Blood Lines (27 page)

He laid his head back and closed his eyes. All he needed was a few more minutes of sleep.

“Don,” Shel said.

“Yeah.”

“You need to check that phone?”

Don fumbled with his pocket. “Why are you awake?”

“The night nurse is cute. I didn't want to miss her.”

“Thanks for that.”

“You're too married to appreciate things like that.”

Don peered at his brother. He could barely make him out in the darkness. “You sound better.”

“I feel better. I'm ready to get out of here.”

“I don't think that's going to happen.”

Shel sighed. “This being laid up is going to be wearisome.”

“You should enjoy the downtime.”

“I wasn't made for downtime.”

Don silently agreed with that. He didn't know who was more driven: Shel or their daddy. When he opened the phone and checked under recent calls, he was surprised at the number he found.

“So who was it?” Shel asked.

“Daddy,” Don said. “I didn't even know he knew my cell phone number.”

>> Mecklenburg County Medical Examiner

>> 618 North College Street

>> Charlotte, North Carolina

>> 0423 Hours

Howie Jernigan attended junior college and loved horror magazines. He needed money to go to college, and he intended to be a writer. Both of those things were parts of the reason he'd taken the job as night security guard at the county medical examiner's office.

The money thing was self-explanatory. The writing part was almost as easy to explain, but it was slightly twisted. When he sold his first horror novel, he wanted the About the Author page to mention that he'd once worked in a morgue.

That would get people's attention and boost up the cool factor. And it would be something he could talk about on Leno or Letterman.

The fact that the medical examiners did autopsies of murder victims there only added to it. He could claim he'd been part of big murder cases.
Instrumental,
he told himself.
I was
instrumental
in the solution of several big crimes.

Unfortunately, during the four-month tenure of his employment, there had been no big murder investigations. There had been drunk drivers and heart attack victims, people who'd drowned and people who'd burned to death in fires.

There hadn't been a single murder of note.

At least, there hadn't been any until Bobby Lee Gant had gotten his head blown off at the tattoo parlor. Even then, Bobby Lee wasn't murdered. He'd been killed in self-defense.

But still, the shooting went down as a homicide. And that was what it would stay called too. If a person killed a person, no matter if that killing was justified, it was a homicide. A justifiable homicide, but a homicide nonetheless.

Howie had played high school football and remained in shape. The shirt of his security uniform was tight across his shoulders and chest. He was twenty-one years old and knew how to take care of himself. He was prepared for anything.

But during his employment at the medical examiner's office, there had never been any break-ins or even juvenile destruction of any kind. It had always been quiet. He'd sat in the office where he watched the security monitors in between reading books by favorite authors. Mostly he'd read.

But tonight the security cameras had gone down.

There hadn't been any real instruction on what to do if that happened. Howie didn't want to call the police department all freaked out if it was something as simple as plugging a wire back in somewhere or throwing a switch.

And he didn't want to look like he was scared being there alone. Being remembered as the wannabe horror writer scared of his own shadow wouldn't have been a good thing.

So he'd gone looking for the switch.

That was when he thought he'd seen a light in the autopsy room.

Going into that room pretty much guaranteed he'd be creeped out. Every time he went in there he was pretty much creeped out.

He'd only actually seen a dead body in there once. That had been when he'd gotten the tour during business hours. Seeing the wrinkled and withered body of the old man had almost been enough to put him off the job.

Standing outside the autopsy room, Howie told himself that the medical examiners went off the clock at five and he didn't come on till ten. That almost guaranteed that there'd be no dead bodies from ten till six in the morning Monday through Friday.

When the light flickered out in the vault room, Howie almost went for the police anyway. Only a deep fear of being ridiculed kept him from it. Despite his size, he was always the kid who'd gotten shoved into his own locker in junior high.

Some of the people who'd done the shoving had gone on to become police officers. Some of them had gone on to become the druggies and thieves in town too. That was just life after high school.

He wasn't armed. Protecting dead bodies didn't usually involve any kind of real danger. The only problem would be kids wanting to break in to look at bodies and challenge each other to touch one.

Kids, Howie reflected at the grand old age of twenty-one, did some awfully strange things and had truly weird ideas.

With his long-handled flashlight in hand, he approached the door of the vault. The beam fell over the open doorway. That was strange, because he'd been certain it was shut. He always liked to make sure this door was closed. Sometimes—actually more often than he liked to admit—he imagined some of those dead people in the vaults getting up off the tables and coming calling.

Those were definitely not happy thoughts.

As he held the flashlight on the door, he listened for any sound of movement inside. If it had been kids, he'd have figured they would have given themselves up by now.

But there were a few kids these days who wouldn't give up anything unless they had to.

Howie cleared his throat and said, “Come on out of there now. Come on out and we'll talk. We don't have to call the police if we can talk.”

There was no response.

Getting aggravated, Howie rapped his flashlight against the doorframe. “Come on out. I mean it. If I have to come in there after you, we'll be calling the police—and your parents—for sure.”

There was still no response.

Howie screwed up his courage. He heard nothing in the room. Of course, he reminded himself, zombies that weren't moving were quiet too. But he didn't really believe in zombies. They were just cool monsters.

He walked into the room and shined the light around for a second. When he caught sight of the body rolled out of the vault and hanging there over the floor, he froze. He couldn't even breathe.

Despite the fact that he hadn't been there when the doctors had gone home, Howie was fairly certain they never left the bodies hanging out in the open like that. His hand crept down for the cell phone he wore on his belt. The phone wasn't for use on the job. It was more to keep up with his peeps.

Before he could pull the phone from his belt, he heard someone breathe behind him. He wasn't alone in the room.

Just like that, he realized his mistake. He'd become
that
guy. In every horror movie, there was always
that
guy who became the sacrificial lamb. Usually he was the one who walked into a basement—or a medical examiner's morgue—when everyone else understood that you weren't supposed to do that.

He turned around slowly, but it was actually as fast as he could move. All of his muscles felt numb and dead. Although he didn't point the flashlight at the figure standing behind him, there was enough reflected glow to recognize that a man stood there.

In the darkness of the morgue, the man looked like some wild-eyed creature. Howie had just a moment to wonder if maybe zombies did exist after all.

Then the man swung something that caught Howie in the face and drove him backward. Darkness drank down his thoughts and took him away before he hit the ground.

27

>> Intensive Care Unit

>> Presbyterian Hospital

>> Charlotte, North Carolina

>> 0428 Hours

Shel cranked the bed upward with the remote control taped to the side of the bed. Movement hurt, but hurting meant he was alive. It also meant that the doctor had cut back on the pain medication, but that was all right. Pain meds were a necessary evil in recovery. He'd been wounded enough times to know that. But he was just as glad to get over needing them.

Don just stared at the phone in his hand.

“Are you gonna call him back?” Shel asked.

“I'm thinking about it,” Don said. He gazed at the phone like it was a coiled rattler about to strike.

“If Daddy called, it must have been important,” Shel said.

“It could have been a mistake.”

Shel snorted. “Wimp.”

“Nope. Just thinking things through. The one thing that keeps coming back to mind is that Daddy has never—and I do mean
never
—called me on my cell phone.”

“All the more reason to call him.”

“He might have accidentally hit the buttons.”

“And dialed your cell phone number?”

Don grimaced. “Does sound pretty weak when you say it like that.”

“It is weak,” Shel said. “Give me the phone and I'll call him.”

Don started to hand the phone over, then pulled it back. He eyed Shel suspiciously. “If I give you the phone and you chicken out, Daddy's going to see my number on his caller ID.”

“I didn't know Daddy even had caller ID,” Shel said. His daddy was notorious for being against technological advancement, though he'd gotten satellite television once it became available.

“He's got it,” Don said. “You can call him from the hospital.”

“If I call him from the hospital, they'll mask the numbers. When he sees a number he doesn't recognize, he'll probably ignore it.”

“Don't you have a cell phone?”

“Yes.”

“Then why don't you use it?”

Shel tried to be very patient. He also tried not to think about his daddy having a heart attack and calling for help.

“Because Daddy won't recognize that number either. Give it up, Don. Your phone is the only one we can use.”

Reluctantly Don handed his phone over. “Have you ever thought about how ridiculous it is that two grown men have trouble calling their daddy?”

“Not really,” Shel replied.

“Well, maybe you should,” Don said.

Shel found the number and hit Send. His breathing grew shorter and tighter, and he felt like he was going into combat. He hated the fact that the machinery connected to him revealed that rising stress level to Don.

Tyrel answered on the second ring.

“Don,” Tyrel growled.

“It's not Don, Daddy,” Shel said. “It's me.”

“Where's Don?”

“Went to the bathroom. He left his phone on the nightstand. He'll be back directly.” Shel was conscious of how his accent had crept into his words. “I figured I'd call you back and see if something was wrong.”

“Nothing's wrong.”

Shel listened to the slur in his father's voice. Tyrel drank every now and again, but he never let it get ahead of him. In all his years growing up on the Rafter M, Shel had never seen his daddy drunk. He suspected he was listening to that now.

“I called to talk to you,” Tyrel said.

“Yes, sir,” Shel said.

“I didn't come up there because I figured you were too mean to kill. You got too much of your old man in you for that.”

Shel honestly didn't know whether to feel proud or angry about that comparison. Other people had always compared him to his daddy, but he'd never done it himself.

It was something he would never do.

“Yes, sir,” he said.

“Are you doing all right?” Tyrel asked.

“I am.”

“Nurses taking good care of you?”

“Yes, sir.” Shel felt uncomfortable talking to his daddy like this. Tyrel wasn't one for talking about things.
It's the alcohol,
Shel couldn't help thinking. He braced himself as best he could because he knew the call could be as unpredictable as a roller coaster ride.