Thumbprint by Joe Hill

Author:Joe Hill [Hill, Joe]
Language: eng
Format: epub, mobi
Publisher: HarperCollins
Published: 2012-01-01T05:00:00+00:00

Read on for an excerpt from Joe Hill’s new novel,

NOS4A2

on sale April 30, 2013

Presbyterian Hospital, Denver

Spring 2013

WHEN SOMEONE INTERESTING was dead, Hicks always took a picture with them.

There had been a local news anchor, a pretty thirty-two-year-old with splendid white-blond hair and pale blue eyes, who got wasted and choked to death on her own puke. Hicks had slipped into the morgue at 1:00 A.M., pulled her out of her drawer, and sat her up. He got an arm around her and bent down to lap at her nipple, while holding out his cell phone to take a shot. He didn’t actually lick her, though. That would’ve been gross.

There was a rock star, too—a minor rock star anyway. He was the one in that band that had the hit from the Stallone movie. The rock star wasted out from cancer and in death looked like a withered old woman, with his feathery brown hair and long eyelashes and wide, somehow feminine lips. Hicks got him out of the drawer and bent his hand into devil’s horns, then leaned in and threw the horns himself, snapped a shot of them hanging out together. The rock star’s eyelids sagged, so he looked sleepy and cool.

Hicks’s girlfriend, Sasha, was the one who told him there was a famous serial killer down in the morgue. Sasha was a nurse in pediatrics, eight floors up. She loved his photos with famous dead people; she was always the first person he e-mailed them to. Sasha thought Hicks was hilarious. She said he ought to be on The Daily Show. Hicks was fond of Sasha, too. She had a key to the pharmacy locker, and Saturday nights she’d filch them something good, a little oxy or some medical-grade coke, and on breaks they’d find an empty delivery room and she’d shimmy out of the bottoms of her loose nurse jammies and climb up into the stirrups.

Hicks had never heard of the guy, so Sasha used the computer in the nurses’ station to pull up a news story about him. The mug shot was bad enough, a bald guy with a narrow face and a mouthful of sharp, crooked teeth. His eyes were bright and round and stupid in their hollow sockets. The caption identified him as Charles Talent Manx, sent to the federal pen more than a decade before for burning some sorry motherfucker to death in front of a dozen witnesses.

“He’s not any big deal,” Hicks said. “He just killed one dude.”

“Un-uh. He’s worse than John Wayne Stacy. He killed, like, all kinds of kids. All kinds. He had a house where he did it. He hung little angels in the trees, one for every one he cut up. It’s awesome. It’s like creepy symbolism. Little Christmas angels. They called the place the Sleigh House. Get it? Do you get it, Hicks?”

“No.”

“Like he slayed ’em there? But also like Santa’s sleigh? Do you get it now?” she said.

“No.” He didn’t see what Santa had to do with a guy like Manx.

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