“This is it. Grab that gurney there, and it’s all yours.”
Kent hesitated. The gurney, of course. He grabbed the wheeled table and pushed it parallel to the casket. Together they pulled the plywood box onto the gurney, a task made surprisingly easy by rollers on the shelf.
The girl slapped the box again. Seemed to like doing that. “There you go. Sign this, and you’re all set.”
Kent signed her release and offered a smile. “Thanks.”
She returned the smile and opened the door for him.
Halfway back to the outer door he decided it might be best if she did not watch him load the body. “What should I do with the gurney when I’m done?” he asked.
“Oh, I’ll help you.”
“No. No problem, I can handle it. I should be able to—I’ve done this enough. I’ll just shove it back through the door when I’m done.”
She smiled. “It’s okay. I don’t mind. I need to close down anyway.”
Kent thought about objecting again but decided it would only raise her curiosity. She held the door again, and he rolled the brown box into the sun. From this angle, with the truck parked below in the loading dock, he caught sight of the Iveco’s roof. And it wasn’t a pretty sight.
He jerked in shock and immediately covered by coughing hard. But his breathing was suddenly ragged and obvious. Large red words splashed across the roof of the Iveco’s box: Front Range Meat Packers.
He flung a hand toward the bottom of the truck’s roll door, hoping to draw her attention there. “Can you get the door?” If she saw the sign he might need to improvise. And he had no clue how to do that. Stealing bodies was not something he had perfected yet.
But Miss Gum-Smacker jumped to his suggestion and yanked the door up like a world-class chain-saw starter. She’d obviously done that a few times. Kent rolled the gurney down the short ramp and into the truck, gripping the ramp’s aluminum railing to steady his jitters. As long as they remained down here, she would not have a chance to see the sign. Now, when he drove off . . . that would be a different story.
It occurred to him then that the casket would not fit on the shelves designed for meat. It would have to go on the floor.
“How do you lower this?” he asked.
She stepped in and looked at him with a raised brow. “You’re asking me how to lower a gurney?”
“I usually carry ours—battery powered. All you do is push a button. But this is a new rig. It’s not outfitted properly yet.” Now,
there
was some quick thinking. Powered gurneys? There must be such a thing these days. She nodded, apparently satisfied, and lowered the contraption. Together they slid the coffin off and let it rest on the floor. Now to get her back into the warehouse without looking back.
“Here, let me help you,” he said and walked right past her to the warehouse door, which he yanked open.
She wheeled the gurney up after him and pushed it through the door. “Thanks,” she said and walked into the dim light.
“Thank you. Have a great weekend.”
“Sure. Same to you.”
Kent released the door and heard its lock engage. He glanced around and ran for the cab, trembling. What if she were to come back out?
“Hey, you forgot your clipboard.”
Only he hadn’t forgotten it. It was in his right hand, and he tossed it onto the bench seat. With a final glance back, he sprang into the truck, released the brake, and pulled out of the loading dock, his heart slamming in his chest.
He’d crossed the parking area and was pulling onto the long, snakelike drive before remembering the rear door. It was still open!
Kent screeched to a halt and ran to the back, beating back images of a shattered box strewn behind the truck. But not this day; this day the gods were smiling on him. The box remained where he’d left it, unmoved. He pulled the door closed, flooded with relief at small favors.
He pulled out of Liberty Valley’s gates, shaking like a leaf. A full city block flew by before he realized that the jerking motion under him resulted from a fully engaged parking brake. He released it and felt the truck surge forward. Now, that was a Stupid Street trick if there ever was one. He had to get control of himself here!
Two blocks later the chills of victory began their run up and down his spine. Then Kent threw back his head and yelled out loud in the musty cabin. “Yes!”
The driver in the Cadillac beside him glanced his way. He didn’t care.
“Yes, yes, yes!”
He had himself a body. A fish.
HELEN SCANNED the note again and knew it said more than it read. This fishing business was hogwash, because it didn’t bring a smile to her face as in,
Oh, good. He’s gone to catch us some trout. I love trout
. Instead, it brought a knot to her gut, as in,
Oh, my God! What’s he gone and done?
She had felt the separation all day, walking the streets of Littleton. It was a quiet day in the heavens. A sad day. The angels were mourning. She still had energy to burn, but her heart was not so light, and she found praying difficult. God seemed distracted. Or maybe
she
was distracted.
Helen had walked the same twenty-mile route five days now, stopping briefly at the hot-dog stand at Fifth and Grand each day for a drink and a quick exchange with its proprietor, Chuck. She’d suspected from the first words out of Chuck’s mouth that he was a man holed up in his religion.
Today she had helped him out of his shell.
“You walk every day, Helen?”
She’d nodded.
“How far?”
“A long way. Longer than I can count.”
“More than a mile?”
“I can count a mile, young man.”
“Longer?”
“Longer than I can count.”
He’d chuckled nervously. “Ten miles?”
She sipped at the lemonade he’d served her. “Longer.”
“Twenty?” he asked incredulous.
She shrugged. “I don’t know for sure.”
“But that’s impossible! You walk twenty miles
every
day?”
She looked right into his eyes then. “Yes, I’m an intercessor, Chuck. You know what that is, don’t you? I will walk as long as he requires me to.”
He glanced around quickly. “You mean you pray?”
“I pray, and I walk. And as long as I’m walking and praying I don’t feel strain on my legs at all.” She eyed him steadily. “How does that sound, Chuck?”
He stood there with his mouth open, possibly thinking that this kind woman he’d served over the last five days was stark-raving mad. “Sound strange? Well, there’s more, Chuck. I see things too. I walk on legs that have no business walking, and I see things.” It was the first time she had been so vocal about this business to a stranger, but she could hardly resist.
She pointed to the overcast sky and gave it a faraway look. “You see those clouds there? Or this air?” She swept her hand through the air. “Suppose you could tear away this air and expose what lay behind. What do you think you would find?”
Chuck the hot-dog man was stuck in the open-mouth, wide-eyes look. He did not answer.
“I’ll tell you what you would find. A million beings peering over the railing at the choices of one man. You would find the real game. Because it’s all about what happens on the other side, Chuck. And if you could tear the heavens apart, you would see that. All this other stuff you see with those marbles in your head are props for the real game.” She flashed him a grin and let that sink in. “At least, that’s one way of looking at it all. And I think there is a game over your soul as well, young man.”
She had left him like that, holding a hot dog in one hand with his mouth gaping as if he were ready to shove it in.
It had been the high point of the day, actually, because she knew Chuck’s life would change now. But the balance of her walk had been a somber one.
Back at home, Helen picked up the phone and called Pastor Bill at home.
“Bill Madison here.”
“He’s gone off the deep end, Bill.”
“Helen?”
“Yes.”
“What do you mean?”
“Kent’s gone off the deep end, and I smell death in the air. I think he may be in trouble.”
“Whoa. You think he may
die?
I didn’t think he
could
die in this thing.”
“I didn’t either. But there’s death in the air. And I think it’s his death, although I don’t know that. There was a lot of silence in the heavens today.”
“Then maybe you should warn him. Tell him about this. You haven’t been . . . you know . . . told not to, have you?”
“No. Not specifically. I’ve had no desire to tell him, which usually means that I shouldn’t. But I think you may be right. I think I will tell him the next time I see him.”
They let the phones rest silent for a moment.
“Helen, are you walking tomorrow?”
“Did you awake this morning, Bill?”
“What? Of course I did.”
“The answer to your question should be as obvious, don’t you think? I walk every day.”
He continued after regrouping himself. “Would you mind if I walked with you for a spell tomorrow? Before church?”
“I would like that, Pastor.”
“Good. Five o’clock?”
“Five-thirty. I sleep in on Sundays.”
IF KENT thought he could have managed it, he would have driven straight back to Denver. But his body was in no condition to pull a twenty-four-hour shift without sleeping. He had to rest somewhere. At least, that was the way he’d planned it on paper.
He pulled into Grady’s Truck Stop two hours outside of Denver, near midnight. A hundred sleeping rigs lined the graveled lot to the west of the all-night diner, and he pulled the little Iveco between two large, purring diesels. So far, so good. No flat tires, no routine pullovers, no breakdowns, no boulders from the sky. He could easily be a real driver for a mortuary, handling just one more body in a series of a hundred.
Kent locked the truck up and walked briskly toward the café. The cool night air rushed softly under the power of the towering trucks on all sides. What were the odds of being recognized in such a remote spot? He paused by the front wheel of a black International tractor-trailer and studied the diner thirty yards away. It stood there all decked out in neon like a Christmas tree. Two thoughts crossed his mind simultaneously, and they brought his pulse up to a steady thump.
The first was that the Iveco back there did not have a lock on the rear door. That had been an oversight on his part. He should have bought a padlock. A grisly wino on the prowl would find his little Iveco easy pickings. Only when the vagrant got back to his lair would he and his cohorts discover that the brown box did not contain rifles or beef or a priceless statue or any such treasure, but a cadaver. A smelly old fish. A dead body—not fit for the eating unless you were on an airplane that went down in the Andes and it was either you or the bodies.
The second thought was that entering Grady’s diner, all lit up like a Christmas tree, was starting to seem like one of those stupid mistakes a criminal from Stupid Street might make.
“Yes sir, everything was going perfect until I ran into Bill at Grady’s Diner, and he asked me what I was doing at one in the morning toting a cadaver around in a meat truck. Imagine, Bill at Grady’s Diner! Who would have possibly thought?”
Anybody with half a brain would have thought, that’s who would have thought! He should have brought his own food. Although he
was
two hours out of Denver. Who that he knew could possibly be here at midnight? But that was just the point, wasn’t it? What would
he
be doing here at midnight?
Kent slunk back into the shadows and climbed into the cab he’d made home for the last sixteen hours. He lifted a 7-Up can he’d purchased four hours earlier at the Utah border and swallowed the flat dregs in one gulp. There would be plenty of time for food and drink later. Now he needed sleep.
But sleep did not come easily. For one thing, he found himself craving a real drink. Just one quick nip to settle the nerves. Grady’s could probably oblige him with at least a six-pack of beer.
“Don’t be a fool,” he muttered and lay down on the bench seat.
It was then, parked outside of Grady’s, two hours from Denver, that the first major flaw in his plan presented itself to him like a siren in the night. He jerked upright and stared, wide eyed, out the windshield.
Helen!
Helen had moved in
after
he’d laid out the timetable. When the rest of his plan was put into play, they would question her, and that questioning rang through his head now, clear and concise—and as condemning as a judge’s gavel.
“You’re saying he left you a note stating he’s going fishing on Saturday but he never comes back? Not even on Sunday?”
“Yes, officer. As far as I can tell.”
“So he goes fishing—we know that from the neighbor who saw him—and goes straight to the office in his fishing gear thirty-six hours later, without bothering to come home. No pun intended here, but doesn’t that smell a little fishy?”
He had decided not to return for the simple reason that he had the body to contend with. He couldn’t very well drive up to his house in the meat truck. Neither could he drive around town with a body in the trunk of the Lexus for a whole day. At some point things would be smelling more than just fishy.
But that was before Helen.
An alarm went off in his head.
Stupid, stupid, stupid!
He had to get to Denver. Get home somehow.
Kent brought the truck to life and roared back to the freeway, once again bouncing on the edge of the seat like some kind of idiot.
An hour later, rumbling into the outskirts of suburban Denver, he conceded to the only plan that made sense in the morning’s wee hours. A new element of risk threatened now, but nobody ever said stealing twenty million would be light on the risk factor.
Kent slowly wound his way back to the Front Range Meat Packers compound south of 470 and entered the industrial maze of metal buildings. He killed the lights and crept forward, his eyes peeled for motion, his muscles rigid, his fingers wrapped white on the wheel.