Read an Excerpt
Chapter One
Every time they got a call from the leper hospital to pick up a body Jack Delaney would feel himself coming down with the flu or something. Leo Mullen, his boss, was finally calling it to Jack's attenion. "You notice that? They phone, usually, it's one of the sisters, and a while later you get kind of a moan in vour voice. 'Oh, man, I don't know what's the matter with me. I feel kind of punk."
Jack said, "Punk, I never used the word punk in my life. When was the last time? I mean they called. Wait a minute. How many times since I been here have they called, twice?
Leo Mullen looked up from the body on the prep table. "You want me to tell you exactly? This is the fourth time I've asked you in the past almost three years now." Leo wore latex gloves and a plastic-coated disposable apron over his vest, shirt, and tie. He looked like a man all dressed up doing the dishes.
Jack Delaney stood in the open double doorway of the tiled room, about five feet from the head of the porcelain table — tilted slightly toward the sink — where Leo was preparing the body. It appeared to be a short balding man with a lot of body hair. The poor guy, his feet down at the other end pointing in at each other, a tag wired to his left big toe. Jack would never walk in here and look directly at a body. He'd take quick glances to guard against shockers, accident victims, sights that could remain vivid in your mind forever. This one seemed to be safe. Jack looked. Oh, shit. And looked away again. The guy must have been in a car wreck. He wasn't balding, he'd been scalped in front, given a sudden receding hairline through a car windshield. Jack ran ahand through his own hair. Then dropped his hand before Leo noticed and might tell him to get a haircut. He kept his eyes on Leo, who was squirting Dis-Spray, a disinfectant, into all of the guy's orifices, his nostrils, his mouth, his ears, all of his dark openings.
"All three times they phoned the times before," Leo said, "I seem to recall you came down with some kind of twenty-four-hour bug. That's all I'm saying. Am I right or wrong?"Jack said, "I've been to Carville. When I worked for the Rive's we'd go up there once or twice a year, tune the organ. One of 'em, usually Uncle Brother, would be on the console hitting notes, I'm up in the loft by the pipes, way up on a shaky ladder making the adjustments on the sleeve. I was the one with the ear."
Leo looked like he was tuning the organ of the guy on the prep table, lifting his private parts to spray down in there good, Jack watching, thinking the guy might've been proud of that set at one time. A little guy, but hung.
Jack said, "Have I mentioned I'm sick or not feeling too good?"
Leo said, "Not yet you haven't. They just called." He picked up a plastic hose attached to the sink and turned on the water. "Hold this for me, will you?"
"I can't," Jack said, "I'm not licensed."
"I won't tell on you. Come on, just keep the table rinsed. Run it off from by the incision."Jack edged in to take the hose without looking directly at the body. "There're things I'd rather do than handle a person that died of leprosy."
"Hansen's disease," Leo said. "You don't die from it, you die of something else."Jack said, "If I remember correctly, the last time Carville had a body for us you had a removal service get it."
"On account of I had three bodies in the house already, two of'em up here, and you telling me how punk you felt."
Jack said, "Hey, Leo? Bullshit. You don't want to touch a dead leper anymore'n I do."
Jack Delaney could talk this way to his boss because they were pretty good friends and because Leo was his brother-in-law, married to jack's sister, Raejeanne, and because Jack's mother lived with Leo and Raejeanne part of the year, the four or five months they spent across the lake, at Bay St. Louis, Mississippi.
Copyright ) 1999 by 1987 by Elmore Leonard
