the road. That was when I saw her, and I’m pretty sure I slowed even more. I don’t know for sure, though, since everything that happened next went so fast that I couldn’t swear to anything.
I was coming up behind her, the gap between us closing. She was off to the side, on the grass shoulder. I remember she was wearing a white shirt and blue shorts and not going real fast, kind of gliding along in a relaxed sort of way.
In this neighborhood, the houses sat on half an acre, and no one was outside. She knew I was coming up behind her—I saw her glance quickly to the side, maybe enough to catch sight of me from the corner of her eye, and she moved another half step farther from the road. Both my hands were on the wheel. I was paying attention to everything I should have and thought I was being careful. And so was she.
Neither of us, however, saw the dog.
Almost as if lying in wait for her, it charged out from a gap in a hedge when she was no more than twenty feet from my car. A big black dog, and even though I was in my car, I could hear its vicious snarl as it charged right at her. It must have caught her off-guard because she suddenly reared back, away from the dog, and took one step too many into the road.
My car, all three thousand pounds of it, smashed into her in that instant.
Chapter 17
Sims Addison, at forty, looked something like a rat: a sharp nose, a forehead that sloped backward, and a chin that seemed to have stopped growing before the rest of his body did. He kept his hair slicked back over his head, with the help of a wide-toothed comb he always carried with him.
Sims was also an alcoholic.
He wasn’t, however, the kind of alcoholic who drank every night. Sims was the kind of alcoholic whose hands shook in the morning prior to taking his first drink of the day, which he usually finished long before most people headed for work. Although he was partial to bourbon, he seldom had enough money for anything other than the cheapest wines, which he drank by the gallon. Where he got his money he didn’t like to say, but then, aside from booze and the rent, he didn’t need much.
If Sims had any redeeming feature, it was that he had the knack of making himself invisible and, as a result, had a way of learning things about people. When he drank, he was neither loud nor obnoxious, but his normal expression—eyes half-closed, mouth slack—gave him the appearance of someone who was far drunker than he usually was. Because of that, people said things in his presence.
Things they should have kept to themselves.
Sims earned the little money he did by calling in tips to the police.
Not all of them, though. Only the ones where he could stay anonymous and still get the money. Only the ones where the police would keep his secret, where he wouldn’t have to testify.
Criminals, he knew, had a way of keeping grudges, and he wasn’t stupid enough to believe that if they knew who’d turned them in, they’d just roll over and forget it.
Sims had spent time in prison: once in his early twenties for petty theft and twice in his thirties for possession of marijuana. The third time behind bars, however, changed him. By then, his alcoholism was full-blown, and he spent the first week suffering from the most severe case of withdrawal imaginable. He shook, he vomited, and when he closed his eyes, he saw monsters. He nearly died, too, though not from withdrawal. After a few days of listening to Sims scream and moan, the other man in the cell beat him until he was unconscious, so he could get some sleep. Sims spent three weeks in the infirmary and was released by a parole board sympathetic to what he’d been through. Instead of finishing the year he still had to serve, he was placed on probation and told to report to a parole officer. He was warned, however, that if he drank or used drugs, his sentence would be reinstated.
The possibility of going through withdrawal, coupled with the beating, left Sims with a deathly fear of going back to jail.
But for Sims it wasn’t possible to face life sober. In the beginning, he was careful to drink only in the privacy of