The Company Man

CHAPTER FORTY-FOUR

Hayes went to him in the morgue. At first he did not want to look at all. But then he decided he must. Someone has to look, he told himself. Someone has to look, for things like that.

He was not sure which cabinet was his so he began pulling them out at random. Garvey’s was on the far wall. When Hayes found him he looked nothing like how he remembered him. He was just a thing now. An object, cold and pallid. A casualty, perhaps.

Hayes looked at his friend laid out on the slab, his legs and chest and hands dotted with wounds. He felt grief grip his chest and he knew then as he had perhaps known all his life that in this fading world the good were forever fated to die young and die violently. Fated to change the world only in their remembrance left behind in the hearts of those who lived on. In the sinners. In those who unjustly survived the slain.

“It should have been you,” Hayes said.

A young boy in a white coat came walking in. He saw Hayes standing there and said, “Who the hell are you?”

Hayes turned around. The young man saw the gun in Hayes’s hand and paled and drew back.

“Whoa,” he said. “Whoa, hey.”

“Shut up,” said Hayes.

The young man was quiet. Hayes walked past him and up the stairs of the Department, and then outside.

It was growing dark now. An uneasy hush rolled throughout the city. Tattered clouds made bird’s nests around the yellow eye of the moon overhead. A crowd of drunks tottered over the lanes nearby. Hayes thought he heard one of them singing but when he stopped to listen he realized they were not.