Jack & Jill (13 page)

             
"Sounds like a story I'll be telling the boys at your funeral while we raise a toast over your shot-up corpse," Dale had said, and the point had been made clear.

             
Now, gun securely snapped into his holster, Bryce stepped from the car.

             
He hitched up his belt and felt it wedge against his gut. He was putting on weight, the probable result of eating Iris's greasy cooking. He made a mental note to be careful not to let it get out of hand in case Sarah got suspicious, though he could always fall back on the old stereotype and claim he was eating one too many doughnuts while on duty. If Sarah gave it any thought at all, however, she'd remember that there hadn't been a place to buy doughnuts in Milestone since the night Benny Caldwell of Benny's Bakery went nuts, stuffed his wife in the oven, set it to 425 and then blew his brains out with a .357 Magnum.

             
Sighing, Bryce raised the flashlight and ran the beam over the wreck.

             
The only sounds in the night were the hissing of the steam from beneath the crumpled up hood of the car, which by the decal on the twisted grille appeared to be a Dodge something-or-other, and the arrhythmic ticking of cooling metal.

             
"Christ," he muttered, approaching with a caution that was not customary in such situations but which he felt, without knowing why, was advisable in this one. Sheriff Underwood would have called that
gut instinct
and smiled at him in a fatherly way. Bryce himself smiled a little at the thought, but it quickly faded. That instinct, of which Dale would be so proud, was a red neon sign flashing a single word in his mind: TROUBLE. He didn't know why, and that bothered him even more. Nothing about this scenario looked any different from the others he'd had to deal with. But the wariness within him was so strong he paused to consider going back to the car and radioing the station again. But what would he say?
Hey Sheriff? Any chance you could tool on out here? I've got the heebies.
  That was if Sheila, their tremendously overweight and foulmouthed dispatcher, even bothered to pass the message along to Dale. Obnoxious as she was, she seemed to have a keen sense for situations that required her to hoist herself up off her chair and waddle into the Sheriff's office. And he had a feeling this situation would not qualify. At least, not yet. Which meant, for now, he was alone.

             
Get on with it, you big baby.

             
He started walking again.

             
If somebody was alive in the wreck and not too badly hurt, he'd radio for Doctor Hendricks. For worse, someone would end up having to ferry the injured party to the Sisters of Mercy Hospital in Saddleback. And if it was a stiff, they'd attempt to ID the body, call the police department nearest the person's address so the next of kin could be notified, assuming they had any (which, in Bryce's experience, they never did—the dead always seemed to be not only strangers, but loners too, which Bryce thought was pretty odd in itself, as if Milestone was some kind of suicide magnet for friendless out-of-towners), then bring it on over to Hendricks for preparation in his basement mortuary. After that, it was on to the Morning Rose Cemetery and a burial presided over by Reverend Lewis, who would do his best to look sincere as he muttered something profoundly obscure and, with a gnarled hand, sliced the air over the grave into quarters. All very routine. Then Bryce would go back to the station, file the report, and tell Sheila all the gory details, while Dale observed him from his desk, searching for a sign that the sight of the body had troubled Bryce more than he was letting on.

             
"Hello?" he called to the night.

             
In the beginning, such sights
had
bothered him. The only corpse Bryce had ever seen up until that point had been his father's, and that had looked like a wax dummy someone had laid in the casket as a joke. He had felt no connection to that fake-looking thing, and in a way it had comforted him, told him the shell didn't matter, only what it had once contained. Had he come upon his father's mangled Buick and found the old man with his chest pulverized from the force of the steering wheel, his eyes bugging out as his insides were forced up into his throat, his severed foot lying sideways on the road and still wearing its loafer, well, that would have been different. Then, he might have screamed and clawed his own eyes out. Though when it came to the first accident scene, he hadn't reacted that way at all. Instead, he'd just nodded at Dale when asked if he was all right, then he'd smiled, said something he couldn't remember, and vomited copiously all over the elder man's shirt and shoes. It was the look of irritation on the Sheriff's face, which to the man's credit he quickly shed in favor of concern, that yanked Bryce back from the edge of the precipice upon which he'd been teetering, ready to plummet into stark raving madness. Because from the beginning, Dale Underwood had been someone he'd wanted to impress, a man who commanded respect and had little trouble getting it—a man like his father. That look, there and then gone, was all it took to steady him.

             
But later, in the dark, when sleep was further away than the moon, Dale had not been there to talk him back from the edge of the abyss where the seething mass of shattered human bodies tumbled endlessly upward, their mouths open and screaming. But he'd been there the next day, ready with a speech reminding Bryce what he already knew:
They're just bodies, son, flesh and blood machines to carry the soul around. Once the soul goes, the body's just like an abandoned car, and not much good to anyone anymore. What you see out there won't be pretty because the pretty part's up in Heaven playin' horseshoes with the Almighty.

             
Funny that he should remember those words now, Bryce thought, because the car in the middle of the road was abandoned too. Broken glass crunching beneath his boots, he tried the driver side door. It was not locked, but the collision (
with what?)
had warped it sufficiently that it wouldn't budge. He poked his head in through the glassless window and inspected the interior of the vehicle, his flashlight beam alighting on a deployed airbag smeared with blood.

             
The breeze tickled the hair on the back of his neck and slipped down the back of his shirt. Bryce shivered and did a quick three hundred-and-sixty degree sweep with the flashlight just in case it was something else, but saw nothing. He turned back to the car, noting the veritable mountain of fast food wrappers littered in the passenger side footwell. The glove box was hanging open like an idiot's mouth, the interior light glowing a dull amber. It had coughed its contents out onto the passenger seat, and Bryce could make out a package of unopened tissues and a tire-pressure gauge among the explosion of papers. He made a note to check those papers for some identifying documentation if the owner turned out to have wandered off, and then drew his focus back to the driver seat. Fragments of glass glittered in the light as he poked his head further into the car and angled the beam to the left and down, illuminating the darkness beneath the dashboard.

             
There was a pair of shoes under there. White sneakers speckled with blood, the laces untied, as if the driver had removed them for comfort. He couldn't be sure, but judging by the size of them, he guessed the driver had been a woman. A cursory check of the backseat revealed nothing but more trash, some old clothes, and a stuffed teddy bear with one of its black button eyes missing lying on the floor. The sight of it leering myopically up at him gave him the creeps and he reversed course, backing out of the car and giving the tall grass behind him another sweep of the light. He was looking for a trail, some sign that the driver had walked, crawled, or been flung into the field, but the grass hadn't been trampled. In the breeze, it stirred lazily as if responding to the light.

             
Bryce made his way around the back of the car, and that's where he found the woman.

             
Startled, he stopped in his tracks.
Time to call Dale
, he thought, but made no move to do so.

             
"Ma'am?"

             
The high, swollen moon had illuminated a glittering path of broken glass on the dark road. Within the myriad cobalt sparks, the woman knelt and keened to herself, occasionally jerking forward to stab at something on the asphalt. She wore what appeared to be a hospital gown, white with a pattern of small dark shapes. Flowers, probably, or something equally innocuous, intended to make you feel as if things were just dandy when just the fact that you had to wear it meant they most certainly weren't. Through the gap in the back of the material, he could see the shadowed bumps of her spine and when she spasmed forward to jab at the road, her bare ass was exposed. If she was aware of this, it didn't seem to bother her. Nevertheless, Bryce averted his gaze in case she suddenly snapped her head around to look at him.

             
TROUBLE.

             
"Ma'am," he said, the peculiarity of the situation forcing his hand to the butt of his gun, because it had occurred to him that there was nothing to suggest that the woman hadn't escaped from a mental home, like something from an urban legend, intent on murdering anyone and anything that crossed her path. Certainly her behavior indicated that she was unstable, but he knew it could just as easily be shock. The gown, however, tilted his suspicions toward the former theory.

             
The woman's long dark hair hung in her face. He couldn't tell from here if she was injured, but assuming she'd been driving, the blood on the airbag suggested as much, so he made his way back to the patrol car, leaned in through the window and grabbed the radio.

             
"Dispatch, this is Bryce."

             
"Go ahead, Lone Ranger," Sheila droned. "You got a body for us?"

             
"Yeah, but it's currently walking around dressed in a hospital gown."

             
"Huh. That's new. I'm guessing you want Dale."

             
He thought about this for a moment. He did want Dale, if only so he wouldn't be stuck out here alone in the unnatural quiet with a potentially psychopathic woman, but he knew it would look a damn sight better if he took care of this himself. Of course, if the woman
did
turn out to be a lunatic and attacked him, he would regret not taking the opportunity to summon the Sheriff while the option had been available.

             
"No," he decided. "Just let him know the situation. Dodge...Dynasty, I think, busted to hell out here on 23 North right by the exit sign. The usual spot, like you said. Another deer, most likely." As he spoke, he eyed the car, the accordioned hood, the shattered lights, the engine block driven back into the vehicle, the wheels bent back and up into the chassis, and he shook his head.
Maybe if the deer was driving a tank
. "Driver is a Caucasian female, probably mid-thirties—"

             
"Probably?"

             
"I haven't gotten a good look at her yet. She's busy attacking the road. Might do to call some of the hospitals and see if they're missing a patient."

             
"Yeah, I'll get right on that," Sheila said, and he knew she wouldn't. The grim fact of the matter was that the woman was an outsider, and as soon as outsiders crossed into Milestone, they more often than not ceased to matter to the world beyond the town's borders. Indeed it was Dale's contention that not mattering to the outside world was what drew such people to Milestone in the first place. Bryce thought there might be something to that. After all, he had once been an outsider himself, had moved here from Nebraska, and though he hadn't intended on settling in Milestone—the damn place wasn't even on any of the new maps—it was where he'd ended up.

             
"You get ID?" Sheila asked, and Bryce clenched his teeth.

             
"Not yet. Working on gauging the woman's condition. I'll get back to you when I have a name."

             
"Yeah, why don't you do that, because, you know, we could be looking that shit up as we speak, checking if that car was stolen. That's what we do here at—"

             
"Send Doctor Hendricks out here, Sheila," he snapped and tossed the radio into the cab.
Bitch
.  He headed back to the woman, but not before he unclipped his holster and checked to be sure the gun was loaded. It was, and that made him feel better. The thought that he might ever have to draw down on a living human being, that he might have to do that very thing
tonight
, however, did not. He put the gun away and snapped the holster shut.

             
Despite the vague hope that she might have run off never to be seen again, the woman was exactly where he'd left her, crouched there naked but for the gown, hair over her face as she twitched and lunged at something on the road. He stopped a few feet away from her and cleared his throat.

             
"Ma'am, my name is Deputy Bryce. I'm with the Milestone Sheriff's Department." Spoken aloud, the words sounded a lot less confident, less authoritative than they had when he'd rehearsed them in his head. Not that it mattered, because the woman continued to ignore him.