First Thrills Read online

  The other cop said, “Hit her pretty good first. The black eye. Maybe it was accidental.”

  Eddie said, “Naw, the bruising needed some time to come up before he twisted her neck.”

  The other cop said, “He’s got the weight for it,” and then he walked off.

  I said, “I must be stronger than I think. Like Wolverine.”

  The detective said, “What do you mean?”

  I said, “He heals fast.” I held up my hand. “No owies.”

  The detective took my hand in his, then my other, and looked at my fingers. His hands were warm and they felt nice.

  I said, “I punched Sammy White once when he tried to put Jenny Little’s head in the toilet and it hurt my knuckles and the skin came up and Mrs. Connelly had to tape up my hands and put orange stuff on it that smelled funny and I cried. But not as loud as Sammy White.”

  The detective said, “I’ll bet.”

  He let go of my hands and said, “Not a mark, Eddie.”

  I said, “Momma said she couldn’t trust me. But she could trust me. I never took her Frank Sinatra CD or the shimmery snake shirt or the shoebox in the closet.”

  The detective said, “Shoebox? What’s in the shoebox?”

  “Momma’s tips.”

  “How many tips?”

  I held up my hands, like showing how big the fish was I caught. “About that many.”

  Eddie walked out. He came back a few minutes later and shook his head.

  “There’s no shoebox,” the detective said.

  “I guess I took that, too,” I said. “I can’t be trusted.”

  “Is that true?” the detective asked. “That you can’t be trusted?”

  “I think so. That’s what the voice in my head told me.”

  “A voice in your head told you to do this?”

  “Yeah. He’s like Jiminy Cricket. He doesn’t exist.”

  They looked at each other like when people say, “There you go.”

  I said, “But know what’s weird about it?”

  The detective was watching me closely now, with wrinkles in his forehead and his mouth a little open like I sometimes keep mine before Momma reminds me to close it. “What?” he said.

  “I have a picture of him, even though he’s just in my head.”

  The detective said, “You do?”

  “Uh-huh.” I stood up and they followed me down the hall. I went into my room and dug beneath my pillow and took out the wallet with the pretty Indian stitching on it and opened it up and there was a little driving card with Bo’s picture on it.

  I said, “I stole it from his jacket and I’m sorry.”

  The detective smiled and said, “That’s okay. You did just fine.”

  I said, “Can I have a sandwich?”

  *

  GREGG HURWITZ is the critically acclaimed, internationally best-selling author of ten thrillers, most recently They’re Watching. His books have been short-listed for best novel of the year by International Thriller Writers, nominated for the British Crime Writers’ Association’s Ian Fleming Steel Dagger, chosen as feature selections for all four major literary book clubs, honored as Book Sense Picks, and translated into seventeen languages.

  He has written screenplays for Jerry Bruckheimer Films, Paramount Studios, MGM, and ESPN, developed TV series for Warner Bros. and Lakeshore, acted as consulting producer on ABC’s V, written issues of the Wolverine, Punisher, and Foolkiller series for Marvel, and published numerous academic articles on Shakespeare. He has taught fiction writing in the USC English Department, and guest lectured for UCLA, and for Harvard in the United States and around the world. In the course of researching his thrillers, he has sneaked onto demolition ranges with Navy SEALs, swam with sharks in the Galápagos, and gone undercover into mind-control cults. For more information, visit www.gregghurwitz.net.

  CJ LYONS

  The dead guy was a skinny old fart who didn’t have the good sense to have a Do Not Resuscitate on file. He’d spend his last few years at a nursing home, decaying from a plethora of old-timers diseases. Diabetes, hypertension, strokes, kidney disease, cataracts, pneumonia, broken hip. After surviving all that, Mr. “I’ll live to be a hundred and don’t need a DNR” finally succumbed to food poisoning from the nursing home’s egg salad.

  What a way to go—covered in shit and no family left to give a damn. But the dead guy’s bad luck was just the break Andy needed.

  As an emergency medicine intern, Andy was usually assigned the most boring cases: peri-rectal abscesses, drunks who needed to detox, screaming babies with earaches. He was expected to perform all those piddling tasks that the nurses and techs were too busy for, like art gases and IV sticks and blood draws—scutwork.

  Andy was destined for greater things. Scutwork was for fools, not future chief residents.

  Yet, here he was, performing the ultimate in degrading scutwork: pushing a “death box”—the gurney equipped with a sealed steel box containing the fresh remains of a deceased patient—down to the morgue. And loving it.

  Andy had been waiting for this opportunity all night long. Thanks to the kinky Goth chick he’d met last night at Diggers, the bar across from Angels of Mercy’s cemetery.

  Syrene was her name. “Think gy-rene,” she’d told him while bending forward to rack the pool balls, giving him a glimpse of come-to-papa cleavage. “But instead of gy, you sigh.”

  Yeah, no points for intellect, but when she tilted her head to give him a full wattage glimpse of her baby blues highlighted with contact lenses to an impossibly brilliant shade, he’d found himself sighing.

  Her hair was dyed jet black except for one sapphire streak that matched her eyes. Her eyebrows, ears, nose, and tongue were pierced. Celtic knots and intertwined flowers were tattooed on her lower back, a glimpse of one thorny rose peeked up from the black lace edge of her camisole, and an intricate Hindu pattern extended from her left ring finger across the back of her hand and up under the black leather biker jacket she wore over the peek-a-boo lace camisole. Completing her outfit were a pair of skinny jeans form fitted to her curves along with some heavy-duty shit-kicking Doc Martens.

  And she was all his for the asking. Only he hadn’t had to ask—all he had to do was hint at his profession and suddenly her tongue was in his ear, her hand down his pants, and she was whispering things he’d only dreamed of.

  The rest of the night was spent at her place, time fractured by sweaty groans and moans and shrieks. He hadn’t slept at all; she’d kept at him all night and most of the day until he reported for his shift at seven P.M.

  Now at three A.M., he was wrecked, barely functioning. But it was worth it. The heavy gurney squeaked to a stop as he paused, sighing so hard it emerged as a whistle echoing from the steam pipes overhead. Man oh man, was it worth it.

  He couldn’t wait to see what she’d do for him after tonight. After he brought her the corpse.

  All she’d asked for last night, her black lipsticked mouth pursing into the cutest pout this side of Hollywood, was a glimpse at a “real live dead guy.”

  She’d do anything for that, she’d said, rubbing her body along his. “Anything you want, baby.”

  Andy pushed the gurney faster, its squeaky wheel emitting a soprano wail.

  Oh yeah, this was going to be soooo damn good.

  He turned the final corner leading to the morgue. He’d seen no one the entire journey through the tunnels—no surprise, at three A.M., security would be busy in the ER with the after-hours bar crowd. Besides, there was nothing of value to bring anyone down here.

  He punched in the code to unlock the main door to the morgue and the lights came on. Behind him, Syrene stepped forward from the shadows, wrapping her arms around his waist, her fingers greedily kneading the flesh below his bellybutton. He’d called her before he left the ER and told her how to get to the morgue. She’d made good time.

  “Is that what I think it is?” she asked, her breath hot against his neck.

  He shoved the
flat-topped gurney into the cavernous room with a single push that sent it ricocheting off an empty autopsy table. Then he turned to Syrene.

  She was all in black again, except for white eye shadow that made her look more like a corpse than the dead guy. Before he could say anything, she wrapped one leg around him and snagged his hair in her black-taloned fingers, pulling him into a kiss. The smooth roundness of her tongue stud danced along the inside of his mouth, in and out, mimicking the motion of her hips pulsing against his.

  Syrene rocked back and forth, pushing him into the room and spinning him until he had his back against the wall behind the open door. She released his hair, her fingernails biting into his flesh as they scraped down his body, until she finally untied his scrub pants and slipped her hand inside to tease him.

  She tightened her grip. Andy closed his eyes, his head banging against the door as he arched back. Just as he was about to come, right there in her palm, he smelled a curious mix of stale beer and cigars. Cold steel nudged the side of his neck.

  “Time to get to work, bi-itch,” a man’s voice sang out, accompanied by a cackle of laughter from Syrene.

  “Who the hell are you?” Andy grabbed his pants, fumbling them closed. “You can’t be down here.”

  “Oh no?” The stranger smiled, revealing gold-capped teeth with skulls chiseled into the metal. “You gonna tell me what I can and can’t do?”

  He stood a head taller than Andy’s five-ten, with muscles that screamed steroids, and was either a light-skinned black man or a dark-skinned Hispanic, Andy wasn’t sure. What he was sure about was the big, black gun in the man’s hand. Pointed at him.

  Syrene stood on her tiptoes and gave the man a languorous kiss. The man locked eyes with Andy over her head, one hand caressing her butt, his aim never wavering. Andy was trapped in the corner behind the door, nowhere to go, no choice but to watch.

  “What’s going on here?” he demanded, using the sharp tone that usually worked on nurses in the ER. “I have to get back to work.”

  Syrene broke away from the man, melding her body into his side and watching with a Cheshire grin, one black-taloned finger tapping her lips. The man shoved the gun under Andy’s chin, leveraging his head up, the gun barrel pressing against his larynx with bruising force.

  “You ain’t going nowhere, honeybear.” The man’s dark eyes dilated as he watched Andy squirm, trying to relieve the pressure on his throat.

  “Don’t hurt him, Dutch,” Syrene crooned. “We need him.”

  Dutch? The guy sure as hell didn’t look Dutch, but who was Andy to argue. Hell, Andy could only hope it wasn’t the guy’s real name—he didn’t want anyone worried about him remembering little details like that. Worrying about the gun jabbed into his throat was more than enough.

  Dutch released the pressure a microfraction. Enough for Andy to breathe and find his voice. “What do you want?”

  “Nothing you’ll miss. Just a body.”

  Andy yanked the drawstring on his scrub pants tighter and tied it into a knot. Christ, he was going to get killed by a couple of freaks who wanted to screw a corpse. “So take one, what do I care? I’m going back to work.”

  He stepped forward, trying to brush Dutch’s hand aside. No go. The arm was as rigid as a steel I-beam, not going anywhere. Just like Andy.

  “Did you bring my stuff?” Syrene asked, ignoring the standoff between the men. Ignoring Andy like he wasn’t even there, like they hadn’t spent the night and most of the day together. Guess since he wasn’t cold and dead, he hadn’t really turned her on.

  Dutch shrugged his shoulder, releasing a black messenger bag. Syrene hauled it to an autopsy table and dumped the contents. Large colorful dart shaped objects spilled out. Then she removed something shiny and dangerous looking with ribbons of steel glistening in the overhead fluorescent lights. She slid it onto her hand. It looked like a medieval gauntlet turned into a torture device.

  “I’ll need juice.” She dangled an electrical cord from her fingers.

  “Let’s get the body first.” Dutch grabbed onto Andy’s lab coat lapels and dragged him out of the corner. Andy didn’t even try to resist; it was obvious the other man could easily out-muscle him. Better to wait for an opening to escape. “Check the one he brought us.”

  Syrene laid her steel torture implement onto the table and trotted over to the gurney Andy had transported down from the ER. She seemed giddy. Probably high on something. Like this was a fricking party. Whisking the sheet off as if she was Vanna White, she tried to unlatch the body box. “I can’t open it.”

  Dutch shoved Andy forward. “You do it, Goldilocks.”

  Andy straightened and turned to face Dutch. “Stop calling me those names.”

  “I’ll call you what ever I damn well please, bitch.” Dutch didn’t bother to use the gun to bolster his menacing tone. The scowl on his face and gleam of the gold skulls flashing from his teeth were enough. That and the ripples of muscle extending down from his hunched shoulders.

  Andy didn’t answer, but instead moved to the gurney housing the corpse, wheeled it alongside an autopsy table, and undid the latch that held the top shut. Opening the lid, he swung the side of the metal box against the tabletop, where it acted as a ramp.

  Before he could reach for the body, Syrene leaned over the table and yanked the old man wrapped in sheets across to her. As she eagerly tore at the swaddled corpse, Andy swung the side of the box back into place, leaving the top of the gurney open, the large hollow box waiting its next occupant.

  Which would be him if he wasn’t careful. He glanced around the room. All the instruments that could help him, like scalpels and shears and the like, were neatly tucked away in glass-fronted cabinets on the other side of the room. The only thing useful near him was the walk in refrigerator that held the bodies awaiting examination. Maybe he could lock them inside?

  “Damn, it’s just an old fart,” Syrene said. “The cops would never buy him as you, even after we torch him.”

  “Where are the others?” Dutch asked. “Don’t you have those metal drawers like in the movies?”

  “No.” Andy walked over to the refrigerator and swung the heavy door open. A light came on automatically. “We keep them in here.”

  Dutch and Syrene joined him. Inside the refrigerator were several gurneys, each containing a body wrapped in clear plastic.

  Dutch held back, obviously not happy about being surrounded by so many dead people. But Syrene practically danced into the cooler, rummaging through the corpses like she was selecting the perfect side of beef. The expression on her face resembled the expression she’d had last night in bed with Andy, supposedly in the throes of passion.

  God, how could he have been so stupid?

  “Look, man,” he tried to reason with Dutch. “You don’t need me. Do what you want, I won’t tell. It’d mean my job if I did.”

  Dutch slanted his eyes at Andy. He thought he might have a chance, began to edge toward the exit, taking a deep breath, ready to run.

  “Found one!” Syrene chimed out, her voice bouncing off the steel walls like a rock skidding across an icy pond. “He’s a big one. I need a hand.”

  Dutch jerked his chin at Andy. Shivering not only from the cold but also from the gun muzzle at his back, Andy entered the refrigerator and helped Syrene steer a gurney out the door. The corpse was large, over six feet, and dark skinned. Dutch glanced down. “Yeah, he’ll do.” He nodded. “Strip him, sugarloo.”

  Andy scowled at the name, but began to unravel the plastic enshrouding the dead man. To his surprise, as he worked, Dutch shrugged free of his jacket and stripped his shirt off, revealing a cobra tattoo encircling his waist and chest, the snake’s head coming to rest over his left shoulder, staring back at Andy with glistening emerald green eyes. Syrene skittered around, humming an eerie cadence, plugging in her steel torture device and inserting one of the colorful darts into it.

  “It needs to look old,” Dutch said. “Can’t look fresh.”

&n
bsp; Syrene frowned at him, rolling her eyes. “I know what I’m doing.”

  She plunged the needle end of the machine into the corpse.

  It didn’t take a genius to figure out the scam. Syrene was meticulously copying Dutch’s tattoo onto the corpse. Andy was certain that dismemberment of the hands and head were soon to follow. Add a fire and the easiest way to identify the corpse would be through the ink trapped beneath the skin—ink soon to look identical to Dutch’s.

  What he wasn’t certain of was why they kept him alive—or how long that would last.

  “Why here?” he asked. “Just take him with you, do what you have to.”

  “Cops looking for me will never look here. Besides, if she messes up, we’ll need to get another—the cops have pictures of my art.”

  “I won’t mess up,” Syrene grumbled, now wearing a pair of magnifying glasses as the machine on her hand hummed.

  Cops looking for Dutch—Andy didn’t dare ask what he was wanted for. What ever it was, the man was desperate enough to add tonight’s fun and games to his list of felonies. Hopefully homicide wasn’t soon to follow.

  “You don’t need me,” Andy tried again. “And someone will come looking for me soon.”

  “That’s what’s keeping you alive. Anyone comes looking, you’re our fall guy—giving kinky sex tours of the morgue.”

  Andy didn’t care for the chuckle Syrene and Dutch shared at that. Or the fact that as soon as Syrene was done, so was he. He considered his options. The refrigerator was his best bet—he could lock them inside. There was an alarm button, but they wouldn’t use it—wouldn’t want security to come get them out. The day shift would find them in the morning, cold but no worse for the wear—they might even talk their way past the day shift. As long as it wasn’t his job on the line, he couldn’t care less.

  Okay, he had a plan. Now how to put it in motion?

  Dutch did half the work for him. Syrene had him turn away and lift his arm over his head. That put him directly in line with the empty body box on the gurney.

  “Stand up on that stool so I can see better,” she ordered, peering over the tops of her glasses, wielding the tattoo gun like it was Michelangelo’s brush. Dutch complied. Andy saw his chance.