Second Chance (11 page)

Ryan clammed up then.

“Well, I
did
tell Bruce I thought we would all be there,” Vicki added. “But
you
made no promises, so it’s up to you.”

“I’ll probably come,” Ryan said, as if he had no choice. Vicki thought that showed progress. It was totally up to him, and he was pretending to reluctantly go along.

Ryan wandered up to his room, the one that used to belong to Judd’s little brother, Marc. Vicki got out the Bible Bruce had given her and started reading in the New Testament where he had told her to begin. Who would have ever thought, she wondered, that she would want to read the Bible
at all, let alone on her own when no one was making her?

Lionel wasn’t comfortable with Judd yet. As they rode into Chicago, he found himself having to work at holding his end of the conversation. He was sort of amused at Judd. He had been a rich kid from a good home who had tried to blend in with the bad kids and the rebels. Lionel knew the type. He found Judd sort of plain and not at all a tough guy or streetwise. That made it funny to him that Judd had tried to be something he was not. In fact, he was so far from the image he had tried to project that it was laughable.

Lionel had to admit that Judd had changed pretty quickly. With the goatee gone and him no longer wearing all black, Judd started to look like a normal, suburban teen.

Lionel asked him about the details of the visit to the morgue. When Judd told him what Bruce had spelled out, Lionel said, “You know, I think I can handle this myself. Your car is not going to be safe down there, so you should probably stay with it. I won’t be long.”

Lionel thought Judd would put up a fuss,
insisting on talking with the authorities himself. So far Judd had seemed to enjoy playing the big shot. But to Lionel’s surprise, Judd seemed relieved. “Yeah, OK,” he said quickly. “That’s probably a good idea. I’ll stay with the car, you do this stuff, and then we’ll be out of there.”

When Judd finally pulled in to the small, fenced lot behind the gray morgue building, he handed Lionel the sheet with the contact name. “I’ll be right out,” Lionel said.

He had prepared himself, he thought, for this moment. He had to be sure André was dead, and there was no better way than to see his body for himself. Lionel had always hated funerals, and he had been to his share for someone thirteen years old. What he hated most was the filing past the bodies. He always peeked at them, but he didn’t stop and linger. He knew this would not be easy.

He had seen a lot of movies where someone had to identify a body. The coroner or medical examiner or whoever would dramatically yank the sheet away, and the identifier would collapse from the shock. Lionel didn’t want that to happen. He knew André was in danger most of his life, and whether he really killed himself or had been murdered, it was no surprise that he had come to
the end so soon. But he didn’t want to be shocked by some horrible sight.

Lionel had stepped from the car with confidence, telling himself to just do his duty and get it over with. It made him feel grown up to handle this for his parents. He wished he could see them and his brother and sisters, but he was sure glad they weren’t dead.

And yet as Lionel neared the front of the building, it was as if his legs had turned to jelly. He began to shudder and tremble, and he found it difficult to put one foot in front of the other. His breath came in short gasps, and he fought the urge to race back to the car and have Judd run him back to Mount Prospect.
I’m going to do this,
he thought.
I have to. Otherwise, I’ll be a wuss, just like Ryan.

Lionel put his hand on the brass handle of the front door and stopped. It was as if he was paralyzed, his legs heavy. The handle felt icy, though it was not that cold out. He forced himself to pull the heavy door open, and he was immediately struck with fear and dread by what he saw. This was nothing at all like he had assumed. The entire place had been turned into a storage area for white-sheeted bodies.

Lionel thought a morgue had one area for bodies in drawers. He knew that was true,
but it shouldn’t have surprised him to find this morgue overcrowded, what with everything that had gone on.

Lionel felt the cold rush from the air conditioners. This place, the whole building, was cold as a refrigerator. Covered bodies were lined up on stretchers down both sides of the hallway, and Lionel could only assume that’s the way it was all through the building.

A bored receptionist in a winter coat said, “You can’t be in here, son. What are you doing?”

“I’m here to identify a body,” he said.

“All the bodies in here have been identified,” she said.

Lionel dug the sheet of instructions from his pocket. “I’m looking for assistant medical examiner Ford,” he said.

The receptionist paged him. “You’d better take a seat,” she said. “No telling how long he’ll be.”

He was twenty minutes, time enough for Lionel to calm himself if he was able. But he was not able. All the wait did was to make him more upset. He wanted to be anywhere other than this creepy place. None of the dead bodies he had ever seen before were related to him. He had no idea how he would react.

Dr. Ford was a pudgy man in a hurry, and
he was all business. “You’re Washington? Where’s Barnes?”

“Couldn’t make it,” Lionel said.

“This way, Washington.”

Lionel followed the fast-walking doctor down the halls between the stretchers with bodies on them. He held his breath and looked neither right nor left. The doctor peeled a couple of sheets of paper back off his clipboard and studied a page. “André Dupree, right?”

“Yes, sir.”

“Age 36, male, African-American, 5 foot 8, 155 pounds?”

“That’s him.”

“He’s in the back. You OK?”

“Yeah, just a little out of breath.”

“Almost there.”

“Could you do it slow?”

“What, walking? Lots to do, son. Never seen this many deaths in so short a time. Never anything like it.”

“No, I mean, will you show me his body slow?”

“Meaning?”

“Like, don’t whip the sheet off.”

“I never do that.”

“Good.”

When Dr. Ford got to the back, the place looked more like what Lionel expected. Six
bodies were lined up next to each other. The doctor lifted the bottom of the sheets and read the tags on the toes of two in the middle. “Dupree,” he said. “Here are his effects, if you want them. We threw away the jeans. They were, um, stained with blood.”

“Lots of it?”

“’Fraid so. This was a suicide, you know.”

“I figured.” Lionel was having trouble speaking loudly enough to be heard. He still wasn’t sure he could keep from running out of there. The doctor handed him a manila envelope clasped by a red string. He unwound it with shaky fingers and saw his uncle’s watch, bracelet, earring, ring, beeper, belt, and socks.

“He came in here with that and a pair of jeans and stocking feet.”

Lionel nodded, dreading what was to come.

The doctor moved to the other end of the stretcher. “Ever done this before, son?”

Lionel shook his head.

“I’m just going to fold the sheet back to his chest and you can see his face.”

“And then I identify him to you?”

“That’s not necessary. Identity is not in question in this case. The personal effects were on the body and in the pockets. A neighbor identified him. He was in his own
apartment. You can just look away for a moment if you’d like.”

Lionel held the envelope in both hands, as if he were holding a hat in front of him. He heard the slow rustle of the sheet. “OK, son,” Dr. Ford said.

Lionel stared, speechless, at the expressionless face, and his heart seemed to stop. He could hear himself breathing. He wanted to say something, but words would not come.

“All right?” the doctor said.

Lionel nodded, his lips quivering.

“Can you find your way out?” Dr. Ford said.

Lionel nodded again and hurried toward the door. He was afraid he was going to be sick. The corridors looked longer than ever, and he couldn’t wait to get out to the warmth of the day. By the time he reached the receptionist’s area he was running. He burst through the door and sprinted to the parking lot, jumping into the car.

“You look like you saw a ghost,” Judd said, starting the car.

Lionel could only snort.

“Oh, sorry, man,” Judd said. “I guess you sorta did, huh?”

Lionel nodded.

“That his stuff there?”

“Uh-huh.” It was the first sound Lionel had emitted since seeing the body.

“Did he look like himself?” Judd asked.

“I wouldn’t know,” Lionel said. “He probably did. The only thing I know for sure is that that was
not
my uncle.”

Jerry B. Jenkins
(
www.jerryjenkins.com
) is the writer of the Left Behind series. He owns the Jerry B. Jenkins Christian Writers Guild, an organization dedicated to mentoring aspiring authors. Former vice president for publishing for the Moody Bible Institute of Chicago, he also served many years as editor of
Moody
magazine and is now Moody’s writer-at-large.

His writing has appeared in publications as varied as
Reader’s Digest, Parade, Guideposts,
in-flight magazines, and dozens of other periodicals. Jenkins’s biographies include books with Billy Graham, Hank Aaron, Bill Gaither, Luis Palau, Walter Payton, Orel Hershiser, and Nolan Ryan, among many others. His books appear regularly on the
New York Times, USA Today, Wall Street Journal,
and
Publishers Weekly
best seller lists.

Jerry is also the writer of the nationally syndicated sports story comic strip
Gil Thorp,
distributed to newspapers across the United States by Tribune Media Services.

Jerry and his wife, Dianna, live in Colorado and have three grown sons.

Dr. Tim LaHaye
(
www.timlahaye.com
), who conceived the idea of fictionalizing an account of the Rapture and the Tribulation, is a noted author, minister, and nationally recognized speaker on Bible prophecy. He is the founder of both Tim LaHaye Ministries and The PreTrib Research Center. He also recently cofounded the Tim LaHaye School of Prophecy at Liberty University. Presently Dr. LaHaye speaks at many of the major Bible prophecy conferences in the U.S. and Canada, where his current prophecy books are very popular.

Dr. LaHaye holds a doctor of ministry degree from Western Theological Seminary and a doctor of literature degree from Liberty University. For twenty-five years he pastored one of the nation’s outstanding churches in San Diego, which grew to three locations. It was during that time that he founded two accredited Christian high schools, a Christian school system of ten schools, and Christian Heritage College.

Dr. LaHaye has written over forty books that have been published in more than thirty languages. He has written books on a wide variety of subjects, such as family life, temperaments, and Bible prophecy. His current fiction works, the Left Behind series, written with Jerry B. Jenkins, continue to appear on the best seller lists of the Christian Booksellers Association,
Publishers Weekly, Wall Street Journal, USA Today,
and the
New York Times.

He is the father of four grown children and grandfather of nine. Snow skiing, waterskiing, motorcycling, golfing, vacationing with family, and jogging are among his leisure activities.