The Corpse Next Door: A Detective Sergeant Randall Mystery. John Farris
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got a pain,” she said. She put her hand on her abdomen. “I got a pain here.”
“I hope it’s a boy,” I said politely.
At this, she moved around and lurched to her feet like a colt learning to walk. She had hair only a little darker than orange peel and a sagging chin and pouches under her eyes. She looked about thirty-five.
“Goddam sonbitch,” she muttered, shivering. “Gon’ sue goddam sonbitch drive so fast.” She slipped and fell against me, legs dragging. “I’m dying.”
I picked her up and carried her out of the ditch, placing my feet carefully on the slippery bank. I carried her across the road and tucked her away in my Oldsmobile. On the floor of the back seat. I didn’t want my seat covers ruined. She was due to puke her head off.
It was raining harder as I climbed back down the bank. Fisher was still beside his car. He stood there in the rain with water dripping from his hair, his forehead lined with pain, his teeth chattering. He looked bad.
He put his hands over his handsome face. “Ah, God,” he wailed. “I’ve got another damned headache.” He took his hands away and turned toward the car and took three steps alongside it, then slipped in the mud. He kneeled beside the back fender and looked at me as if I had interrupted his evening prayer.
“What are you looking at?” he cried, his eyes squinting and wild. “Like fingers squeezing my head . . . What are you looking at, you dirty son of a bitch?” He got to his feet and floundered around the car and jerked open the front door, half-fell into the front seat, reached out a hand to open the glove compartment. He groped inside. Rain hit against the roof and made a loose wet curtain covering the door space. His feet scrambled a little on the ground. He took out a small bottle, uncapped it, and white pills gleamed in his muddy palm. He swallowed them, put his face against the seat in a vise formed by his arms. He stayed that way for about a minute, then slipped out of the car, turned his head and vomited. It lasted a long time, or maybe it just seemed long, standing in the rain. Finally he crawled away from his regurgitation and lay down in a cradle of wet weeds. I went over to him and took him by the shoulder. His face was composed. The vomiting seemed to have done him some good. One of his eyes, the one I could see, opened a little.
“Take me home,” he said.
So I went out of the ditch again. The truckman stood in the road, his flashlight pointed at the blacktop.
“Wasn’t nobody hurt much, was they?” he said.
“No,” I said. “I need some help now. I have to haul out a man. I don’t think I can manage by myself.”
He came with me, walking behind me. “I should have gone down in the ditch, I know it,” he said apologetically. “Everybody’s afraid of something. I guess I’m just most afraid of seein’ hurt people.”
“You think I’m afraid of something?” I said.
“Why,” he said surprised, “why, I don’t know.”
The hell he didn’t. He could smell it on me, like a dog can. But he couldn’t know why, and I didn’t know, myself.
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