Down And Dirty

"Jesus, mister, what are you doing?" he asked in a strangled whisper, trying to move his throat as little as possible. "Where's the long-term storage room?"

"Over there, over that way." The janitor made little jerking motions with his eyeballs, afraid to move even a muscle.

"Go get Deadhead."

"I don't know no one with that name," the fat man pleaded, sweat beading his forehead.,

"I wasn't talking to you. I was talking to the mouse."

"O Lord." The janitor started to mumble an incoherent prayer, sure that Bre

Bre

"Anyone else on this floor?" he asked, urging the janitor up with a slight flick of his knife wrist. The janitor, catching on quickly, stood immediately.

"No one. Not now."

"No guards?"

The janitor looked as if he wanted to shake his head, but the proximity of the knife to his throat stopped him. "Don't really need them. No one's broke into the morgue for, jeez, months now."

"Okay." Bre

Bre

"It's this way," the janitor said, and Deadhead and Bre

The janitor let them into the room with his key. It was a dark, cold, depressing room with floor-to-ceiling body lockers in the walls. It was where the city kept all the corpses that no one wanted or that no one could identify, before their pauper burials.

Deadhead's jittery smile widened when they entered the room, and he hopped from foot to foot with ill-suppressed excitement.

"Help me find it!" he commanded. "Help me find it!"

"What?" Bre

"The body. Gruber's fat, cold body." He looked frantically at the lockers, capering in a macabre dance as he went along the wall.

Bre

"Say, this what you looking for?"

The docile janitor, who was preceeding Bre

"Here it is," Bre

"The body's been here a long time," Bre

"Yes, it has, yes, indeed," Deadhead said, staring at the dingy sheet that covered the body. "They pulled strings. Pulled strings to keep it here until I… until I could get out."

"Get out?"

Deadhead pulled the sheet down, exposing Gruber's face and chest. He had been a fat young man, soft and pastylooking. The expression of fear and horror pasted on his face was the worst that Bre

"Yes," Deadhead said, but he never looked up from Gruber's dead, staring eyes. " I was in prison… hospital, really." From somewhere on his person he had produced a small, shiny hacksaw. His lips twitched in incessant, spasmodic jerks, and a line of spittle ran from the corner of his mouth to drip off his chin. "For corpse abuse."

"Are we taking the body with us?" Bre

Bre

III

Bre

"How'd it go?" Whiskers asked when Bre

"Fine, I think. Deadhead had a snack."

Whiskers nodded, started the car, and pulled away from the curb. Lazy Dragon climbed from Bre

"How'd it go?" Whiskers mumbled again, glancing up into the rearview mirror as he dove.

"Lazy Dragon dropped his mouse-sculpture in his jacket pocket and nodded. 'As pla

"Great. We'd better get Deadhead to the boss while he's still digesting."

"Now that we're all buddies," Bre

Whiskers flipped off a driver who'd cut in front of them. "Well

… I suppose it'd be all right. Deadhead there," he snickered, "is an ace, sort of. He can get people's memories by eating their brains."

Bre

Whiskers nodded and gu

Bre

Whiskers shrugged. "Deadhead was in some kinda hospital. Cops caught him doing his thing with a body he'd found on the street back on Wild Card Day, and it took the lawyers a couple of months to spring him."

Bre

Because she'd lifted Kien's private diary in the early morning hours of the wildest Wild Car Day ever, Bre