If I’d been alone, I might have smiled at that. The customized number plates echoed the starkness of the hearse’s exterior-THEEND. There was a discreet crest painted on the driver’s door containing three curlicue letters: JKB. The hearse’s chrome and black luster rendered it catlike and serious in the glow from the skylight. There were three vehicles parked inside-a fine silver Mercedes sedan, a white van that looked like an unmarked ambulance, and the hearse. The garage, on the other hand, smelled of cool oiled dust. The service areas smelled of flowery air freshener, with a metallic underscore of disinfectant.

There was a quietness and studied neatness to the whole place. John Barton gave me a fleeting tour-office chapel and viewing room with visitors’ bathrooms between them display room storeroom full of plastic-wrapped coffins standing on their ends cool-room door-on our way to the garage at the rear of the establishment. How would you feel about getting a haircut?” The words hung in the air like a balled fist. “Is that so? What are your parents’ names? I may know them.” Barton measure you up, and we’ll get something tailored.” He snatched a pen from a plastic holder and made notes on a pad. Is your back okay? Need a good back in this line of work.” There’ll be some fetching, heavy lifting, and cleaning. I’m proposing a three-month trial period, at the end of which we’ll sit here again and assess how we’ve gone. Your school counselor speaks very highly of you. The chairs were deep, lugubrious leather-more comfortable than anything I’d ever sat in. The door hushed shut, and he held out his hand. I wiped my feet more than necessary, and stepped past the man into the cool silence of the building. He looked me up and down, then shielded his eyes as if my head were at the top of a distant mountain. It opened with the smoothness of automation, but there was a man at the handle, a round man with half a smile on his easy, ruddy face. I checked my front for breakfast crumbs and then rapped on the door. There were concrete urns on either side of the entry door, spilling with white flowers. It had the boxy gabled ends of an old chapel with tall narrow eyes of stained glass to suit. The office of JKB Funerals was a majestic orange-brick addition to a modest orange-brick house.

The dead i know by scot gardner