Rapid Fire
Donna Ball

Excerpt

It was as I was climbing into my car that I noticed the glint of something on the ground, just a few inches behind my front tire. I probably wouldn’t have noticed it at all had not the courtesy lamp from the driver’s side door reflected off the sliver of metal as it swung open. I stretched down to pick it up. It was a gold chain, broken at the clasp, with a gold crucifix attached to it. I recognized it immediately, of course. Manny, the Mexican fellow who had stolen my dog’s affections away this afternoon, had obviously lost it on the job when he returned to the construction site.

I lifted my hand toward the workers Buck was now interviewing, and started to call out to one of them, then thought better of it. This was a valuable piece of jewelry and I didn’t know any of those guys. Buck hated this kind of babysitting work, and there was no point in bothering him with a lost-and-found job when I knew who the item belonged to. Better to try to give it back to its owner myself, or at least to find the construction foreman in the morning and turn it over to him. I slipped the necklace into the change compartment of my wallet, and it never once occurred to me this might not be the right thing to do.

Why should it have?

I proceeded down the gravel-strewn slope and onto Valley Street at a slower-than usual pace, partly because dark was coming on and the place where the carved-out construction road met the main road was on a dangerous curve, and partly because my eyes were still scanning the surrounding woods for the bear. I felt pretty sure he had high-tailed it home, wherever home might be, but bears can be unpredictable creatures where food is concerned. And he had already been rewarded for his efforts twice tonight– once with my supper.

Had I been traveling at my usual confident speed, or if I had been paying more attention to the surrounding countryside than to the road, I might have missed it. As it was, my headlights picked up the shape on the side of the road, half- in and half out of the ditch, and I had driven another hundred yards before my mind actually registered what I had seen. I slammed on the brakes, threw the gear shift into reverse, and backed up, my heart pounding in my throat, hoping against hope that I had not, in fact, seen what I knew I had seen.

I actually backed past the spot, and I thought I must have been mistaken after all. But no. When I turned my attention away from the rear-view mirror and looked forward, a caught a suggestion of a lumpy shape in the dry grass, a scrap of fabric that was out of place. I eased the car forward until the headlights shone like spotlights on the body on the side of the road.

Somehow I remembered to put the car in park and to set the emergency brake. When I flung open the door the awkward angle at which I had stopped caused it to fly out of my hand and I almost fell out of the car. My throat was dry and my stomach hurt and my knees were like rubber. I stumbled and slid on loose gravel as I scrambled down the slope, catching myself on one hand. I halted, heart pounding, about three feet away from where the body lay at a broken angle face down in the weeds.

Wilderness training has taught me what to do in an emergency, and I had, unfortunately, seen more than one dead body in my life. But none of that made it any easier to approach the prone figure, and to drop to my knees beside it.

His hair was dark, and so was the skin of his arms beneath the short-sleeved plaid shirt he wore. His jeans were scuffed and torn and one shoe was missing. One leg was hyperextended away from his body at the knee and the material covering it was dark with blood.

Death is unmistakable. There is no stillness like it, no silence to compare to it. I knew this man was dead. But compassion, or perhaps some faint stubborn hope, compelled me to stretch out a hand, and search for a carotid pulse.

The flesh was cold, but still relatively supple, which a far-away part of my brain registered to mean that death had occurred recently. When I moved my fingers, still searching futilely for a pulse I knew was not there, his head shifted and rolled loosely on broken, disconnected vertebra, revealing a portion of his face.

I gasped and jerked back. "Oh God," I whispered, staring. "Oh, no."

I scrambled to my feet, clawed my way back to the car, and pulled open the door. I couldn’t find my phone, couldn’t remember whether I had even brought it with me. And all I could think of to do was to blow the horn, and to keep on leaning on it until Buck got there.