Chapter 6 #3
The sheriff cuts Clarence off. “Sheriff.”
Clarence’s lips draw back. He enunciates his words clearly. “Sheriff. If she says she thinks someone did it, I believe her. She’s obviously scared.”
“Not saying she’s not scared. Just saying maybe it’s not what she thinks. Either way, we’ll get it resolved at the station.”
He puts his arm out, motioning me to the front door ahead of him. I hesitate and look at Clarence.
“I’ll follow,” he says.
The sheriff doesn’t argue, though he looks extremely annoyed. His car is an old black-and-white Crown Victoria with the air of a late-’90s buddy-cop movie. He opens the back door and motions for us to go inside.
“I can’t sit in the front?”
“Nope. Rules are rules, even for a victim.”
Victim. It bounces around inside my skull like an echo. What am I the victim of? A coyote that didn’t even hurt me? My own paranoia?
Clarence puts his hand on my shoulder. I flinch in surprise. “S’alright. I’ll be behind you the whole time.”
I nod and slip out of my backpack. Get out of the woods. Get Ripley somewhere safe. Do both of those things as quickly as possible. I run Emma’s number through my head again. I’ll call her soon as I get to the station.
“Load up,” I tell Ripley.
She hops in, and I follow. The car smells like a ’90s buddy-cop movie: cheap cologne, sweat, and unwashed bodies. I clutch my backpack on my lap and rest my knuckles against the hatchet dangling from its loop. Ripley presses her nose against the window and pants in the heat of the car.
Sheriff Cory slides into the driver’s seat and turns the key. He glances back at me through the metal grate.
“Hotter than a whore in hell.” He shakes his head, then rolls down his window. “Almost forgot. Hey!”
Clarence, who was just about to climb into his ancient turquoise Ford truck, frowns at the sheriff waving him over. The sheriff shifts in his seat, doing something I can’t see.
Clarence makes his slow, old-man way over. He stoops to look down through the window. “What’s the problem—”
And then Clarence’s head explodes.
Sometimes in a movie or a book or even a graphic novel, the world will freeze when something stunning and horrible happens. There’s no freezing in this world. There’s only red in the air like a mist, and Clarence’s body crumpling on his front yard.
Ripley is barking and I’m yelling. I lunge for the door handle. Locked.
Sheriff Cory turns in his seat and aims a gun with a silencer at me. That’s what I couldn’t see. “You shut that mutt up or I’ll shoot it.”
I pull her close. “Ripley, enough.”
Thankfully she listens. Still, her tail is tucked and she keeps making quiet little sounds of distress.
“Good,” he says, and backs up out of the driveway.
I strain to see Clarence, to see if he’s moving, if he’s still alive, but I can’t see him past the curve in the driveway.
“What are you doing? What’s going on?”
Sheriff Cory glances at me in the rearview mirror, then looks back to the road. I slap the metal grate. My breath is coming too quick. My pulse is rushing in my ears. I think I’m having a panic attack.
What do I have on me? What can I do?
There’s my hatchet. It’s curved on one end and pointed at the other.
I could break one of the windows with the pointed bit.
It’d take at least three or four swings.
The space is cramped. With Ripley taking up half of it I could easily hurt her.
The sheriff could shoot her or me while I try to break it.
I glance down. The pepper spray is right where I put it after our encounter with the coyote.
Letting it off in an enclosed space is maybe the dumbest thing you could do with pepper spray. It literally says not to on the label. If we can’t get out, both Ripley and I will be trapped in here with it. And him.
Something Emma said to me after recounting a story she heard on one of her favorite true crime podcasts comes to me.
“If you don’t fight, you’re fucked. If you do fight, you’re still probably fucked.
“So you might as well just fight.”
“He was kind,” I say, slipping my hand into the side pocket. “And you’re a piece of shit.”
He cranks the radio, which is perfect because now he can’t hear me uncapping the spray.
I raise it to the grate separating us. “Hey, asshole!”
He glances in the rearview mirror, then does a double take when he sees the spray. He half turns, his mouth open to say something.
Pepper spray hits him directly in the face.
He curses, and yells at me to “Fucking stop!” but I don’t let up. I don’t let up when my eyes, my lungs, my throat burn like I’ve swallowed hot coals. I don’t let up when Ripley whimpers and wipes her paws over her eyes.
The car lurches to the side.
And then we’re weightless.
An instinct in the back of my brain screams that weightlessness is bad, and I better hold on.
Before I can even brace myself, the car’s front tires hit the ground. Pain explodes as the top of my head cracks on the ceiling. Ripley yelps when she falls from the seat into the footwell. I find her with my hands and duck down over her.
Trees and bushes whip against the car as it speeds down the hill. One of the windows shatters. Bits of glass land in my hair and scrape the backs of my arms. The car goes weightless again when it hits a divot, then crashes back down. Ripley yelps and so do I.
Finally, the car meets something it can’t crush in its path, throwing the both of us into the back of the driver’s seat.
I groan from the pit of my stomach and try to open my eyes. Saliva is thick in my mouth. A searing fire torches my throat. The world is composed of blurry shadows for the brief seconds I manage to open my stinging eyes. Glass shards press into my palms when I prop myself up on the seat.
Sheriff Cory is moaning and slurring, “shit, shit, fucking bitch,” and I know I have to get out, get out, get out before he can get me himself.
I fumble around for the door handle—still locked—but the window above is shattered. I push my backpack and then myself through, and crumple shoulder-first onto the forest floor.
I manage to stand, but Sheriff Cory stumbles out of the car before I can get Ripley. My backpack tumbled down the incline after I pushed it out. I go for it and the hatchet, and trip on the uneven ground. I land hard on my hip.
The sheriff’s blurry shape wavers toward me. He snarls something garbled along the lines of “fucking” and “bitch.”
My fingertips touch a branch. I grip it and slam it into his knee.
I’m weak, uncoordinated. It glances along the outside and I think, Oh shit.
But then he trips on his own feet and falls back through the open driver’s side door.
His head makes a watermelon-on-concrete thunk when it hits the doorframe. He moans and lies stunned.
I haul myself up and grip the driver’s side door by the open window.
His whole body jerks when I slam the door on his head. I slam it and slam it until he isn’t a person anymore, until the man he once was is reduced to a red smear of meat dripping into the underbrush.
I throw up until I can’t breathe. My whole face is wet with tears and snot and saliva.
The lukewarm water bottle he had in the cup holder helps to clear my eyes. The creek at the bottom of the hill we careened down is even better. I stick my head in, think vaguely about parasites, and gargle until my throat is no longer on fire.
Getting Ripley in is more difficult. She’s confused and squirming, and panics when I dunk her in the deepest part of the creek. I shush her and spill water cupped in my palm over her eyes and snout until she can blink sad what-the-fuck-mom eyes at me without rubbing them with her paws.
We sit on the creek bed—me staring into the water, her trying to sit on my lap. I wrap my arms around her middle and lay my temple on her back.
“Well,” I say, focusing on how her ribs contract under my cheek. “Damn.”