Chapter 9
“Wouldya look at that,” says a thick Chicago accent next to me. “He’s dead.”
I’m embarrassed to report that my first bewildered thought was that the dogs were talking to me, and that my second thought was: But aren’t they French?
Let’s just chalk it up to the shock of seeing my first-ever dead body.
But then when I turn away from the accident, the brim of an enormous green sun hat smacks me in the face, and it’s honestly
kind of a relief to see the old Mission: Impossible lady.
This is all awful, but at least dogs aren’t talking to me.
“Super dead,” I agree shakily.
The old lady squints hard into the driver’s-side window, lips pursed. She humphs, reaches in, and lifts up the dead guy’s wrist like she’s taking his pulse.
I’m going to barf.
She drops the hand, letting it flop back down lifelessly, and turns to squint at me accusingly. “Did you do this?”
“What?” I squawk. “No!”
But the moment it’s out of my mouth, I realize I did do this. If I hadn’t been late for my shift, I could have made him slow down or directed him away from the sinkhole. He definitely
would’ve screamed at me again, but at least the car wouldn’t have crashed. He wouldn’t be dead.
Oh god.
This is totally my fault.
I’m about to blurt out a confession, but the lady has moved on—she’s scoping out the scene, looking underneath the car, peering
in the back windows, opening and closing the passenger-side door, which makes the car groan.
“Hey, ma’am?”
She shoots me a dirty look, and I start again.
“Do you think maybe we should wait for—” The rest of that sentence catches in my throat as she lifts Poodle Dude’s head off the steering wheel, which somehow sets off a deluge of what appears to be . . . the totality of his guts? My vision goes wavy, my soul leaves
my body, and before I know it, the lady is next to me, snapping her fingers in my face and patting my cheek.
Then she full-out slaps me.
“What the heck!” I yell.
“This is no time to get soft,” she says, elbowing me. “They’re coming.”
I drag my eyes away from Poodle Dude and see what she’s elbowing about: The first wave of kids and parents is making their
way toward us. Their bright, excited faces and colorful backpacks and cheerful, innocent morning chatter are steadily closing
in on this extremely gross dead guy and a lifetime of therapy. “What do I do?” I ask, absolutely panicked.
“I’ll call 911,” she says. “You cover this up.”
“Cover this . . .”
“Cover him up. So all those cute little kids aren’t traumatized for the rest of their lives.” She shoves her green hat in my hands.
There are bloody fingerprints smeared across the brim. “There you go.”
Oh.
Okay.
Yes.
I can do this. I can keep those kids from owing a mountain of therapy co-pays.
I take a step toward the car and the dogs growl.
I take a step back.
“Now!” the lady orders. She waves her phone at me aggressively, and I decide she’s scarier than the dogs, so I leap into action,
first sticking my hand carefully through the driver’s-side window and placing the green sun hat over the dead guy. It doesn’t
cover all of him, but it’s a good start.
The kids are getting closer and as she listens to someone on the other end of the phone, the lady frowns at me and mouths
the words Keep going! but I have no idea what else there is to do. The windows are tinted, but maybe that’s not enough? There needs to be some
other distraction, but my brain is just screaming Save the kids!, so I do the first thing that flashes into my mind: I hop up on the hood of the Kia and sprawl out like I’m the goofy member
of a nineties boy band.
Between me and the tinted windows, these kids are not seeing a dead body on my watch.
Unfortunately, I’m so focused on the kids that I’ve forgotten about the poodles, who now start scratching at the car (not ideal) and one of them is hunching down like he’s going to jump up here with me, while at the same time the car begins to groan like it’s a centimeter away from dipping perilously farther into the hole.
Nope, nope, this isn’t good. I lean back hard into the windshield, propping myself on the little pocket where the wipers go.
To my everlasting relief, the groaning stops.
The poodles are now going crazy, though, barking their poofy heads off at me and their dead papá. Oh god, do dogs eat dead
bodies?
I can’t let the kids see that.
Clearly the dogs managed to jump out of the car windows, what if they jump back in?
And time’s up, because the first group of kids and parents has reached the opposite corner, where they’re all eyeing me curiously.
“Just a little fender bender!” I call, trying to sound chipper. “Don’t worry, everyone’s still alive!” I look both ways for
oncoming traffic, then stretch out my stop sign arm as far as it can go. “No one’s coming, go ahead and cross!”
They do not cross.
Instead, they peer past the car at the dogs, and I can’t blame them, because the dogs are going absolutely berserk. One is
up on its hind legs again, nosing around inside the driver’s window, poking at the hat. I try a gentle roundhouse kick to
nudge the dog down. Unfortunately, I don’t know how to roundhouse kick. Also, I am balanced on a car hood, so I only succeed
in straining a groin muscle. I stifle a grunt of pain.
The assembled kids and parents all stare at the seafoam Kia and me, at the dogs and at the old lady who’s yelling into her
phone, confusion playing across their faces. One parent opens his mouth to ask a question I definitely won’t want to answer,
so I plaster on a smile and put on my loudest voice.
“Looks clear for crossing!” I say, pointing forcefully toward the street. “It’s swimming pool rules today! I’m a traffic lifeguard
up here right now! Just go with it!”
Cool. Very normal, Mo.
But it works, or rather, the first bell rings, so they mumble to themselves and walk across the street, and I’m mulling over how I might turn this experience into a bullet point on my résumé, when the old lady yells, “Marlowe. No.”
It startles me enough that I yelp and almost slide off the hood and straight into the hole. At the last minute, I spin and
manage to grip the windshield wiper gap and pull myself back up.
And now I see what the old lady was yelling about.
It’s that pink-haired kid again.
She’s at the driver’s-side window, peeking under the giant hat and taking a picture with her phone as the dogs flank her.
“Whoa,” she says. “Dead guy.”
“He’s just sleeping,” I say quickly, awkwardly scooting over so I can climb down onto the relative safety of the street. “And
you shouldn’t disturb . . . people while they’re sleeping.”
Marlowe looks up at me dryly, like it’s too much effort to fully roll her eyes, but she would if she felt like it. “That is
not a sleeping guy. That is a dead guy. I’ve watched a lot of Law & Order.”
“Marlowe,” scolds the old lady again, crossing to join us. “Delete that before I tell your moms.”
“You can’t tell me what to do, Claudia.” The tween crosses her arms defiantly.
The old lady—Claudia, apparently—steps in so the two of them are eye to eye, and she points in the direction of the train
station a couple blocks away. It’s one of the few in the city on street level, and the early wave of commuters is heading
toward the entrance.
“I can see Shoshanna from here,” Claudia says. “Do you want me to yell for her? Do you think she’ll appreciate being late
for her fancy-pants lawyer meetings because her daughter is taking pictures of dead people?”
Marlowe sighs loudly.
“Phone. Delete. Now.”
Marlowe groans as she goes through the phone, trashing the pictures. “I wasn’t going to do anything with them.”
“Only a creep says that sort of thing,” Claudia declares. “Now get to class.”
With one final grumble, Marlowe heads for the school.
Once she’s out of earshot, Claudia whispers, “Smart kid. Huge pain in the ass, though.”
“So, um, back to the dead body?” I ask, my voice squeaking. “What exactly do we do now?”
“You go help those folks across the street,” she says, nodding at a few oncoming stragglers. “I’ll hover around the car and
shoo off anybody who wants to get too close.”
I do exactly what she says, and some people ask about the accident, but most people roll their eyes as if to say, Of course that happened, it was inevitable, how could that douchebag not hit a sinkhole.
I absolutely do not mention the corpse inside.
As the latecomers cross, I glance back and see that Claudia has removed the big green hat and is, it seems, taking lots of
pictures of the dead guy as the poodles swarm around her, begging for attention.
What’s she doing?
Just as I’m about to ask her, an ambulance whizzes down the block and I swear to god, I’ve never been so happy to hear a siren
in my life, not even the time I thought my appendix was bursting in Target and I made Chris call 911 and it turned out to
be the Italian beef I’d had for lunch.
Still. That was a good sandwich.
The ambulance parks next to the Kia, followed by a cop car and a tow truck. They all block off access to the accident, which
makes my job a lot easier. Then it gets even better when the second bell rings, and I am officially off duty.
I shrug out of my vest and join Claudia on the sidewalk, still awash in guilt.
The cops are setting up cones around the sinkhole, which feels very too-little-too-late to me, and, since the kids are finally gone, the EMTs pull the guy from the car and plop him on a gurney.
They’re a little slow to put a sheet over him, and I accidentally catch another glimpse of the body before I catch myself. The body. Ugh.
I am trying very hard not to be woozy, and only partly succeeding.
I turn my attention to the poodles, who seem sort of lost. They follow the EMTs from the car to the ambulance, try to hop
in, and, after being nudged off, wait patiently after the door shuts and it drives away, no siren necessary. Then they straggle
over to us, and for a moment, we all stand there like we’re at the most awkward cocktail party ever, until one of the dogs
leaps at me. I flinch, preparing myself for an attack—after all, I’m responsible for the death of his person, plus dogs seem
to like leaping on me these days. But all he does is headbutt my hip, pushing against my hand, while the other two dogs lie
down on the grass, looking pathetic.
He likes me.
Somehow that destroys me even more.
Just then, one of the cops—a youngish white guy with a shaved head and an I-drink-more-High-Life-than-water look—walks up
to us with a tiny spiral notebook.
“Did either of you see what happened?” he asks, flipping the notebook open.
We shake our heads.
“Not even you, crossing guard?”
“I got to work late,” I say, miserably.
He writes that down. Ugh, why didn’t I lie?
“Those your dogs?” he asks.
“These dogs? The dogs that just tried to get into the ambulance?” Claudia says. “No, you dipshit.”
I almost choke. “They belong—belonged—to the dead guy. Uh, sir.”
He glares at her and writes something in his notebook. “Watch your tone, young lady.”
“Me? What did I do?” I say.
He leans into his walkie-talkie. “Get Animal Control up here.”
“No!” Claudia blurts.
We both look at her.
“Animal Control will put them in a kill shelter. No way. I’ll take care of the dogs,” she says.
The cop raises an eyebrow. “And how are you related to the deceased?”
Claudia straightens up to her full height of approximately four feet. Her hair is short and gray and mashed against her head
unflatteringly, and she’s got the sun hat all folded up behind her back so the cop can’t see the body fluids smeared all over
it. RIP, hat, I think somberly. Thank you for your service.
“I’m a friend,” she says.
“Uh-huh,” the cop says. “So what was his name?”
“Cran Johnston,” she says, not skipping a beat.
Cran? That’s the best she could come up with? Cran?
But the cop checks his notes and nods. Okay then, Cran it is.
Claudia points at the poodles. “Look how fancy they are. They’d hate it in a shelter,” she says firmly. “That’s like puppy prison. But then, you cops love prisons, don’t you?”
“Excuse me?” the cop says. They glare at each other again.
“I think what she means,” I jump in, “is why use good taxpayer money when you have someone who will take them for free?”
“This is your second warning,” he says to me.
What the hell?
Luckily, the cop looks like he wants nothing more than to get the heck out of here. He clicks his walkie-talkie again. “Forget
it, animal situation contained.”
For the first time ever, I see Claudia smile. It doesn’t quite reach her eyes, and there’s some kind of threat behind it. I would not mess with her, personally. “Great,” she says.
Someone calls a string of numbers over Officer High Life’s walkie-talkie and Claudia takes the opportunity to look at me meaningfully,
which is terrific except that I have no idea what the meaning is.
The cop reaches in his shirt pocket. “Here’s my card if you have any more trouble. Don’t abuse the privilege.”
“Don’t worry,” Claudia says. She plucks the card from him and, while maintaining eye contact, drops it in the sinkhole. “We
won’t.”
It flutters into the abyss, and he does that thing where he points at his eyes and then at me, like I’m watching you. Then he heads back to his car.
“Yeah yeah, we’re watching you, too, buddy. Watching you walk away.” Claudia gives a loud wolf whistle.
Despite everything, I’m actually starting to like her.
“Here,” she says. “Give me your phone. I don’t give a flying fuck about calling that guy, but you and me are friends now.”
I hand over my phone, marveling at the bonding experience one small fatal accident can be between strangers. The tow truck
goes to work pulling the Kia out of the sinkhole as the two of us watch. At my side, the affectionate poodle licks my hand
sweetly.
“That was nice of you,” I say, petting this poodle who now fully adores me. “To take his dogs. I don’t think they’d die with
Animal Control, but I’m sure they’d prefer a real home.”
“Oh, I’m not taking them,” she says as she types her number into the text app and then sends herself a text before handing
it back to me.
“But you said—”
“You are,” she interrupts casually.
I laugh.
Then I stop laughing.
“Wait, what?” I ask.
She watches the cop car screech around the corner. “Fucking cops,” she says, shaking her head. “We’re on our own, kiddo.”
“I can’t take the dogs,” I say, even though I know instinctively that I shouldn’t argue with Claudia. “I don’t know how to dog.”
“Well, I’m sorry but you have to,” she says. “They’re our only witnesses.”
“I’m sorry, witnesses to what?” I ask.
“It’s just for a short time, sweetie,” she says, patting my hand like a grandmother. “Just until we figure out who murdered
Cran Johnston.”