water, and then he seemed to breathe okay, but he never really came around.”
“Never a lifeguard around when you need one, right?” Gary grinned. “You got a name for me?”
“Royce Lewis. He’s the night man here at the cemetery.”
Gary scribbled the name. “Date of birth? Social security number?”
“I just found the guy, Gary. I just hauled him out of the grave a couple minutes ago.”
“Okay Steve. We’ll handle it.”
“No problem at all,” Bob called. “His wallet’s in his pocket.”
“Voila,” Gary said.
“Thank God for little miracles,” Steve added.
The young paramedic shot a glance at his partner. “How we doing?”
“Got a head wound, for starters,”‘ Bob said. “Respiration’s shallow.”“ He fastened a blood-pressure cuff around Royce Lewis’s arm.
“Oh my,” Ernest Kellogg said. “This is horrible.” The paramedic noticed the man in yellow boots for the first time and gave Steve the old nudge-nudge wink-wink. “You’re the employer?” Gary asked, and Kellogg nodded. “Can you tell me if Mr. Lewis has any medical conditions?”
“No medic alert bracelet,” Bob volunteered.
Kellogg’s eyes glazed over. “I don’t know… We must have Royce’s employment application around here somewhere. And there is a question on the application about medical conditions; I do know that much. Insurance rates aren’t what they used to be, you understand.” Kellogg hesitated, and then his eyes sparkled as if he’d had the greatest idea in the world. “We could call Royce’s wife! She would know!”
“That’s what we’ll do,” Gary said, taking the phone number. “But first we’re going to get Mr. Lewis out of here.”
The two paramedics took a backboard from the ambulance. Bob put a neck brace on Royce Lewis to prevent further damage from any neck injuries he might have incurred. Steve got a camera from his patrol car and moved in for a few quick snaps of the tough little umpire, including a close-up of the head wound.
Standard investigative procedure was what it was called. But looking through the lens at Royce Lewis, Steve felt an unfamiliar shiver climb his back. It scrabbled over his shoulders, down his arms, and settled in his hands.
His hands were shaking. Something was happening, something that hadn’t happened before. Steve fought the feeling, forcing himself to concentrate on the little umpire’s wound. Beneath the man’s white hair, the skin was the color of steak gone bad. Even through the thick lens, the wound looked horrible. Just seeing it made Steve’s head throb.
The click of the camera brought Steve out of it. He realized that he hadn’t been breathing, and he gasped deeply. No one noticed, because they were concentrating on the umpire.
The paramedics taped the wounded man to the backboard, stowed him in the back of the ambulance, and took off for the hospital. Steve wandered over to the grave. Brown water lapped gently against the muddy walls; he couldn’t see the coffin.
The dreamweaver’s coffin was a sunken treasure in a tiny sea.
No. He had no time for waking dreams or silly imaginings. He needed to get back on track. There weren’t any prints on the coffin to worry about. But there wouldn’t have been any prints even if the grave had remained dry.
Steve had worn gloves during that part of the operation. He was sure of that.
Steve hadn’t worn gloves while he was pitching, though. He skirted the mound of dirt that he had shoveled from the grave and wandered over to the granite cross with April’s name on it. A little pile of broken glass glittered
