Майкл Корита: If She Wakes

“I didn’t know either of them had a son,” Carlos said. “They didn’t seem like—”

He managed to stop himself.

The kid said, “Want to finish that thought, Carlos? Or do you want me to guess?”

His eyes were on the road, and his right hand was looped over the steering wheel and he seemed perfectly relaxed, but Carlos did not like the sound of that question, so he decided to answer it without fucking around.

“They didn’t seem like the family type,” he said.

“Oh. All about their work, you mean?”

“I guess.”

“Well, everyone has a personal life. Does that surprise you? That they would have had lives of their own and that they would have been private about those things?” He looked at Carlos, and Carlos struggled to meet his eyes, then chose instead to stare over the kid’s shoulder at the construction site they were passing, the gutted remains of an old strip mall that stood waiting for bulldozers to raze it. Then he looked down at the vibrating aluminum can. Bang. Potent brain and body fuel. He released the armrest so that both hands were free. Suddenly, it seemed very important to have his hands free.

“No,” he said. “It doesn’t surprise me, and I don’t really give a shit. I was just curious, that’s all. I should’ve figured it out earlier. You remind me of them.”

They’d pulled up to a stop sign. The kid smiled at him again.

“I hear that a lot,” he said, and then he fired two shots from a suppressed handgun that was inside his jacket pocket. He shot left-handed, firing under his right arm without ever removing his right hand from the steering wheel, that confident in his aim, and he never lost the smile.

Then he turned the corner, pulled the Camaro to the curb, and put it in park. He left the key in the ignition and the engine running, the music still playing, those high piano notes over the low bass with no lyrics, but he took the energy drink. He sipped it while he shut the door on the music and the corpse, adjusted his baseball cap with the other hand, and walked away.

The case was so simple that Abby Kaplan decided to stop for a beer on her way to the scene.

This wasn’t encouraged protocol — drinking on the job could get her fired, of course — but there wasn’t much pressure today. The cops had already gotten one of the drivers to admit guilt. They had a signed statement and a recorded statement. Not much for Abby to do but review their report, take her own photos, and agree with their assessment. Cut and dried.

Besides, Hammel was a forty-minute drive from the Biddeford office of Coastal Claims and Investigations, and Abby, well... Abby got a little nervous driving these days. A beer could help that. Contrary to what most people — and, certainly, the police — believed, a beer before driving could make her safer for society. It settled twitching hands and a jumpy mind, kept her both relaxed and focused. Abby had no doubt that she drove better with a six-pack in her bloodstream than most people did stone-cold sober. She was damn sure safer than most drivers, with their eyes on their cell phones and their heads up their asses.

This wasn’t an argument you’d win in court, but that didn’t mean it wasn’t the truth.

She stopped at a brewpub not far from the Portland jetport, a place busy enough that she wouldn’t stand out, and she paid cash so there would be no credit card transaction to haunt her if something went wrong. Not that anything would go wrong, but she’d seen the ways it could. She also made a point of tearing the receipt into bits, because cash could help you only so much; there were different kinds of paper trails. She’d worked one case where the driver had been dumb enough to leave a receipt on the console recording the five margaritas he’d knocked back just before getting behind the wheel and blowing through a stop sign. It wasn’t that abnormal, really. You stopped by the body shop to take pictures of a cracked-up car and found damning evidence just sitting there in the cup holder, a tiny slip of paper with a time-and-date stamp that blew up any possible defense. Amazing. Abby had been on the fringes of the PI game for only a few months, but already she understood what sustained the profession: people lied, and people were stupid.

Oh, and one more: People sued. People loved to sue.

That was precisely what worried the good folks in the risk-mitigation office of Hammel College, her current client. When a world-renowned engineer was killed on your campus while in the care of a student escort, you didn’t have to be paranoid to imagine the lawsuit.

Abby sat at the bar, sipped her beer, and reviewed the case file. She didn’t see much for the college to worry about. The girl who’d been escorting the engineer around town had had clean bloodwork — a relief to the college, since it meant no DUI claim, but not much help to the girl, because she was still lights-out, five days in a coma now. And even though she had a negative drug screen, she could still have been negligent or at fault, which could turn into an expensive wrongful-death suit, but — good news for the Hammel Hurricanes — the second driver involved had taken responsibility on the scene!

He’d given a full statement to the police that was the accident-report equivalent of tying a hangman’s noose and sticking his own head through it: He’d been using his cell phone, trying to get his bearings through the phone’s map application, and when he looked up, he realized that what he’d thought was a road bridge was in fact a pedestrian bridge. He swerved to avoid it — and ended up in a hell of a lot of trouble.

Mr. Carlos Ramirez of Brighton, Massachusetts, was now into the realm of criminal courts, because one person was dead and another was a vegetable and Ramirez had eliminated any compelling argument for even a shared-fault case, what was known in Maine as modified comparative negligence. A good investigator paired with a good attorney could almost always find a weasel’s way into a modified-comparative-negligence ruling, but Carlos Ramirez was going to make it tough on his team.

It was Abby’s job to imagine what that team was considering, though, and in this case, it would be Tara Beckley’s location at the time of the accident. She was supposed to deliver her charge to an auditorium that was nowhere near where she’d parked. Some enterprising attorney might wonder whether her failure to follow the plan for the evening’s keynote speaker might qualify as negligence and, if so, whether the college might be responsible for that.

After Tara had parked her CRV beside a bridge that led to the Hammel College campus, Carlos Ramirez smashed into the car, killing Amandi Oltamu and knocking Tara Beckley into the cold waters of the Willow River. A bystander on the opposite side of the river had heard the crash but hadn’t seen it, and he managed to pull her out in a heroic but ultimately futile effort, because Tara Beckley was in a coma from which she was unlikely to emerge.

That left one dead man, one silent woman, and no witnesses.

I need to get my hands on her cell phone, Abby thought. Cell phones could either save you or hang you in almost any accident investigation. The beautiful simplicity of the case against Ramirez could be destroyed by something like a text message from Tara Beckley saying that her car had run out of gas or that she had a migraine and couldn’t see well enough to drive. You just never knew. Dozens of apps kept tracking information that most users were blissfully unaware of; it was entirely possible that the precise timing of the accident could be established from a cell phone. And if Tara Beckley had been using the phone while she was behind the wheel, Oltamu’s family might take a renewed interest in suing the college and their selected escort. Any whiff of negligence had to be considered.