“Yes, of course. Callan. I knew Malcolm Taylor for a number of years. I assure you, while he may have been a fairly stern man, I really don’t think he would have raised a hand to his daught—”
I can’t even bear to hear him finish his sentence. I raise the bat above my head and bring it crashing down onto his desk. The room is filled with the sound of splintering wood and cracking plastic. Feels like my blood is thumping through my veins, too much pressure in my head as I try and calm myself down. “If you know what’s good for you,” I grit out, “you won’t say another word about Malcolm Taylor. Now where the fuck are Coralie’s things?”
Ezra Mendel swallows, his Adam’s apple bobbing wildly in his throat. Shane laughs under his breath, eyes wide, like he can’t believe what I’ve just done. “Jesus Christ, Cal,” he whispers.
“I’m about to really lose my shit, Ezra. Willful destruction of property isn’t really something I care about on my rap sheet. At this point I probably don’t care about assault chargers either. Am I making myself clear?”
Ezra stumbles over his own feet as he sidesteps around us, fumbling the top drawer of his desk. “Yes. Yeah, of course. Here. Here, take this.” He holds out a key to Shane, flinching as far away from me as humanly possible in the process. “There’s a lock up downstairs. The boxes are labeled.”
“Thank you, Ezra. That wasn’t so hard now, was it?” We leave him there, hugging the wall, white as a sheet.
Shane shoves me in the shoulder as I open the lock up down on street level. “You know he’s serious about calling the cops,” he says.
“He’s not calling anybody. His pride won’t let him.” Inside the lock up, we find what we’re looking for and load the boxes into Shane’s pick up. “You mind stopping at the county morgue on the way back?” I ask. Shane pauses, giving me a wary look.
“Why? You can’t go smashing up the morgue, Callan. That’s a government building. It doesn’t work like that.”
“Don’t worry, I’m not going to smash anything else. I’m just gonna have a quiet word with them.”
“Fuck.” Shane looks like he’s about to have a nervous breakdown. “You know, if you get me arrested, Tina is going to castrate you. And then she’s going to castrate me, and I like my junk, man.”
“The thought had occurred to me, yes. I promise, no one is getting arrested.”
Despite that I leave Shane in the car at the morgue. If these guys don’t give me what I want, I might be tempted to cause a scene after all, and I really don’t want to excite the wrath of his pregnant wife. Threatening people with baseball bats and shouting at morgue clerks was not how I envisioned today going when I woke up earlier, blissed out as fuck, still thinking that Coralie was in bed beside me. As I push open the door to the morgue, a stunned looking girl in her early twenties looks up at me, blinking through her coke bottle glasses like she’s just been busted watching porn.
“Uh, can I help you?”
“Yeah. I need to identify the body of Malcolm Taylor.”
She stares at me blankly. “Are you a family member?”
“Nope.”
“Then I’m really sorry, sir, but—”
“How long do you want to sit on that frozen meatsicle back there…” I scan her weird UFO t-shirt, trying to find a name badge. There isn’t one.
“Raynor,” she says.
“Raynor.”
“We legally have to hold an unclaimed body for sixty days before we can release it for burial.”
“Right. So do you want me coming in here every day for two months, harassing you, asking you the same question, morning, noon and night? Because that’s what’s going to happen.”
“Uh…I don’t…”
“Raynor, what happens if there’s a power cut here? What happens to all of the bodies?”
“We have a back up generator that keeps everything cool,” she says slowly.
“And what if that fails? Who comes in first thing in the morning to find an inch of decaying, liquefied human flesh on the floor? And how badly would that smell in the height of summer?”
Raynor rocks back from behind her desk, horror pulling her features in five different directions. “That would be very, very bad,” she says.
“Then perhaps you write down on your forms that I’m Malcolm Taylor’s son, and you take me through to see his shriveled up, frosty blue carcass before I go looking for a fuse box.”
Poor, poor Raynor. She looks stumped. “I don’t know if I can do that.”
“Sure you can. You’re in charge of paperwork, right?”
She nods.
“Then it’s a simple matter of crossing some fake Is and dotting some fake Ts.” I plaster on my most charming, most asshole-ish smile—the one I know women go for, for some weird, masochistic reason—and a tiny smile flutters over Raynor’s face in response. God, I have no idea how girls can stare down the barrel of a loaded gun and still bat their eyelashes like they’re blind to the danger they find themselves in.
“Uhhh…Okaaaay, but I mean, I really shouldn’t. This could get me into a lot of trouble.”