Diana Rowland: My Life as a White Trash Zombie

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. Okay, so Abadie thinks I’m lower than dirt, but Roth seems all right. And the other cops are all pretty much ignoring me.

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.

Maybe that’s what I need to do , I thought as I grimly set the brain on the scale and wiped my hands. Distract myself. Do whatever it is guys do to keep from coming too soon. Baseball scores or some shit like that . Not that I’d ever known a baseball score.

Still the fact that I’d frozen like that had me more than a little freaked out.

I made it through the rest of the day, but when I finally climbed into my car I knew without any doubt at all that I didn’t want to go home just yet. I tried calling Randy again, but when it rolled to voice mail I didn’t bother leaving a message and simply headed to his house. I was used to him not answering the phone since he was usually out working in his garage.

Randy lived at the end of several miles of long and narrow rural road. There were only a few houses on the entire road, and the rest of it was dense pine forest. At night it was creepy as all hell, though during the day it was practically scenic—until you made it to the end.

Randy lived in a trailer—which really wasn’t so bad since it was actually a pretty decent trailer, as far as trailers went—but the part that really killed the “scenic” aspect was the ramshackle garage. Made of corrugated sheet metal and god-only-knew what else, it was over fifty years old and looked it. Randy’s daddy had worked out of it as an auto mechanic until he’d met a lady and moved to Houston with her a couple of years ago. Now Randy was the mechanic, though sometimes I suspected he had a side business going on when it came to cars. After all, the guy who’d sold me the stolen Prius had been a buddy of his. It hadn’t been worth the trouble, though, to accuse Randy of knowing it had been stolen. It wouldn’t have made any difference at that point.

Randy was out front when I pulled up, his tall, lanky body under the hood of an El Camino. He lifted his head as I got out of my car, a puzzled look crossing his face before it was replaced by his usual lazy smile.

“Hey, babe,” he said, wiping his hands on a rag. “Didn’t think I’d see you around here anytime soon.”

I paused and frowned. “Why?” I asked, right before another memory flickered into place. We’d had some sort of fight that night I’d ODed, though I hadn’t the faintest idea what it had been about. It couldn’t have been too serious, since he didn’t act like he was still mad or anything. But we never had fights about anything major. Sure, we argued, but it was always stupid crap like me getting pissed because he was paying too much attention to how short Ida Miller’s skirt was or him thinking I was banging every guy who looked sideways at me.

He lifted a shoulder in a mild shrug. “After that scene at Pillar’s the other night,” he said, confirming my memory of some sort of argument. “I been worried about you.”