The Laughing Corpse - Laurell K. Hamilton [99]
“The medical examiner says the corpse is tall, six feet, six-two. Male, white. Immensely strong.”
“We knew the last, and the rest doesn’t really help.”
“You got a better idea?”
“As a matter of fact,” I said, “have all the officers about the right height walk the neighborhood for an hour. Then block off that much of the area.”
“And search all the sheds and garages,” Dolph said.
“And basements, crawl spaces, old refrigerators,” I said.
“If we find it?”
“Fry it. Get an exterminator team out here.”
“Will the zombie attack during the day?” Dolph asked.
“If disturbed enough, yes. This one’s awfully aggressive.”
“No joke,” he said. “We’d need a dozen exterminator teams or more. The city’ll never go for that. Besides, we could walk a pretty damn wide circle. We might search and miss it completely.”
“It’ll move at dark. If you’re ready, you’ll find it then.”
“Okay. You sound like you’re not going to help search.”
“I’ll be back to help, but John Burke returned my call.”
“You taking him to the morgue?”
“Yeah, in time to try to use him against Dominga Salvador. What timing,” I said.
“Good. You need anything from me?”
“Just access to the morgue for both of us,” I said.
“Sure thing. You think you’ll really learn anything from Burke?”
“Don’t know till I try,” I said.
He smiled. “Give it the old college try, eh?”
“Win one for the Gipper,” I said.
“You go visit the morgue and deal with voodoo John. We’ll turn this fucking neighborhood upside down.”
“Nice to know we’ve both got our days planned,” I said.
“Don’t forget this afternoon we check out Salvador’s house.”
I nodded. “Yeah, and tonight we hunt zombies.”
“We’re going to end this shit tonight,” he said.
“I hope so.”
He looked at me, eyes narrowed. “You got a problem with our plans?”
“Just that no plan is perfect.”
He was quiet a moment, then stood. “Wish this one was.”
“Me, too.”
29
THE ST. LOUIS county morgue was a large building. It needs to be. Every death not attended by a physician comes to the morgue. Not to mention every murder. In St. Louis that made for some very heavy traffic.
I use to come to the morgue fairly regularly. To stake suspected vampire victims so they wouldn’t rise and feast on the morgue attendants. With the new vamp laws, that’s murder. You have to wait for the puppies to rise, unless they’ve left a will strictly forbidding coming back as a vampire. My will says to put me out of my misery if they think I’m coming back with fangs. Hell, my will asks for cremation. I don’t want to come back as a zombie either, thank you very much.
John Burke was as I remembered him. Tall, dark, handsome, vaguely villainous. It was the little goatee that did it. No one wears goatees outside of horror movies. You know, the ones with strange cults that worship horned images.
He looked a little faded around the eyes and mouth. Grief will do that to you even if your skin tone is dark. His lips were set in a thin line as we walked into the morgue. He held his shoulders as if something hurt.
“How’s it going at your sister-in-law’s?” I asked.
“Bleak, very bleak.”
I waited for him to elaborate, but he didn’t. So I let it go. If he didn’t want to talk about it, that was his privilege.
We were walking down a wide empty corridor. Wide enough for three gurneys to wheel abreast. The guard station looked like a WWII bunker, complete with machine guns. In case the dead should rise all at once and make for freedom. It had never happened here in St. Louis, but it had happened as close as Kansas City.
A machine gun will take the starch out of any walking dead. You’re only in trouble if there are a lot of them. If there is a crowd, you’re pretty much cooked.
I flashed my ID at the guard. “Hi, Fred, long time no see.”
“I wish they let you come down here like before. We’ve had three get up this week and go home. Can you believe that?”
“Vampires?”
“What else? There’s going to be more of them than of us someday.”
I didn’t know what to say, so I said nothing. He was probably right. “We’re here to see the personal effects of Peter