The Morgue and Me (28 page)

She pressed Tim’s number on her phone and held it to her ear.

“Tell him to meet me,” I said.

“Where are you going?”

“The morgue.”

“
C
hris, no.”

“They’re going to do it again—just what they did to Mitch.” I had to stop it if they were going to try to cover up another murder.

“Don’t,” she said. “We’re lucky we got away; we’ve got to stay out of it now. You know what we just saw.”

“I’m going.”

I was heading to the door when she gave in. “Go into my bedroom then,” Tina said, “in the drawer of the nightstand. Just do it.”

She wasn’t trying to stop me anymore, so I went. The house got darker down the hallway to her bedroom. I flicked the light and found a rumpled bed with scarlet sheets and a jungle of curiosities that I couldn’t bother to investigate. A Dalí print hung over a black laminate nightstand. Stepping through a week’s worth of laundry, I pulled the tiny drawer open.

The handgun sat alone inside the drawer. Metallic and small, cold to the touch. I heard Tina’s muffled voice, talking to Tim, telling him she couldn’t stop me, he had to get over there now. I picked up the gun and carried it back.

Tina waved me over to the sofa. “Turn your phone on. Tim’s on his way there.” I nodded, distracted by the thing in my hand. I didn’t know the first thing about guns. Tina ejected a clip from the handle, checked it, and put it back in.

“This is the safety,” she said, showing me. “You pull this back, and then all you do is pull the trigger.”

“Hopefully not.”

“Yeah. But take it.”

 

 

The Escort rattled to a stop a block from the hospital. I didn’t want them seeing it if I’d beaten them there. I ran through the soggy air to the hospital.

Sweat was rimming the neckline of my shirt within thirty seconds. Mobley’s Oldsmobile wasn’t in the parking lot yet; I hoped that meant I had a few minutes to get down there ahead of him. I bent at the waist by the front doors and let a few sharp breaths pull through me, until I got control.

The doors were open and the lights on, but they didn’t staff the volunteer information booth this late. The morgue would be locked—I had to get the key from Dr. Sutter’s office. A candy striper walked through the lobby, carrying charts in her hand. I ducked down to a water fountain, waiting for her to pass.

“Can I help you?” she said when I pulled up.

“Which . . . uh . . . way is the emergency room?”

The question satisfied her. “Out the doors, around the building to your right.”

“Ah, thanks.” I hung there, waiting for her to pass down the hall, when an EMT van pulled up outside. Lovell’s body, probably. There was no more time to wait—I jogged back to Dr. Sutter’s office.

His door was open, but the desk drawer with the keys to the morgue was locked. I banged on it uselessly, with a sinking feeling that I wouldn’t be able to prevent another cover-up. My camera strap weighed on my shoulder—I shouldn’t have brought it with me. I had enough evidence in there to at least show that the mayor had killed Lovell, and I was putting it at risk by carrying it around with me.

It was a metal desk, an old one from the fifties or something. Dr. Sutter had a paperweight of an Irish clover on his desk. It weighed a ton, much heavier than the gun. The lip of the desk hung out over the drawer. I checked out in the hall and saw no one, then rammed the paperweight up into the lip of the desk. After a few more hits, the lip raised enough to show the small metal bar that locked the drawer in place. Dr. Sutter had a letter opener in his pen holder, a mug shaped like a brain. I slid it through the opening and the metal bar turned down easily. I had seen Dr. Sutter open that drawer plenty of times and knew right where the key to the morgue would be sitting. I took it out and headed downstairs.

 

 

I set up on Mobley’s sofa. I’d been waiting there five long minutes, the cold air freezing my T-shirt to my chest. Every once in a while I snuck a peek at the empty autopsy room through the large window looking out from Mobley’s office. It was pointless—I’d know if anybody entered. I’d be able to hear them. The gun sat on the cushion next to me. I didn’t want to touch it. I doubted if I could use it.

My cell phone rang loudly, the electronic noise banging against the hard walls of Mobley’s office. I didn’t recognize the number.

“Yeah,” I said.

“Christopher. Are you at the hospital?” Tim.

“I’m down in the morgue.” I figured Tina had told him everything. “It sounded like they were calling Mobley before.”

“You’re out of sight, right?”

“Yeah, in the office.”

“Okay, good. I’m almost there. Don’t come out. Don’t make yourself known. Just stay put, okay?”

“Yeah, okay, Tim,” I said. It was his deal now. A wash of relief came over me, and I closed my eyes.

I had just closed my phone and lain back on the sofa when I heard something at the morgue entrance. Somebody had opened the door. A second door opened and brought another wave of relief—whoever came in had gone straight into the autopsy room instead of heading back to the office.

I heard a different, harder clack of shoes. Two people.

The door to the autopsy room closed, muffling their sounds. I leaned closer to the window when their voices picked up in anger. Concentrating, I could distinguish their words.

“It’s not gonna happen again.” And then a cough. It was Dr. Mobley. I could see him in my mind, dabbing at his mouth with the handkerchief.

“Whatever you want. I’ll give you more.” The mayor. Like I thought—he’d bribed Dr. Mobley the first time, and he wanted to do it again.

“This is different,” Dr. Mobley said. He’d already come to Tim about Mitch Blaylock—he wasn’t about to fake another death certificate. I figured he was stalling, but it was funny how he’d chosen the same words as the sheriff had:
Blaylock was different.
I still didn’t know what that meant.

“Whatever you want,” the mayor said. He was almost shouting.

Mobley didn’t answer. Finally, he said, “I’m going to talk to the sheriff. You should be gone when I get back.”

I heard Dr. Mobley leave and waited for the mayor to follow him.

After a minute the door opened, and I thought he was gone. But when I looked into the autopsy room, I saw that it was Tim, entering with a severe look on his face. His eyes focused downward, against the wall; the mayor must have been sitting there. I should have ducked back down, but I couldn’t peel my eyes away.

Tim pulled a pair of handcuffs from his belt. “Mr. Mayor, I have to arrest you.”

I raised up another few inches, far enough to see the Mayor slumped against the wall. He had placed his gun on the floor. It lay alongside his leg, and I wondered if Tim could even see it there.

“No,” he said to Tim. “The sheriff ’ll talk to you. We’ll work this out.”

Tim shook his head. “I’m arresting you for murder. The sheriff can’t help with that.”

I don’t know if I saw anything snap in the mayor’s face or not, but afterward I thought I did. His hand flashed to the gun as he pushed up off the wall. Tim didn’t have time to react. He hadn’t realized how far gone the mayor was; he hadn’t prepared himself for this.

In a split second, the mayor had risen to his feet, his back turned to me. I could see Tim’s face, watching helplessly as the mayor raised the gun. I was going to watch Tim Spencer die right there in the morgue. Another fraction of a second.

The shot I fired blew a chunk of the window apart. The shards sprayed like confetti, and the mayor’s left knee buckled. I had hit him just below the shoulder. He held the gun in his right hand, not giving up, struggling to forge on. His right arm made a wide, arcing motion as he turned himself around. His eyes latched onto me as the gun traveled up to my chest.

I pulled the trigger again. Glass clinked to the floor as the Mayor clutched his ribs. Blood ran across his fingers, spilling over his knuckles. I must have hit his heart.

 

 

“C’mon, Christopher.”

It was the third or fourth time Tim had said it. Calmly, softly, trying to pull me away with gentle words. I had come into the autopsy room to see what I had done, and now the mayor’s blood was pooling around my feet. My mind was stranded in a vast nowhere.

Nurses rushed in from somewhere, and then the mayor was being lifted to a table. White coats swept past me and closed around his body, huddling over his chest, frantic with activity.

Tim’s hand closed around my arm, and I let him take me away.

He sat me on the plastic bench at the front of the hospital lobby by a dying fern. Everything turned to background noise—Tim making calls on his radio, police funneling in, red and blue lights from squad cars swirling pointlessly around the lobby. I don’t know what Tim told them, but it was enough to convince them not to arrest me.

My cell phone rang. Home. Daniel.

“Hey,” he said.

“Hey, Daniel.”

“What’s wrong?” It took him two words to sense it, and I wondered if, for the rest of my life, people would know something was off about me with my first introductory sentence.

“Nothing.”

“Mom and Dad are home. They picked me up from Julia’s. Where are you?”

“The hospital.”

“Where’d you go tonight?”

“Nowhere. I can’t talk about it. . . . Daniel?”

“Yeah.”

“Tell them I’m not coming home tonight. Tell them I’m sleeping at Tina’s.”

Tim was standing by me when I hung up the phone. “I’ll drive you,” he said.

 

 

“I’ll go to your parents’ place next and tell them everything,” Tim said as we parked at Tina’s. I nodded, though I wasn’t understanding much of anything.

Tina met us at the front door. I don’t know what we looked like, but she took a sharp breath of surprise before smoothing out, smiling weakly.

“He saved my life,” Tim said, before Tina could ask any questions. He drew her aside, whispering the bare details to her while I stood numb at the door. On his way out Tim clapped me on the back. “I might come over later, when I’ve finished for the night.”

Tina nodded. “Sure.”

“It might be real late.”

“Whenever,” she said.

PART V

W
e limped together into the living room. Her ankle wasn’t any better, but it felt like she was the one holding me up.

“Tell me,” she said when we sat on the couch.

I wanted to, but I couldn’t speak.

She stroked my arm, doing what she could. “Take your time.”

I’d slumped into her house like this before, after getting tailed coming back from the Hideaway. A little thing like that had seemed dangerous back then. For some reason, I remembered Tina badger ing me for details then, demanding the scoop while she made us hot chocolate. A small, deep part of me smiled at the memory, and it was enough to bring me back, lurching slowly to the world.

“I got to the morgue first,” I told her. “The mayor, he tried to convince Dr. Mobley to do it again, with Lovell this time. He said he’d give him anything.”

“Mobley was there?”

“Yeah, but he left quick. I thought that might be it, but the mayor stayed in the morgue. That’s when Tim came. The mayor, he still had his gun, but Tim didn’t see it. He stood up with it and I thought . . . I could see it happening . . . I didn’t even think. . . .”

“You saved him.” Tina was hugging me. I let my head fall on her shoulder, pressing into her wiry black hair. “You saved him,” she kept saying, over and over.

We stayed like that for a while, and then without a word Tina pulled me up. “C’mon, keep me company,” she said, and brought me to the kitchen.

I sat on the counter as she made grilled cheese sandwiches. The pan crackled against the bread and the smell filled her house. She made two plates up and handed me one. “Comfort food,” she said. “When all else fails.”

I managed a bite, and then my hunger kicked in and I finished the whole thing. Tina put on some music while we ate, so low I could hardly hear it. A woman, singing softly to us. Tina didn’t try to make me feel better. She didn’t give me any lines to soothe me. She didn’t pretend that my life hadn’t just changed. She was perfect.

 

 

Tim dragged himself in around three. Tina was changing the CD—we hadn’t even thought about sleeping.

“It’s a mess over there,” Tim said.

Tina shut off the stereo. “What do you mean?”

“I did what I could tonight, getting Christopher out of there and giving the whole story to the Bureau guys. I had to wait for one of them forever in Traverse City, that’s what took me so long getting here.”

“So, they know Christopher did it to protect you, right?” Tina said.

“Yeah. But now the sheriff ’s over there, and he’s trying to stay in control. It’s going to be a struggle before this gets worked out. Christopher, you’re going to have to do a lot of police interviews before this is through.”

I really only cared about one thing. “Is he alive?”

Tim shook his head. “They’re still working, but it isn’t looking good. Not at all.”

“They can’t arrest Christopher or anything, right?” Tina said.

“I’m trying to keep that from happening. But whatever happens, even if the Sheriff tries to make this look like something different, the truth is going to come out. You’re going to be okay.”

I hadn’t even thought about it—getting arrested. I drew into myself again, and only heard Tim and Tina’s conversation as background noise. They were putting together the pieces, analyzing the jigsaw puzzle that it seemed we’d put together.

The piece in the center was Mitch Blaylock, and if people ever really did find out what happened that night, it’d be easy for them to think the mayor had killed him. He’d paid Dr. Mobley off to fake his death certificate—that was clear from what the mayor had said.