Without wasting another second, he turned away from the mirror and crammed his own finger down his throat in an effort to puke. He reached as far back as he could, painfully stabbing tender flesh and poking his tonsils.
He gagged a few times, but nothing came up.
“Dammit,” he shrieked. “This can’t be happening!”
He slammed his fists on the sink top and punched a hole in the plastic cover of the paper towel dispenser. He tried hitting himself in the stomach a few times, but when that didn’t work to bring up the finger, he took his frustration out on the waste basket in a flurry of kicks.
Huffing out of exertion and fear, he leaned against the sink and paused to collect himself.
“Think, dipshit! Think!”
His breathing had just begun to ease when the door to one of the two toilet stalls clicked in its frame and slowly swung open. Jimmy looked up. A moment later, a balding middle-aged man wearing a business suit and wire-frame glasses stepped out, clutching his unzipped pants at the waist. Without making eye contact, he edged toward the exit like an overweight tourist who’d fallen into the lion pit at the zoo.
Jimmy gaped at him. “Can’t you see I’m having a moment here, pal?”
“I don’t want any trouble, Mister,” the man quickly replied.
A dull silver cell phone poked out of the breast pocket of his shirt.
Jimmy saw it and lunged at him.
The stunned patron blubbered out a string of half-coherent pleas for release as Jimmy seized him by the lapels of his jacket and plucked the phone from his pocket. His pudgy hands flew up to ward off Jimmy’s attack, leaving his pants and underwear to collapse at his feet.
“Please, Mister, don’t hurt me!”
But even as he said it, Jimmy unlocked the bathroom, shoved the phone-owner into the hall, and yanked the door shut again before his bare ass hit the floor.
Jimmy flipped the phone open and dialed Stuart’s number.
“Hello?”
“Stu, it’s me—”
“Jesus, Jim,” Stuart said. “I’ve been trying to get a hold of you all morning. Listen, don’t—”
“I swallowed it, man!”
“What?”
“The finger! The fucking thing’s in my guts!”
Stuart’s reply came out as one word. “Wathefugitshididyoudothatfor?”
“I was hungry!” Jimmy bellowed back at him. “What do you think?”
“Jesus, this figures!” Stu moaned.
“What the hell does that mean?”
“It means Sheriff Pickett came by this morning and told Harrington not to ship the corpse over to HCMC for cooking, that’s what! Some homicide detective called about him last night, and he’s on his way here right now to ID the body. If he’s right, our illegal amigo might actually be a Navajo serial killer!”
“I don’t give a damn!” Jimmy replied. “I need you to pump my stomach!”
“I don’t know how to do that!”
“You’re the goddamn medical expert here, you gotta do something!”
“Shit…I don’t know… Just give it some time; it’ll pass through you.”
“I don’t want it to pass through me, you idiot! I want it OUT!”
Suddenly a fist pounded on the bathroom door. “Open up!” a formidable voice ordered.
“Jim, we’re in deep sewage here,” Stuart said.
“Yeah, thanks for the tip!”
Jimmy snapped the phone shut and shoved it into his jacket.
“I said open up in there!” the voice ordered.
Rather than go for the door, Jimmy kicked through the window at the back of the room and jumped into the alley, landing in a filthy puddle of dumpster runoff when he dropped to the ground.
6.
That night Jimmy tossed and turned.
He’d gone to a roadside motel off the interstate rather than chance returning to his trailer, and he spent the better half of the evening waiting for the police to show up.
Finally, around two a.m., he lay down on the bed. Sleep came in short spurts, but only out of exhaustion, and during the times when he dozed, he dreamed of the finger sloshing around in his stomach, refusing to digest.
Or trying to crawl out the way it went in.
Jimmy moaned at the thought, not wanting to recall it.
He’d chugged a whole bottle of FiberAll for dinner in an attempt to be free of the thing, followed by half a package of Exlax that he picked up at a small market adjacent to his hideout. So far, neither had worked.
Earlier, he tried to call Stuart but the bastard never picked up. On the contrary, his stolen cell phone rang about two dozen times, its display glowing with the names and numbers of callers he didn’t dare answer.
He finally drifted off to sleep as the first red rays of sunlight bled over the horizon.
7.
When Jimmy awoke he went straight to the bathroom.
The day had come and gone while he slept, and he felt confident that the long rest had given the meds time to generate some results. Much to his disappointment, however, he spent nearly twenty minutes on the toilet straining/praying to shit out the finger, all the while secretly fearing that he’d crap a whole hand.
Back in the bedroom, the television droned. He’d left it on last night to escape the burbling sounds produced from his gut, and now some sitcom gave way to the ten o’clock news.
“Our top story: a morbid case of burglary at the Hewitt County morgue—”
Jimmy bound back into the main room with his pants trailing behind him.
“—involving the theft of an unidentified corpse.”
He watched the report in a state of stupefied captivity as the newscaster went on to explain how the county’s medical examiner had found the morgue’s autopsy room in disarray earlier that evening, a discovery that led him to a second scene of destruction inside the cooler. There, the perpetrator(s) had stolen the decapitated remains of a body that was being held for forensic testing as part of a murder investigation by authorities upstate. According to sources, the room’s stainless steel door had been torn off its hinges in order to get at the body.
Jimmy dropped down on the end of the bed as he listened.
The events of the last few days spiraled through his head, chased by the dread of whatever new miseries the future might hold, and all at once, he thought his wish to be rid of the thing in his stomach was about to come true.
He clutched his midsection and ran for the bathroom.
The lurching started even as he leaned over the sink. He seized the faucet handles to stabilize himself while the tremors passed through him, then sagged in despair when the convulsions concluded with nothing more than a foul-smelling belch.
He rinsed out his mouth, and was about to leave when he glimpsed movement in his peripheral vision. He glanced to the left, facing the room’s tiny window.
And saw a dog staring back at him.
Two yellow eyes glinted in the dark air outside the motel, reflecting the light from the bathroom, and Jimmy leapt backward in shock even as his over-stressed brain realized that the eyes had to be at least six feet off the ground.
The window exploded in a hailstorm of glass.
Blood-splattered arms reached through the frame.
Jimmy shrieked as the attacker clutched fistfuls of his shirt, each hand a skeletal mess of torn flesh and exposed bone, as if the person outside had recently clawed his way out of a grave—or through a stainless steel door. Then, in a split-second moment of hyper-awareness he saw that the assailant’s smallest left-hand finger ended in a clean, circular stump.
The missing stiff from the morgue, he thought. Oh, Jesus, it can’t be!