The Enfield Marine units (Maps and Territory)
the girl ended up back in New Bedford, and then within like three hours of hitting the streets got picked up by New Bedford’s Finest on an old default warrant and sent to Framingham Women’s for a 1-to-2 bit, and got found one morning in her bunk with a kitchen-rigged shiv protruding from her privates and another in her neck and a thoroughly eliminated personal map, and Gately’s individual counselor Gene M. brought Gately the news and invited him to see the methedrine addict’s demise as a clear case of There But For the Grace of God Goeth D. W. Gately.
Context
The idiom's grimmest early use, and its first attachment to a real corpse: Gately's prank partner from early residency relapses, gets discharged, and is murdered at Framingham Women's, her face rendered as "a thoroughly eliminated personal map." Where scene 040 kept the idiom inside yrstruly's dialect (pp. 128–135, below), here it surfaces in the book's own narration, deadpan, mid-sentence, in the middle of a real-estate tour — and Gene M. immediately converts the eliminated map into recovery arithmetic.