Angel Crawford #2: Even White Trash Zombies Get the Blues (20 page)

I didn’t bother to point out that I liked working there. Because as much as that was true, I also knew I’d jump on the chance to not
have
to work there. “I still don’t understand how Zeke could be alive—or dead, rather—if his head was chopped off.”

“That one has me baffled too,” he admitted. “But I think that’s even more evidence that this other faction of zombies is making strides with their own research.” He spread his hands and shrugged. “There’s so much we still don’t know about how the parasite works.” His phone beeped, and he pulled it off his belt to peer at the screen. “I need to run.” He looked back up at me. “Please—and I swear this isn’t me trying to babysit you—please resist the urge to poke at this. You got caught in the middle completely by accident. I doubt that the guy who stole the body had any idea you were a zombie.” He squeezed my shoulders. “I don’t want you to become a target.”

“You’ll ask Sofia about McKinney?”

He looked like he wanted to sigh, but he didn’t. “I will. Promise. I’m heading to Lafayette tonight to visit my folks, but I’ll get up with her before I go.”

“All right then,” I said. “I’ll stop poking at the lab stuff.”

He smiled, and for an instant I thought he was going to kiss me, but instead he simply released me and turned and headed back to his car. I watched as he drove off, then climbed into my own.

Good thing I was a lying, untrustworthy bitch. ’Cause there was no fucking way I was letting this shit go. Not as long as I was the one being slammed in the news. Both the zombie mafia and the rebel zombie alliance could suck my white trash undead ass.

I slept late enough to feel almost rested, and went on in to work my noon shift. However, when I swiped my card at the back morgue entrance, the card reader stubbornly refused to let me in and instead kept blinking a “fuck you” red light at me. Scowling, I got back in my car—’cause I was lazy like that—and drove around to the front.

The receptionist, Rebecca, gave me a bright smile as I walked in. “Hi, sweetheart. Don’t normally see you coming through this way.”

“Yeah, there’s something wrong with my card,” I said. “Can you buzz me through?”

The smile slipped from her face. “Of course.” She bit her lip as she looked at something on her desk. “There’s a message here for you to see Allen when you come in.” Her eyes were shadowed with worry, and I didn’t need a high school diploma to put the pieces together. Card not working
and
a note to see my supervisor?

“Have I been fired?” I managed to ask.

Her eyes narrowed. “You’d better not have been!” she announced, but there was a shimmer of doubt in her eyes as she pressed the button to let me in.

The door buzzed, and I went on through, anger and dismay fighting it out in a hard knot within my chest. I began to head down the hallway to Allen’s office, but Rebecca reached out and stopped me with a hand on my arm.

“No matter what happens, you’ll always have friends here, darlin’.”

I forced out a smile for her. She gave me a little pat, then turned back to her desk. I continued on to Allen’s office, deeply grateful when I didn’t run into anyone else on the way.

His door was open. I didn’t bother knocking on the doorframe or anything polite like that. I simply came in and plopped down in the chair in front of the desk. “Hi, Allen. My card isn’t working. And I have a message to see you. Have I been fired?” And hey, I managed to say it without sounding like I was about to burst into tears.

He frowned at the still open door, but I wasn’t about to get up and close it so that he could say the bullshit he had to say in private.

“You’re not fired,” he said, returning his gaze to me.

“But?” Because it was obvious there was a gigantic “but” coming.

His mouth tightened into a thin line. “But…the coroner feels that it would be best to let all of this…messiness blow over.”

“You mean until after the election’s over?” I said. I stuffed my hands into the pockets of my jacket. I wanted
to hide that they were clenched to keep them from shaking. The election was over three months away. If I was super careful I might be able to make my stash of brains last that long.
But then what if he loses?
His opponents were nobodies, and he was heavily favored to win, but stranger things had happened. And why would his replacement possibly want to take a chance on hiring
me
?

Allen leaned back. “You’re taking a leave of absence for personal reasons. Once Dr. Duplessis secures the re-election, you’ll have the option to return from your leave to your former position.” He cleared his throat. “Of course it would be unpaid leave. I’m sorry to say that you haven’t been with us long enough to have that much vacation time.”

I stared at him while everything he said tumbled over in my head. “Wow,” I finally said. “I must admit, I wasn’t expecting this.”

“Haven’t you been reading the papers?” he asked with a snide curl of his lip. “It’s been on the front page since the incident.”

“Yes, I’ve been reading the papers,” I shot back. “Despite what you think of me, I’m not illiterate. I totally expected that at some point I was going to get fucked. What I didn’t expect was to be asked to fuck myself.” I stood up, aware that I was beginning to shout, but I had no desire to control myself. “Well, you know what? It’s not going to happen. I’m not going to meekly take myself off so that the coroner can avoid a nonexistent scandal.
I was held up at fucking gunpoint!
Why the fuck doesn’t he grow a pair of fucking balls and come out and say that? And, y’know what? He can grow a pair of fucking balls and fire me to my goddamn face if he wants me gone!” I
was beyond shouting at this point. I was shrieking like an insane bitch. Hey, at least now there was legitimate reason to fire me.

I didn’t give him a chance. I spun and stormed out, holding my fury and hurt close to me, and didn’t look around even though I knew there were plenty of shocked observers leaning out of office doors. I thought I heard Reb whisper, “Good luck, babe,” as I stormed past her and through the security door, but I couldn’t be sure. I liked to think she did.

I drove out to my storage locker and numbly counted up my stash even though I had a pretty solid idea of how much I had saved. If I was careful and wasn’t too active and didn’t get hurt, I could probably last a couple of months. And what then?

And then I’m fucked. Unless Sofia manages to get her fake brain formula right by then.

Why the hell had I gone off on Allen like that? Yeah, sure, the whole “leave without pay” thing was bullshit, but at least it would’ve most likely been temporary. Life was full of bullshit, and sometimes it was smarter to suck it up and wait for a better opportunity.

With a sense of complete despair paired with a fair amount of self-loathing, I shut and locked the freezer and the storage unit. I stopped at the first store that sold cheap clothing, bought a t-shirt, and changed out of my coroner’s office shirt. I briefly considered chucking it into the trash, but then changed my mind and shoved it into the trunk of my car. I really had loved the job, and just because Allen and the coroner were jerks didn’t mean I needed to scrub it from my entire life.

Now if I could only find something that would help
take my mind off the complete clusterfuck my life had become.

I couldn’t get drunk. Drugs didn’t work on me anymore. Even cigarettes did nothing but burn my brains up and make me feel dead. And for that matter, even feeling dead wasn’t an escape since it always came with a hunger that wouldn’t go away until it was satisfied.

In other words, being bummed and depressed as a zombie sucked complete ass.

I finally stopped driving and pulled into the parking lot of Lou-Ann’s Café. That was one thing the morgue job had been good for—after so many months of working odd hours I knew where all the good greasy spoons were. Not to mention which ones had bathrooms that were fairly clean.

Lou-Ann’s had decent bathrooms, and more importantly, a really good key lime pie that would have to be my substitute for drugs and alcohol. I sat at the counter and ignored everyone else around me while I focused on enjoying every bite of the damn pie. I was vaguely aware that someone sat next to me and did his best to hit on me, but I ignored him and kept eating and eventually he got the message and slunk off.

The waitress didn’t make any attempt to engage me in conversation, which I appreciated more than she could possibly know. I made sure to give her an insanely large tip, and when I headed out I was somewhat calmer. And fuller. And at least I didn’t have to worry about diabetes.

I was nearly to my car when I heard an aggravatingly familiar voice from behind me. “Look who it is—the cunt from the newspaper.”

Looking back, I saw Clive’s sneering face. I was pretty
sure he hadn’t been in the café while I was there, so I figured he was on his way in. “Get it right, Clive,” I said. “It’s ‘fucking bitch.’”

He snorted. “I’ll just go with fucking loser. It’s only a matter of time before you end up back in jail, y’know.”

I rolled my eyes and continued to my car. I’d just opened the door when he spoke again.

“Maybe you can share a cell with that fuckup loser of a dad you got.”

Goddammit, but I was getting really sick of people shitting on me and my dad. I stopped, turned, made a quick scan of the parking lot then took two steps toward him. “What did you say?”

Clive’s mouth spread into a sneering grin. He straightened his shoulders as he closed the distance between us, deliberately flexing and pushing his chest out a bit—which almost made me laugh. I weighed barely a hundred pounds. He was bowing up to me?

“I said your dad’s a fucking loser—”

That was all he got out before my fist connected with his face as hard as I could manage. I wasn’t full up on brains, but I was pretty damn close, and I was able to hit him hard enough to send him reeling back, clutching at his nose.

“You fucking bitch!” he screeched as blood began to fountain through his fingers. “You broke my fucking nose!”

I grimaced and looked down at my right hand. I’d never really learned how to punch, and it showed. Two of the bones in my hand were clearly bent at angles that weren’t supposed to be there, and blood seeped from a wide cut across my knuckles. It hurt like fuck-all but
even as I peered at it, the pain began to fade to a dull background ache.

Clive let out a wheezing noise that I suddenly realized was him laughing. “You stupid bitch,” he gurgled through his bloody fingers. “I’m calling the cops. I’m pressing charges. And your loser ass will be going back to jail.”

I lifted my eyes to his. “Okay. Call them,” I said, absolutely loving how calm I sounded. “I’ll wait right here.”

Clive fumbled his phone out of his pocket. I watched him thumb nine-one-one on the keypad, listened to him tell the dispatcher that he’d been attacked and was holding the perpetrator—me—and needed the cops to come so that I could be properly arrested. While he did this, I casually reached into my car and pulled my bottle of brain smoothie out of the cup holder. I took several long gulps, resisting the urge to grin as I felt the bones pulling back together.

“Don’t you fucking try and run from me, bitch,” Clive told me after he disconnected. “They said they have a unit right around the corner.”

I shrugged and took another pull from the bottle. Might as well finish it off just in case he decided he didn’t want to wait for the cops and would rather take his fury out on me in person. I was careful to hold the bottle in my left hand, and deliberately kept my right cradled against me to make it look as if it was still hurt.

He fumbled his car open and snagged a towel out of the backseat, held it to his face. “Then again,” he said, “maybe you should run.” He let out a nasty laugh. “Y’ever been tasered? I’d fucking pay money to see that.”

I set the empty bottle back in the cup holder. A quick
glance told me that there was still a smear of blood on my knuckle, which I left there for now. But when the two sheriff’s cars pulled into the parking lot, and Clive took his eyes from me, I took that chance to quickly lick the blood off. Gross, I know, but I didn’t want to wipe the blood on my clothes anywhere it might show.

I vaguely recognized the deputies who stepped out, but I doubted that they could do the same with me since I wasn’t dressed in my coroner’s office gear anymore. I didn’t say anything while Clive indignantly told them the story of how I’d hauled off and slugged him. He actually stayed pretty close to the truth, probably because it really didn’t need any sort of elaboration. He knew perfectly well that even a misdemeanor battery arrest would violate my probation. And, with the damage to his nose, it could possibly even be considered a felony.

The two deputies listened to his account with the occasional glance toward me, clearly thinking something on the order of, “this tiny thing broke your nose?” But they let him finish before turning to me.

“He made the whole thing up,” I said before they could speak. “I was out here making a phone call when he came stumbling around the corner with a bloody nose, then he started babbling about how I’d hit him.”

Clive puffed up. “Oh yeah? Check her hand! She broke her fucking hand on my nose!”

I locked eyes with Clive and extended both my hands to the deputies. I didn’t say a word while they carefully examined my knuckles, fingers, and the condition of the various bones.

They exchanged a look, then turned back to Clive. “Not a damn thing wrong with her hands, sir,” one said.
“There’s no possible way she punched you—and certainly not hard enough to break your nose. Why don’t you tell us what
really
happened?”

Things really went downhill for Clive after that, though for me it was a truly beautiful thing. I watched in serene glee as he argued, then frothed, then, when they attempted to cite him for disturbing the peace, he fought, which earned him the tasering he’d taunted me about.

And, on top of all that, they found steroids and painkillers in his vehicle—enough to get him charged with possession with intent to distribute.