smelled.
I cautiously peeked through the open door to his bedroom, relieved to see that he was asleep. Passed out, more likely, to judge by the empty beer cans on the nightstand and the bottle of Jack Daniels out in the kitchen. I stood there for a few seconds to make sure his chest was actually going up and down and decided against going in and tugging the blanket over him. More chance that he’d wake up from the movement of the blanket than from being cold. And we got along a lot better when he was like this.
I turned away, headed to the kitchen, found a package of macaroni and cheese and a clean bowl. I thought briefly about watching some TV while I ate, maybe smoke a joint, but decided I didn’t want to risk waking my dad up with either. Instead I scarfed down the mac and cheese, dumped the bowl into the sink with the other dirty dishes and headed to the bathroom to take the epic shower I’d promised myself earlier. It ended up only being a few minutes of “epic-ness” thanks to our ancient water heater, but it was enough to get me feeling less gross.
Toweling my hair dry, I headed to my room and glanced at the clock. It wasn’t even six P.M. yet, but I wanted to get to bed nice and early. I sure as shit didn’t want to oversleep again. I got down on my hands and knees and reached up under my bed, feeling for the pill bottle wedged between the springs. I pulled it out, pried the top off, shook a bunch of pills out into my hand. There were six or seven different kinds, but I knew them well enough that I didn’t need them to be in separate, labeled prescription bottles. Good thing, since I didn’t have prescriptions for any of them.
Resisting the urge to snag the Vicodin out, I settled for a Xanax instead. I only had the one Vicodin, and there was no sense wasting it when all I really wanted was some help getting to sleep. I returned the other pills back to the bottle, replaced it in its hiding spot, and washed the Xanax down with a beer from the mini-fridge in my room.
Flipping off the lights, I crawled under my blankets and waited for the lovely wave of relaxation to wash over me.
Twenty minutes later I was still wide awake.
By six-thirty I was forced to admit that whatever I’d taken must not have been Xanax.
I scowled into the darkness. Well, this sucked
I stubbornly stayed in bed. At some point after eight I finally fell asleep, still waiting for the Xanax to kick in.
Chapter 5
Despite the failure of Xanax, I managed to get a good night’s sleep, and actually got out of bed when my alarm went off. As soon as I made it in to work, my training began in earnest. Nick was an obsessive-compulsive, anal-retentive jerk with no social skills, but he took his job damn seriously and was hell bent on making sure I was totally prepared for anything. For the rest of the week I was drilled, instructed, trained, and learned to fucking death, but I gritted my teeth, managed to keep from bitch-slapping Nick, and actually got the hang of the whole thing faster than I ever expected. It helped that there wasn’t much about the job that was particularly difficult or complicated. The van drivers were also called bodysnatchers, and that’s basically what our job was: Go to the death scene, grab the dead person, stuff’em into a body bag. And if there were ever any doubts or questions, the investigator was there to clear things up.
I’d braced myself for all sorts of gross or weird stuff when it came to the dead people. Rotten bodies, bizarre suicides, that sort of thing. I was ready for it. I was determined not to freak out, no matter what.
What I wasn’t prepared for was the cops.
Cops everywhere, and me trying to keep from looking all guilty and spastic every time one happened to glance my way. I kept having to remind myself I wasn’t in trouble, wasn’t being hassled—I had no reason to instantly get all defensive. And for the most part the cops and detectives ignored me, or at least didn’t give me anything more than the grunt and nod that they gave various other non-cop types who happened to be on the scene.
I’d been on the job for a whole four days before I managed to run into the two detectives who knew exactly what kind of loser I was.
It was Detective Abadie who recognized me first. We were in the front yard of a two-story house in a nice- as-hell gated subdivision. The overweight and out of shape guy who owned the house had apparently decided that having a half-million dollar house meant that he couldn’t afford to hire someone to clean out his gutters. Now he was dead with what looked to me like a broken neck after the ladder had slipped. He’d taken the plunge into his fancy landscaping—complete with rock garden. But hey, his fucking gutters were clean.
Abadie’s dark eyes scanned the area, skimmed across me and then came back, narrowing. He took in the insignia on my shirt—his mouth pursing as if he’d eaten something bitter. Meanwhile I pretended to be focusing on something intensely interesting near the body so that I didn’t have to meet his gaze. But I could still see him nudge Detective Roth and whisper something. It wasn’t too difficult to figure out the general gist of what he was saying. The burly detective turned around, but to my surprise a smile spread across his face, and he lifted his hand in a wave. I couldn’t really pretend I didn’t see it, and it would’ve probably been horrible and rude to ignore it, so I gave him an awkward and hesitant wave back, hoping that it wasn’t one of those cases where he was actually smiling and waving to someone behind me.
Abadie shook his head and stalked off toward his car with the same expression on his face that Allen Prejean had worn—contempt mixed with a healthy dollop of disgust, and a side of disbelief for good measure.
Roth watched him walk off, then looked back to me and gave me a shrug and a smile before returning to his work. I let out a breath I hadn’t realized I was holding, tugged a hand through my hair to cover the fact that I was shaking a little.
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.
