by Jim Nisbet
“His money spends just like anybody else’s, don’t it?”
“Don’t it,” the other sighed. “Don’t it.”
The light left the corner where the parapet met the clerestory and swept through empty space.
“Vince,” said the second voice, “that old coon’s got these carps about thinned out.”
Vince chuckled. “Have to get him some more. Kinda fond of that old coon.”
After another moment the light went out, and the two men walked around the side of the building, talking as they went, until their voices faded.
“Bet he’d like trout better.”
“Or perch.”
“Okay. Perch.”
“Where in hell you get perch…?”
A door slammed directly behind the wall against which Stanley had flattened himself, and he realized that the two men had entered the room onto which the clerestory allowed daylight. Beyond the glass, a chair scraped on a tile floor.
Paydirt. He recognized both those voices.
When they weren’t feeding raccoons they delivered rugs.
Vince and his buddy.
He’d found the right funeral home.
This would be an excellent opportunity to telephone Inspector Corrigan. Never better. If it hadn’t been for that raccoon Stanley would have opened the clerestory window practically on top of the two thugs, and Stanley would have found the end of his trail. Next time there might not be a raccoon hanging around to save him.
What would the end of the trail mean around here?
He needn’t speculate. All he had to do was recall those photographs of Giles MacIntosh. Or what was left of him.
They should change the name of this joint, from Chippendale O’Hare to Trail’s End.
Or Chippendale O’Negative.
Har de har.
Guy could just laugh himself to death around here.
Stanley stood on the parapet wall and tiptoed back the way he had come. He took the long step down to the brick perimeter wall. He shot a glance across the street, where he could see his truck. He should get out while he could still walk. He should call Corrigan. He knew it.
He could read the name of Hop Toy’s business on the door of the truck. Even though it was in Chinese.
Then he saw a green butane lighter and a pack of cigarettes hit a polished bartop, and before the memory could roll its first reel his face burned with shame.
He turned his back on the truck and headed for the cattails.
Where the brick wall cornered, the cattails were very high. He crouched behind them and listened. Nothing. Just the wind passing through conifer boughs.
Stanley gently parted the cattails, and obtained a line of sight past the chapel building, straight across the driveway, to a sunken loading dock.
The brown van was parked there, backed up to the loading dock with its back door open. If he had seen it earlier, he would have been as certain about the true business of Chippendale O’Hare as he was when he heard Vince’s voice.
He ran along the crown of the brick wall like a rat, keeping as much of the landscaping between himself and the compound as possible.
The wall ended in a brick pilaster at the rear gate. The gate was closed and the ground outside the wall, to his left, fell away sharply to the street. If he chose to use the cover of the outside slope to cross the mouth of the drive it was doubtful he would be able to climb back inside.
A pool of light flooded the asphalt between Stanley and the loading dock. To his right and slightly behind him stood the building behind whose clerestory roof he had just been cowering. In its lower corner stood a gray metal fire door, through which Vince and his partner must have passed. The door was closed. Twenty yards in front of him, just inside the wall, the big Monterey pine swayed, creaking gently. Little else stirred. Stanley waited, breathing deeply. The cool air had a salty tang to it. He, Stanley Ahearn, about as introspective as a claw hammer, now discovered within his soul a sudden nostalgia for sea air, cool and damp and salty. He should have taken more walks on the beach, when he had the leisure.
He touched the extra clip in the lining of his jacket and thought, Fine, motherfucker; let it be the last time I taste salt air.
When the breeze picked up and the big pine began to creak and sigh he dropped off the wall, stood up, and walked across the pool of light, as casually as a man making certain his golf clubs were in the trunk of his Mercedes, ready for tomorrow’s early tee-off. When he reached the pine he stood in its shadow, its rough bark under the heel of his gun hand, the right front door of the van not ten feet away. Still he saw no one. A magnetic sign on the door panel said,
CHIPPENDALE O’HARE
Your Complete Funeral Service
Genteel & Dignified
Funerary Articles
Transport & Display
Refrigeration
Cemetery & Interment
Crematorium
Columbarium
Music & Oration
Memory Garden
** Free Estimates **
24 Hours
34 Avenida Del Fumador
Oakland
510-836-4796
‘Since 1941’
He stepped to the passenger side of the panel truck and had a look in the window. On the seat lay a second magnetic sign.
Stanley knew what it said, but he turned his head to read it anyway.
CABRINI CARPET
Sales
Installation
Service
1338 Mission St
San Francisco
415-864-2825.
The thing about magnetic signs is, they’re cheap. Why get just one?
A large garage door at the back of the loading dock was closed. A trash can stood to its left. The van was headed out, its back door stood open. Beyond the garage door was another, smaller door. Closer to Stanley, five or six narrow concrete steps led up from the asphalt to the loading dock.
He took these steps two at a time, crossed the loading dock, and tried the door.
It opened.
There was no light behind it. He went in anyway.
Closing the door behind him he pulled the pencil flashlight from his hip pocket.
The place looked very much like what Stanley would expect to find beyond any loading dock, like the warehouses of any number of places at which he daily picked up produce.
It didn’t smell like produce, though.
This loading dock had another exceptional detail.
There was a carpet on the floor.
It was a nice carpet, too. Oriental job. Fringe.
Against the far wall stood a gurney, much like those Stanley had seen during his recent stay in the hospital. This one had a couple of seat belts dangling from it. Beyond the gurney was a glass wall that looked on to a sort of control room. It would be from in there that the flame and the conveyor and other aspects of cremation would be controlled.
Stanley clicked off the flash and stood in the dark. As he grew accustomed to the darkness he could hear the distant hum of machinery. A compressor perhaps. Refrigeration.
Then he discerned a line of light. He watched it for a long time, but it didn’t move. It didn’t get bigger, and it didn’t get smaller. It was just a horizontal line of light, floating in the darkness in front of him.
Not in front of him, exactly. More like below him.
He clicked the penlight on again. To his right the beam found a concrete ramp behind a pipe railing, leading down. At the bottom of the ramp was a wide double door.
He clicked the penlight off. The sliver of light reappeared, right where the threshold of the double doors would be.
He watched the line of light as his dilating eyes allowed it to reappear, and listened. Other than the distant hum of machinery, the place was as quiet as a globe full of falling snow.
He thumbed on the penlight and followed its thin beam down the ramp. When he reached the doors he doused the penlight and listened. Nothing.
H
e pocketed the light and clicked off the safety on the pistol.
With his other hand he pushed gently at the door.
It moved. A vertical slit of light appeared before him, and the sounds of compressor motors became louder. There was a smell, too. A smell he recognized but couldn’t place. He applied his eye and the gun barrel to the slit. Nothing stirred beyond the door. It looked like a corridor, pale green and brightly lit. The door swung easily, about fourteen inches away from him. He was about to step through it when the door crashed violently backwards, throwing him down on the concrete ramp.
He lost the gun as he fell, and for some reason it didn’t go off in his face. He expected to be attacked, but nothing touched him. Something kicked the doors from the other side. The doors shivered but didn’t open.
“Oh! That was a nasty trick to pull on me. But I’ve got you now!”
Still, nothing touched Stanley. No light came on over the ramp. The doors did not open.
There were sounds of a struggle, followed by the deep laughter of a woman, and assorted kicks and thumps against the door.
The woman screamed, and fabric was torn.
“Hah!” said a man, and something was torn further. “Jezebel!”
“Monster!” she screamed. “Beast!”
As Stanley rolled away from the door he also rolled over the automatic.
“Oh, God!” shouted the woman, amid the rending of cloth.
“Mine!” screamed the man. “All mine!”
Stanley retrieved the pistol, sat up, and pointed it at the closed doors. Loud thumps and grunts sounded beyond it.
“Jesus!” the woman shouted.
“Christ!” The man responded.
The man puffed and rhythmically grunted, as if he were driving a stake with a twelve-pound mallet.
“Mother of God!” the woman screamed.
“Hippocrates!” he screamed.
As Stanley crouched toward the doors, he could smell natural gas and some kind of solvent, maybe formaldehyde or ether — strange industrial odors.
Preceded by eight inches of pistol he pushed open the door.
Sweeping the gun to his right he saw an empty corridor, with closed double doors at the far end, perhaps thirty feet away.
To his left a pair of slim rails, let into the concrete floor like railroad or trolley tracks of a narrow gauge, paralleled beneath and past him and disappeared under steel double doors at the other end of the hall a mere ten feet away. These were secured by an iron bar.
Dead center between the two rails, pinned against the bar, Green Eyes struggled. She wore a nurse’s uniform, or what was left of one. Her dark hair was in disarray, spilling over one shoulder, with a little white nurse’s cap clinging to it by dint of a single bobby pin.
The green eyes were open and looking right at Stanley. But her mouth was open, too, and she was rhythmically moaning. The sound upset Stanley deeply. Blocking most of his view of her was the bulk of a large man, draped in a white coat not unlike the uniform of a lab technician. But this man’s tweed pants were pooled around his ankles, which were encased in a pair of argyle socks. From the paired V’s of their garters the stems of two hirsute, pale legs disappeared up into the drape of the white coat. With all of his weight, with all of his energy, this monstrosity was slamming his body into that of Green Eyes. She was pinned between him and the double doors of the crematorium, the iron bar across the small of her back. Yet, far from resisting or even letting him do it, she was helping. She was reciprocating.
When Green Eyes saw the gun her eyes widened, and she faintly smiled. Then she raised her right leg, the one toward Stanley, who stood not ten feet away, and lodged her foot firmly in the small of Lab coat’s back. The coat caught on her heel so that, had he had any doubts before, Stanley could plainly see that everybody was mostly naked beneath.
Naked except, on Green Eyes’ part, a white garter belt and two torn white nylon stockings.
Torrid, thought some part of Stanley’s mind. They are filming pornography in here. But the sexual aspect of this scene commanded only part of his attention.
Equally riveting was the syringe taped to the inside of Lab Coat’s naked forearm.
“Ach!” screamed Lab Coat, raising his face toward the ceiling. “It is close!”
“Is it close?” coaxed Green Eyes, lapsing into apparent passivity despite the fervent jactitations of the man who had her pinioned against the door, while her eyes, though glazed, never left Stanley’s.
“Jah!” screamed the other. “Jah jah! It is close! Ever so close! Minutely, incrementally, Angstrom close!”
“Say when, darling,” said Green Eyes, and she moved one hand to the syringe.
So fascinated had he been by the two circles of white adhesive tape, holding the stem and the barrel of the syringe firmly to the inside of the doctor’s forearm, for the first time Stanley noticed a length of coffee-colored rubber tubing knotted around the arm, just below the biceps, and just above where the point of the needle had entered the man’s skin.
“When! When!” screamed the man, lunging against the woman with such force that the firebricked doors behind them boomed with the impact. “Now is when!”
Despite the ride she was getting Green Eyes managed, with considerable adroitness, and not taking her eyes off Stanley for so much as a second, to loose the knot in the surgical tubing, and, even from ten feet away, Stanley saw a bright trace of scarlet jet into the glass of the syringe with the abrupt suddenness of a moray eel starting after its prey.
“When,” she gasped, and “When,” the man whimpered, and Stanley could see that if, a moment ago, he had blown the spine out of this man theoretically assaulting Green Eyes, as he’d originally considered, she might have torn him, Stanley, limb from limb. For this was a consensual act he was witnessing. It would have been like a cop interrupting a fist fight between man and wife, only to have them both turn on him.
The man was grunting, huffing, laboring toward some invisible peak of ecstasy, one arm hooked under his partner’s shoulder, the other with its syringe suspended mid air, as if from an invisible subway strap, the fist opening and closing. He could barely master his voice sufficient to croak, “Now! Now my bitch, my angel, my nurse, my whore! Now Now Now…!”
And Green Eyes, clutching the forearm with both hands now, sent the plunger home, not with an abrupt stab but with a deliberate, even pressure of her thumb, a disconcerting vector, harrowing to witness, for all its thoughtfulness.
“My God!” the man screamed. “My God!” And his head rolled back between his shoulders, and his eyeballs into his head.
Green Eyes released the syringe and clasped the man’s hips to hers, taking her eyes off Stanley for the first time, closing them in fact, and closing with her shuddering partner, convulsing with him, whispering nonsense to him, stroking, encouraging, joining him in the anguish of these frantic devotionals, to which they, she and he, had obviously gone to such great lengths to achieve.
Stanley let the door swing to behind him. His gun hung unaimed at his side.
It seemed banal to think that the steel doors behind the couple led into the furnace. So the rails must lead from the furnace to the chamber wherein the bodies were prepared for cremation. In a chamber where bodies could be prepared for cremation, they could be prepared for other things.…
“Oh,” said the man, sobbing now in the woman’s arms, she stroking his hair, their clothing as if the wreckage of the cocoon from which they’d just emerged. “Jesus, Joseph and Mary…”
Before Stanley could consciously detect the absence of the door’s mass and the draft that had replaced it, tiny cool pricks arrived, nearly simultaneously, at the hollows beneath each of his earlobes.
A voice behind him, as falsetto as a child’s, said, “If you move, you’ll die.”
Chapter Twenty Two
THOSE GREEN EYES HAD FOOLED HIM AGAIN.
Even as the spent customer in the white coat sagged in her arms, Green Eyes watched Stanley.
Like a cat in a window watching a bird’s nest, she studied him. She’d used her eyes to hold Stanley while some guy with a voice like broken train wheel slipped up behind him.
She’d fooled Stanley again.
Green Eyes let her ankle fall away from the small of her partner’s back. As her dress fell with it, Stanley caught a glimpse of pale thigh and despite the circumstances felt himself momentarily blanked by loathing and desire.
He moved his head.
“Tsk,” clucked the man behind him. “There’s a hollow stainless steel no. 14 point aimed at each of your eardrums. A penetration will destroy your hearing. But you’ll never hear the sound of silence. Hello darkness hello pain… Eh? Eh?”
Oh, perfect, thought Stanley. I’m going to be Simon and Garfunkeled to death.
“But,” the helium voice continued, “there’s enough sufenta in these two syringes to enable you to walk through the fires of Hell without feeling a thing, if you get my meaning.”
Green Eyes smoothed the front of her skirt.
“I’ve never done it before,” the high voice assured him. “But if you’re up for fuel-injected audio, I’m willing to watch — get it? Get it?”
The guy was hysterical. “Take it easy,” said Stanley. “I get it.”
“So. Let’s dosey doe, down to the floor, and let that heater go.”
Stanley bent his knees slowly.
The needles followed him down.
“This is like dowsing,” said the helium voice. “Dowsing for disarmament.”
Stanley laid the pistol on the floor in front of him. The safety is still off, a little voice said inside him.
Oh, Stanley responded. All I have to do is kick backwards, catching this helium freak in the nuts and rendering his voice a full octave higher, pitch myself forward as he convulsively stabs himself in each of his wrists with the two needles intended for my eardrums, taking up the pistol as I roll, and come up one gun blazing.
He opened his hand over the pistol, as if releasing a set trap.
Still and all, he thought, with a longing look, the safety is off.
“Good boy. Now, up. Up.”
Stanley, the needles, Helium Voice—they all stood up.