Fear Nothing

I imagined him, head cocked with curiosity, staring at my father's suitcase.
        A minute ago I had been sure that I could overpower this man. Now my confidence ebbed. Physically, I was more than his equal - but he might possess a ruthlessness that I did not.
        I didn't hear him approaching. He was on the other side of the open door, inches from me, and I became aware of him only because the rubber soles of his shoes squeaked on the porcelain tile when he crossed the threshold.
        If he came all the way inside, a confrontation was inevitable. My nerves were coiled as tight as clockwork mainsprings.
        After a disconcertingly long hesitation, the orderly switched off the lights. He pulled the door shut as he backed out of the room.
        I heard him insert a key in the lock. The dead bolt snapped into place with a sound like the hammer of a heavy-caliber revolver driving the firing pin into an empty chamber.
        I doubted that any corpses occupied the chilled morgue drawers. Mercy Hospital - in quiet Moonlight Bay - doesn't crank out the dead at the frenetic pace with which the big institutions process them in the violence-ridden cities.
        Even if breathless sleepers were nestled in all these stainless steel bunks, however, I wasn't nervous about being with them. I will one day be as dead as any resident of a graveyard-no doubt sooner than will other men of my age. The dead are merely the countrymen of my future.
        I did dread the light, and now the perfect darkness of this cool windowless room was, to me, like quenching water to a man dying of thirst. For a minute or longer I relished the absolute blackness that bathed my skin, my eyes.
        Reluctant to move, I remained beside the door, my back against the wall. I half expected the orderly to return at any moment.
        Finally I took off my sunglasses and slipped them into my shirt pocket again.
        Although I stood in blackness, through my mind spun bright pinwheels of anxious speculation.
        My father's body was in the white van. Bound for a destination that I could not guess. In the custody of people whose motivations were utterly incomprehensible to me.
        I couldn't imagine any logical reason for this bizarre corpse swap-except that the cause of Dad's death must not have been as straightforward as cancer. Yet if my father's poor dead bones could somehow incriminate someone, why wouldn't the guilty party let Sandy Kirk's crematorium destroy the evidence?
        Apparently they needed his body.
        For what ?
        A cold dew had formed inside my clenched fists, and the back of my neck was damp.
        The more I thought about the scene that I had witnessed in the garage, the less comfortable I felt in this lightless way station for the dead. These peculiar events stirred primitive fears so deep in my mind that I could not even discern their shape as they swam and circled in the murk.
        A murdered hitchhiker would be cremated in my father's place. But why kill a harmless vagrant for this purpose? Sandy could have filled the bronze memorial urn with ordinary wood ashes, and I would have been convinced that they were human. Besides, it was unlikely in the extreme that I would ever pry open the sealed urn once I received it-unlikelier still that I would submit the powdery contents for laboratory testing to determine their composition and true source.
        My thoughts seemed tangled in a tightly woven mesh. I couldn't thrash loose.
        Shakily, I withdrew the lighter from my pocket. I hesitated, listening for furtive sounds on the far side of the locked door, and then I struck a flame.
        I would not have been surprised to see an alabaster corpse silently risen from its steel sarcophagus, standing before me, face greasy with death and glimmering in the butane lambency, eyes wide but blind, mouth working to impart secrets but producing not even a whisper. No cadaver confronted me, but serpents of light and shadow slipped from the fluttering flame and purled across the steel panels, imparting an illusion of movement to the drawers, so that each receptacle appeared to be inching outward.
        Turning to the door, I discovered that to prevent anyone from being accidentally locked in the cold-holding room, the dead bolt could be disengaged from within. On this side, no key was required; the lock could be operated with a simple thumbturn.
        I eased the dead