Stephen King - Sleeping Beauties

He got out of the cruiser. She slid down from the tailgate, and would have gone to her knees if Terry hadn’t caught her around the middle. The skin under his hands was chilly, and he could feel every rib. This close, he saw that some of her tattoos were actually bruises. She clung to him and began to cry.

“Hey, now,” Terry said. “Hey, now, girl. You’re okay. Whatever happened here, it’s over.”

Under other circumstances, he would have considered the sole survivor the prime suspect, and all that blather about the Avon Lady so much bullshit, but the bag of bones in his arms could never have put that guy’s head through the trailer wall. Terry didn’t know how long Tiffany had been getting high on Truman’s supply, but in her current condition he thought just blowing her nose would have taken a major effort.

Roger strolled over, looking oddly cheerful. “Did you make the call, ma’am?”

“Yes…”

Roger took out his notebook. “Your name?”

“This is Tiffany Jones,” Terry said. “That’s right, isn’t it, Tiff?”

“Yeah. I seen you before, sir. When I come get Tru out of jail that time. I remember. You were nice.”

“And that guy? Who’s he?” Roger waved his notebook at the protruding head, a casual gesture, as if he were pointing out an interesting local landmark, and not a ruined human being. His casualness was appalling—and Terry envied it. If he could learn to adjust to such sights as easily as Roger, he thought he’d be a happier man, and maybe better police.

“Don’t know,” Tiffany said. “He was just Trume’s friend. Or cousin, maybe. He come up from Arkansas last week. Or maybe it was the week before.”

From down the road, firemen were shouting and water was whooshing—presumably from a tanker truck; there was no city water out here. Terry saw a momentary rainbow in the air, floating in front of smoke that was now turning white.

Terry took Tiffany gently by her stick-thin wrists and looked into her bloodshot eyes. “What about the woman who did this? You told the dispatcher it was a woman.”

“Tru’s friend called her the Avon Lady, but she sure wasn’t one of those.” A little emotion surfaced through Tiffany’s shock. She straightened up and looked around fearfully. “She gone, ain’t she? She better be.”

“What did she look like?”

Tiffany shook her head. “I don’t remember. But she stole Tru’s shirt. I think she was nekkid beneath.”

Her eyes slipped shut, then slowly rolled open again. Terry recognized the signs. First the trauma of some unexpected violent event, next the hysterical call to 911, and now the post-event shock. Add to that whatever drugs she had been taking, and how long she had been taking them. Elevator up, elevator down. For all he knew, Truman Mayweather, Tiffany, and Truman Mayweather’s Arkansas cuz had been on a three-day run.

“Tiff? I want you to sit in the cruiser while my partner and I have a look around. Sit right here in back. Rest up.”

“Sleepytime gal,” Roger said, grinning, and for a moment Terry felt a well-nigh irresistible urge to kick his country ass.

Instead of doing that, he held open the cruiser’s back door for her, and this called up another memory: the limousine he’d rented to go to the prom in with Mary Jean Stukey. Her in a pink strapless dress with puffy sleeves, the corsage he’d brought her at her wrist, him in a rented tuxedo. This was in the golden age before he had ever seen the white-eyed corpse of a pretty girl with the crater of a shotgun blast in her chest, or a man who had hung himself in his hayloft, or a hollow-eyed meth-addicted prostitute who looked as if she had less than six months to live.

I am too old for this job, Terry thought. I should retire.

He was forty-five.

Although Lila had never actually shot anyone, she had drawn her gun on five occasions and fired it into the air once (and oy vey , the paperwork just for doing that). Like Terry and Roger and all the others in her small band of blue knights, she had cleaned up the human wreckage from plenty of mishaps on the county roads (usually with the smell of alcohol still hanging in the air). She had dodged flying objects, broken up family disagreements that turned physical, administered CPR, and splinted broken limbs. She and her guys had found two children lost in the woods, and on a handful of occasions she had been puked upon. She had experienced a great deal during her fourteen years in law enforcement, but she had never encountered a bloodstained woman in nothing but a flannel shirt strolling up the centerline of Dooling County’s main highway. That was a first.

She crested Ball’s Hill doing eighty, and the woman was less than a hundred feet from the cruiser. She made no effort to dodge either right or left, but even in that hair-thin moment Lila saw no deer-in-the-headlights expression on her face, just calm observation. And something else: she was gorgeous.

Lila couldn’t have stopped in time even if she’d had a full night’s sleep—not at eighty. She swung the wheel to the right instead, missing the woman in the road by mere inches, and not entirely missing her, at that; she heard a clup sound, and suddenly the outside mirror was reflecting Lila herself instead of the road behind.

Meanwhile, she had Unit One to contend with, a projectile now barely under her control. She hit a mailbox and sent it flying into the air, the post twirling like a majorette’s baton before it crashed to the earth. Dust spumed up behind her, and she could feel the heavy cruiser wanting to slide ditchward. Braking wouldn’t save her, so she stepped down on the accelerator instead, increasing her speed, the cruiser tearing up the rightside shoulder, gravel pinging off the undercarriage. She was riding at a severe slant. If the ditch captured her she would roll, and chances that she would ever see Jared graduate high school would shrink drastically.

Lila feathered the wheel to the left. At first the car slid, but then it caught hold and roared back onto the highway. With tar under her again she hit the brakes hard, the nose of the cruiser dipping, the deceleration pushing her so hard against her seatbelt that she could feel her eyes bulging.

She stopped at the end of a long double track of burned rubber. Her heart was hammering. Black dots floated in front of her eyes. She forced herself to breathe so she wouldn’t faint, and looked into the rearview mirror.

The woman hadn’t run into the woods, nor was she beating feet up Ball’s Hill, where another road forked off toward the Ball Creek Ferry. She was just standing there, gazing over her shoulder. That glance-back, coupled with the woman’s bare butt protruding from under the tail of her shirt, was strangely coquettish; she looked like a pin-up on an Alberto Vargas calendar.

Breathing fast, her mouth metallic with the taste of spent adrenalin, Lila backed into the dirt driveway of a neat little ranch home. A woman was standing on the porch with a toddler cradled in her arms. Lila powered down her window and said, “Go back inside, ma’am. Right now.”

Without waiting to see if the bystander would do as ordered, Lila shifted to drive and rolled back up Ball’s Hill toward where the woman stood, being careful to swerve around the dead mailbox. She could hear her bent front fender scraping one of her tires.

The radio blurped. It was Terry Coombs. “Unit One, this is Four. You there, Lila? Come back. We got a couple of dead meth cookers out here past the lumberyard.”

She grabbed the mic, said, “Not now, Ter,” and dropped it on the seat. She stopped in front of the woman, unsnapped the strap on her holster, and, as she got out of Unit One, pulled her service weapon for the sixth time in her career as a law enforcement officer. As she looked at those long, tanned legs and high breasts she flashed back to her driveway—could it only have been fifteen minutes ago? What are you looking at? she had asked. Anton had replied, Morning glory.