Life Sentences (26 page)

The morgue smelled sickeningly
sweet-of organ meats and burnt bone from the mortuary technician's
saw. Roy touched Anna's smooth face and felt a slight resistance beneath
his fingertips. There was a pearly translucence to her skin, but the underlying
muscle tone was gone. Her body was a battlefield where the retreating
army had left evidence of its defeat-obstetric forceps, clamps, IV lines,
bloody gauze swabs. The doctors hadn't even bothered to sew her back up
again, and the uterine cavity lay exposed, layers of tissue peeled
back like the petals of a dark flower. An abandoned retractor widened
the walls of her womb, and the baby's umbilical cord came trailing out like
a sad little
piggie's
tail,
ligated
at one end. The doctors and nurses had scooped Anna's baby out like a mound
of cherry ice cream. Where was it now? What had they done with it?

Air scudded into Roy's lungs, the
pain like a thousand wasp stings as he touched the hollow of her neck and
stroked the heavy loops of her hair, then bent to kiss those sugary, grainy
lips. She did not kiss him back. Where was Anna Hubbard? Where had she gone?

He tried to close the womb back up
with a soft-pawed groping. He wanted to put it all back together again.
He wanted to reverse time. An itchy flush crawled up his neck. Anna
wasn't supposed to die. He'd been aiming for her sister, but everything
had happened so fast. They were supposed to be together forever, and
now this had happened, and he couldn't figure out what had gone wrong.

He plucked out the suction apparatus
and threw it on the floor. He removed the retractor, the forceps, IV lines,
the gauze swabs. He picked up the clipboard and glanced at the Authorization
for Disposal of Body form. He scanned the pathology request. This was
not the way it was supposed to be. He noticed the stamped tag on her ankle
and touched the coolness of her skin. Her leg was soft and pliable. He
compared their hands. Anna's fingers were like his-only smaller and more
delicate.

He took shallow, wheezing breaths,
then retreated into some crawly corner of his brain where he couldn't
see Anna anymore, only his dead mother. Roy's mother had died when he
was eight years old, from alcohol poisoning and five different medications.
He'd grown up in the deserts of the Southwest, a lonely, troubled boy.
Linda
Hildreth
would show Roy affection only
during those occasions when the two of them would discuss her symptoms
together. The rest of the time she'd be semiconscious.

His father started out as a medical
equipment salesman but soon stumbled upon the bone trade when he met
an unscrupulous doctor willing to off-load body parts. Mercenary morticians
and photojournalists soon followed. Benny
Hildreth
would go to the ends of the earth for a snip of celebrity hair, a dead president's
bone fragments or a rare photograph of Lee Harvey Oswald's rotting head.
He bought and sold gruesome crime scene pictures from European police
archives and rare collectibles from the Holocaust. Roy wasn't supposed
to tell anyone what his father did for a living. He could only say he was
in the medical profession. Roy wasn't supposed to go into his father's
office, either; but one day he snuck in and raided the forbidden file cabinets,
snagged a file at random and smuggled it up to his room. That night, he read
the whole thing. Inside were black-and-white photographs of a woman
who'd decapitated her husband. There was a newspaper clipping accompanying
the pictures that described the gory details. On June 12, 1943, after
stabbing her husband repeatedly in the chest,
Cissy
Cregg
laid his face on the kitchen breadboard
and hacked off his head. She did this because she thought he was the devil.
She even took pictures of herself killing the devil, arranging each
shot with great care, since she wanted to document it for her minister.
The minister, of course, had called the police immediately.

After his mother had died, Roy
started to accompany his father on his cross-country trips. Posing as a
medical equipment salesman, his father would have access to all sorts
of places other people could never get into. The doctors who sold him
this stuff, especially in Los Angeles and New York City, always wanted
to meet far away from the hospital. They picked tacky all-night diners or
burger joints on the seedy side of town to meet clandestinely in, and
Roy loved the wisecracking waitresses and exaggerated claims of Best
Burgers in the Universe! The men who met with his father in these places
always looked uncomfortable to find Roy sitting there, but his father
would say, "Don't worry about him." The men would turn red and
glance over their shoulders, as if they were doing something bad.

Sometimes when people came to the
house to buy something, Roy would listen at the door. Before his father
showed them anything, he would say, "What I'm about to show you could
cause lasting emotional distress, so I'm going to have to ask you… do
you hereby swear that you will not hold me responsible for any of the
things that may occur as a result of your viewing these photos and collectibles?"
And the person would say "I do," just like in a wedding ceremony.

Back in the hospital morgue, Roy kicked
a swivel caster, disturbing the cart, then staggered to one knee. He touched
his face and noticed there was a strange wetness on his cheek. He looked
at his wet fingers while heavy sobs erupted from his lungs. Where were
these animal sounds coming from? Anna's arm dropped off the cart and slapped
him gently in the face. It frightened him. He took her cold hand and gave
in to another uncontrolled outburst. Now that she was gone, would the
sun ever rise again? Or would this be the end of the world forever? She
wasn't supposed to die. He laced his fingers through hers and felt a stabbing
pain in his left arm. It was bandaged with his T-shirt, and the bleeding
had finally stopped. The wound wasn't serious. He would survive. Why
hadn't Anna?

Now he heard footsteps approaching
and struggled to his feet. Somebody was in the outer office. The police
would be looking for him. Roy knew the ins and outs of medical institutions.
He knew exactly what to do. He glanced around the room and spotted the stainless-steel
door behind which the dead bodies were stored. He snatched a pair of
surgical pliers and a skull chisel from an instrument tray, then checked
the clipboard for the body release schedule. He found the body tag number
for the next release and, inching off his sneakers, walked barefoot into
the refrigerated room.

Thirty-year old slacker Chuck
Dozoretz
worked for Callaghan Funeral Homes and was
used to dead bodies by now. Nothing fazed him, except for this heat. It
was hot all over. "Once the sun goes down, shouldn't the temperature
go down with it?" he complained as he entered the morgue through
the loading bay. "Is that too much to ask?"

The only employee inside the
morgue tonight wasn't young, he wasn't old, he was just Kent the Morgue
Tech. Ageless Kent was a zero in the personality department.

"What's that on your
chin?" Chuck asked him.

"I'm growing a goatee."

"You don't say? Trying to butch
yourself up for your girlfriend, huh?"

Kent took the clipboard off the
wall and handed it to him. "Sign at the bottom."

"Hey, if I was a girl, I'd do
you." Chuck signed with a flourish. "How about those Lakers,
huh?"

"Go, Lakers." Kent tore
off a copy of the signed release form and handed it to Chuck, who folded
it and put it in his pocket.

"I'm in a real bad mood,"
Chuck admitted. "My boss informed me today that I don't have a winning
attitude. Can you believe that?"

"A can-do attitude?"

"Exactly. A can-do attitude.
Hello? I work for a funeral home. How much of a winning attitude do you
need? But hey, you
gotta
pay the rent."

"Rent doesn't go away."
Kent wore the kind of cheap cologne that smelled like an electrical fire.
He put the clipboard back on the wall, and Chuck followed him into the refrigerated
room where the dead bodies were stored.

"So I decided okay, I'm getting
drunk tonight. That's why I'm in such a hurry." He looked at his watch.
"It's closing in on beer-thirty."

Kent checked the body-bag tags and
slid one of the stainless-steel trays out.

Through the opaque plastic, Chuck
could see the corpse's feet and hands, the ghostly outline of a head.
"Pyramid Snowcap ale," he said. "Great mahogany color.
What's your brew, Kent?"

The prick didn't answer him.
"Ready?" Kent said, and together they lifted the body onto the
lightweight aluminum transporter cart. "He's all yours."

Chuck didn't want to leave the refrigerated
room just yet. It was so frosty in here you could see your own breath.
"Later, dude." He pushed the cart back down the hallway toward
the loading dock, where he'd parked the hearse.

"Up you go." He loaded
the body into the back of the wagon, fished out his keys and slipped in behind
the wheel of the hearse. How depressingly predictable his life was. He
paused to comb his thinning brown hair with his sweaty fingers, then started
the engine. The CD player burst to life. The speakers throbbed, the bass
line pounded, and Chuck backed out of the reserved space and drove
away.

Tully went tumbling down the stairwell
until he came to the ground floor, where he smashed through a series
of doors and flashed his badge at the startled orderlies. "Which
way's the morgue?"

They pointed him in the right direction,
and he sprinted down the eastern corridor, then punched through another
fire door before taking a flight of stairs down. The morgue was right in
front of him now. He paused to slow his racing heart, then went inside.
"Hello7'

In the silence that followed, he
thought he could detect the ghostly echoes of past activity-the clink of
a steel scalpel being dropped on a tray, the sucking sound of internal
organs being pulled out of a body cavity. It smelled awful down here, like
burnt rubber and disinfectant. "Hello?"

Silence.

His calves had knotted up. He walked
past modular storage racks full of surgical equipment and a large scale
used for weighing dead bodies, then turned the corner and stopped. Anna
Hubbard's body lay naked on an autopsy table. His first instinct was to cover
her up. He looked around for a sheet or a towel.

"Can I help you, sir?"

He spun around. A pasty-faced young
man stood in the doorway with his arms crossed. He had materialized out
of nowhere, setting Tully's heart racing again.

"Detective Tully, LAPD."
He flashed his badge. "I'm looking for a white guy, six foot three,
black hair, bad complexion. You seen him?"

The morgue tech shook his head.

"Any activity recently?"

"Yeah, I just released a body
to Callaghan Funeral Homes."

"When was this?"

"Five minutes ago."

"Which way?"

"Out the loading dock."
He pointed. "That way."

Rattling off a string of obscenities,
Tully flew across the room and ran into a tray of instruments. "Shit."
The steel instruments went clattering across the floor.

He raced out the back door and stood
on the loading dock, staring into the vast parking lot. Hundreds of cars
gleamed beneath the sodium-vapor lights. The heat was suffocating.
The smog hung in the air like curtains. He radioed the two cops staking
out Jack's car. "Any activity?" he asked.

"No sign of him yet, Detective."

"Did you see a hearse pull
out of the parking lot?"

"Yeah, a few minutes
ago."

"Go after it."

"Why?"

"Just go. I'm right behind
you."

Roy could barely breathe. He was
lying on his back inside the plastic body bag, loud rock music reverberating
throughout the floor pan of the hearse. He could feel the bass line pounding
up his spine as he wormed his index finger into the zipper seam of the
body bag and pushed it down a few inches. Just enough for him to squeeze
his hand through. He felt around for the pull tab, then slid the zipper all
the way down and took a deep breath. He could feel the brakes squeezing
against the brake drum as the hearse came to a stop. While the driver
distracted himself with a little off-key yodeling, Roy took the opportunity
to crawl out of the body bag, open the
liftgate
and hop out of the hearse.

His bare feet hit the warm asphalt
as he ran across the road. He was in a residential area-not a great one-the surrounding city blocks shabby and anonymous. The hearse was stopped
at a red light, and the driver continued to rock his head to the beat and
wait for the light to change. He didn't even realize his cargo was gone.

Roy's left arm throbbed, and he
cradled it close to his body, then picked a direction and ran full out,
legs pumping. Somewhere in the distance, a mutt was barking at a phantom.
He turned down a commercial street and jogged past a closed-for-the-night
fruit stand and a shoe repair shop. A cloud of steam whistled out of the
Laundromat vent, wisps of smoke dissipating into the moonlit air.
Only the Chinese restaurant was open at this hour, emitting an intoxicating
aroma through its windows and doors. There were no customers, just a
bunch of tired-looking cooks and waiters clustered around the wobbly tables.
To the left of the restaurant was an alleyway.

Roy darted around back into a narrow
parking lot, where four cars stood in front of a smelly Dumpster, the
buckling pavement strewn with broken glass. A fishy smell saturated the
air. Roy paused for a moment. These cars were no good. Too new. He needed
something vintage. He continued up the alleyway, then took a left onto
a quiet residential street full of darkened houses and made his way
east. He eyeballed the driveways. There. The gold Chevy Impala, circa
1975.

Roy followed the concrete walkway
around behind an aging ranch-style house, then paused at the hummingbird
feeder strung from a gutter with a coat hanger. It contained sugar water,
but the ruby-throated hummers had long since stopped coming. Instead,
a troop of metallic-green beetles marched through a crack in the basin
to sip at the artificial nectar.

He moved into the depthless shadows
of the broad overhanging eaves behind the house and peeked into a rear
window. He could see a drab room, small by anyone's standards, full of
nondescript furniture carelessly arranged-a desk with a pockmarked
surface, a pink-shaded lamp, a broken swivel chair. Everything had
lost its luster. His throat grew parched, and his scalp tightened. This
was one of those places that made him almost physically ill.

He moved out of the shadows and nearly
tripped over a barbecue grill, where two black lumps were stuck to the
grillwork. Gut grenades. On the back porch was an American flag on a pole,
looking sad around the edges. The car was parked in the gravel driveway.
Roy liked Chevy Impalas best. This one was big and roomy with a gold-leaf
paint job, dual exhaust, a CD player with a punch amp, 56K on the odometer.
Not bad. His hair lifted in a humid breeze as he moved toward it and opened
the hood.

Just as he'd suspected. A chromed-out
V-8 engine. He followed the plug wires to the red coil wires, then ran a
wire from the positive side of the battery to the coil, giving power
to the dash. Next he located the starter solenoid, which on most GM cars
was on the starter. Using the surgical pliers he'd ripped off from the morgue,
Roy crossed the small wire with the positive battery cable, and the engine
roared to life.

He slammed the hood shut, then
went over to the driver's side door, where he jammed the skull chisel info
the keyhole. He worked the chisel hard until it broke the pins, allowing
him to turn the chamber and open the door. He got in behind the wheel and
adjusted the rearview mirror. Then he unlocked the steering column
using the flat blade of the skull chisel, shifted the car into reverse
and backed out of the driveway.

Upstairs in the house, a light blinked
on. "Hey!" Somebody stuck their head out the window.
"What's going on down there?"

Roy nosed onto the quiet street
and sped away.