"Jesus."
"Please." And the man weakly took the cop's hand and guided it to a place just below his sternum.
And goddamn. The cop felt it.
Something twisting inside the man's stomach. Something alive. Coiling and uncoiling.
The cop jerked his hand back as if he'd been burned.
"He dead, ain't he?" a young boy said peeping down into the man’s face.
The cop looked up at the kid and scowled. "You go stand back on the kerb, you hear me?"
But the kid kept leaning over and peeping down at the man. Blood bubbled from the man's nostrils and mouth and dripped from his chin.
The cop just kept staring at the man's stomach right above the wound.
Something was fucking in there. Moving.
"He dead," the kid said again, but he finally moved back to the kerb.
By the time the ambulance came the man's stomach was still and the cop would be damned if he'd say anything about it to the ambulance attendants or the man from the Medical Examiner's.
He had felt something moving in there. No shit. Honest.
The cop didn't want to end up at Hastings House himself.
TODAY
Tuesday, April 25
A male nurse named Claiborne was the first person to notice that a patient named Dobyns was missing. Claiborne was on the third floor of Hastings House to deliver 100 mg of Thorazine to a delusional patient who had been somewhat violent earlier in the day.
The time was 9:02 P.M.
Claiborne's first assumption was that Dobyns had gone one of two places: the TV room (several of the patients had expressed an interest in HBO's presentation this evening of Chariots of Fire) or the library Before his somewhat lengthy stay here, Dobyns had been an English professor at a local college. While the library didn't offer a sophisticated reader much to choose from-the selection ran heavily to romances, mysteries that emphasised puzzles instead of character, science fiction that was mostly about an intergalactic lawman named Rick Starman, and westerns in which the horses were at least as smart as the people-even patients as cosmopolitan as Dobyns found the library a nice place to sit and relax. Only when you noticed the bars on the windows was the effect spoiled somewhat.