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 did dread the light, and now the perfect darkness of this cool windowless room was, to me, like quenching water to a man dying of thirst. For a minute or longer I relished the absolute blackness that bathed my skin, my eyes.
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,