by Joe Hill
He lowered the corpse and glanced at the phone. It wasn’t a great picture. Hicks had wanted to look dangerous, but the pained expression on his face suggested that Sasha had finally wiggled her pinkie up his ass after all. He was thinking about reshooting when he heard loud voices, right outside the autopsy room’s door. For one terrible moment, he thought the first voice belonged to his Uncle Jim:
“Oh, that little bastard is in for it. He has no idea—”
Hicks flung a sheet over the body, his heart going off like someone speed-shooting a Glock. Those voices had hitched up right beyond the door, and he was sure they were about to start pushing to come in. He walked halfway to the door to pull out the chock when he realized he was still holding the bone saw. He set it on the tool cart with a shaking hand.
He was already recovering by the time he paced back to the door. A second man was laughing, and the first was speaking again:
“—have all four molars yanked. They’ll gas him out with the sevoflurane, and when they smash the teeth, he won’t feel a thing. But when he wakes up, he’s gonna feel like he got fucked in the mouth with a shovel—”
Hicks didn’t know who was having his teeth removed, but once he heard a little more of the voice, he could tell that it wasn’t his Uncle Jim out in the hall, just some old bastard with a creaky old-bastard voice. He waited until he heard the two men walk away before he bent to pull the chock free. He counted to five, then slipped out. Hicks needed a drink of water and to wash his hands. He still felt a little trembly.
He took a long, soothing stroll, breathing deeply. When he finally reached the men’s room, he didn’t just need a drink, he needed to unload his bowels. Hicks took the handicapped stall for the extra leg room. While he was parked there dropping bombs, he e-mailed Sasha the photo of him and Manx together and wrote, “Bend over & drop youre pants daddee is cumming w/teh saw if u dont do what i say u crazee bitch. Wait 4 me in the room of punishmint.”
But by the time he was leaning over the sink, slurping noisily at the water, Hicks had begun to have worrisome thoughts. He had been so rattled by the sound of voices in the hallway that he could not remember if he had left the body the way he’d found it. Worse: He had a terrible idea he had left the bone mallet in Charlie Manx’s hand. If it was found there in the morning, some smart-ass doc would probably want to know why, and it was a safe bet that Uncle Jim would grill the entire staff. Hicks didn’t know if he could handle that kind of pressure.
He decided to wander back to the autopsy theater and make sure he had cleaned up properly.
He paused outside the door to peek through the window, only to discover he had left the curtains drawn. That was one thing to fix right there. Hicks eased the door in and frowned. In his haste to get out of the autopsy theater, he had switched all the lights off—not just the lights over the gurneys but also the safety lights that were always on, in the corners of the room and over the desk. The room smelled of iodine and benzaldehyde. Hicks let the door sigh shut behind him and stood isolate in the darkness.
He was running his hand across the tiled wall, feeling for the light switches, when he heard the squeak of a wheel in the dark and the gentle clink of metal on metal.
Hicks caught himself and listened and in the next moment felt someone rushing across the room at him. It was not a sound or anything he could see. It was something he felt on his skin and a sense in his eardrums, like a change in pressure. His stomach went watery and sick. He had reached out with his right hand for the light switch. Now he dropped the hand, feeling for the .38. He had it partway out when he heard something whistling at him in the darkness, and he was struck in the stomach with what felt like an aluminum baseball bat. He doubled over with a woofing sound. The gun sank back into the holster.
The club went away and came back. It caught Hicks in the left side of the head, above his ear, spun him on his heel, and dropped him. He fell straight back, out a plane and down through frozen night sky, falling and falling, and try as hard as he could to scream, he made not a sound, all the air in his lungs pounded right out of him.
WHEN ERNEST HICKS OPENED HIS EYES, THERE WAS A MAN BENT OVER him, smiling shyly. Hicks opened his mouth to ask what had happened, and then the pain flooded into his head and he turned his face and puked all over the guy’s black loafers. His stomach pumped up his dinner—General Tso’s chicken—in a pungent gush.
“I am so sorry, man,” Hicks said when he was done heaving.
“It’s okay, son,” the doc said. “Don’t try to stand. We’re going to take you up to the ER. You’ve suffered a concussion. I want to make sure you don’t have a skull fracture.”
But it was coming back to Hicks, what had happened, the man in the dark hitting him with a metal bludgeon.
“What the fuck?” he cried. “What the fuck? Is my gun . . . ? Anyone see my gun?”
The doc—his tag said SOPHER—put a hand on Hicks’s chest to prevent him from sitting up.
“I think that one’s gone, son,” said Sopher.
“Don’t try and get up, Ernie,” said Sasha, standing three feet away and staring at him with a look of something approximating horror on her face. There were a couple of other nurses standing with her, all of them looking pale and strained.
“Oh, God. Oh, my God. They stole my .38. Did they grab anything else?”
“Just your pants,” said Sopher.
“Just my— What? Fucking what?”
Hicks twisted his head to look and saw he was bare naked from the waist down, his cock out for the doc and Sasha and the other nurses to look at. Hicks thought he might vomit again. It was like the bad dream he got sometimes, the one about showing up at work with no pants on, everyone staring at him. He had the sudden, wrenching idea that the sick fuck who had ripped his pants off had maybe poked a finger up his asshole, like Sasha was always threatening to do.
“Did he touch me? Did he fucking touch me?”
“We don’t know,” the doctor said. “Probably not. He probably just didn’t want you to get up and chase him and figured you wouldn’t run after him if you were naked. It’s very possible he only took your gun because it was in your holster, on your belt.”
Although the guy hadn’t taken his shirt. He had grabbed Hicks’s windbreaker, but not his shirt.
Hicks began to cry. He farted: a wet, whistling blat. He had never felt so miserable.
“Oh, my God. Oh, my God. What the fuck is wrong with people?” Hicks cried.
Dr. Sopher shook his head. “Who knows what the guy was thinking? Maybe he was hopped up on something. Maybe he’s just some sick creep who wanted a one-of-a-kind trophy. Let the cops worry about that. I just want to focus on you.”
“Trophy?” Hicks cried, imagining his pants hung up on a wall in a picture frame.
“Yeah, I guess,” Doc Sopher said, glancing over his shoulder, across the room. “Only reason I can think why someone would want to come in here and steal the body of a famous serial killer.”
Hicks turned his head—a gong went off in his brain and filled his skull with dark reverberations—and saw that the gurney had been rolled halfway across the room and that someone had yanked the dead body right off it. He moaned again and shut his eyes.
He heard the rapid clip-clop of boot heels coming down the hallway and thought he recognized the goose-stepping gait of his Uncle Jim on the march, out from behind his desk and not happy about it. There was no logical reason to fear the man. Hicks was the victim here; he had been assaulted, for chrissake. But alone and miserable in his only refuge—the dark behind his eyelids—he felt that logic didn’t enter into it. His Uncle Jim was coming, and a third citation was coming with him, was about to fall like a silver hammer. Hicks had literally been caught with his pants down, and he saw already that at least in one sense he was never going to be stepping into those security pants again.
It was all lost, had been taken away in a moment, in the shadows of the autopsy room: the good job, the good days of Sasha and stirrups an
d treats from the pharmacy locker and funny photos with dead bodies. Even his Trans Am with the zebra upholstery was gone, although no one would know it for hours; the sick fuck who’d clubbed him senseless had helped himself to the keys and driven away in it.
Gone. Everything. All of it.
Gone off with dead old Charlie Manx and never coming back.
BAD MOTHER
DECEMBER 16, 2011–
JULY 6, 2012
Lamar Rehabilitation Center, Massachusetts
LOU BROUGHT THE BOY TO VISIT FOR AN EARLY CHRISTMAS, WHILE Vic McQueen was in rehab, doing her twenty-eight days. The tree in the rec room was made of wire and tinsel, and the three of them ate powdered doughnuts from the supermarket.
“They all crazy in here?” Wayne asked, no shyness in him, never had been any.
“They’re all drunks,” Vic said. “The crazies were in the last place.”
“So is this an improvement?”
“Upward mobility,” Lou Carmody told him. “We’re all about the upward mobility in this family.”
Haverhill
VIC WAS RELEASED A WEEK LATER, DRY FOR THE FIRST TIME IN HER adult life, and she went home to watch her mother die, to witness Linda McQueen’s heroic attempts to finish herself off.
Vic helped, bought her mom cartons of the Virginia Slims she liked and smoked them with her. Linda went on smoking even when she had only one lung left. A battered green oxygen tank stood next to the bed, the words HIGHLY FLAMMABLE printed on the side above a graphic of red flames. Linda would hold the mask to her face for a hit of air, then lower the mask and take a drag off her cigarette.
“It’s okay, innit? You aren’t worried—” Linda jerked a thumb meaningfully at the oxygen tank.
“What? That you’ll blow up my life?” Vic asked. “Too late, Mom. Beat you to it.”
Vic had not spent a day in the same house with her mother since leaving the place for good the summer she turned eighteen. She had not realized, as a child, how dark it was inside her childhood home. It stood in the shade of tall pines and received almost no natural light at all, so that even at noon you had to switch lights on to see where the hell you were going. Now it stank of cigarettes and incontinence. By the end of January, she was desperate to escape. The darkness and lack of air made her think of the laundry chute in Charlie Manx’s Sleigh House.
“We should go someplace for the summer. We could rent a place up on The Lake, like we used to.” She didn’t need to say Lake Winnipesaukee. It had always just been The Lake, as if there were no other body of water worth mentioning, in the same way The Town had always meant Boston. “I’ve got money.”
Not so much, actually. She had managed to drink up a fair portion of her earnings. Much of what she hadn’t swallowed had been devoured by legal fees or paid out to various institutions. There was still enough, though, to leave her in a better financial position than the average recovering alcoholic with tattoos and a criminal record. There would be more, too, if she could finish the next Search Engine book. Sometimes she thought she had gotten sane and sober to finish the next book, God help her. It should’ve been for her son, but it wasn’t.
Linda smiled in a sly, drowsy way that said they both knew she wasn’t going to make it to June, that she would be vacationing that summer three blocks away, in the cemetery, where her older sisters and her parents were buried. But she said, “Sure. Get your boy offa Lou, bring him along. I’d like to spend some time with that kid—if you don’t think it would ruin him.”
Vic let that one go. She was working on the eighth step of her program and was here in Haverhill to make amends. For years she had not wanted Linda to know Wayne, to be a part of his life. She took pleasure in limiting her mother’s contact with the boy, felt it was her job to protect Wayne from Linda. She wished now there had been someone to protect Wayne from herself. She had amends to make to him, too.
“You could introduce your father to his grandson while you’re at it,” Linda said. “He’s there, you know. In Dover. Not far from The Lake. Still making things go boom. I know he’d love to meet the boy.”
Vic let that one go, too. Did she need to make amends to Christopher McQueen as well? Sometimes she thought so—and then she remembered him rinsing his raw knuckles under cold water and dismissed the notion.
It rained all spring, cornering Vic inside the Haverhill house with the dying woman. Sometimes the rain fell so hard it was like being trapped inside a drum. Linda coughed fat blobs of red-specked phlegm into a rubber trough and watched the Food Network with the volume turned up too loud. Getting away—getting out—began to seem a desperate thing, a matter of survival. When Vic shut her eyes, she saw a flat reach of lake at sunset, dragonflies the size of swallows gliding over the surface of the water.
But she didn’t decide to rent a place until Lou called one night from Colorado to suggest Wayne and Vic spend the summer together.
“Kid needs his mom,” Lou said. “Don’t you think it’s time?”
“I’d like that,” she said, struggling to keep her voice level. It hurt to breathe. It had been a good three years since she and Lou had hung it up. She couldn’t stomach being loved so completely by him and doing so poorly by him in return. Had to deal herself out.
It was one thing to quit on Lou, though, and another to quit on the boy. Lou said the kid needed his mother, but Vic thought she needed Wayne more. The prospect of spending the summer with him—of starting again, taking another shot at being the mother Wayne deserved—gave Vic flashes of panic. Also flashes of brilliant, shimmering hope. She didn’t like to feel things so intensely. It reminded her of being crazy.
“You’d be okay with that? Trusting him with me? After all the shit I pulled?”
“Aw, dude,” he said. “If you’re ready to get back in the ring, he’s ready to climb in there with you.”
Vic didn’t mention to Lou that when people climbed into the ring together, it was usually to clobber the shit out of each other. Maybe it wasn’t such a bad metaphor. God knew Wayne had plenty of valid reasons for wanting to throw a few roundhouses her way. If Wayne needed a punching bag, Vic was ready to take the hits. It would be a way of making amends.
How she loved that word. She liked that it almost sounded like “amen.”
She began to hunt, feverishly, for a place to spend the summer, somewhere that would match the picture in her head. If she’d still possessed her Raleigh, she could have found her way to the perfect spot in a matter of minutes, one quick trip across the Shortaway and back. Of course, she knew now that there had never been any trips across the Shorter Way Bridge. She had learned the truth about her finding expeditions while she was in a Colorado mental hospital. Her sanity was a fragile thing, a butterfly cupped in her hands, that she carried with her everywhere, afraid of what would happen if she let it go—or got careless and crushed it.
Without the Shorter Way, Vic had to rely on Google, same as everyone else. It took her until late April to find what she wanted, a spinster’s cottage with a hundred feet of frontage, its own dock, float, and carriage house. It was all on one floor, so Linda wouldn’t have to climb any stairs. By then a part of Vic really believed that her mother was coming with them, that amends would be made. There was even a ramp around the back of the house, for Linda’s wheelchair.
The real-estate agent sent a half dozen full-page glossies, and Vic climbed up onto her mother’s bed to look at them with her.
“See the carriage house? I’ll clean it out and make an artist’s studio. I bet it smells great in there,” Vic said. “Bet it smells like hay. Like horses. I wonder why I never went through a horse phase. I thought that was mandatory for spoiled little girls.”
“Chris and me never exactly killed ourselves spoiling you, Vicki. I was afraid to. Now I don’t even think a parent can. Spoil a child, I mean. I didn’t figure nothing out until it was too late to do me any good. I never seemed to have much of a feel for parenting. I was so scared of doing the wrong thing I hardly ever
did the right thing.”
Vic tried out a few different lines in her head. You and me both was one. You did your best—which is more than I can say of myself was another. You loved me as hard as you knew how. I’d give anything to go back and love you better was a third. But she couldn’t find her voice—her throat had gone tight—and the moment passed.
“Anyway,” Linda said. “You didn’t need a horse. You had your bike. Vic McQueen’s Fast Machine. Take you farther than any horse ever could. I looked for it, you know. A couple years ago. I thought your father stuck it in the basement, and I had an idea I could give it to Wayne. Always thought it was a bike for a boy. But it was gone. Don’t know where it disappeared to.” She was quiet, her eyes half closed. Vic eased off the bed. But before she could get to the door, Linda said, “You don’t know what happened to it, do you, Vic? Your Fast Machine?”
There was something sly and dangerous in her voice.
“It’s gone,” Vic said. “That’s all I know.”
Her mother said, “I like the cottage. Your lake house. You found a good place, Vic. I knew you would. You were always good at that. At finding things.”
Vic’s arms bristled with gooseflesh.
“Get your rest, Mom,” she said, moving to the door. “I’m glad you like the place. We should go up there sometime soon. It’s ours for the summer after I sign the papers. We should break it in. Have a couple days there, just the two of us.”
“Sure,” her mother said. “We’ll stop at Terry’s Primo Subs on the way back. Get ourselves milkshakes.”
The already dim room seemed to darken briefly, as if a cloud were moving across the sun.
“Frappes,” Vic said, in a voice that was rough with emotion. “If you want a milkshake, you have to go somewhere else.”
Her mother nodded. “That’s right.”