Thumbprint (4 page)

When her vision cleared, she found Anshaw sitting above her, on the edge of her father's bed. He had lost weight, and he hadn't any to lose. His eyes peeked out, too bright at the bottoms of deep hollows, moonlight reflected in the water at the bottom of a long well. In his lap was a bag, like an old-fashioned doctor's case, the leather pebbled and handsome.

“I observed you while you were running this morning,” he began, without preamble. Using the word “observed,” like he would in a report on enemy troop movements. “Who were you signaling when you were up on the hill?”

“Anshaw,” Mal said. “What are you talking about, Anshaw? What is this?”

“You're staying in shape. You're still a soldier. I tried to follow you, but you outran me on the hill this morning. When you were on the crest, I saw you flashing a light. Two long flashes, one short, two long. You signaled someone. Tell me who.”

At first she didn't know what he was talking about; then she did. Her canteen. Her canteen had flashed in the sunlight when she tipped it up to drink. She opened her mouth to reply, but before she could, he lowered himself to one knee beside her. Anshaw unbuckled his bag and dumped the contents onto the floor. He had a collection of tools: a pair of heavy-duty shears, a Taser, a hammer, a hacksaw, a portable vise. Mixed in with the tools were five or six human thumbs.

Some of the thumbs were thick and blunt and male, and some were white and slender and female, and some were too shriveled and darkened with rot to provide much of any clue about the person they had belonged to. Each thumb ended in a lump of bone and sinew. The inside of the bag had a smell, a sickly-sweet, almost floral stink of corruption.

Anshaw selected the heavy-duty shears.

“You went up the hill and signaled someone this morning. And tonight you came back with a lot of money. I looked in the envelope while you were in the shower. So you signaled for a meeting, and at the meeting you were paid for intel. Who did you meet? CIA?”

“I went to work. At the bar. You know where I work. You followed me there.”

“Five hundred dollars. Is that supposed to be tips?”

She didn't have a reply. She couldn't think. She was looking at the thumbs mixed in with his mess of tools.

He followed her gaze, prodded a blackened and shriveled thumb with the blade of the shears. The only identifiable feature remaining on the thumb was a twisted, silvery fishhook scar.

“Plough,” Anshaw said. “He had helicopters doing flyovers of my house. They'd fly over once or twice a day. They used different kinds of helicopters on different days to try and keep me from putting two and two together. But I knew what they were up to. I started watching them from the kitchen with my field glasses, and one day I saw Plough at the controls of a radio-station traffic copter. I didn't even know he knew how to pilot a bird until then. He was wearing a black helmet and sunglasses, but I still recognized him.”

As Anshaw spoke, Mal remembered Corporal Plough trying to open a bottle of Red Stripe with the blade of his bayonet and the knife slipping, catching him across the thumb, Plough sucking on it and saying around his thumb,
Motherfuck, someone open this for me.

“No, Anshaw. It wasn't him. It was just someone who looked like him. If he could fly a helicopter, they would've had him piloting Apaches over there.”

“Plough admitted it. Not at first. At first he lied. But eventually he told me everything, that he was in the helicopter, that they'd been keeping me under surveillance ever since I came home.” Anshaw moved the tip of the shears to point at another thumb, shriveled and brown, with the texture and appearance of a dried mushroom. “This was his wife. She admitted it, too. They were putting dope in my water to make me sluggish and stupid. Sometimes I'd be driving home and I'd forget what my own house looked like. I'd spend twenty minutes cruising around my development before I realized I'd gone by my place twice.”

He paused, moved the tip of the shears to a fresher thumb, a woman's, the nail painted red. “She followed me into a supermarket in Poughkeepsie. This was while I was on my way north, to see you. To see if you had been compromised. This woman in the supermarket, she followed me aisle to aisle, always whispering on her cell phone. Pretending not to look at me. Then, later, I went into a Chinese place and noticed her parked across the street, still on the phone. She was the toughest to get solid information out of. I almost thought I was wrong about her. She told me she was a first-grade teacher. She told me she didn't even know my name and that she wasn't following me. I almost believed her. She had a photo in her purse, of her sitting on the grass with a bunch of little kids. But it was tricked up. They used Photoshop to stick her in that picture. I even got her to admit it in the end.”

“Plough told you he could fly helicopters so you wouldn't keep hurting him. The first-grade teacher told you the photo was faked to make you stop. People will tell you anything if you hurt them badly enough. You're having some kind of break with reality, Anshaw. You don't know what's true anymore.”

“You
would
say that. You're part of it. Part of the plan to make me crazy, make me kill myself. I thought the thumbprints would startle you into getting in contact with your handler, and they did. You went straight to the hills to send him a signal. To let him know I was close. But where's your backup now?”

“I don't have backup. I don't have a handler.”

“We were friends, Mal. You got me through the worst parts of being over there, when I thought I was going crazy. I hate that I have to do this to you. But I need to know who you were signaling. And you're going to tell. Who did you signal, Mal?”

“No one,” she said, trying to squirm away from him on her belly.

He grabbed her hair and wrapped it around his fist, to keep her from going anywhere. She felt a tearing along her scalp. He pinned her with a knee in her back. She went still, head turned, right cheek mashed against the nubbly rug on the floor.

“I didn't know you were married. I didn't notice the ring until just tonight. Is he coming home? Is he part of it? Tell me.” Tapping the ring on her finger with the blade of the shears.

Mal's face was turned so she was staring under the bed at the case with her M4 and bayonet in it. She had left the clasps undone.

Anshaw clubbed her in the back of the head, at the base of the skull, with the handles of the shears. The world snapped out of focus, went to a soft blur, and then slowly her vision cleared and details regained their sharpness, until at last she was seeing the case under the bed again, not a foot away from her, the silver clasps hanging loose.

“Tell me, Mal. Tell me the truth now.”

In Iraq the Fedayeen had escaped the handcuffs after his thumbs were broken. Cuffs wouldn't hold a person whose thumb could move in any direction . . . or someone who didn't have a thumb at all.

Mal felt herself growing calm. Her panic was like static on a radio, and she had just found the volume, was slowly dialing it down. He would not begin with the shears, of course, but would work his way up to them. He meant to beat her first. At least. She drew a long, surprisingly steady breath. Mal felt almost as if she were back on Hatchet Hill, climbing with all the will and strength she had in her, for the cold, open blue of the sky.

“I'm not married,” she said. “I stole this wedding ring off a drunk. I was just wearing it because I like it.”

He laughed: a bitter, ugly sound. “That isn't even a good lie.”

And another breath, filling her chest with air, expanding her lungs to their limit. He was about to start hurting her. He would force her to talk, to give him information, to tell him what he wanted to hear. She was ready. She was not afraid of being pushed to the edge of what could be endured. She had a high tolerance for pain, and her bayonet was in arm's reach, if only she had an arm to reach.

“It's the truth,” she said, and with that, PFC Mallory Grennan began her confession.

 

Read on for an excerpt from Joe Hill's new novel,

NOS4A2

on sale April 30, 2013

 

Presbyterian Hospital, Denver

Spring 2013

W
HEN 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 motherfucker 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 every 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 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.