open in a continuous scream. The arm was disappearing under the safety bar and beneath the first roller;
the fabric of his shirt had torn away at the shoulder seam and his upper arm bulged grotesquely as the
blood was pushed steadily backwards.
‘Turn if off!’ Stanner screamed. There was a snap as his elbow broke.
Diment thumbed the off button.
The mangler continued to hum and growl and turn.
Unbelieving, he slammed the button again and again -nothing. The skin of Stanner’s arm had grown
shiny and taut. Soon it would split with the pressure the roll was putting on it; and still he was
conscious and screaming. Diment had a nightmare cartoon image of a man flattened by a steamroller,
leaving only a shadow.
‘Fuses -‘ Stanner screeched. His head was being pulled down, down, as he was dragged forward.
Diment whirled and ran to the boiler room, Stanner’s screams chasing him like lunatic ghosts. The
mixed stench of blood and steam rose in the air.
On the left wall were three heavy grey boxes containing all the fuses for the laundry’s electricity.
Diment yanked them open and began to pull the long, cylindrical fuses like a crazy man, throwing them
back over his shoulders. The overhead lights went out; then the air compressor; then the boiler itself,
with a huge dying whine.
And still the mangler turned. Stanner’s screams had been reduced to bubbly moans.
Diment’s eye happened on the fire axe in its glassed-in box. He grabbed it with a small, gagging
whimper and ran back. Stanner’s arm was gone almost to the shoulder. Within seconds his bent and
straining neck would be snapped against the safety bar.
‘I can’t,’ Diment blubbered, holding the axe. ‘Jesus, George, I can’t, I can’t, I -‘
The machine was an abattoir now. The folder spat out pieces of shirt sleeve, scraps of flesh, a finger.
Stanner gave a huge, whooping scream and Diment swung the axe up and brought it down in the
laundry’s shadowy lightlessness. Twice. Again.
Stanner fell away, unconscious and blue, blood jetting from the stump just below the shoulder. The
mangler sucked what was left into itself. . . and shut down.
Weeping, Diment pulled his belt out of its loops and began to make a tourniquet.
Hunton was talking on the phone with Roger Martin, the inspector. Jackson watched him while he patiently rolled a ball back and forth for three-year-old Patty Hunton to chase.
‘He pulled all the fuses?’ Hunton was asking. ‘And the off button just didn’t function, huh? . . . Has the ironer been shut down? . . . Good. Great. Huh? . . . No, not official.’ Hunton frowned, then looked
sideways at Jackson. ‘Are you still reminded of that refrigerator, Roger?
Yes. Me too, Goodbye.’
He hung up and looked at Jackson. ‘Let’s go see the girl, Mark.’
She had her own apartment (the hesitant yet proprietary way she showed them in after Hunton had
flashed his buzzer made him suspect that she hadn’t had it long), and she sat uncomfortably across from
them in the carefully decorated, postage-stamp living room.
‘I’m Officer Hunton and this is my associate, Mr Jackson. It’s about the accident at the laundry.’ He felt hugely uncomfortable with this dark, shyly pretty girl.
‘Awful,’ Sherry Ouelette murmured. ‘It’s the only place I’ve ever worked. Mr Gartley is my uncle. I
liked it because it let me have this place and my own friends. But now. . it’s so spooky.’
‘The State Board of Safety has shut the ironer down pending a full investigation,’ Hunton said. ‘Did you
know that?’
‘Sure,’ She sighed restlessly. ‘I don’t know what I’m going to do -‘
‘Miss Ouelette,’ Jackson interrupted, ‘you had an accident with the ironer, didn’t you? Cut your hand on
a clamp, I believe?’
‘Yes, I cut my finger.’ Suddenly her face clouded. ‘That was the first thing.’ She looked at them
woefully. ‘Sometimes I feel like the girls don’t like me so much any more as if I were to blame.’
‘I have to ask you a hard question,’ Jackson said slowly. ‘A question you won’t like. It seems absurdly
personal and off the subject, but I can only tell you it is not. Your answers won’t ever be marked down