Fear Nothing Read Online Free PDF Page B

Nevertheless, this was still not a safe place for me, and I moved quickly toward the hearse and the white van.
        The corner of the basement immediately to the left of the rollup garage door and past those two waiting vehicles was occupied by a room that I knew well. It was the cold-holding chamber, where the dead were kept until they could be transported to mortuaries.
        One terrible January night two years ago, by candlelight, my father and I had waited miserably in cold-holding more than half an hour with the body of my mother. We could not bear to leave her there alone.
        Dad would have followed her from the hospital to the mortuary and into the crematorium furnace that night-if not for his inability to abandon me. A poet and a scientist, but such similar souls.
        She had been brought from the scene of the accident by ambulance and rushed from the emergency room to surgery. She died three minutes after reaching the operating table, without regaining consciousness, even before the full extent of her injuries could be determined.
        Now the insulated door to the cold-holding chamber stood open, and as I approached it, I heard men arguing inside. In spite of their anger, they kept their voices low; an emotional note of strenuous disagreement was matched by a tone of urgency and secrecy.
        Their circumspection rather than their anger brought me to a stop 'just before I reached the doorway. In spite of the deadly fluorescent light, I stood for a moment in indecision.
        From beyond the door came a voice I recognized. Sandy Kirk said, “So who is this guy I'll be cremating?”
        Another man said, “Nobody. Just a vagrant.”
        “You should have brought him to my place, not here,” Sandy complained. “And what happens when he's missed?”
        A third man spoke, and I recognized his voice as that of one of the two orderlies who had collected my father's body from the room upstairs: “Can we for God's sake 'just move this along?”
        Suddenly certain that it was dangerous to be encumbered, I set the suitcase against the wall, freeing both hands.
        A man appeared in the doorway, but he didn't see me because he was backing across the threshold, pulling a gurney.
        The hearse was eight feet away. Before I was spotted, I slipped to it, crouching by the rear door through which cadavers were loaded.
        Peering around the fender, I could still see the entrance to the cold-holding chamber. The man backing out of that room was a stranger: late twenties, six feet, massively built, with a thick neck and a shaved head. He was wearing work shoes, blue jeans, a red-plaid flannel shirt-and one pearl earring.
        After he drew the gurney completely across the threshold, he swung it around toward the hearse, ready to push instead of pull.
        On the gurney was a corpse in an opaque, zippered vinyl bag. In the cold-holding chamber two years ago, my mother was transferred into a similar bag before being released to the mortician.
        Following the stone-bald stranger into the garage, Sandy Kirk gripped the gurney with one hand. Blocking a wheel with his left foot, he asked again, “What happens when he's missed?”
        The bald man frowned and cocked his head. The pearl his earlobe was luminous. “I told you, he was a vagrant. Everything he owned is in his backpack.”
        “So?”
        “He disappears - who's to notice or care?”
        Sandy was thirty-two and so good-looking that even his grisly occupation gave no pause to the women who pursued him. Although he was charming and less self-consciously dignified than many in his profession, he made me uneasy. His handsome features seemed to be a mask behind which was not another face but an emptiness-not as though he were a different and less morally motivated man than he pretended to be, but as though he were no man at all.
        Sandy said, “What about his hospital