MAX ORDOS DOES NOT EXIST

MAX ORDOS DOES NOT EXIST: CHAPTER ELEVEN

"Change of plans," Jane says, opening her car door. "We're going to the morgue."

Pearl shakes his head. "I've had enough of this shit. I'll take one of these cop cars and just leave."

Jane sighs and points her gun at him. "No, you won't."

Pearl gauges the look on her face, then crawls back into her backseat, grateful to be out of the rain. They make a U-turn at the hedge-lined entrance to a dirt road and go back the way they came, past the two cop cars and one possibly-dead sheriff. That other cop isn't sitting where he was a moment ago, but there's a blood splotch where he'd been.

The rain lightens up a little, then swells up worse than before. By the time they see a sign for Kadath, it's pissing down rain so hard that Jane's wipers can't keep up with it. "We've got some time," she says, "but not much. Assuming West hasn't called backup yet, no one really knows he's out there except him. And us." She slows down to drive through a huge puddle. "Once we get the body, we'll take it back to my lab and figure things out from there."

"Okay," Pearl says. His knee doesn't hurt as much as it did, but he credits that to fatigue. "Do you know who Max Ordos is?"

"Who?"

"Max Ordos."

"No," Jane says. "Why? Is that one of your fake names?"

Pearl shakes his head. "It's a name that kept coming up during this whole thing." He has nothing to follow that statement, and neither does Jane until she comes to a stoplight.

"What's the craziest lie you've ever told on the job?" she asks.

"Told someone at a bar that I played piano on 'Bridge Over Troubled Water'," Pearl says, laughing a little. He'd tailed a bail jumper to Delaware, where he said that to a bartender he was trying to take back to his hotel room. It didn't work, but a few of the barflies believed him enough to badger him about Simon and Garfunkel for the rest of the night.

"That's random," Jane says. "Why'd you pick that?"

"I look a lot like the guy who did," Pearl says. "Larry Knechtel. He played on a lot of big hits."

Jane chuckles, but falls silent, and their car ride is quiet until they turn into the guarded parking lot of a large, segmented brick building. Jane flashes her ID to the guard on duty and tells him that she ruined her clothes changing a flat. He lifts the gate for them.

Once they park, Jane opens the door by Pearl's feet and helps him out.

"Can't I wait in the car?" Pearl asks.

"And steal it? Hell no," Jane says. "Follow my lead and don't say anything." She swipes her ID through a keycard lock at the building's entrance and leads him through a drab lobby to an elevator, showing her ID to the bored-looking security guard at the front desk. Pearl has trouble keeping up with her, and almost falls down in the elevator.

"Walking on this leg can't be good for it," he says. Jane replies that it's not, and to shut up, as she hits the button for SB2. "This morgue will probably be guarded. Don't say anything." The elevator lowers them to a short, narrow hallway ending at a reinforced yellow door. A man in a vaguely-military uniform stands in front of it, and snaps to attention when the elevator door opens.

"Step away from this door," he says. "Now." His eyes narrow.

"I work with the Regenerative Medicine Institute," Jane says. "Sheriff West told me to pick something up from here." She shows him her ID. He's unimpressed.

"Bullshit," he says. "This is your last warning. Step away now."

"Let us in or my friend here will shoot you," Jane says, gesturing to Pearl, who stiffens when his name is mentioned. Shoot him with what? He doesn't have a gun.