The Face

frustration.
        “Anyway,” Corky continued, “there’s a bigger threat to your job than being caught here with me-if someone discovers you people have mistakenly penned up a living man in this place with all these dead bodies.”
        “Are you wired on something?”
        “I already told you on the phone, a few minutes ago. One of these unfortunate souls is still alive.”
        “What kind of mind game is this?” Roman demanded.
        “It’s not a game. It’s true. I heard him murmuring ‘Help me, help me,’ so soft, barely loud enough to hear.”
        “Heard who?”
        “I tracked him down, peeled the shroud back from his face. He’s paralyzed. Facial muscles distorted by a stroke.”
        Hunching closer, bristling like the collection of dry sticks in a bindle of kindling, Roman insisted on eye-to-eye conversation, as if he believed the fierceness of his gaze would convey the message that his words had failed to deliver.
        Corky blithely continued: “The poor guy was probably comatose when they brought him in here, then he regained consciousness. But he’s awfully weak.”
        A crack of uncertainty breached Roman Castevet’s armor of disbelief. He broke eye contact and swept the bunks with his gaze. “Who?”
        “Over there,” Corky said brightly, indicating the back of the vault, where the light from the overhead fixture barely reached, leaving the recumbent dead shrouded in gloom as well as in white cotton cloth. [182] “Seems to me I’m saving all your jobs by alerting you to this, so you ought to fill my order for free, out of gratitude.”
        Moving toward the back of the vault, Roman said, “Which one?”
        Stepping close behind the pathologist, Corky replied, “On the left, the second from the bottom.”
        As Roman bent to peel the shroud off the face of the corpse, Corky raised his right arm, revealing the hand that until now had been concealed in the sleeve of his yellow slicker, and the ice pick in the hand. With judicious aim, great force, and utter confidence, he drove the weapon into the pathologist’s back.
        Placed with precision, an ice pick can penetrate atriums and ventricles, causing such a convulsive shock in cardiac muscle that the heart stops in an instant and forever.
        With a rustle of clothes and a quiet knockety-knock of folding limbs, Roman Castevet collapsed without a cry to the floor.
        Corky didn’t need to check for a pulse. The gaping mouth, from which no breath escaped, and the eyes, as fixed as the glass orbs in a fine work of taxidermy, confirmed the perfection of his aim.
        Preparation paid off. At home, using this same ice pick, Corky had practiced on a CPR dummy that he had stolen from the university medical school.
        If he’d needed to stab twice, three, four times, or if Roman’s heart had continued to pump for even a short while, the assault could have proved messy. For that reason, he’d worn the stainproof slicker.
        In the unlikely event that one of the vault’s properly chilled treasures sprung an unfortunate leak, the tile floor featured a large drain. Near the door, a collapsible vinyl hose on a reel was attached to a wall spigot.
        Corky knew about this janitorial equipment from the articles that he had read two years ago, when the rat scandal had made the front page. Happily, he didn’t need the hose.
        He lifted Roman into one of the empty bunks along the back wall of the vault, where the shadows served his scheme.
        [183] From a deep inner pocket of his slicker, he withdrew the sheet that earlier he’d purchased in a department store at the mall. He draped the sheet over Roman, being careful to cover him entirely, for he needed to conceal both the identity of the corpse and the fact that, unlike the others here, it was fully clothed.
        Because death had been instantaneous and the wound had been minute, no blood seeped forth to stain the sheet and thus call attention to the freshness of this carcass.
        In a day or two, or three, Roman would most likely be found by a morgue employee taking inventory or withdrawing a cadaver for an overdue autopsy. Another front-page story for the medical examiner.
        Corky regretted having to kill a man like Roman Castevet. As a good Satanist and a committed anarchist, the pathologist had served well in the campaign to destabilize the social order and hasten its