NOS4A2(63)

After six hours in the car, he felt no panic, only a kind of numb wonder. On some level he had come to view his situation as almost natural. Sooner or later a black car came for everyone. It came and took you away from your loved ones, and you never got to go back.

Perry Como warned Nathan in a chipper tone of voice that it was beginning to look a lot like Christmas.

“No shit, Perry,” Nathan said, and then, in a hoarse, cracking voice, he began to sing as he thumped on the driver’s-side door. He sang Bob Seger; sang about the old-time rock ’n’ roll, the type believed to soothe the soul. He belted it out as loud as he could, one verse and another, and when he fell quiet, he found the radio had shut itself off.

Well. That was a Christmas gift right there. Last one he’d ever get, he thought.


NEXT TIME HE OPENED HIS EYES, HIS FACE WAS PRESSED TO THE STEERING wheel and the car was idling, and there was so much light it hurt his eyes.

He squinted, the world a bright blue blur. Not at any time in the night had his head hurt as bad as it hurt now. The ache in his skull was so intense he thought he might vomit. It was behind his eyes, a somehow yellow glare of pain. All that sunlight was unfair.

He blinked at tears, and the world sharpened, began to come into focus.

A fat man in a gasmask and fatigues stared through the driver’s-side window at him, peering in past the smeared bloody handprints on the glass. It was an old gasmask, WWII era or thereabouts, a kind of mustardy green.

“Who the f*ck are you?” Nathan asked.

The fat man seemed to be jiggling up and down. Nathan was unable to see the guy’s face but thought he was bouncing on his toes with excitement.

The lock on the driver’s-side door shot up with a loud, steely bang.

The fat man had something in one hand, a cylinder—it looked like an aerosol can. GINGERSNAP SPICE AIR FRESHENER, it said on the side and showed an old-fashioned painting of a cheerful mommy type pulling a pan of gingerbread men out of the oven.

“Where am I?” Nathan Demeter asked. “Where the hell is this?”

The Gasmask Man twisted the latch and opened the door onto the fragrant spring morning.

“This is where you get out,” he said.





St. Luke’s Medical Center, Denver


WHEN SOMEONE INTERESTING WAS DEAD, HICKS ALWAYS TOOK A picture with them.

There had been a local news anchor, a pretty thirty-two-year-old with splendid white-blond hair and pale blue eyes, who got wasted and choked to death on her own puke. Hicks had slipped into the morgue at 1:00 A.M., pulled her out of her drawer, and sat her up. He got an arm around her and bent down to lap at her nipple, while holding out his cell phone to take a shot. He didn’t actually lick her, though. That would’ve been gross.

There was a rock star, too—a minor rock star anyway. He was the one in that band that had the hit from the Stallone movie. The rock star wasted out from cancer and in death looked like a withered old woman, with his feathery brown hair and long eyelashes and wide, somehow feminine lips. Hicks got him out of the drawer and bent his hand into devil’s horns, then leaned in and threw the horns himself, snapped a shot of them hanging out together. The rock star’s eyelids sagged, so he looked sleepy and cool.

Hicks’s girlfriend, Sasha, was the one who told him there was a famous serial killer down in the morgue. Sasha was a nurse in Pediatrics, eight floors up. She loved his photos with famous dead people; she was always the first person he e-mailed them to. Sasha thought Hicks was hilarious. She said he ought to be on The Daily Show. Hicks was fond of Sasha, too. She had a key to the pharmacy locker, and Saturday nights she’d filch them something good, a little oxy or some medical-grade coke, and on breaks they’d find an empty delivery room and she’d shimmy out of the bottoms of her loose nurse jammies and climb up into the stirrups.

Hicks had never heard of the guy, so Sasha used the computer in the nurses’ station to pull up a news story about him. The mug shot was bad enough, a bald guy with a narrow face and a mouthful of sharp, crooked teeth. His eyes were bright and round and stupid in their hollow sockets. The caption identified him as Charles Talent Manx, sent to the federal pen more than a decade before for burning some sorry motherf*cker to death in front of a dozen witnesses.

“He’s not any big deal,” Hicks said. “He just killed one dude.”

“Un-uh. He’s worse than John Wayne Stacy. He killed, like, all kinds of kids. All kinds. He had a house where he did it. He hung little angels in the trees, one for ever’ one he cut up. It’s awesome. It’s like creepy symbolism. Little Christmas angels. They called the place the Sleigh House. Get it? Do you get it, Hicks?”

“No.”

“Like he slayed ’em there? But also like Santa’s sleigh? Do you get it now?” she said.

“No.” He didn’t see what Santa had to do with a guy like Manx.

“The house got burnt down, but the ornaments are still there, hanging in the trees, like a memorial.” She tugged at the drawstring of her scrubs. “Serial killers get me hot. All I can think about is all the nasty shit I’d do to keep ’em from killing me. You go take a pic with him and e-mail it to me. And, like, tell me what you’re going to do if I don’t get naked for you.”

He didn’t see any reason to argue with that kind of logic, 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.