“Have I been fired?” I managed to ask.
Her eyes narrowed. “You’d better not have been!” she announced, but there was a shimmer of doubt in her eyes as she pressed the button to let me in.
The door buzzed, and I went on through, anger and dismay fighting it out in a hard knot within my chest. I began to head down the hallway to Allen’s office, but Rebecca reached out and stopped me with a hand on my arm.
“No matter what happens, you’ll always have friends here, darlin’.”
I forced out a smile for her. She gave me a little pat, then turned back to her desk. I continued on to Allen’s office, deeply grateful when I didn’t run into anyone else on the way.
His door was open. I didn’t bother knocking on the doorframe or anything polite like that. I simply came in and plopped down in the chair in front of the desk. “Hi, Allen. My card isn’t working. And I have a message to see you. Have I been fired?” And hey, I managed to say it without sounding like I was about to burst into tears.
He frowned at the still open door, but I wasn’t about to get up and close it so that he could say the bullshit he had to say in private.
“You’re not fired,” he said, returning his gaze to me.
“But?” Because it was obvious there was a gigantic “but” coming.
His mouth tightened into a thin line. “But…the coroner feels that it would be best to let all of this…messiness blow over.”
“You mean until after the election’s over?” I said. I stuffed my hands into the pockets of my jacket. I wanted to hide that they were clenched to keep them from shaking. The election was over three months away. If I was super careful I might be able to make my stash of brains last that long. But then what if he loses? His opponents were nobodies, and he was heavily favored to win, but stranger things had happened. And why would his replacement possibly want to take a chance on hiring me?
Allen leaned back. “You’re taking a leave of absence for personal reasons. Once Dr. Duplessis secures the re-election, you’ll have the option to return from your leave to your former position.” He cleared his throat. “Of course it would be unpaid leave. I’m sorry to say that you haven’t been with us long enough to have that much vacation time.”
I stared at him while everything he said tumbled over in my head. “Wow,” I finally said. “I must admit, I wasn’t expecting this.”
“Haven’t you been reading the papers?” he asked with a snide curl of his lip. “It’s been on the front page since the incident.”
“Yes, I’ve been reading the papers,” I shot back. “Despite what you think of me, I’m not illiterate. I totally expected that at some point I was going to get fucked. What I didn’t expect was to be asked to fuck myself.” I stood up, aware that I was beginning to shout, but I had no desire to control myself. “Well, you know what? It’s not going to happen. I’m not going to meekly take myself off so that the coroner can avoid a nonexistent scandal. I was held up at fucking gunpoint! Why the fuck doesn’t he grow a pair of fucking balls and come out and say that? And, y’know what? He can grow a pair of fucking balls and fire me to my goddamn face if he wants me gone!” I was beyond shouting at this point. I was shrieking like an insane bitch. Hey, at least now there was legitimate reason to fire me.
I didn’t give him a chance. I spun and stormed out, holding my fury and hurt close to me, and didn’t look around even though I knew there were plenty of shocked observers leaning out of office doors. I thought I heard Reb whisper, “Good luck, babe,” as I stormed past her and through the security door, but I couldn’t be sure. I liked to think she did.
I drove out to my storage locker and numbly counted up my stash even though I had a pretty solid idea of how much I had saved. If I was careful and wasn’t too active and didn’t get hurt, I could probably last a couple of months. And what then?
And then I’m fucked. Unless Sofia manages to get her fake brain formula right by then.
Why the hell had I gone off on Allen like that? Yeah, sure, the whole “leave without pay” thing was bullshit, but at least it would’ve most likely been temporary. Life was full of bullshit, and sometimes it was smarter to suck it up and wait for a better opportunity.
With a sense of complete despair paired with a fair amount of self-loathing, I shut and locked the freezer and the storage unit. I stopped at the first store that sold cheap clothing, bought a t-shirt, and changed out of my coroner’s office shirt. I briefly considered chucking it into the trash, but then changed my mind and shoved it into the trunk of my car. I really had loved the job, and just because Allen and the coroner were jerks didn’t mean I needed to scrub it from my entire life.
Now if I could only find something that would help take my mind off the complete clusterfuck my life had become.
I couldn’t get drunk. Drugs didn’t work on me anymore. Even cigarettes did nothing but burn my brains up and make me feel dead. And for that matter, even feeling dead wasn’t an escape since it always came with a hunger that wouldn’t go away until it was satisfied.
In other words, being bummed and depressed as a zombie sucked complete ass.
I finally stopped driving and pulled into the parking lot of Lou-Ann’s Café. That was one thing the morgue job had been good for—after so many months of working odd hours I knew where all the good greasy spoons were. Not to mention which ones had bathrooms that were fairly clean.
Lou-Ann’s had decent bathrooms, and more importantly, a really good key lime pie that would have to be my substitute for drugs and alcohol. I sat at the counter and ignored everyone else around me while I focused on enjoying every bite of the damn pie. I was vaguely aware that someone sat next to me and did his best to hit on me, but I ignored him and kept eating and eventually he got the message and slunk off.
The waitress didn’t make any attempt to engage me in conversation, which I appreciated more than she could possibly know. I made sure to give her an insanely large tip, and when I headed out I was somewhat calmer. And fuller. And at least I didn’t have to worry about diabetes.
I was nearly to my car when I heard an aggravatingly familiar voice from behind me. “Look who it is—the cunt from the newspaper.”
Looking back, I saw Clive’s sneering face. I was pretty sure he hadn’t been in the café while I was there, so I figured he was on his way in. “Get it right, Clive,” I said. “It’s ‘fucking bitch.’”
He snorted. “I’ll just go with fucking loser. It’s only a matter of time before you end up back in jail, y’know.”
I rolled my eyes and continued to my car. I’d just opened the door when he spoke again.
“Maybe you can share a cell with that fuckup loser of a dad you got.”
Goddammit, but I was getting really sick of people shitting on me and my dad. I stopped, turned, made a quick scan of the parking lot then took two steps toward him. “What did you say?”
Clive’s mouth spread into a sneering grin. He straightened his shoulders as he closed the distance between us, deliberately flexing and pushing his chest out a bit—which almost made me laugh. I weighed barely a hundred pounds. He was bowing up to me?
“I said your dad’s a fucking loser—”
That was all he got out before my fist connected with his face as hard as I could manage. I wasn’t full up on brains, but I was pretty damn close, and I was able to hit him hard enough to send him reeling back, clutching at his nose.
“You fucking bitch!” he screeched as blood began to fountain through his fingers. “You broke my fucking nose!”
I grimaced and looked down at my right hand. I’d never really learned how to punch, and it showed. Two of the bones in my hand were clearly bent at angles that weren’t supposed to be there, and blood seeped from a wide cut across my knuckles. It hurt like fuck-all but even as I peered at it, the pain began to fade to a dull background ache.
Clive let out a wheezing noise that I suddenly realized was him laughing. “You stupid bitch,” he gurgled through his bloody
fingers. “I’m calling the cops. I’m pressing charges. And your loser ass will be going back to jail.”
I lifted my eyes to his. “Okay. Call them,” I said, absolutely loving how calm I sounded. “I’ll wait right here.”
Clive fumbled his phone out of his pocket. I watched him thumb nine-one-one on the keypad, listened to him tell the dispatcher that he’d been attacked and was holding the perpetrator—me—and needed the cops to come so that I could be properly arrested. While he did this, I casually reached into my car and pulled my bottle of brain smoothie out of the cup holder. I took several long gulps, resisting the urge to grin as I felt the bones pulling back together.
“Don’t you fucking try and run from me, bitch,” Clive told me after he disconnected. “They said they have a unit right around the corner.”
I shrugged and took another pull from the bottle. Might as well finish it off just in case he decided he didn’t want to wait for the cops and would rather take his fury out on me in person. I was careful to hold the bottle in my left hand, and deliberately kept my right cradled against me to make it look as if it was still hurt.
He fumbled his car open and snagged a towel out of the backseat, held it to his face. “Then again,” he said, “maybe you should run.” He let out a nasty laugh. “Y’ever been tasered? I’d fucking pay money to see that.”
I set the empty bottle back in the cup holder. A quick glance told me that there was still a smear of blood on my knuckle, which I left there for now. But when the two sheriff’s cars pulled into the parking lot, and Clive took his eyes from me, I took that chance to quickly lick the blood off. Gross, I know, but I didn’t want to wipe the blood on my clothes anywhere it might show.
I vaguely recognized the deputies who stepped out, but I doubted that they could do the same with me since I wasn’t dressed in my coroner’s office gear anymore. I didn’t say anything while Clive indignantly told them the story of how I’d hauled off and slugged him. He actually stayed pretty close to the truth, probably because it really didn’t need any sort of elaboration. He knew perfectly well that even a misdemeanor battery arrest would violate my probation. And, with the damage to his nose, it could possibly even be considered a felony.
The two deputies listened to his account with the occasional glance toward me, clearly thinking something on the order of, “this tiny thing broke your nose?” But they let him finish before turning to me.
“He made the whole thing up,” I said before they could speak. “I was out here making a phone call when he came stumbling around the corner with a bloody nose, then he started babbling about how I’d hit him.”
Clive puffed up. “Oh yeah? Check her hand! She broke her fucking hand on my nose!”
I locked eyes with Clive and extended both my hands to the deputies. I didn’t say a word while they carefully examined my knuckles, fingers, and the condition of the various bones.
They exchanged a look, then turned back to Clive. “Not a damn thing wrong with her hands, sir,” one said. “There’s no possible way she punched you—and certainly not hard enough to break your nose. Why don’t you tell us what really happened?”
Things really went downhill for Clive after that, though for me it was a truly beautiful thing. I watched in serene glee as he argued, then frothed, then, when they attempted to cite him for disturbing the peace, he fought, which earned him the tasering he’d taunted me about.
And, on top of all that, they found steroids and painkillers in his vehicle—enough to get him charged with possession with intent to distribute.
All in all it was the best high I could have ever asked for.
Chapter 19
As I drove home, distant flashes of lightning were putting on a spectacular show in the clouds to the west. And, at least for the moment, I was in the perfect mood to appreciate the beauty of it. Every time I started to think about how badly I’d screwed the pooch with my job, I summoned up the memory of Clive shrieking like a little bitch as the Taser probes hit him. Yeah, I’d lectured my dad about being forgiving and all that shit, but sometimes forgiveness was overrated.
My phone rang, and I was more than a little surprised to see that it was Sofia. I made a face, regretting my decision to actually put her number into my contacts list. I was in a really good mood right now, and I doubted that she had anything to say to me that would keep that good mood going. And I sure as hell didn’t want to get sucked into a “Let’s do coffee” date or something equally lame. Therefore, I channeled my pettiness and immaturity and let it go to voicemail. That was a decent compromise, right? I was willing to listen to a recording of her. I simply didn’t want to actually talk to her.
I waited for the ding that would tell me I had a new voicemail, but instead my phone rang—Sofia again. I sighed, dialed down my pettiness, and answered.
“Angel, I need your help!” she gasped. “Oh my god, I don’t know who else to turn to. I can’t reach Marcus, and there’s someone outside of my house and—”
“Whoa, wait! Sofia, slow down. Marcus is in Lafayette. What the hell is going on?”
I heard her take a shuddering breath. “I think I’m in danger. I keep hearing sounds outside my house.”
“Have you called the cops?” I asked.
“Yes!” she wailed. “I called them, and two cops came and they checked around the house and they said they didn’t see anything. But ten minutes after they left I started hearing it again. I…I think someone is maybe just trying to scare me.” She gulped. “And they’re succeeding. I know we barely know each other, but is there any way you could…come over here?”
You have got to be kidding me, I thought with unchecked annoyance.
“Please,” she said, voice cracking. “I know it’s stupid, but I’d feel so much safer if…if you could come by for a bit. The cops won’t stay but…”
But I’m a zombie and hard to kill and could actually offer a bit of security. I sighed. “Okay.” Shit. When did I become so nice? “Where do you live?”
“Oh my god, thank you thank you! I live in Breckenridge Estates. I’ll text you the address.”
I racked my brain for where the hell that was. Oh yeah, it was a new subdivision out off Highway 1790. “Okay, I’m probably only about ten minutes away.”
“I’ll be watching for you. Honk when you pull up, okay?” she said. “I don’t even want to peek out the window at this point.”
I bit back a frustrated sigh. “Sure. See you soon.” And then I disconnected before I could be pulled into more paranoid angst.
But is it really paranoia? I had to wonder. There was definitely some weird shit going on. And if I had to be honest with myself, my dislike of her stemmed mostly from our encounter at Pietro’s…and, if I really had to continue being honest with myself, from my jealousy of her and her friendship with Marcus, even though I didn’t believe for a second that the two were anything more than friends. Didn’t matter. I envied their closeness, however platonic it was.
I mused on this as I drove—easy enough to do since there wasn’t much else to occupy my attention out here. Highway 1790 ran from one end of the parish to the other, with a big stretch in the middle through woods and swamp that I affectionately called Bum-Fuck Nowhere. Back in my don’t-give-a-shit days, I used to come out here and get whatever car I was driving to its top speed—which was awesome when I was in a Camaro that Randy had been fixing up, but was pretty damn lame in my Honda.
I didn’t stick strictly to the speed limit, but I did my best not to go more than ten miles per hour over. Which was probably a damn good thing when I saw something shimmering in the road ahead of me. Unfortunately I was still almost on top of it before I saw the glint of spikes.
I slammed on the brakes out of pure instinct, but I was already too close for that to do any good. A second later the road spikes ripped through my front tires with a bang that I felt as much as heard, quickly replaced by the shriek of metal on pavement and the thump of rubber slapping the side of my car.
I fought the steering wheel and pulled the car over to the side of the road, gasping raggedly in reaction. What the fuck? Why would police spikes be out here with no cop car in sight? No cop car means it’s not cops, I told myself. I was on a straight and empty stretch of road with at least fifty feet of knee-high grass on either side before it turned into scrub marsh and scattered trees. A perfect ambush spot. I needed to get the hell out of there, and my only option was to run for it and hope to lose whoever was after me in the marsh. Gators. Giant Squid. Oh, man, this is gonna suck.
My purse was god-only-knew-where on the floor, along with my phone. I automatically reached for the water bottle of brain smoothie, cursing as I remembered that I’d finished it off after punching Clive and hadn’t replaced it. I was still pretty tanked up, but it sure would have been nice to have some extra on hand. ’Cause I had a feeling I was about to burn up a whole lot.
Bolting out of the car, I took off at a sprint for the woods on the other side of the highway. I heard a gunshot and bit back a screech of panic as I increased my speed. But the next gunshot came with a searing pain in my left calf that sent me sprawling into an awkward tumble on the asphalt.
It’s Ed. My thoughts whirled frantically as I stumbled back to my feet and started running again. He’s finally come back to finish me off.
I could hear footsteps behind me, the loping pace of someone who knows that they don’t need to run their prey down. Something hard hit me in my lower back, and I fell again, landing heavily on my hands and knees in the gravel of the highway shoulder. Pain flared briefly, but then it faded to a dull sense of pressure even as everything around me shifted to a greyscale monotone. I could still see and hear and smell, but it was as if everything was abruptly dialed back to the absolute basics. This gunshot wound was obviously a lot worse, and my body was abandoning all those extra resources right now. I wanted to scream at it that it needed to put all the energy into my legs, because once my head got chopped off it wouldn’t make a difference.
Angel Crawford #2: Even White Trash Zombies Get the Blues Page 16