Thumbprint by Joe Hill Read Free Book Online Page B

“Who knows what the guy was thinking? Maybe he was hopped up on something. Maybe he’s just some sick creep who wanted a one-of-a-kind trophy. Let the cops worry about that. I just want to focus on you.”
    â€œTrophy?” Hicks cried, imagining his pants hung up on a wall in a picture frame.
    â€œYeah, I guess,” Doc Sopher said, glancing over his shoulder, across the room. “Only reason I can think why someone would come in here and steal the body of a famous serial killer.”
    Hicks turned his head—a gong went off in his brain and filled his skull with dark reverberations—and saw that the gurney had been rolled halfway across the room and someone had yanked the dead body right off it. He moaned again and shut his eyes.
    He heard the rapid clip-clop of boot heels coming down the hallway and thought he recognized the goose-stepping gait of his uncle Jim on the march, out from behind his desk and not happy about it. There was no logical reason to fear the man. Hicks was the victim here; he had been assaulted, for chrissake. But alone and miserable in his only refuge—the dark behind his eyelids—he felt that logic didn’t enter into it. His uncle Jim was coming, and a third citation was coming with him, was about to fall like a silver hammer. He had literally been caught with his pants down, and he saw already that at least in one sense he was never going to be stepping into those security pants again.
    It was all lost, had been taken away in a moment, in the shadows of the autopsy room: the good job, the good days of Sasha and stirrups and treats from the pharmacy locker and funny photos with dead bodies. Even his Trans Am with the zebra upholstery was gone, although no one would know it for hours; the sick fuck who clubbed him senseless had helped himself to the keys and driven away in it.
    Gone. Everything. All of it.
    Gone off with dead old Charlie Manx and never coming back.

 
    Also by Joe Hill
    Horns
    Heart-Shaped Box
    20th Century Ghosts (story collection)
    Locke & Key, vols. 1–5 (IDW Publishing)

 
    Credits
    Cover design and illustration by Adam Johnson

 
    Copyright
    This is a work of fiction. The characters, incidents, and dialogue are drawn from the author’s imagination and are not to be construed as real. Any resemblance to actual events or persons, living or dead, is entirely coincidental.
    â€œThumbprint” copyright © 2007 by Joe Hill originally appeared in the print anthology Postscripts #10, Spring 2007, published by PS Publishing.
    â€œTHUMBPRINT.” Copyright © 2007, 2012 by Joe Hill. Excerpt from NOS4A2 copyright © 2012 by Joe Hill. All rights reserved under International and Pan-American Copyright Conventions. By payment of the required fees, you have been granted the nonexclusive, nontransferable right to access and read the text of this e-book on-screen. No part of this text may be reproduced, transmitted, decompiled, reverse-engineered, or stored in or introduced into any information storage and retrieval system, in any form or by any means, whether electronic or mechanical, now known or hereinafter invented, without the express written permission of HarperCollins e-books.
    FIRST EDITION
    EPub Edition © NOVEMBER 2012 ISBN: 9780062252531
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