Sounded like a tie game to me—and that was an improvement over “loser” any way you looked at it, right? Still, I wasn’t in the best frame of mind for what happened that afternoon.
I’d been through another three autopsies since my first day on the job and each time the damn weird-as-hell craving for brains hit me as soon as the skull was opened up. Each time I gritted my teeth and got through it by not looking directly at the brain and by pretending I was somewhere else.
It worked great until we started the autopsy of the guy we’d just picked up, and Nick handed me the scalpel and bone saw and told me to give it a try. I couldn’t pretend to be somewhere else when I was trying to slice through the nasty rubbery thickness of scalp and keep my teeth from rattling out of my head while maintaining something resembling a straight line around the top of the guy’s head. And I had to admit that it was weirdly satisfying to give that skullcracker a twist and feel the crack of bone all the way up my arms. Of course by the time I dug my fingers into the crack and pulled the top of the skull off, my damn mouth was watering like a dog who hadn’t been fed for a week, looking at a steak.
But that wasn’t the worst part. No, the really bad part was that I froze—stood there with half the guy’s skull in my hands and stared at the pinkish-grey flesh. Didn’t snap out of it until Nick smacked me on the arm.
“Angel? You’re not done,” he said, eyes narrowing. “Are you about to puke or something?”
I took an unsteady breath and tore my eyes away from the brain. “Don’t be stupid,” I snapped, a hell of a lot more sharply than I meant.
It didn’t seem to faze Nick though. He simply gave a snort and jerked a thumb toward the brain. “Then keep going. Did you forget what to do?”
I scowled behind the mask I’d put on to keep from breathing in bone dust. “It’s not fucking rocket science. I was only looking for a second. Gimme a damn break.” With that I set the top of the skull on the table and fiercely set about removing the brain from its former home—and a teensy bit grateful to Nick for pissing me off enough that I could get through this.
Maybe that’s what I need to do, I thought as I grimly set the brain on the scale and wiped my hands. Distract myself. Do whatever it is guys do to keep from coming too soon. Baseball scores or some shit like that. Not that I’d ever known a baseball score.
Still the fact that I’d frozen like that had me more than a little freaked out.
I made it through the rest of the day, but when I finally climbed into my car I knew without any doubt at all that I didn’t want to go home just yet. I tried calling Randy again, but when it rolled to voice mail I didn’t bother leaving a message and simply headed to his house. I was used to him not answering the phone since he was usually out working in his garage.
Randy lived at the end of several miles of long and narrow rural road. There were only a few houses on the entire road, and the rest of it was dense pine forest. At night it was creepy as all hell, though during the day it was practically scenic—until you made it to the end.
Randy lived in a trailer—which really wasn’t so bad since it was actually a pretty decent trailer, as far as trailers went—but the part that really killed the “scenic” aspect was the ramshackle garage. Made of corrugated sheet metal and god-only-knew what else, it was over fifty years old and looked it. Randy’s daddy had worked out of it as an auto mechanic until he’d met a lady and moved to Houston with her a couple of years ago. Now Randy was the mechanic, though sometimes I suspected he had a side business going on when it came to cars. After all, the guy who’d sold me the stolen Prius had been a buddy of his. It hadn’t been worth the trouble, though, to accuse Randy of knowing it had been stolen. It wouldn’t have made any difference at that point.
Randy was out front when I pulled up, his tall, lanky body under the hood of an El Camino. He lifted his head as I got out of my car, a puzzled look crossing his face before it was replaced by his usual lazy smile.
“Hey, babe,” he said, wiping his hands on a rag. “Didn’t think I’d see you around here anytime soon.”
I paused and frowned. “Why?” I asked, right before another memory flickered into place. We’d had some sort of fight that night I’d ODed, though I hadn’t the faintest idea what it had been about. It couldn’t have been too serious, since he didn’t act like he was still mad or anything. But we never had fights about anything major. Sure, we argued, but it was always stupid crap like me getting pissed because he was paying too much attention to how short Ida Miller’s skirt was or him thinking I was banging every guy who looked sideways at me.
He lifted a shoulder in a mild shrug. “After that scene at Pillar’s the other night,” he said, confirming my memory of some sort of argument. “I been worried about you.”
I bit back the urge to ask him why the hell he hadn’t called in the past few days if he was worried about me. I was feeling good. I sure as hell didn’t want to get over one fight just to get into another.
“Busy. Got a job,” I said instead. “Been at it almost a week now.”
“Cool,” he said as he gave me a hug. He smelled of tobacco and grease. A faint whiff of pot clung to him as well, and I could feel myself mentally focusing on that scent. A faint spark of annoyance passed through me that he didn’t ask about the job. Then again, I was the queen of minimum wage. He probably assumed I was working another convenience store gig.
“I’m working at the Coroner’s Office as a van driver,” I told him.
He pulled back and gave a sharp bark of laughter. “You? Touching dead people?”
“Yeah, well, I haven’t puked yet.” Suddenly I didn’t want to talk about my job. If I started thinking about that, then I’d start thinking about why I was working there. “You wanna go get a drink or something?”
“I need to finish this up.” He gestured in the direction of the El Camino. “But there’s beer in the fridge if you want to hang around. This won’t take more than about ten minutes.”
Well, that was the best offer I was likely to get today. I headed into the trailer and snagged two beers out of his fridge. A frying pan on the stove held congealing bacon fat, and the kitchen table was covered with old newspapers and engine parts—both combining to give a faint bacon/engine grease tang to the air. It didn’t bother me. I was pretty used to it since I usually slept over here as often as I could. Randy’s furniture was old and battered, and the carpet had more stains on it than a bum’s underwear, but the trailer didn’t have roaches, rats, or my dad.
I plopped down on the couch and put my feet up on the coffee table, shoving aside a stack of old Car and Driver magazines and about six remotes. Even though Randy didn’t seem to give much of a shit about his living arrangements, he took his entertainment pretty seriously : wide screen HDTV, Blu-Ray/DVD player, Xbox, and a kick-ass stereo system. Yet another reason why I preferred spending my time over here.
I didn’t turn the TV on. After the day I’d had, I was more in the mood for quiet. No fights. No insults. Nothing weird or disturbing.
I’d finished the first beer and was well into the second by the time Randy came in. He headed straight to the kitchen, returning after a moment with a beer in one hand and baggie in the other. He cracked the beer open and took a long swig, then snagged an already-rolled joint out of the baggie and lit it. After several puffs he passed it to me.
I took a long hit, then tipped my head back and waited for it to take effect.
“You been to Pillar’s since the other night?” he asked.
“Nope,” I said, without moving. The mellow hadn’t hit yet, and I felt that if I shook my head it would kill it.
“Me neither.” He paused. “Gotta admit, I was kinda surprised to see you come by here after all that.”
Damn. Must have been more of a fight than I thought. I took another hit off the joint as a missing fragment of memory abruptly slid into place. Oh yeah, he’d gone off with some chick, so I’d tried to get back by flirting with a guy I didn’t even know. Then the guy had offered to drive me home, because I was way too drunk to drive. Or too stoned. I didn’t remember drinking all that much. No, wait, the guy had been buying me drinks. But I didn’t leave with him. I was sure of that. There was no way I’d go off with someone I didn’t know. I could be stupid as all hell sometimes, but I knew better than to do that. So instead I tried to walk home. Yeah, that was so much smarter.
“Guess that’s why I haven’t called you.” Randy was still talking.
I took another pull on the joint, a hard one, as if I could get it to take effect faster. Why the hell wasn’t I high yet? “Umm, okay.”
He frowned down into his beer. “You know I didn’t fuck her, right?”
I blinked at him. “Hunh?”
“Alison,” he said. “The chick I left with? You came after me, asked where the fuck I was going. Acting all jealous and shit—”
“I remember,” I interrupted. “And you laughed and said you were gonna go bang her in the parking lot.”
A grimace flickered over his face. “I was just fucking with you,” he muttered. “I didn’t think you’d believe me. I was going out to take a look at her car. She was having trouble with her battery. Then I came back in and you were all over some asshole. Pissed me off.”
Yeah, I’d believed him. It wasn’t as if he’d never cheated on me before, though now I could see that doing so in the middle of our night out together would have been a stretch, even for him. And I’d overreacted like a moron, trying to make him jealous. I remembered that much, though I couldn’t for the life of me remember who the other guy was. Hopefully I hadn’t made too much of an ass of myself.
“Well, it was a dick thing to say,” I told him.
“I know,” he said with a wince. “Sorry. So how’d you get the job?” It was pretty obvious he wanted to change the subject, but that was fine with me. If we kept hashing over what had happened at the bar we’d probably end up in another fight.