Thumbprint: A Story Page 4

  He didn’t see any reason to argue with that kind of reasoning, and he had to make his rounds anyway. Besides, if the guy had killed lots of people, it might be worth taking a pic, to add to his collection. Hicks had already done several funny photographs, but he felt it would be good to have a snap with a serial killer, to demonstrate his darker, more serious side.

  In the elevator, alone, Hicks drew his gun on his own reflection and said, “Either this is going in your mouth or my big cock is.” Practicing his lines for Sasha.

  It was all good till his walkie-talkie went off and his uncle said, “Hey, dumb-ass, keep playing with that gun, maybe you’ll shoot yourself and we can hire someone who can actually do this fuckin’ job.”

  He had forgotten there was a camera in the elevator. Fortunately, there was no hidden microphone. Hicks pushed his .38 back into the holster and lowered his head, hoping the brim of his hat hid his face. He took ten seconds, fighting with his anger and embarrassment, then pressed the TALK button on his walkie, meaning to snap off something really fucking harsh, shut the old turd up for once. But instead all he managed was “Copy that,” in a pinched little squeak that he hated.

  His uncle Jim had gotten him the security job, glossing over Hicks’s early departure from high school and the arrest for public drunkenness. Hicks had been at the hospital for only two months and had been cited twice already, once for tardiness, once for not responding to his walkie (at the time it had been his turn in the stirrups). His uncle Jim had already said if there was a third citation, before he had a full year under his belt, they’d have to let him go.

  His uncle Jim had a spotless record, probably because all he had to do was sit in the security office for six hours a day and watch the monitors with one eye while perusing Skinamax with the other. Thirty years of watching TV, for fourteen dollars an hour and full benefits. That was what Hicks was angling for, but if he lost the security job—if he got cited again—he might have to go back to McDonald’s. That would be bad. When he signed on at the hospital, he had given up the glamour job at the drive-thru window, and he loathed the idea of starting from the bottom rung again. Even worse, it would probably be the end of Sasha, and Sasha’s key to the pharmacy locker, and all the fun they had taking turns in the stirrups. Sasha liked Hicks’s uniform; he didn’t think she’d feel the same way about a McDonald’s getup.

  Hicks reached basement level one and slouched out. When the elevator doors were closed, he turned back, grabbed his crotch, and blew a wet kiss at them.

  “Suck my balls, you homosexual fat-ass,” he said. “I bet you’d like that!”

  There wasn’t a lot of action in the basement at eleven-thirty at night. Most of the lights were off, just one bank of overhead fluorescents every fifty feet, one of the hospital’s new austerity measures. The only foot traffic was the occasional person wandering in from the parking lot across the street by way of an underground tunnel.

  Hicks’s prize possession was parked over there, a black Trans Am with zebra upholstery and blue neon lights set in the undercarriage, so when it roared down the road, it looked like a UFO right out of E.T. Something else he’d have to give up if he lost this job. No way could he make the payments flipping burgers. Sasha loved to fuck him in the Trans Am. She was crazy for animals, and the faux zebra seat covers brought out her wild side.

  Hicks thought the serial killer would be in the morgue, but it turned out he was already in the autopsy theater. One of the docs had started in on him, then abandoned him there to finish tomorrow. Hicks flipped on the lights over the tables but left the rest of the room in darkness. He pulled the curtain across the window in the door. There was no bolt, but he pushed the chock in under the door as far as it would go, to make it impossible for anyone to wander in casually.

  Whoever had been working on Charlie Manx had covered him with a sheet before going. He was the only body in the theater tonight, his gurney parked under a plaque that said HIC LOCUS EST UBI MORS GAUDET SUCCURRERE VITAE. Someday Hicks was going to Google that one, find out what the hell it meant.

  He snapped the sheet down to Manx’s ankles, had himself a look. The chest had been sawed open, then stitched back together with coarse black thread. It was a Y-shaped cut and extended all the way down to the pelvic bone. Charlie Manx’s wang was as long and skinny as a Hebrew National. He had a ghastly overbite, so his crooked brown teeth stuck out into his lower lip. His eyes were open, and he seemed to be staring at Hicks with a kind of blank fascination.

  Hicks didn’t like that much. He had seen his share of deaders, but they usually had their eyes closed. And if their eyes weren’t closed, there was a kind of milky look to them, as if something in them had curdled—life itself, perhaps. But these eyes seemed bright and alert, the eyes of the living, not the dead. They had in them an avid, birdlike curiosity. No, Hicks didn’t care for that at all.

  For the most part, however, he had no anxieties about the dead. He wasn’t scared of the dark either. He was a little scared of his uncle Jim, he worried about Sasha poking a finger up his ass (something she insisted he would like), and he had recurring nightmares about finding himself at work with no pants on, wandering the halls with his cock slapping between his thighs, people turning to stare. That was about it for fears and phobias.

  He wasn’t sure why they hadn’t put Manx back in his drawer, because it looked like they were done with the chest cavity. But when Hicks got him sat up—he propped him against the wall, with his long, skinny hands in his lap—he saw a dotted line curving around the back of his skull, drawn in Sharpie. Right. Hicks had seen in Sasha’s newspaper article that Manx had been in and out of a coma for going on six years, so naturally the docs would want to poke around in his head. Besides, who didn’t want to peek at a serial killer’s brain? There was probably a medical paper in that.

  The autopsy tools—the saw, the forceps, the rib cutters, the bone mallet—were on a wheeled steel tray by the corpse. At first Hicks thought he’d give Manx the scalpel, which looked pretty serial-killerish. But it was too small. He could tell just by looking at it that it wouldn’t show up good in the picture he snapped with his shitty camera phone.

  The bone mallet was a different story. It was a big silver hammer, with a head shaped like a brick but pointed at one end, the back edge as sharp as a meat cleaver. At the other end of the handle was a hook, what they used to dig under the edge of the skull and pull it off, like a cap from a bottle. The bone mallet was hard-core.

  Hicks took a minute to fit it into Manx’s hand. He pulled a face at the sight of Manx’s nasty-long fingernails, split at the ends and as yellow as the guy’s fuckin’ teeth. He looked like that actor from the Aliens movie, Lance Henriksen, if someone had shaved Henriksen’s head, then smashed him a couple times with the ugly stick. Manx also had thin, pinkish white, saggy tits that reminded Hicks, horribly, of what his own mother had under her bra.

  Hicks picked out the bone saw for himself and stuck an arm around Manx’s shoulders. Manx sagged, his big bald head resting against Hicks’s chest. That was all right. Now they looked like drinking buddies who’d had a few. Hicks dug his cell phone out of its holster and held it out from his body. He narrowed his eyes, struck a menacing grimace, and took the shot.

  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 a Glock being speed-fired. 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 it wasn’t his uncle Jim, 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 PANS 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 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 off all the lights—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 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 Gau’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 an expression 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 at himself 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?” Hicks cried.

  “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 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 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. He 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 and 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 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.

  About the Author

  Joe Hill is the New York Times bestselling author of the novels Horns and Heart-Shaped Box, and the prizewinning story collection 20th Century Ghosts. He is also the Eisner Award–winning writer of an ongoing comic book series, Locke & Key. His new novel, NOS4A2, will be publ
ished in May 2013. You can learn more at www.joehillfiction.com, or follow Joe on Twitter, where he goes by the inspired handle of @joe_hill.

  Visit www.AuthorTracker.com for exclusive information on your favorite HarperCollins authors.

  Also by Joe Hill

  Horns

  Heart-Shaped Box

  20th Century Ghosts (story collection)

  Locke & Key, vols. 1–5 (IDW Publishing)

  Credits

  Cover design and illustration by Adam Johnson

  Copyright

  This is a work of fiction. The characters, incidents, and dialogue are drawn from the author’s imagination and are not to be construed as real. Any resemblance to actual events or persons, living or dead, is entirely coincidental.

  “Thumbprint” copyright © 2007 by Joe Hill originally appeared in the print anthology Postscripts #10, Spring 2007, published by PS Publishing.

  “THUMBPRINT.” Copyright © 2007, 2012 by Joe Hill. Excerpt from NOS4A2 copyright © 2012 by Joe Hill. All rights reserved under International and Pan-American Copyright Conventions. By payment of the required fees, you have been granted the nonexclusive, nontransferable right to access and read the text of this e-book on-screen. No part of this text may be reproduced, transmitted, decompiled, reverse-engineered, or stored in or introduced into any information storage and retrieval system, in any form or by any means, whether electronic or mechanical, now known or hereinafter invented, without the express written permission of HarperCollins e-books.

  FIRST EDITION

  EPub Edition © NOVEMBER 2012 ISBN: 9780062252531

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