"SHUT UP, JACK!" Nikki screamed. "Can't you go any faster?"

"Hearses only go twenty miles an hour. That's in the handbook. Harry read it. Fifteen is the recommended speed, so we're five miles over the limit. Just sit back and enjoy the ride, knowing you're going to get out when I bring this goddamn fucking vehicle to a complete stop at the mortuary."

The women clamped their lips shut, until Yoko said, "I feel like something is crawling all over me."

"Me, too," Isabelle said.

Twenty minutes later, Jack said, "Okay, ladies, look alive here, no pun intended. We have arrived! You have to wait while we get out to open the door. That was in the handbook, too. One time, some mortician forgot to lock it, and the casket slid out and landed in the middle of I-95 in Florida. Stopped traffic for days until they could figure whose jurisdiction it was in. That was in the handbook, too. You know, case histories or Mortuary 101, something like that. It never happened again. Families get irate when things like that happen, so morticians have to really be on top of shit like that."

"Kill him right now!" Annie said, landing on the asphalt driveway.

"I would if I had a gun," Myra replied. "Enough already, we don't have much time. We need to get in place."

"What time is it?" Yoko asked.

"Twenty minutes of seven," Kathryn said. "Alexis, where's your Red Bag?"

"Harry took it in."

Jack took a moment to look around at the line of shiny black hearses under the portico. Six in all. He wondered how much it had cost Charles to rent the place for the evening. Probably a bundle. Like Yoko, he was starting to itch. He took one last look around and entered the building. He hated the sound the door made when it locked behind him.

The scent of cloying flowers was so intense, Jack found himself gagging as he followed the women to the front of the building, where somber music was playing in the background. He thought he smelled incense. He passed a chapel loaded with fresh bouquets. He decided right then that he never wanted to live in a place that had such a robust dying business. Twelve layout rooms. Translation, according to the handbook, twelve bodies for viewing at any given time. Only six hearses. He shrugged. Two a day would work.

Suddenly, he found himself in a short hallway facing a door that said, in stark black letters, EMPLOYEES ONLY. He opened it and looked inside. Rows and rows of caskets lined the room. Bronze, silver, wood, aluminum, white, big, small. All were on wheels. He turned to run and bumped into Harry, who was bug-eyed. "Chop-chop, Harry, we have to get these back to the. . .what the hell did the handbook call it?"

"THE WORKROOM."

"Yeah, yeah, the workroom. C'mon pedal to the metal, we need to get four of these babies into that workroom."