Lee Child: First Thrills

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.”

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.

“Need more light?” He reached up to adjust the overhead operating light that was extended on a swivel.

Dutch had his back to them and never saw the blow coming. Andy smashed the heavy, metal-rimmed light into the back of Dutch’s head. He followed through with a tackle to the waist, toppling the larger man facedown into the gaping steel box. The gun flew free, sliding across the floor and under a cabinet.

Dutch shouted a curse, but it was muffled as Andy slammed the lid shut and latched it.

“You bastard!” Syrene lunged at Andy with her tattoo gun. She brought it overhead and plunged it down, aiming at Andy’s face. Andy raised his arm and was instead impaled in the meaty part of his forearm. The machine whipped free of the outlet, its cord snapping through the air.

Syrene was on him, their weight hurtling against the gurney with Dutch inside, banging on the lid and shouting. They skidded across the room, crashing against the wall. She landed a knee on Andy’s inner thigh, missing vital organs but still painful, and scratched his neck and arm. Andy tried to grab her but it was like wrestling a rabid squirrel, all claws and writhing limbs.

Finally, he grabbed the electric cord and wrapped it around her neck-not tight enough to strangle her but it got her attention. He doubled over, heaving in a breath, then yanked the tattoo gun out of his arm.

“Let him out,” she whimpered, trying to lunge past him to reach the latch on the box. He hauled her back. “He’s afraid of the dark.”

“And I’m afraid of dying. You can let him out yourself-once you two are in the meat locker.” He twisted the cord in his good hand, making her yelp but not cutting off her air. He shoved his weight against the gurney and rolled it into the refrigerator, then pushed her inside as well, flinging the tattoo gun in after her.

As soon as the door was secured, he collapsed against its cold steel and slid to the floor.

“Hey, man, where you’ve been all night?” Blake Crider, one of Andy’s fellow interns, asked him when seven A.M. finally rolled around. “You hear about the popsicle people they found in the morgue?”

Andy had kept himself busy in the suture room-once he’d finished cleaning and dressing his own wounds. Wounds he hid under a long-sleeved T-shirt and his lab coat.

“What happened?” A sense of dread roiled in his gut. Had the day shift let them out? Were Syrene and Dutch going to come after him now?

“Some chick and dude were messing around, got themselves locked in the meat locker,” Blake said. “The dude suffocated-couldn’t get out of a death box.”

Dead? No one was supposed to die. Andy swallowed hard, his arm throbbing in time with his pounding pulse, and tried to ignore the trickle of guilt that chilled him from the inside out. He had no doubt Dutch would have killed him, but still, he should have called the police, should have confessed everything, should have…

“What about the girl?” Had Syrene told the cops he was the one who let her in? If so, he could kiss his future good-bye.

“That’s where it gets even freakier,” Blake continued. “The chick must have been locked in there for hours-long enough that she tattooed a note on herself.”

Andy could barely swallow past the fist-sized lump in his throat. “A note?”

“A confession. Don’t know what it said, but apparently the cops are pretty interested.”

Andy found himself nodding as if agreeing to his guilt even as he backed up a step.

“Then the chick hung herself with an electrical cord. Freaky- deaky,” Blake said, wagging his eyebrows as if any of this was funny.

It wasn’t. The two men in suits who entered the ER and were talking to the charge nurse didn’t look like they thought it was funny either. They looked dead serious as the nurse pointed to Andy. He licked his suddenly parched lips, jerked his head, searching for an escape. Shuffling his feet, he finally sighed and gave up, slouching against an empty gurney.

Blake didn’t notice the men approaching Andy, their hands reaching under their suit coats, splitting up so that he was trapped between them. No, Blake just kept on talking. “You have to admit, it was convenient as hell. I mean, they’re already right there in the morgue. Saved someone some scutwork.”