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this, Mr. LaChaise,” he said, looking nervously at LaChaise’s handcuffs, “we can’t be responsible for the results.”
    “Open the boxes,” LaChaise said.
    Logan, worried, cracked the lids and stepped back. Way back. LaChaise stepped up, raised them.
    Candy, his wife.
    She’d been shot several times through the body, out of sight under her burial dress, but one shot had gone almost straight through her nose. The nose had been rebuilt with some kind of putty. Other than that, she looked as sweet as she had the day he first saw her at the Wal-Mart. He looked at her for a full minute, and thought he might have shed a tear; but he didn’t.
    Georgie was worse. Georgie had been hit at least three times in the face. While the funeral home had sewed and patched and made up, there was no doubt that something was massively wrong with Georgie’s skull. The body in the box looked no more like the living Georgie than did a plastic baby doll.
    His sister.
    He could remember that one good Christmas when they’d had the tree, he was nine or ten, she was three or four, and somebody had given her pajamas with feet in them. “Feetsies,” she called them. “I’m gonna put on my feetsies.” Must have been twenty-five years gone by, and here she was, with a head like a football. Again he felt the impulse toward tears; again, nothing happened.
    Logan, the funeral director, his face drained of blood, cleared his throat and said, “Mr. LaChaise?”
    LaChaise nodded. “You did okay,” he said, gruffly. “Where’s the preacher?”
    “He should be here. Any minute.” Logan’s hands flittered gratefully with the compliment, like sparrows at a bird feeder.
    “I want to wait back here until the funeral starts,” LaChaise said. “I don’t wanna talk to my mama no more’n I have to.”
    “I understand,” the funeral director said. He did: he’d been dealing with old lady LaChaise since the bodies had been released by the Hennepin County Medical Examiner. “We’ll move Candy and Georgie into the chapel. When Reverend Pyle arrives, I’ll step back and notify you.”
    “That’s good,” LaChaise said. “You got a Coke machine here somewhere?”
    “Well, there is a Coke box in the staff area,” Logan said.
    “I could use a Coke. I’d buy it.”
    “No, no, that’s fine . . .”
    LaChaise looked at the escort. “How about it, Wayne? I’ll buy you one.”
    Sand drank fifteen caffeinated Diet Cokes a day and got headaches if he went without. LaChaise knew that. “Yeah,” Sand said. “A Coke would be good.”
    “Then I’ll make the arrangements,” the funeral director said. “The Coke box is back through that door.”
    He pointed back through the Peace Room, as the staging area was called, to a door that said, simply, “Staff.”
     
     
     
    ON THE OTHER side of the staff door was a storage room full of broken-down shipping cartons for coffins, eight or ten large green awnings, folded, for funerals on rainy days, a forklift and a tool bench. The Coke box was just inside the door, an old-fashioned red top-opening cooler, with a dozen Coke Classic cans and a couple of white Diet Coke cans bathed in five inches of icy water.
    “Get one of them Diets,” Sand said, looking down into the water. He was watching his weight. LaChaise dipped into the cooler and got a regular Coke and a Diet, and when he turned back to the escort, Crazy Ansel Butters had stepped quietly out from behind the pile of awnings. He had a .22 pistol and he put it against Sand’s head and said, “Don’t fuckin’ move.”
    Sand froze, then looked at LaChaise and said, “Don’t hurt me, Dick.”
    “Gimme the keys,” LaChaise said.
    “You’re making a mistake,” Sand said. His eyes were rolling, and LaChaise thought he might faint.
    “Give him the keys or you’ll be making a mistake,” Butters said. Butters had a voice like a bastard file skittering down a copper pipe.
    Sand fumbled the keys out of his pocket and LaChaise stuck his