Salem's Lot

11

The county morgue in Portland is a cold and antiseptic room done entirely in green tile. The floors and walls are a uniform medium green, and the ceiling is a lighter green. The walls are lined with square doors which look like large bus-terminal coin lockers. Long parallel fluorescent tubes shed a chilly neutral light over all of this. The decor is hardly inspired, but none of the clientele have ever been known to complain.

At quarter to ten on this Saturday night, two attendants were wheeling in the sheet-covered body of a young homosexual who had been shot in a downtown bar. It was the first stiff they had received that night; the highway fatals usually came in between 1:00 and 3:00 A.M.

Buddy Bascomb was in the middle of a Frenchman joke that had to do with vaginal deodorant spray when he broke off in midsentence and stared down the line of locker doors M-Z. Two of them were standing open.

He and Bob Greenberg left the new arrival and hurried down quickly. Buddy glanced at the tag on the first door he came to while Bob went down to the next.

TIBBITS, FLOYD MARTIN

Sex: M

Admitted: 10/4/75

Autops. sched.: 10/5/75

Signator: J. M. Cody, MD

He yanked the handle set inside the door, and the slab rolled out on silent casters.

Empty.

‘Hey!’ Greenberg yelled up to him. ‘This fucking thing is empty. Whose idea of a joke-’

‘I was on the desk all the time,’ Buddy said. ‘No one went by me. I’d swear to it. It must have happened on Carty’s shift. What’s the name on that one?’

‘McDougall, Randall Fratus. What does this abbreviation inf. mean?’

‘Infant,’ Buddy said dully. ‘Jesus Christ, I think we’re in trouble.’