driver of the truck is a tired-looking, big white man with a greasy trucker hat on, and he gives Deputy Dawg a hearty hey, but completely ignores me and Winston, the coroner. “What you want me to do?” he asks the deputy, who looks over at me. I step up.
“We need to get that car out of the pond,” I tell him, as if that isn’t completely obvious. “Carefully as possible. It’s evidence in a crime.”
He doesn’t like getting orders from me. Too bad. I hold his stare until he nods and looks away. “Gonna take a while,” he says. “Hope you like the cold. I damn sure don’t.” He pulls out a pair of hip waders from an equipment box on his rig and jams them on. “Could’ve waited for goddamn morning. Gonna need that car moved off down the road, far as possible.” He points to my unmarked sedan. I’ve already moved it to what I thought was a safe distance.
“It’s mine,” I say. “I’ll get it out of the way.”
“Well thank you, Officer,” he says. There’s a lot of sass in that, and I’m tempted to respond. I don’t. The South has never been friendly to my particular shade of folks, and bad things happen out here in the dark. I’m wearing a badge and a gun and I still feel it, like an ache in your bones when the weather shifts.
Last thing I need to do is start something. I need to focus on what’s important: those two little babies, and getting them justice. Ignoring another Klan-adjacent asshole is just part of the rural landscape.
I realize that I’m not being completely rational about this. That I’m prickly in all the wrong ways, noticing things too much and giving the normal way too much power over me. I don’t know if that’s hormones, or just awareness of the world I’m bringing a little miracle of a child into. Our child will be loved, at least. But safety is a long way off.
I move my car and drive it to the side road I spotted on the way in; I park it and leave the portable red strobe light on top, in case someone comes barreling down from up-mountain. I walk back. The tow truck operator, cursing under his breath, has already waded into the pond. “Gonna get that brain-eating amoeba shit being in here,” he says. I don’t tell him that he wouldn’t notice much of a change. Even if I don’t care for the man, he does seem to know his business; he attaches the chains, grimacing when he has to crouch down and immerse himself in the pond. He curses as devoutly as most people pray. He scrambles up the bank, and the deputy offers him a hand when he slips. We’ll have to document that shit, too, but there’s no help for it. The driver gets a dirty towel from his truck and dries himself off, not that it helps the green gunk clinging to him. He gets to the controls and starts the work.
He’s good at this. He balances the slow, careful drag against the weight of both car and water. Gears grind. I grit my teeth and have to bite the urge to tell him, Treat that car like your own babies are in there. I don’t even know what that would mean to him. I want some damn reverence in this nasty process.
My cell phone buzzes. I grab for it and check; it’s Javier. I let out a little sigh of relief as I accept the call, and then feel the weight of this place crush that relief flat. “Hey, Javi. I love you.”
Javier Esparza’s warm baritone voice glides through me like waves of summer heat, so welcome right now in this cold place. He sounds husky. “I love you too. You okay?”
It’s in my voice, the creeping dread. Must have been for him to ask. I make an effort to shove it away. “Yes,” I say. It sounds convincing. “Is it late for you right now, or early?” I don’t know where he’s deployed for his weeks of Marine Corps reserve training; I often don’t. Safer for him that way. He’s in the hands of the marines right now. They could have taken him anywhere.
“Querida, where I am, it’s late morning already. I forgot it would be so early, but this is my slot. We don’t get a lot of choices.” He’s been gone only a few days, and I