I nodded. Then I peeked over Elroy’s shoulder, seeking out another adult if I needed to yell for help. But there wasn’t anyone around.

  “I’ve been shy my whole life,” Elroy said. “Painfully shy. Afraid to talk to people. So I watch. I listen. And I learned something about human behavior. Know what I learned?”

  I shook my head, the fear building up inside me.

  “I learned how to spot it when someone is lying.” He glanced up at my balloon. “You’re not giving that to your mommy. You’re up to something.”

  I finally found my voice. “It’s going to look strange, you talking to a little girl. Someone is going to see us.”

  “Are you afraid of me?”

  I considered the question, then told the truth.

  “Yeah.”

  Elroy popped, and his face twitched. “Just stay away from Ward C. Got it?”

  I nodded, wondering if maybe he was the Destiny Drac.

  Elroy stood up, glanced around, and then walked away.

  I watched him turn the corner as I tried to control my breathing. When Elroy was out of sight, I quickly went back to the elevator, which was still on the G floor so the doors opened immediately.

  I got in and pressed B—

  —just as Elroy came back into the hallway. I locked eyes with him as the doors were closing, and I tried to think of my next move. If he was the Destiny Drac, and he was coming back for me, he’d watch the lights and see that I went into the basement. I could stay in the elevator, then go back up, but if he pressed the call button he could get in with me.

  I probably needed to get out in the basement, then run to another elevator. I’d seen the floorplan of the hospital, and I had an eidetic memory, so I knew where the nearest elevator was.

  But Elroy was a janitor. He would know the hospital better than I do. And he had a body like a marathon runner, tall and thin with long legs. He would be fast.

  The doors opened, and I decided that hiding would be the smartest move.

  Then I pictured Mom saying, “You should have given this plan more thought.”

  Then I pictured Dad saying, “What the hell were you thinking? You’re eight!”

  Then I pictured Uncle Harry saying, “Well, she died wearing a Fatal Autonomy T-shirt, so at least her gruesome murder will get me some publicity.”

  Then I pictured Elroy waiting for the elevator, just a few meters above me.

  Then I ran.

  The basement level was bright and busy like the rest of the hospital. The floor wasn’t tiled. It was concrete. The lights were much farther apart, and one of them was flickering which made everything even scarier.

  I wasn’t smart. I was stupid. I was a stupid kid who did a stupid thing and no one even knew where I was because I didn’t even take my cell phone with me.

  Stupid stupid stupid.

  I cut left, heading for the elevator, passing up some closed doors and realizing that the hospital morgue was coming up. But I knew that I shouldn’t stop because I needed to get back to my room and get into bed and quit trying to act like a grown-up when I wasn’t a grown-up.

  And then I stopped. Right at the morgue door.

  If Elroy was chasing me, he wouldn’t think I would go into the morgue. After all, what kind of person, especially a child, would willingly go into a room full of dead bodies?

  Me. I was that kind of person.

  So I didn’t second-guess myself, and went inside.

  The mortuary was large and bright and smelled like bad things. Spoiled meat. Harsh chemicals. Rot. It made my mouth taste sour and like I was sucking pennies.

  There were metal tables for doing autopsies, and the far wall was covered in half-size refrigerator doors.

  That’s where they kept the dead people.

  There were eighteen numbered stainless steel doors, six across and three high, all with big metal handles on them. Before coming up with this dumb idea I did some Internet research on hospital mortuaries, and those refrigerators had drawers in them that the bodies lay on, which could be pulled out just like drawers in a kitchen cabinet.

  Next to the wall was a chart with names on it that matched the numbers on the doors.

  I quickly spotted Larold’s and Rita’s refrigerated compartments, and began to creep toward the drawers.

  Then I stopped.

  Rita’s door was open a crack.

  I held my breath, listening.

  I heard… sounds.

  Grunting?

  Moaning?

  Chewing?

  I let go of my balloon and realized my stupid idea was even stupider than I thought.

  What if Rita wasn’t dead? What was I supposed to do? I couldn’t fight her. I was just a kid. All I’d be doing is giving her a chance to grab me and eat me.

  Then another sound came out of the drawer.

  A voice.

  “Mmmmmmmm-mmmmmm. Yessssssssssss.”

  I hadn’t wet my pants since I was a baby, but I was so scared I came really close. I turned, and then ducked because I saw Elroy walking past the window in the morgue door.

  “Uuuhn-uuuhn-uuuhn…”

  Whatever was in Rita’s drawer was getting louder.

  I crawled over to the autopsy table, got behind it and sat down, hugging my own shoulders. My pants were wet but it was a cold wet so I think it was something goopy on the floor.

  “OH GOD!”

  The voice from Rita’s drawer was a man, and he sounded really angry.

  I started to cry, muffling my mouth with my hands.

  The noises stopped. All I could hear was the drone of the refrigerator compressor.

  Was this all my imagination?

  Maybe Elroy scared me so bad that I was freaking myself out.

  Lots of people think they see things that aren’t really there. Aliens. Bigfoot. Angels. Ghosts. Those things don’t exist, but people swear they saw them.

  The mind can play tricks. Bad eyewitness testimony was responsible for more than half of the wrongful convictions that had been discovered since DNA evidence became available. People are wrong all the time.

  But I’m usually wrong when it comes to seeing stuff.

  I can look at a room for just a few seconds, then describe it perfectly.

  My memory is great.

  And I was sure I heard something.

  So why did the sounds stop?

  I realized I was still holding my breath, so I let it out, slow and steady, keeping my eyes on Rita’s drawer.

  I didn’t hear anymore sounds.

  I needed to leave. To get back up to my hospital bed, and write a long, stern letter to my future self to never do anything stupid like this ever again.

  But I knew that if I walked away without checking that vault, I would always wonder. Always second-guess myself.

  I’d drive myself nuts replaying this scene in my head, over and over, eating away at me for the rest of my life, speculating about what was in that vault.

  I needed to look inside.

  I checked over my shoulder to make sure Elroy wasn’t at the front door, then I began to crawl toward Rita’s drawer.

  The floor was cool and a little sticky under my palms.

  At three meters away I stopped and listened.

  Nothing.

  I kept going.

  At two meters away I stopped and listened.

  Nothing.

  But the smell got worse. One time I took a bologna sandwich into the garage and got distracted with helping Dad change the brake pads on the truck and I left the sandwich on a shelf and forgot about it until three days later.

  That’s what it stank like. Moldy bologna.

  I crawled to less than a meter away. Waited.

  This time I did hear a sound.

  Coming from behind Rita’s vault door.

  Crying.

  A person crying.

  Soft, like someone was trying to hide it.

  Then the sobbing became a giggle.

  It was definitely NOT my imagination.

  I needed to run away.

  My brain kept fighting with itself, common sense and emotion screaming at me that this was dangerous and idiotic and I was nominating myself for a Darwin Award, which are annual awards for people who did such dumb stuff they died, taking themselves out of the gene pool and confirming Darwin’s theory of survival of the fittest, but logic and rational thinking told me that there are no such things as ghosts, or zombies, and that if Rita was still alive why hadn’t she gotten out of the refrigerator? Why did she sound like a man? Why make all the super-scary sounds?

  Out of all possibilities, I convinced myself that the noises were real, but also they had to be fake. Maybe someone put a tape recorder in the vault to scare co-workers. Or a remote Wi-Fi speaker.

  It couldn’t be Rita. It had to be a prank.

  And I needed to woman-up and stop being a scaredy pants and just open the freaking door and look.

  I reached out my hand—

  —stretching to pull the handle—

  —and the door began to open by itself.

  Logic/rational thinking told me maybe it was a wire, or remote control.

  My limbic system told me to get the frak out of there.

  While I tried to decide what to do, I froze.

  The door continued to open, until I could see inside the refrigerator. It was slightly higher up than my eyes, so I had to get onto my knees and stretch up my neck to get a look at—

  “Hello, Samantha.”

  A man on top of Rita’s dead body, his face covered with blood, his red mouth grinning wide and showing bits of tissue stuck in his teeth.

  Two things happened at once.

  First, I screamed long and loud.

  Second, I realized I recognized this man’s face.

  He lunged for me, two hands shooting out of the vault, one of them snatching my hair.

  I tried to twist away but his grip was too strong because he was a grown man and I was just a little kid and more than that I was a dumb little kid who should have known better but did this stupid thing anyway and OH MY GOD I CAN’T STOP SCREAMING!

  I twisted my whole body, ripping out my hair and then rolling away. I got to my feet and ran hard for the exit, bursting through the door and sprinting down the hallway, turning the corner to get to the elevator—

  —and running right into Elroy.

  HARRY

  Being rich and famous isn’t all fun and games.

  It’s also naps.

  Power naps. Which are needed, because all the fun and games of being rich and famous is exhausting.

  When I awoke from my latest power nap, which may or may not have been a result of tampering with my morphine drip, or the 25mg of THC I consumed in the form of weed candy, or having to deal with Jack’s constant nagging—and let’s all agree she can be a nag—I noticed I was alone in the hospital room.

  That gave me a chance to do some serious thinking about the Destiny Drac. And right when I was on the verge of a breakthrough, I was overcome by another power nap.

  That led directly into a flashback of several decades ago, when Jack and I were partners in the Chicago Police Department…

  BEGIN FLASHBACK

  Behind us we heard retching. Courtesy of the first officer on scene, who’d responded to the domestic violence call and walked into a literal bloodbath.

  Seriously. The dead guy was in a bathtub, soaked with blood.

  “So, what’s missing here?” I mused, staring at the deceased, lying twisted in the bathroom like a dropped, gore-soaked marionette.

  “Anatomy isn’t my strong suit,” Jack said, “but there’s a bunch missing. Like that.” She pointed. “The patella.”

  “What’s a patella? Some sort of Mexican food?”

  “It’s a kneecap.”

  “So why not say kneecap? Why say patella? Using a big word when a small word will do is really perspicacious.”

  “You’re funny. Like tumors are funny.”

  “What if it was a tumor shaped like a clown?” I countered. “Wouldn’t that be funny?”

  “We can only hope it happens to you so we can find out, McGlade.”

  “Thanks. So why does patella sound like a Mexican food?”

  “Because it’s Latin,” Jack said. “And Spanish evolved from Latin.”

  “Do you have any Mexican food?”

  “I do not.”

  “Because all this butchery really reminds me of a spicy chorizo.”

  More puking.

  “Ryker, go get some fresh air,” Jack told the regurgitator.

  “And wipe your feet before you leave,” I added. “We don’t want you tracking pieces of the victim into that clean hallway.”

  Ryker threw up again. Into her uniform cap, so she didn’t contaminate the crime scene.

  “And empty your hat before you spill it,” I advised. “Quickest way is to just chug-a-lug.”

  To my eternal disappointment, Ryker didn’t chug-a-lug. But she managed to get out of the apartment before spilling or puking again.

  “I like her,” Harry said. “I predict that someday she’ll wind up police chief in some small Wisconsin town.”

  “This is supposed to be a flashback,” Jack said. “You’re describing the future.”

  “It’s my flashback. I can say what I want to. I bet in about twenty years you’ll have a little girl with that guy you play pool with. What’s his name? Craig?”

  “Phin. You can’t remember anything, even in your dreams.”

  “Maybe I’ll dream you naked and doing jumping-jacks. Or maybe Phin naked and doing jumping-jacks. Somebody naked, and jumping-jacking.”

  “How about instead of being an idiot you try to figure out why you’re dreaming about this moment? Maybe it has some relevance to the Destiny Drac.”

  Jackie had a point.

  When I was awake and tried to remember a scene from my past, my memories were just word salads. I remembered this homicide scene, but only as if someone had described it to me. But my dreams were visual. I could see this guy, killed by his wife, who cut off the man’s patella, along with a few other choice bits of his anatomy.

  Why was my subconscious bringing this up? What was I trying to tell myself?

  And why was Jack riding on a flying unicorn that was shitting cotton candy?

  END FLASHBACK

  I woke up, still alone in my room, trying to remember why I was trying to remember that old case that I was trying to remember. Was it because the victim’s wife cut off his kneecap, and I was awaiting surgery on my kneecap and therefore anxious?

  Or was my superhuman deductive mind zooming in on some detail related to Blood?

  I decided that I was the only one who could answer my question, so I went back to sleep to dream again.

  BEGIN FLASHBACK

  The bullets echoed throughout the cargo ship, and I slapped another magazine into my Heckler & Koch HP5K. I stared at Jack, who had for some reason transformed into Mel Gibson.

  “This isn’t a flashback,” Mel said in Jack’s voice. “This is a scene from Lethal Weapon 2.”

  “It’s the most underrated movie in the franchise.”

  “Didn’t you go back to sleep to focus on that old homicide case?” she prodded.

  As the South African henchmen shot up the ship, I focused on solving the mystery of the missing patella.

  The victim had other missing parts as well. He’d had several ribs taken out, which wasn’t easy work using only a paring knife. Both ears. Six out of ten toes. Tortured, obviously. But he’d somehow managed to escape from the chair he’d been bound to, and drag his bleeding body to the phone to dial 911.

  Then his wife bashed his head in with a cast iron pan.

  I wonder what happened to that pan. It was used as evidence in court, but then what? Thrown out? Recycled? Given to a thrift store? Right now, was someone in Chicago cooking eggs in Exhibit B, which had been used to squish a man’s brains? It was a long time ago, but those cast iron pans are built to last.

  As I rode my bicycle across the sky, passing the full moon, I decided to ask Jack, who was wrapped in a blanket and sitting in the wire basket attached to the front handlebars.

  “This isn’t a memory,” Jack said. “This is the movie E.T.”

  “Aren’t we going to get some sort of copyright strike for this?” I asked.

  “Parody is protected by the First Amendment,” Jack said. “That’s why they could make all of those Scary Movie sequels.”

  “I liked Scary Movie 2. It’s the most underrated movie in the franchise.”

  “You need to focus,” Jack said. We were floating in a house that was attached to thousands of colorful balloons.

  “The beginning of this movie always makes me cry,” I said, referencing the Pixar film Up. “Do you think I’ll ever find that special someone to share my life with?”

  “No.”

  “You didn’t even hesitate.”

  “You mean you didn’t hesitate. This is your dream,” Jack said. “You control what I say.”

  “I do?”

  “Yes. And I’m a super-duper moron who will never be smarter than you. And I’m sexually attracted to the smell of farts.”

  I laughed. I think I’d always suspected that about Jack.

  Then the dinosaurs came, including one that looked a lot like me. It began to shake me until I awoke.

  END FLASHBACK

  “What’s up?” I said to Phin, who’d rolled his wheelchair next to my bed. “I was just about to crack this case wide open with the mighty power of the subconscious.”

  “Where’s Sam?” He was holding up her cell phone. I knew it was Sam’s because Phin’s phone didn’t have a glitter case with kitties on it. Probably.

  “You check her bed?”

  Phin gestured to her empty bed.

  “Maybe she’s there and was stricken with the curse of invisibility,” I offered.

  “You’re a jackass.”

  “Tough, but fair.”

  Phin pulled out his cell phone. Probably to call Jack, to tattle on me. Like it was my fault they raised their kid to be self-reliant and fearless. My son, Harry Jr., was riddled with neuroses because I taught him to be frightened of everything. Teachers. Doctors. The Amish. Empty boxes. And especially wolfmen. Because those hairy mofos will tear your face off, brother.