NOS4A2 A Novel

Brandenburg, Kentucky


HE SAVED THE HARDEST PART FOR LAST: IN MAY 2012, NATHAN Demeter hauled the engine out of the Wraith with a chain fall and spent two days rebuilding it, cleaning pushrods, and replacing the head bolts with parts ordered from a specialty shop in England. The engine was a big 4,257-cc straight-six, and sitting on his worktable it looked like some vast mechanical heart—which was what it was, he supposed. So many of man’s inventions—the syringe, the sword, the pen, the gun—were metaphorical cocks, but the internal combustion engine had to have been dreamt up by a man who had looked upon the human heart.

“Be cheaper to rent a limo,” Michelle said. “And you wouldn’t get your hands dirty.”

“If you think I’ve got a problem with getting my hands dirty,” he said, “then you weren’t paying much attention the last eighteen years.”

“Something to do with your nervous energy, I guess,” she said.

“Who’s nervous?” he asked, but she just smiled and kissed him.

Sometimes, after he had been working on the car for a few hours, he would find himself stretched across the front seat, one leg hanging out the open door and a beer in hand, playing it back in his head: the afternoons when they went low-riding in the west field, his daughter behind the wheel and the weeds slapping the sides of the Wraith.

She had passed her driver’s test on her first try, just sixteen years old. Eighteen now, and she had her own car, a sporty little Jetta, was planning to drive it all the way to Dartmouth after she graduated. The thought of her out on the road by herself—checking into shabby motels and being checked out by the man behind the cash register, by the truckers in the hotel bar—made him antsy, revved him up with nervous energy.

Michelle liked to do the wash, and he liked to let her, because when he came across her underwear in the dryer, colorful lace from Victoria’s Secret, he began to worry about things like unwanted pregnancy and venereal disease. He had known how to talk to her about cars. He had liked watching her figure out how to work the clutch, how to steer true. He had felt like Gregory Peck in To Kill a Mockingbird then. He didn’t know how to talk to her about men or sex and was unsettled by his sense that she didn’t need his advice on these matters anyway.

“Who’s nervous?” he asked the empty garage one night, and toasted his shadow.

Six days before the big dance, he put the engine back in the Wraith and closed the hood and stood back to consider his work, a sculptor studying the nude that had once been a block of marble. A cold season of banged knuckles and oil under his fingernails and rust flakes falling in his eyes: sacred time, important to him in the way transcribing a holy text was important to a monk in a monastery. He had cared to get it right and it showed.

The ebony body gleamed like a torpedo, like a polished slab of volcanic glass. The rear side door, which had been rusty and mismatched, had been replaced by an original, sent to him by a collector in one of the former Soviet republics. He had reupholstered the interior in kidskin leather, replaced the foldout trays and drawers in the rear of the limo with new walnut components, handmade by a carpenter in Nova Scotia. It was all original, even the vacuum-tube radio, although he had toyed with the idea of installing a CD player, bolting a Bose subwoofer into the trunk. In the end he had decided against it. When you had a Mona Lisa, you didn’t spray-paint a baseball cap on her.

He had promised his daughter on some long-ago, hot, thunderstormy, summer afternoon that he would fix the Rolls up for her prom, and here it was, finished at last, with just under a week to spare. After prom he could sell it; fully restored, the Wraith was good for quarter of a million dollars on the collectors’ market. Not bad for a car that cost just five thousand dollars American when it was released. Not bad at all, when you considered he had paid just twice that to buy it in an FBI auction, ten years earlier.

“Who do you think owned it before you?” Michelle asked one time, after he mentioned where he got it.

“Drug dealer, I imagine,” he said.

“Boy,” she told him, “I hope no one was murdered in it.”

It looked good—but looking good wasn’t enough. He didn’t think Michelle belonged in it, out on the road, until he had clocked a dozen miles on it himself, seen how it handled when it was all the way up to speed.

“Come on, you beautiful bitch,” he said to the car. “Let’s wake you up and see what you can do.”

Demeter got behind the wheel, banged the door shut behind him, and turned the key.

The engine slammed roughly to life—a ragged, almost savagely triumphant blast of noise—but then immediately settled down to a low, luxuriant rumble. The creamy leather front seat was more comfortable than the Tempur-Pedic bed he slept in. Back in the days when the Wraith had been assembled, things were built like tanks, built to last. This car, he felt sure, would outlive him.

He was right.

He had left his cell phone on his worktable, and he wanted it before he took the car out, didn’t want to wind up stranded somewhere if the Wraith decided to throw a rod or some such shit. He reached for the latch, which was when he got his first surprise of the afternoon. The lock slammed down, the sound of it loud enough that he almost cried out.

Demeter was so startled—so unprepared—that he wasn’t sure he had really seen it happen. But then the other locks went down, one after another—bang, bang, bang—just like someone firing a gun, and he couldn’t tell himself he was imagining all that.

“What the f*ck?”

He pulled at the lock on the driver’s-side door, but it stayed down as if welded in place.

The car shuddered from the idling force of the engine, exhaust piling up around the sideboards.

Demeter leaned forward to switch the ignition off, which was when he received his second surprise of the day. The key wouldn’t turn. He wiggled it forward and back, then put his wrist into it, but the key was locked into place, fully engaged, couldn’t be yanked out.

The radio popped on, playing “Jingle Bell Rock” at top volume—so loud it hurt his ears—a song that had no business playing in the spring. At the sound of it, Demeter’s whole body went rough and cold with chickenflesh. He poked the OFF switch, but his capacity for surprise was running thin, and he felt no special amazement when it wouldn’t turn off. He punched buttons to change the station, but no matter where the tuner leaped, it was “Jingle Bell Rock” on every channel.

He could see exhaust fogging the air now. He could taste it, the dizzying reek, making him light-headed. Bobby Helms assured him that Jingle Bell time was a swell time to haul around in a one-horse sleigh. He had to shut that shit up, had to have some quiet, but when he spun the volume dial, it didn’t go down, didn’t do anything.

Fog churned around the headlights. His next breath was a mouthful of poison and set off a coughing fit so strenuous it felt as if it were tearing away the inner lining of his throat. Thoughts flashed by like horses on an accelerating carousel. Michelle wouldn’t be back home for another hour and a half. The closest neighbors were three-quarters of a mile away—no one around to hear him screaming. The car wouldn’t turn off, the locks wouldn’t cooperate, it was like something in a f*cking spy movie—he imagined a hired killer with a name like Blow Job operating the Rolls-Royce by remote control—but that was crazy. He himself had torn the Wraith down and put it back together, and he knew there was nothing wired into it that would give someone power over the engine, the locks, the radio.

Even as these notions occurred to him, he was fumbling on the dash for the automatic garage-door opener. If he didn’t get some air in the garage, he would pass out in another moment or two. For a panicky instant, he felt nothing and thought, Not there, it’s not there—but then his fingers found it behind the raised hump of the housing for the steering wheel. He closed his hand around it, then pointed it at the garage door and pressed the button.

The door rattled up toward the ceiling. The gearshift banged itself into the reverse position, and the Wraith jumped back at the door, tires shrilling.

Nathan Demeter screamed, grabbed the steering wheel—not to control the car but just to have something to hold on to. The slender whitewalls grabbed at the pebble drive, throwing rocks against the undercarriage. The Wraith fell straight back like a kart on some mad backward rollercoaster, plunging three hundred feet down the steep grade of the drive toward the lane below. It seemed to Nathan that he screamed the whole way, although in fact he stopped well before the car was halfway down the hill. The scream he heard was trapped in his own head.

The Wraith didn’t slow as it approached the road but sped up, and if anything was coming from either direction, he would be T-boned at close to forty miles an hour. Of course, even if nothing was coming, the Wraith would shoot across the road, into the trees on the other side, and Nathan assumed he would be launched through the windshield on the recoil. The Wraith, like all the cars of its period, had no safety belts, not even lap belts.

The road was empty, and when the rear tires hit the blacktop, the wheel spun in Nathan’s hands, whirring so fast it burned his palms and he had to let go. The Wraith snapped around, ninety degrees to the right, and Nathan Demeter was flipped across the front seat and into the left-hand door, bashed headfirst into the iron frame.

For a time he didn’t know how badly he was hurt. He sprawled on the front seat, blinking at the ceiling. Through the passenger-side window, he could see the late-afternoon sky, a profoundly deep blue, with a feathering of cirrus clouds in the upper atmosphere. He touched a tender spot on his forehead, and when his hand came away he was looking at blood on his fingertips, as a flute began to play the opening bars of “The Twelve Days of Christmas.”

The car was moving, had clunked down through the gears to fifth all on its own. He knew the roads around his house, felt they were moving east along Route 1638 to the Dixie Highway. Another minute and they would reach the intersection and—and what? Blow right through it, maybe catch a truck coming north and be torn apart? The thought crossed his mind as a possibility, but he couldn’t feel any urgency attached to it, didn’t think the car was on a kamikaze mission now. He had in some dazed way accepted that the Wraith was operating of its own agency. It had business and meant to do it. It had no use for him, was maybe not even really aware of him, any more than a dog might be aware of the tick stuck in its fur.

He climbed up onto one elbow, swayed, sat up the rest of the way, and looked at himself in the rearview mirror.

He wore a red mask of blood. When he touched his forehead again, he could feel a six-inch gash traversing the upper curve of his scalp. He probed it lightly with his fingers and felt the bone beneath.

The Wraith began to slow for the stop sign at the intersection with the Dixie Highway. He watched, mesmerized, as the gearshift dropped from fourth to third, clunked down into second. He began to scream again.

There was a station wagon ahead of him, waiting at the stop. Three towheaded, chubby-faced, dimple-cheeked children were crammed into the backseat. They twisted around to look at the Wraith.

He slapped his hands on the windshield, smearing rusty red prints on the glass.

“HELP!” he screamed, while warm blood leaked down his brow into his face. “HELP HELP HELP ME HELP ME HELP!”

The children inexplicably grinned as if he were being quite silly and waved furiously. He began to scream incoherently—the sound of a cow in the abattoir, slipping in the steaming blood of those who went before.

The station wagon turned right at the first break in traffic. The Wraith turned left, accelerating so quickly that Nathan Demeter felt as if an invisible hand were pressing him back into his seat.

Even with the windows up, he could smell the clean, late-spring odors of mown grass, could smell smoke from backyard barbecues and the green fragrance of new-budding trees.

The sky reddened, as if it, too, were bleeding. The clouds were like tatters of gold foil stamped into it.

Absentmindedly, Nathan Demeter noted that the Wraith was handling like a dream. The engine had never sounded so good. So strong. He thought it was safe to say the beautiful bitch was fully restored.


HE WAS SURE HE DOZED, SITTING UP BEHIND THE WHEEL, BUT HE DID not remember nodding off. He only knew that at some point before it was fully dark, he closed his eyes, and when he opened them, the Wraith was racing through a tunnel of whirling snow, a tunnel of December night. The front windows were blurred with his own bloody handprints, but through them he could see snow devils unspooling across the black asphalt of a two-lane highway that he didn’t recognize. Skeins of snow moving like living silk, like ghosts.

He tried to think if they could’ve gone far enough north while he slept to catch a freak spring snowstorm. He discarded the idea as idiotic. He weighed the cold night and the unfamiliar road and told himself he was dreaming, but he did not believe it. His own moment-by-moment tally of tactile experiences—throbbing head, face tight and sticky with blood, back stiff from sitting too long behind the wheel—was too convincing in its depiction of wakefulness. The car held the road like a panzer, never slipping, never wobbling, never slowing below sixty.

The songs played on: “All I Want for Christmas Is You,” “Silver Bells,” “Joy to the World,” “It Came Upon a Midnight Clear.” Sometimes Demeter was aware of the music. Sometimes he wasn’t. No ads, no news, just holy choirs giving thanks to the Lord and Eartha Kitt promising she could be a very good girl if Santa checked off her Christmas list.

When he shut his eyes, he could picture his cell phone, sitting on the worktable in the garage. Would Michelle have looked for him there yet? Sure—as soon as she got home and found the garage door standing open and the garage itself empty. She would be, by now, out of her mind with worry, and he wished he had his phone, not to call for help—he believed he was well beyond help—but only because he would feel better if he could hear her voice. He wanted to call and tell her that he still wanted her to go to her prom, to try to have fun. He wanted to tell her he wasn’t scared of her being a woman—if he had any true anxiety, it had been about himself getting old and being lonely without her, but he didn’t think he was going to have to worry about that now. He wanted to tell her she had been the best thing in his life. He had not said that to her lately and had never said it enough.

After six hours in the car, he felt no panic, only a kind of numb wonder. On some level he had come to view his situation as almost natural. Sooner or later a black car came for everyone. It came and took you away from your loved ones, and you never got to go back.

Perry Como warned Nathan in a chipper tone of voice that it was beginning to look a lot like Christmas.

“No shit, Perry,” Nathan said, and then, in a hoarse, cracking voice, he began to sing as he thumped on the driver’s-side door. He sang Bob Seger; sang about the old-time rock ’n’ roll, the type believed to soothe the soul. He belted it out as loud as he could, one verse and another, and when he fell quiet, he found the radio had shut itself off.

Well. That was a Christmas gift right there. Last one he’d ever get, he thought.


NEXT TIME HE OPENED HIS EYES, HIS FACE WAS PRESSED TO THE STEERING wheel and the car was idling, and there was so much light it hurt his eyes.

He squinted, the world a bright blue blur. Not at any time in the night had his head hurt as bad as it hurt now. The ache in his skull was so intense he thought he might vomit. It was behind his eyes, a somehow yellow glare of pain. All that sunlight was unfair.

He blinked at tears, and the world sharpened, began to come into focus.

A fat man in a gasmask and fatigues stared through the driver’s-side window at him, peering in past the smeared bloody handprints on the glass. It was an old gasmask, WWII era or thereabouts, a kind of mustardy green.

“Who the f*ck are you?” Nathan asked.

The fat man seemed to be jiggling up and down. Nathan was unable to see the guy’s face but thought he was bouncing on his toes with excitement.

The lock on the driver’s-side door shot up with a loud, steely bang.

The fat man had something in one hand, a cylinder—it looked like an aerosol can. GINGERSNAP SPICE AIR FRESHENER, it said on the side and showed an old-fashioned painting of a cheerful mommy type pulling a pan of gingerbread men out of the oven.

“Where am I?” Nathan Demeter asked. “Where the hell is this?”

The Gasmask Man twisted the latch and opened the door onto the fragrant spring morning.

“This is where you get out,” he said.





St. Luke’s Medical Center, Denver


WHEN SOMEONE INTERESTING WAS DEAD, HICKS ALWAYS TOOK A picture with them.

There had been a local news anchor, a pretty thirty-two-year-old with splendid white-blond hair and pale blue eyes, who got wasted and choked to death on her own puke. Hicks had slipped into the morgue at 1:00 A.M., pulled her out of her drawer, and sat her up. He got an arm around her and bent down to lap at her nipple, while holding out his cell phone to take a shot. He didn’t actually lick her, though. That would’ve been gross.

There was a rock star, too—a minor rock star anyway. He was the one in that band that had the hit from the Stallone movie. The rock star wasted out from cancer and in death looked like a withered old woman, with his feathery brown hair and long eyelashes and wide, somehow feminine lips. Hicks got him out of the drawer and bent his hand into devil’s horns, then leaned in and threw the horns himself, snapped a shot of them hanging out together. The rock star’s eyelids sagged, so he looked sleepy and cool.

Hicks’s girlfriend, Sasha, was the one who told him there was a famous serial killer down in the morgue. Sasha was a nurse in Pediatrics, eight floors up. She loved his photos with famous dead people; she was always the first person he e-mailed them to. Sasha thought Hicks was hilarious. She said he ought to be on The Daily Show. Hicks was fond of Sasha, too. She had a key to the pharmacy locker, and Saturday nights she’d filch them something good, a little oxy or some medical-grade coke, and on breaks they’d find an empty delivery room and she’d shimmy out of the bottoms of her loose nurse jammies and climb up into the stirrups.

Hicks had never heard of the guy, so Sasha used the computer in the nurses’ station to pull up a news story about him. The mug shot was bad enough, a bald guy with a narrow face and a mouthful of sharp, crooked teeth. His eyes were bright and round and stupid in their hollow sockets. The caption identified him as Charles Talent Manx, sent to the federal pen more than a decade before for burning some sorry motherf*cker to death in front of a dozen witnesses.

“He’s not any big deal,” Hicks said. “He just killed one dude.”

“Un-uh. He’s worse than John Wayne Stacy. He killed, like, all kinds of kids. All kinds. He had a house where he did it. He hung little angels in the trees, one for ever’ one he cut up. It’s awesome. It’s like creepy symbolism. Little Christmas angels. They called the place the Sleigh House. Get it? Do you get it, Hicks?”

“No.”

“Like he slayed ’em there? But also like Santa’s sleigh? Do you get it now?” she said.

“No.” He didn’t see what Santa had to do with a guy like Manx.

“The house got burnt down, but the ornaments are still there, hanging in the trees, like a memorial.” She tugged at the drawstring of her scrubs. “Serial killers get me hot. All I can think about is all the nasty shit I’d do to keep ’em from killing me. You go take a pic with him and e-mail it to me. And, like, tell me what you’re going to do if I don’t get naked for you.”

He didn’t see any reason to argue with that kind of logic, and he had to make his rounds anyway. Besides, if the guy had killed lots of people, it might be worth taking a pic, to add to his collection. Hicks had already done several funny photographs, but he felt it would be good to have a snap with a serial killer, to demonstrate his darker, more serious side.

In the elevator, alone, Hicks drew his gun on his own reflection and said, “Either this is going in your mouth, or my big cock is.” Practicing his lines for Sasha.

It was all good till his walkie-talkie went off and his uncle said, “Hey, dumb-ass, keep playing with that gun, maybe you’ll shoot yourself and we can hire someone who can actually do this f*ckin’ job.”

He had forgotten there was a camera in the elevator. Fortunately, there was no hidden microphone. Hicks pushed his .38 back into the holster and lowered his head, hoping the brim of his hat hid his face. He took ten seconds, fighting with his anger and embarrassment, then pressed the TALK button on his walkie, meaning to snap off something really f*cking harsh, shut the old turd up for once. But instead all he managed was “Copy that,” in a pinched little squeak that he hated.

His Uncle Jim had gotten him the security job, glossing over Hicks’s early departure from high school and the arrest for public drunkenness. Hicks had been at the hospital for only two months and had been cited twice already, once for tardiness, once for not responding to his walkie (at the time it had been his turn in the stirrups). His Uncle Jim had already said if there was a third citation, before he had a full year under his belt, they’d have to let him go.

His Uncle Jim had a spotless record, probably because all he had to do was sit in the security office for six hours a day and watch the monitors with one eye while perusing Skinemax with the other. Thirty years of watching TV, for fourteen dollars an hour and full benefits. That was what Hicks was angling for, but if he lost the security job—if he got cited again—he might have to go back to McDonald’s. That would be bad. When he had signed on at the hospital, he had given up the glamour job at the drive-thru window, and he loathed the idea of starting from the bottom rung again. Even worse, it would probably be the end of Sasha, and Sasha’s key to the pharmacy locker, and all the fun they had taking turns in the stirrups. Sasha liked Hicks’s uniform; he didn’t think she’d feel the same way about a McDonald’s getup.

Hicks reached basement level one and slouched out. When the elevator doors were closed, he turned back, grabbed his crotch, and blew a wet kiss at them.

“Suck my balls, you homosexual fat-ass,” he said. “I bet you’d like that!”

There wasn’t a lot of action in the basement at eleven-thirty at night. Most of the lights were off, except for one bank of overhead fluorescents every fifty feet, one of the hospital’s new austerity measures. The only foot traffic was the occasional person wandering in from the parking lot across the street by way of an underground tunnel.

Hicks’s prized possession was parked over there, a black Trans Am with zebra upholstery and blue neon lights set in the undercarriage, so when it roared down the road, it looked like a UFO right out of E.T. Something else he’d have to give up if he lost this job. No way could he make the payments flipping burgers. Sasha loved to f*ck him in the Trans Am. She was crazy for animals, and the faux-zebra seat covers brought out her wild side.

Hicks thought the serial killer would be in the morgue, but it turned out he was already in the autopsy theater. One of the docs had started in on him, then abandoned him there to finish tomorrow. Hicks flipped on the lights over the tables but left the rest of the room in darkness. He pulled the curtain across the window in the door. There was no bolt, but he pushed the chock in under the door as far as it would go, to make it impossible for anyone to wander in casually.

Whoever had been working on Charlie Manx had covered him with a sheet before going. He was the only body in the theater tonight, his gurney parked under a plaque that said HIC LOCUS EST UBI MORS GAUDET SUCCURRERE VITAE. Someday Hicks was going to Google that one, find out what the hell it meant.

He snapped the sheet down to Manx’s ankles, had himself a look. The chest had been sawed open, then stitched back together with coarse black thread. It was a Y-shaped cut and extended all the way down to the pelvic bone. Charlie Manx’s wang was as long and skinny as a Hebrew National. He had a ghastly overbite, so his crooked brown teeth stuck out into his lower lip. His eyes were open, and he seemed to be staring at Hicks with a kind of blank fascination.

Hicks didn’t like that much. He had seen his share of deaders, but they usually had their eyes closed. And if their eyes weren’t closed, there was a kind of milky look to them, as if something in them had curdled—life itself, perhaps. But these eyes seemed bright and alert, the eyes of the living, not the dead. They had in them an avid, birdlike curiosity. No; Hicks didn’t care for that at all.

For the most part, however, Hicks had no anxieties about the dead. He wasn’t scared of the dark either. He was a little scared of his Uncle Jim, he worried about Sasha poking a finger up his ass (something she insisted he would like), and he had recurring nightmares about finding himself at work with no pants on, wandering the halls with his cock slapping between his thighs, people turning to stare. That was about it for fears and phobias.

He wasn’t sure why they hadn’t put Manx back in his drawer, because it looked like they were done with the chest cavity. But when Hicks got him sat up—he propped him against the wall, with his long, skinny hands in his lap—he saw a dotted line curving around the back of his skull, drawn in Sharpie. Right. Hicks had seen in Sasha’s newspaper article that Manx had been in and out of a coma for more than a decade, so naturally the docs would want to poke around in his head. Besides, who didn’t want to peek at a serial killer’s brain? There was probably a medical paper in that.

The autopsy tools—the saw, the forceps, the rib cutters, the bone mallet—were on a wheeled steel tray by the corpse. At first Hicks thought he’d give Manx the scalpel, which looked pretty serial-killerish. But it was too small. He could tell just by looking at it, it wouldn’t show up good in the picture he snapped with his shitty camera phone.

The bone mallet was a different story. It was a big silver hammer, with a head shaped like a brick but pointed at one end, the back edge as sharp as a meat cleaver. At the other end of the handle was a hook, what they used to dig under the edge of the skull and pull it off, like a cap from a bottle. The bone mallet was hardcore.

Hicks took a minute to fit it into Manx’s hand. He pulled a face at the sight of Manx’s nasty-long fingernails, split at the ends and as yellow as the guy’s f*ckin’ teeth. He looked like that actor from the Alien movie, Lance Henriksen, if someone had shaved Henriksen’s head, then smashed him a couple times with the ugly stick. Manx also had thin, pinkish white, saggy tits that reminded Hicks, horribly, of what his own mother had under her bra.

Hicks picked out the bone saw for himself and stuck an arm around Manx’s shoulders. Manx sagged, his big bald head resting against Hicks’s chest. That was all right. Now they looked like drinking buddies who’d had a few. Hicks dug his cell phone from its holster and held it out from his body. He narrowed his eyes, struck a menacing grimace, and took the shot.

He lowered the corpse and glanced at the phone. It wasn’t a great picture. Hicks had wanted to look dangerous, but the pained expression on his face suggested that Sasha had finally wiggled her pinkie up his ass after all. He was thinking about reshooting when he heard loud voices, right outside the autopsy room’s door. For one terrible moment, he thought the first voice belonged to his Uncle Jim:

“Oh, that little bastard is in for it. He has no idea—”

Hicks flung a sheet over the body, his heart going off like someone speed-shooting a Glock. Those voices had hitched up right beyond the door, and he was sure they were about to start pushing to come in. He walked halfway to the door to pull out the chock when he realized he was still holding the bone saw. He set it on the tool cart with a shaking hand.

He was already recovering by the time he paced back to the door. A second man was laughing, and the first was speaking again:

“—have all four molars yanked. They’ll gas him out with the sevoflurane, and when they smash the teeth, he won’t feel a thing. But when he wakes up, he’s gonna feel like he got f*cked in the mouth with a shovel—”

Hicks didn’t know who was having his teeth removed, but once he heard a little more of the voice, he could tell that it wasn’t his Uncle Jim out in the hall, just some old bastard with a creaky old-bastard voice. He waited until he heard the two men walk away before he bent to pull the chock free. He counted to five, then slipped out. Hicks needed a drink of water and to wash his hands. He still felt a little trembly.

He took a long, soothing stroll, breathing deeply. When he finally reached the men’s room, he didn’t just need a drink, he needed to unload his bowels. Hicks took the handicapped stall for the extra leg room. While he was parked there dropping bombs, he e-mailed Sasha the photo of him and Manx together and wrote, “Bend over & drop youre pants daddee is cumming w/teh saw if u dont do what i say u crazee bitch. Wait 4 me in the room of punishmint.”

But by the time he was leaning over the sink, slurping noisily at the water, Hicks had begun to have worrisome thoughts. He had been so rattled by the sound of voices in the hallway that he could not remember if he had left the body the way he’d found it. Worse: He had a terrible idea he had left the bone mallet in Charlie Manx’s hand. If it was found there in the morning, some smart-ass doc would probably want to know why, and it was a safe bet that Uncle Jim would grill the entire staff. Hicks didn’t know if he could handle that kind of pressure.

He decided to wander back to the autopsy theater and make sure he had cleaned up properly.

He paused outside the door to peek through the window, only to discover he had left the curtains drawn. That was one thing to fix right there. Hicks eased the door in and frowned. In his haste to get out of the autopsy theater, he had switched all the lights off—not just the lights over the gurneys but also the safety lights that were always on, in the corners of the room and over the desk. The room smelled of iodine and benzaldehyde. Hicks let the door sigh shut behind him and stood isolate in the darkness.

He was running his hand across the tiled wall, feeling for the light switches, when he heard the squeak of a wheel in the dark and the gentle clink of metal on metal.

Hicks caught himself and listened and in the next moment felt someone rushing across the room at him. It was not a sound or anything he could see. It was something he felt on his skin and a sense in his eardrums, like a change in pressure. His stomach went watery and sick. He had reached out with his right hand for the light switch. Now he dropped the hand, feeling for the .38. He had it partway out when he heard something whistling at him in the darkness, and he was struck in the stomach with what felt like an aluminum baseball bat. He doubled over with a woofing sound. The gun sank back into the holster.

The club went away and came back. It caught Hicks in the left side of the head, above his ear, spun him on his heel, and dropped him. He fell straight back, out a plane and down through frozen night sky, falling and falling, and try as hard as he could to scream, he made not a sound, all the air in his lungs pounded right out of him.


WHEN ERNEST HICKS OPENED HIS EYES, THERE WAS A MAN BENT OVER him, smiling shyly. Hicks opened his mouth to ask what had happened, and then the pain flooded into his head and he turned his face and puked all over the guy’s black loafers. His stomach pumped up his dinner—General Tso’s chicken—in a pungent gush.

“I am so sorry, man,” Hicks said when he was done heaving.

“It’s okay, son,” the doc said. “Don’t try to stand. We’re going to take you up to the ER. You’ve suffered a concussion. I want to make sure you don’t have a skull fracture.”

But it was coming back to Hicks, what had happened, the man in the dark hitting him with a metal bludgeon.

“What the f*ck?” he cried. “What the f*ck? Is my gun . . . ? Anyone see my gun?”

The doc—his tag said SOPHER—put a hand on Hicks’s chest to prevent him from sitting up.

“I think that one’s gone, son,” said Sopher.

“Don’t try and get up, Ernie,” said Sasha, standing three feet away and staring at him with a look of something approximating horror on her face. There were a couple of other nurses standing with her, all of them looking pale and strained.

“Oh, God. Oh, my God. They stole my .38. Did they grab anything else?”

“Just your pants,” said Sopher.

“Just my— What? F*cking what?”

Hicks twisted his head to look and saw he was bare naked from the waist down, his cock out for the doc and Sasha and the other nurses to look at. Hicks thought he might vomit again. It was like the bad dream he got sometimes, the one about showing up at work with no pants on, everyone staring at him. He had the sudden, wrenching idea that the sick f*ck who had ripped his pants off had maybe poked a finger up his a*shole, like Sasha was always threatening to do.

“Did he touch me? Did he f*cking touch me?”

“We don’t know,” the doctor said. “Probably not. He probably just didn’t want you to get up and chase him and figured you wouldn’t run after him if you were naked. It’s very possible he only took your gun because it was in your holster, on your belt.”

Although the guy hadn’t taken his shirt. He had grabbed Hicks’s windbreaker, but not his shirt.

Hicks began to cry. He farted: a wet, whistling blat. He had never felt so miserable.

“Oh, my God. Oh, my God. What the f*ck is wrong with people?” Hicks cried.

Dr. Sopher shook his head. “Who knows what the guy was thinking? Maybe he was hopped up on something. Maybe he’s just some sick creep who wanted a one-of-a-kind trophy. Let the cops worry about that. I just want to focus on you.”

“Trophy?” Hicks cried, imagining his pants hung up on a wall in a picture frame.

“Yeah, I guess,” Doc Sopher said, glancing over his shoulder, across the room. “Only reason I can think why someone would want to come in here and steal the body of a famous serial killer.”

Hicks turned his head—a gong went off in his brain and filled his skull with dark reverberations—and saw that the gurney had been rolled halfway across the room and that someone had yanked the dead body right off it. He moaned again and shut his eyes.

He heard the rapid clip-clop of boot heels coming down the hallway and thought he recognized the goose-stepping gait of his Uncle Jim on the march, out from behind his desk and not happy about it. There was no logical reason to fear the man. Hicks was the victim here; he had been assaulted, for chrissake. But alone and miserable in his only refuge—the dark behind his eyelids—he felt that logic didn’t enter into it. His Uncle Jim was coming, and a third citation was coming with him, was about to fall like a silver hammer. Hicks had literally been caught with his pants down, and he saw already that at least in one sense he was never going to be stepping into those security pants again.

It was all lost, had been taken away in a moment, in the shadows of the autopsy room: the good job, the good days of Sasha and stirrups and treats from the pharmacy locker and funny photos with dead bodies. Even his Trans Am with the zebra upholstery was gone, although no one would know it for hours; the sick f*ck who’d clubbed him senseless had helped himself to the keys and driven away in it.

Gone. Everything. All of it.

Gone off with dead old Charlie Manx and never coming back.