“What’re you gonna do, crawl through that?” Morgan grumbled.
“Nope,” Cowper said, “we’re gonna crawl over it.”
Cowper dragged an old Victorian chair, its upholstered seat worn through, from its hiding place behind the furnace. He shoved it against the wall and stood on it, pushing an acoustic tile into the false ceiling above. A fine mist of red brick dust filled the dead air, briefly obscuring the decaying brick wall that stood between them and the secret room next door. It was likely a wall in the original house, which had always been a mortuary in the McWayne family. At some point, one of the fussy McWaynes must have concealed the dirty brick wall behind sheet rock walls.
“Shit,” Morgan cursed.
Cowper pounded the wall with the butt of his flashlight. More dust billowed, but a couple bricks flinched as chunks of mortar fell on the water-stained concrete floor.
“Looks aren’t everything,” the professor said. “It might be a brick wall, but it’s probably only one brick thick and it’s quickly turning to dust.”
He pounded it a few more times and Morgan breathed in more dust.
“Give me a hand here,” Cowper said. Morgan rummaged around the furnace room and found some wooden crates and empty buckets to stand on. With an old broom handle and the butt of an old two-by-four, they teetered on their rickety platforms and assaulted the wall. After a few minutes, they’d bored a hole in the wall large enough to peek into the next room. Pungent air, reeking of half-disinfected cat pee, surged through the breech, stinging Morgan’s nostrils.
Borrowing the crate and buckets from Morgan, Cowper stacked himself a perch so he could shine his light into the room. After reaching through to remove acoustic tiles on the other side, he studied the room while Morgan stood in the dark below.
“I think we found ourselves a meth lab,” he said, his head poked through the wall. “I’m going in … if I can just …”
Cowper pushed several bricks into the room beyond and enlarged the gap so he could squeeze through. Soon, all Morgan could see was fragments of the flashlight’s beam between Cowper’s legs as they disappeared into the other room.
“Oh man,” Cowper’s muffled voice came from the other side of the wall. “Jackpot.”
Morgan clambered onto the rickety perch and looked inside. The stink of it was even stronger now. His friend’s flashlight illuminated a small room packed with tanks, tubes, chemical vats, a variety of tools and several small propane tanks whose fitting were crusted with doughy blue chemical scabs.
He scuttled through the opening with a hand from Cowper.
On the floor, Cowper handed him a jar of some off-color liquid and smiled.
“So the cat piss isn’t cat piss at all,” Morgan said, examining the jug of ammonia.
“Nope. Man, this place is a mad scientist’s dream. Look at this stuff,” Cowper marveled.
The secret room was something out of an old Hollywood horror flick: burners and ovens, vats and tubes, peculiar flasks and jars marked with mysterious chemical hieroglyphs like HCL, PCI5, NaCN, HgCl2. And most featured a little skull-and-crossbones sticker.
“Don’t touch anything unless you don’t need your mucous membranes or a lung,” Cowper warned. “There are more hazardous materials in here than down at the Crowbar. If it isn’t corrosive, it’s flammable. Some of these chemicals would explode if you simply poured in a drop of water.”
Morgan imagined his eyes beginning to melt and the lining of his nostrils dissolving, but shook it off. He knew — well, hoped really — that Cowper was as knowledgeable about chemistry as he sounded. He glanced at a small Halon fire extinguisher on the wall and felt not at all comforted. Spitting on a big fire might be more effective.
“How the hell could McWayne get all this stuff and nobody notice?” Morgan asked
“Who’s gonna investigate an undertaker buying large amounts of chemicals and weird equipment? Who’s gonna question strange smells from a mortuary? Who’s gonna stand around and gawk while somebody loads a big box into a hearse? He’s got the perfect cover.”
“Hiding in plain sight.”
“Exactly.”
Still, McWayne didn’t seem the type to Morgan. He was a small-town buffoon and pompous lard-ass, hardly a large-scale drug trafficker. Maybe he truly had the perfect cover after all, Morgan thought.
At one end of the narrow wooden workbench, Cowper’s flashlight fell on a tangle of paper strips and some coffee filters with a white residue.
“And here’s what we came for,” he said. He dabbed his index finger in the dust and tasted it. “Oh baby, that’s crank.”
Cowper handed the flashlight to Morgan and stuffed the paper strips and coffee filters into a plastic grocery sack he found nearby. He wrapped it all up tightly and crammed the evidence in the back pocket of his jeans.
“He doesn’t know it yet, but tomorrow, your buddy the sheriff is gonna have a big drug bust, and you’re gonna have a big story,” Cowper said.
A new smell enveloped them.
Gasoline.
Cowper swept his flashlight around the room and saw nothing. But Morgan saw flickering shadows and a dim light beneath the door. And gasoline was pooling in a widening circle over the threshold, inching toward them.
“Get out!” Morgan yelled.
Cowper dropped the flashlight as Morgan leaped up on the workbench. At best, he knew they had seconds to get back through the hole in the wall into the furnace room before the gasoline ignited. And it would be only the beginning of a larger, deadlier inferno when the combustible chemicals in the lab detonated.
The gasoline erupted in a ferocious whoosh and Morgan felt its searing heat against his legs as he hung through the cavity in the brick wall.
Then he felt Cowper shove him from below and he shot through the hole to the cool, safe room next door.
As he plunged from the ceiling to the floor below, his fall was broken only by the pile of boxes, chairs and buckets that had been his ladder. His shoulder collapsed in a sickening crunch as he hit the concrete floor, and electric pain coursed down his arm as he smothered his burning trouser leg with his bare hands.
Cowper was still somewhere inside the hellhole from which he had just fallen. Black smoke belched from the gap in the wall and Morgan could hear the angry flames beginning to growl.
Agonizing moments elapsed. Cowper made no sound, and more importantly, no appearance.
“Shawn!” Morgan yelled.
He heard nothing but the throaty thunder of the growing fire, glass breaking and lumber crackling.
There was no going back for Cowper. Impenetrable black smoke surged from the hole, filling the furnace room and Morgan’s lungs. He covered his mouth and nose with the bottom of his sweatshirt, but the sooty toxic fumes seeped through.
An explosion rocked the walls and floor, then another, and another. Ceiling tiles and bricks began to fall around Morgan as he leaped out of the furnace room and ran down the hall to the padlocked door to the meth lab. Smoke seeped beneath it.
Summoning all his mass and determination, he hurled himself against it. Pain ripped through his injured shoulder and the blunt force of his collision with the heavy wooden door sliced a gash in his temple.
But the door held.
Once again, he threw himself against it, and he felt it give, but it remained steadfast.
Finally, in one last burst, it gave way and flames exploded into the hallway, searing Morgan and filling the hallway with choking smoke, but Morgan could see past the flames.
Cowper had collapsed in a far corner of the room, farthest from the flames and the flammable chemicals. He’d drawn a protective cordon around himself with the extinguisher, buying himself a few extra seconds.
But the heat and smoke had finally knocked him out. His mouth and nose were rimmed with black soot, and he slumped with his back to the wall, the tiny extinguisher spent in his hands. One sleeve had burned away, the other was aflame.
Two or three steps, Morgan’s min
d reeled, that’s all.
Morgan sucked in and held a deep breath, heeled one step backward and then dashed through the wall of flames. He grabbed Cowper’s legs and dragged him unconscious back through the fire into the hallway.
Suddenly, the whole room erupted, splintering walls and furniture. Morgan dragged Cowper toward the back door, where they were protected from flying debris and flames, briefly, around the corner from the embalming room.
Cowper needed a doctor, and the whole mortuary would soon be engulfed. Morgan left Cowper in the relative safety of the embalming room’s doorway and rushed to the back door, knowing they’d locked it as they sneaked in, and knowing he’d have to unlock it before escaping.
He turned the knob. It was unlocked, but the door was jammed closed. Something blocked it from the outside. The narrow hall was filling with smoke, and he knew the flames were close behind.
With his hands, Morgan searched the opaque darkness around his feet. His eyes felt as if a hunting knife had been sliced across them, and his head was beginning to swirl from the inside. He pawed through broomsticks and snow shovels, plastic buckets and empty cardboard boxes before his throbbing hand scraped across a cinder block.
He gathered it in both arms and ran back down the windowless hall, to the little bathroom past the embalming lab. There, he heaved the cinder block through the little window and thrust his torso out, inhaling cool, fresh air that braised his lungs and set off a violent coughing spasm.
Filling himself with one last gasp of fresh air, he crouched and sprinted to Cowper and dragged him twenty feet toward the bathroom window, their last hope of escape.
Winchester’s only ladder truck roared to a stop outside the McWayne Funeral Home just as Morgan shoved Cowper’s limp body through the broken window frame. Two firefighters rushed to help drag Morgan and Cowper to safety, then turned to fighting the flames, which now licked the sky.
While paramedics tended to Cowper, who lay burned, blackened, suffocated, unconscious, concussed and slit — but alive — on old Doc Jackson’s lawn across the street, Morgan tried to clear his brain. His shoulder pulsed with pain, but he followed some firefighters around the building, looking for a place to ram their way into the burning structure.
Just off the alley, Morgan stood among some gawkers who’d come out in their pajamas and slippers to stare at the flames that now swallowed the mortuary.
“Anybody inside, you think?” asked Lowell Tennyson, the local jeweler who dripped smarm and hair oil. He lived on the next street over, but had walked a block in his boxer shorts and huaraches to investigate the commotion.
“I don’t think so,” Morgan said, watching Winchester’s volunteer firefighters — some only half-dressed in bunker gear, as if they’d rushed to the scene while still half-asleep — break windows and gather to storm the back door.
“No, I mean … you know … somebody dead,” Lowell pressed. “That’d be a bad way to go.”
The concept of death in a small town was sometimes as perverse as it was enigmatic, but still, Morgan still wondered how Lowell Tennyson could consider cremation worse than dying in the first place.
But when he turned to point out that Carter McWayne’s “customers” were beyond caring, Tennyson was taking a snapshot with a little disposable camera from a drugstore checkout stand, its pathetic little flash no match for the dark and distance.
Morgan edged closer to the conflagration and watched Tubby Gertz, a volunteer firefighter who, by day, sold furnaces, swing his axe to knock free a short two-by-four that had been wedged beneath the backdoor’s knob.
The shadowy arsonist who’d tried to kill them in McWayne’s clandestine meth lab had escaped. He’d also hedged his bets by taking the extra trouble to make sure Morgan and Cowper wouldn’t be so lucky.
“You’re under arrest, my friend,” said a familiar voice.
Trey Kerrigan stood in the dancing shadows beneath a juniper hedge, just behind Morgan. He already had his handcuffs out.
“For what?” Morgan asked.
Kerrigan pushed his cowboy hat back and his mouth rumpled in an incredulous smile.
“Breakin’ and enterin’, for starters.”
“Wait a minute … “
“Maybe burglary. Maybe arson. Maybe possession of a controlled substance.”
Kerrigan pulled a crinkled plastic bag from his breast pocket. Morgan knew what it was.
“Your buddy had this in his pocket,” Kerrigan said. “I ain’t the smartest cop in the world, but I reckon there’s a few hundred bucks worth of crank in here.”
“It’s evidence,” Morgan insisted.
“Sure is,” Kerrigan smiled.
“No, we found it. Inside.”
“Uh-huh. I’m gonna ask you to put your left hand behind your back now, good buddy.”
“Trey, honest to God …”
“You have the right to remain silent, which I’m sure you can’t or won’t,” Kerrigan said as he clapped the cuffs hard on Morgan’s wrists, “and you have the right to an attorney, although you’ve pissed ‘em all off, and anything you say can be used as evidence against you, so I’d suggest you tell me everything right now. And don’t bullshit me, or I’ll just shoot you.”
Morgan was eager to talk, even though he knew Trey Kerrigan, like his father Deuce before him, was a sheriff who never carried a gun. Whether it was their homespun eloquence or their hair-trigger personalities that made them so convincing without forty-four magnum firepower, neither of them ever needed it.
“McWayne has a meth lab in there,” Morgan said. “We saw it.”
Kerrigan stared into the flames of the burning mortuary. Firefighters had lost the battle long before part of the embalming room’s roof collapsed, spewing sparks into the pre-dawn darkness like dancing bits of star.
And Morgan watched any evidence of McWayne’s meth lab literally going up in smoke.
“This don’t look good,” the sheriff said, his dark eyes piercing Morgan’s, even in the shadows.
“No, it doesn’t,” Morgan admitted. “And we shouldn’t have been inside, but I’m telling you the truth. Somebody tried to kill us in there.”
Kerrigan dismissed Morgan with an incredulous flip of his hand.
“You gotta be the dumbest-ass burglar I ever knew. You break into somebody’s place, and they try to kill you. It’s an occupational hazard. You’re lucky you didn’t get your ass shot off. Don’t come whinin’ to me.”
Morgan’s voice rose an octave.
“We weren’t burglars, goddammit.”
“No? Creepin’ into somebody’s business before the crack of sparrow fart — Jesus Christ, a mortuary — that ain’t against the law? About the best explanation I got for that is that you’re a sick puppy … What’s your best explanation?”
Morgan was speechless and starting to feel the pre-dawn chill. Other than Cowper’s suspicions about the meth lab, he wasn’t exactly sure why a newspaper editor and a college professor might feel compelled to break into a funeral parlor in the middle of the night. It sounded more like a frat prank than a serious investigation.
“Trey, you know me. I’m no junkie or drug dealer.”
“All I know is that you keep turnin’ up in places you ain’t supposed to be, and always about the time somethin’ bad happens. You’re a damned fine suspect, you know? Smart criminals usually run, but you hang around and make it easy for us cops.”
“Listen to me. Cowper was suspicious of some stuff he saw when we were doing the autopsy on John Doe …”
“We? When did they open the damn morgue to reporters? John Doe is evidence and now you’re lookin’ up your own ass at a tamperin’ charge. Maybe I’ll just let those DCI boys eat you for lunch. Your hole is gettin’ deeper, my friend. I suggest you stop diggin’.”
Pain pulsed through Morgan’s shoulder, coruscating down his arm like St. Elmo’s fire. His scalded face felt badly sunburned. For the first time, he noticed his hands and arms had been scorched, and despite the ho
rrendous assault on his nostrils, he was beginning to smell singed hair among the stench of burning chemicals on him and around him. He reeked like both an oil well hell-fighter and a burned shank of lamb.
“How’s Shawn?”
Kerrigan showed no real compassion.
“I have no idea.”
“Well, he’s the guy who can tell you what we saw. Test that stuff in your pocket and you’ll know. I’m telling you, somebody was cooking crank in there. While we were inside, somebody poured gas under the door and lit it. We barely got out.”
“I’m sure a creative guy like you can come up with a better story than that.”
Several small explosions sent forth yellow and greenish blue plumes through the melting asphalt roof of McWayne’s funeral home, and Morgan’s heart fell. By dawn, his chance of proving his story was be a piled of wet ashes, melted debris and charred wood.
Kerrigan led Morgan to his Blazer in handcuffs. A few of the gawkers and firefighters watched, and Morgan knew the gossip would be flying all over town before the Griddle poured its first cup of oily coffee. And long before the ruins of McWayne’s mortuary had cooled, Morgan would be tried and convicted, and his appropriate punishment discussed over most breakfast tables in town.
He sat in the silent Blazer, smelling his own rankness, while Kerrigan stood in the headlight arc between his vehicle and an infuriated Carter McWayne, who’d squealed into the crowd of firefighters and cops in his hearse, wearing only his pajama bottoms and a tee-shirt. Still deafened by the roar of the fire and the fury of explosions, Morgan couldn’t hear what McWayne was saying, but he was clearly out of his mind with anger and fear.
The police radio was silent, except for some firefighting traffic that crackled like crushed aluminum foil over the air.
Kerrigan left his deputy in charge of Carter McWayne and settled into the driver’s seat, his teeth clenched like a vise. Morgan could see the little muscles in his jaw pulsing. He turned down the scanner and started the Blazer.
“Do me a favor?” Morgan asked.
Kerrigan wasn’t in the mood for special requests. He glared at his old friend, who was not a friend at the moment.
The Obituary (Jefferson Morgan Mysteries Book 2) Page 13
