Johnny Gruesome (15 page)

Not his fault, she thought.

Gary reached into his shirt pocket and took something from it. “I want you to have this.”

She looked at the metal foil packet, three inches long. “What is it?”

“Just take it.”

She did. Holding it in the palm of her left hand, she peeled back the edges of the foil, revealing small white rocks and sparkling powder. She’d never snorted cocaine, had never been interested in doing any drug stronger than weed. She looked at him with skepticism in her eyes.

“It’ll make you feel better,” Gary said. “Trust me.”

She folded the foil edges. She could not tell how much the packet contained without opening it, and she didn’t know how to measure the drug anyway. Did she want to try it? She wasn’t sure. Maybe it would make her feel better. “Thanks.”

“Don’t mention it.” He stood. “And call me if you need someone to talk to.”

She set the packet on the coffee table and it reflected light at her. “I will.”

As soon as Gary had driven off, she snatched the packet and ran upstairs to her bedroom. She set the foil on her bureau and peeled back its edges, revealing its contents. Holding the rocks in place with her thumb, she tapped the loose powder onto the wooden surface. Recalling drug usage she’d seen in movies, she slid the painted fingernail of her right pinkie into the coke and raised it to one nostril. She hesitated, debating whether or not she really wanted to go this far to try to forget what had happened. Then she snorted the powder.

A slow tingling sensation numbed her brain. She scooped more coke up her other nostril, and a dreamlike feeling spread through her. Sniffing, she touched the coke with one fingertip and examined it. She licked it and a pleasurable tingling followed the bitter taste. She gazed at the framed photograph on top of the bureau. Dark eyes stared back at her.

Johnny.

She switched on her CD player and heavy-metal music filled the room. Then she flicked off the light and lay down on her bed, losing herself in a jumble of confusing thoughts and sensations. She slid her hands between her legs and imagined Johnny on top of her.

T
he rain had frozen by dawn, encasing the village in ice. Tree limbs cracked, split, and crashed to the ground with thunderous fury and ice rained down.

Wearing street clothes beneath his police coat, Matt stepped through his front door with a bemused look on his face. “It’s a winter wonderland out there, all right. I bet hell froze over, too.”

Carol rubbed her arms. “Shut the door and keep hell at bay, please.” A thick robe covered her nightgown.

Matt closed the door and the flames in the fireplace shifted direction as the door latched. “The street looks dangerous. There’s going to be some bad accidents today.”

Carol knew what that meant. “Chief Crane to the rescue?”

“I’d better at least make a trip to the station and make sure everything’s running smoothly.”

“It’s your day off.”

“A policeman’s duty is never done, ma’am. Besides, I want to check in on Charlie.”

Raising her right hand, she rubbed the sash of her nightgown between two fingers. “You’re a good man, Chief. I’d hoped to spend some quality time with you this morning, if you catch my drift.”

He set his hat on the wooden rack. “Shoot, Miss Carol. Why didn’t you just say so?”

Harold Lawson wheeled the cart supporting Johnny’s naked corpse out of the refrigerated storage room in the funeral home and into the embalming room. His son, Willard, had delivered the body from the morgue earlier. Wearing a respirator over his protective outfit, Harold transferred the body onto the stainless-steel drainage table and pushed the cart out of his way. He covered Johnny’s genitals with a dark towel, then turned on his CD player and selected a disc:
Barbra Streisand’s Greatest Hits.
He and Kitty, his wife of twenty-eight years, had seen Babs perform in Las Vegas when they had been in town for a funeral directors’ convention. It had been a great show.

Oh, God, don’t make me listen to this shit!

With Barbara’s music filling the room, Harold washed Johnny’s body with a germicide-insecticide-olfactant. He swabbed the mouth and nose with the same solution, then plugged those orifices with cotton, to prevent leakage later on, and to protect the patient from insect infestation. He enjoyed being a mortician; his father, Lawrence, preferred the human aspect of funeral directing, interacting with the bereaved. But Harold preferred his dead patients to their living relatives. This John Grissom needed him, and the boy’s open eyes didn’t bother him. If he’d learned one thing in his years in the business, it was that death was a natural stage of life.

His son showed little interest in the family business. Willard acted as the handyman and groundskeeper and showed equal disdain for the living and the dead. He spent most of his free time smoking marijuana alone in a shed deep in the woods behind the Lawson Funeral Home. What a disappointment.

Humming along with Barbra, Harold massaged Johnny’s joints, working the rigor mortis out of them. Some people might have found this common procedure disturbing, but not Harold, who suspected most Red Hill residents found his profession a morbid necessity.

The ancient Egyptians invented the art of embalming: originally, they had buried their dead in the desert and the sand had kept them dry, preserving their bodies. But when they started constructing sarcophaguses and pyramids, moisture decomposed the bodies. The creative solution had been embalming and mummification. Modern embalming techniques concentrated on shortterm preservation.

Harold worked massage cream into Johnny’s face and hands to make the skin soft and pliable. Don Beelock, the assistant medical examiner, had done a fine job reassembling the body after the autopsy, but had been careless with the face, which he had only partially stretched over the skull before suturing it. This was typical of Beelock’s work, which resulted in Grissom’s face resembling a cheap dime-store mask. Setting his one hand on Johnny’s scalp and the other on the boy’s left cheek, he slid the entire face up.

Jesus Christ!

Harold inserted two oval-shaped plastic eye caps beneath Johnny’s eyelids; the grippers kept the lids closed. He stuffed cotton down Johnny’s throat to absorb purging fluids, then reached for his least favorite tool: the injection gun. In the old days, morticians had sutured their patients’ mouths shut with a needle and catgut. Times had changed. He pulled Johnny’s lower lip down and pressed the tip of the gun against the lower gums. He squeezed the trigger—
Ka-CHUNG!

—shooting a thick wire deep into the pink flesh. He repeated the procedure with Johnny’s upper gums, then twisted the two obtruding wires together, locking Johnny’s mouth shut. He discovered stubble on Johnny’s chin, so he applied shaving cream and used a straight-edge razor for a close shave. As the razor scraped Johnny’s neck, he raised his eyebrows at the sight of the bruise on his patient’s throat. Wiping away the remaining shaving cream, he held a class photo of Johnny next to his face. The boy had long hair in the photo, but Harold felt obligated to make him look cleancut. His hair had grown even longer and more unruly in the time since his death, so Harold snipped off a full inch all over Johnny’s head. He gave the boy a neat, layered look, and his chest swelled with pride when he admired his handiwork. Who would mind? Johnny’s brow seemed furrowed with displeasure, but Harold was able to massage his forehead into a relaxed state again.