suitcase.
A minute ago I had been sure that I could overpower this man.
Now my confidence ebbed. Physically, I was more than his equalbut 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 Baydoesn’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, why wouldn’t the guilty party let Sandy
Kirk’s crematorium destroy the evidence?
Apparently they needed his body.
For what?
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 shadow slipped from the
fluttering flame and purled across the steel panels, imparting an
illusion of movement to the drawers, so that each receptacle appeared
to be inching outward.
Turning to the door, I discovered that to prevent anyone from being