NOS4A2(66)

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 f*ck?” he cried. “What the f*ck? 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 f*ck who had ripped his pants off had maybe poked a finger up his *, like Sasha was always threatening to do.

“Did he touch me? Did he f*cking 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 f*ck 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 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 f*ck 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.