backing across the threshold, pulling a gurney.
The hearse was eight feet away. Before I was spotted, I slipped to it,
crouching by the rear door through which cadavers were loaded.
Peering around the fender, I could still see the entrance to the
cold-holding chamber. The man backing out of that room was a stranger:
late twenties, six feet, massively built, with a thick neck and a
shaved head. He was wearing work shoes, blue jeans, a redplaid flannel
shirt-and one pearl earring.
After he drew the gurney completely across the threshold, he swung it
around toward the hearse, ready to push instead of pull.
On the gurney was a corpse in an opaque, zippered vinyl bag.
In the cold-holding chamber two years ago, my mother was transferred
into a similar bag before being released to the mortician.
Following the stone-bald stranger into the garage, Sandy Kirk gripped
the gurney with one hand. Blocking a wheel with his left foot, he
asked again, “What happens when he’s missed?”
The bald man frowned and cocked his head. The pearl his earlobe was
luminous. “I told You, he was a vagrant. Everything he owned is in
his backpack.”
“so?”
“He disappears-who’s to notice or care?”
Sandy was thirty-two and so good-looking that even his grisly
occupation gave no pause to the women who pursued him. Although he was
charming and less self-consciously dignified than many in his
profession, he made me uneasy. His handsome features seemed to be a
mask behind which was not another face but an emptiness-not as though
he were a different and less morally motivated man than he pretended to
be, but as though he were no man at all.
Sandy said, “What about his hospital records?”
I “He didn’t die here,” the bald man said. “I picked him up earlier,
out on the state highway. He was hitchhiking.”
I had never voiced my troubling perception of Sandy Kirk to anyone: not
to my parents, not to Bobby Halloway, not to Sasha, not even to
Orson.
So many thoughtless people have made unkind assumptions about me, based
on my appearance and my affinity for the night, that I am reluctant to
don the club of cruelty and speak ill of anyone without ample reason.
Sandy’s father, Frank, had been a fine and well-liked man, and Sandy
had never done anything to indicate that he was less admirable than his
dad.
Until now.
To the man with the gurney, Sandy said, “I’m taking a big risk.”
“You’re untouchable.”
“I wonder.”
“Wonder on your own time,” said the bald man, and he rolled the gurney
over Sandy’s blocking foot.
Sandy cursed and scuttled out of the way, and the man with the gurney
came directly toward me. The wheels squeaked-as had the wheels of the
gurney on which they had taken away my father.
Still crouching, I slipped around the back of the hearse, between it
and the white Ford van. A quick glance revealed that no company or
institution name adorned the side of the van.
The squeaking gurney was rapidly drawing nearer.
Instinctively, I knew I was in considerable jeopardy. I had caught
them in some scheme that I didn’t understand but that clearly involved
illegalities. They would especially want to keep it secret from me, of
all people.
I dropped facedown on the floor and slid under the hearse, out of sight
and also out of the fluorescent glare, into shadows as cool and smooth
as silk. My hiding place was barely spacious enough to accommodate me,
and when I hunched my back, it pressed against the drive train.
I was facing the rear of the vehicle. I watched the gurney roll past
the hearse and continue to the van.
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