Morgue Drawer Four Read Free Page A

reporting into it that the accident victim was dead.
    Now wait just a second, I thought, that guy is totally exaggerating. He’s welcome to pretend like he’s in charge if he thinks he’ll impress women that way, but there have got to be limits, thank you very much. Plus, his theatrical performance wasn’t even resulting in the fairer sex throwing themselves at him, sobbing. The bystanders were just doing what bystanders do: standing around and staring.

     
    I don’t want to bore you with all the details, so I’ll give you just the digest version of the most important things: the police came, determined that I had fallen off the makeshift pedestrian overpass, pronounced me—as I still thought, inaccurately—dead, and called the coroner’s office.
    “Hi, Rolf,” said the short, chubby man in a dark brown duffle coat (really, I swear, he came in a duffle coat) to the uniform, as he set down his bag and checked my body for life signs. “Hi, Martin,” Rolf, the policeman, replied.
    “How long has he been here?” Duffie asked the crowd of gawkers who were now stamping their freezing feet behind the red and white cordon that had since been strung up.
    “Seventeen minutes,” answered the eager hero with paramedic training. Brownnoser.
    “Accident or foul play?” Duffie asked.
    “Unclear,” replied a guy in civilian clothes who had given the orders for where the red and white tape should be strung up, and who generally gave the impression of being the guy calling the shots.
    Policemen were scurrying around taking a thousand pictures of me, the bridge, the railing, and the bottle that had fallen out of my hand. They retraced the way I had come, measuring distances and angles, and they all looked terribly busy. Duffie—that is, Martin—knelt down next to me in the softly falling snow, studying me top to bottom, part of it actually through a magnifying glass he had pulled out of his bag. He combed every centimeter of my head, paying particularly close attention to the spot on the back of my head that had hit the plank on the wood overpass bridge, and then he crawled around with his face nearly to the ground trying to see as much as possible of the left half of my face, which I was lying on, before he finally turned me over. Then he did his examination again on my now-visible front side with the magnifying glass, and finally, finally he was through. He put the magnifying glass back into his bag, scanned around him, discovered what he was looking for, and gestured with his left hand. Two men came over, stuffed my body into my to-go box, and hauled me away.

     
    As you can well imagine, I was totally freaked out. Those near-death-experience talk show attention-seekers on TV never mentioned the whole thing taking so long. They never said a word about people coming, recording your death, coroners staring at you like an insect under a magnifying glass, getting plopped into a box and hauled off.
    Hauled off— where to? I suddenly wondered, feeling panic take over. How the hell am I supposed to find my way back into my body if I don’t know where it is? You can imagine my horror. So I whooshed over behind the two figures who had just loaded the casket containing my body into a vehicle. Fortunately, and unlike the pallbearers, I did not slip on the icy street; instead I just whooshed through the air and flashed into the vehicle. Perhaps this as well should have given me pause, but we’ve already addressed this topic. I didn’t have any time for pauses. I was just happy that I was still with my body as the vehicle started.
    I didn’t look out the window; I wasn’t particularly interested where they were taking me so long as I was just with my body. At some point they went down a ramp, and then the vehicle’s door opened; a long corridor was waiting for us, and then a door. They pulled open a stainless steel drawer and set my body inside; I wafted in afterward, of course, and then the drawer closed—and we lay in