Devil's Playground (2 page)

Two hundred yards.

The truck moved to the left and straddled the white line, staking its claim to the roadway.

One hundred yards.

The ruby lighted car moved left, right, then left again, seeking refuge, finding none. The car pitched forward, tires screaming and smoking as the driver assaulted the brake pedal. Too late.

The truck consumed the car as easily as it had the scrub brush, flattening it like the bugs that decorated its windshield. Seven of its eighteen tires ruptured, fragmented, releasing their grip on the road. The polished aluminum petroleum-filled trailer swung forward, dragging the cab behind it as the rig jack-knifed, tipped on its side, sparks flying, and exploded, transforming the desert into an inferno.

By 10 p.m., Deputy Samantha Cody had spent two hours catching up on paper work. She hated it. Sitting on her butt, reading mundane reports, completing repetitious forms, was not her idea of police work. The only thing she hated more than doing the work was looking at stacks of it on her desk. She was never this far behind, but the past two months had been neither easy nor routine.

The arrest and trial of Richard Earl Garrett for the murder of three local children and his defense that “the devil made me do it” had turned the quiet desert community of Mercer’s Corner into a macabre carnival. Newspaper and TV reporters roamed the streets, sniffing for sensational stories. Visitors drove hundreds of miles just to say they had seen the town. A group of Satanic groupies had camped on the corner near the Sheriff’s Department everyday for a month. Locals were terrified. Thank God, the entire mess was about to end.

Garrett had already been convicted and tomorrow would be the final arguments in the penalty phase. Sentencing should soon follow, and then, maybe everybody would go back where they came from and life could return to normal. None to soon for Sam.

She had finished off a granola bar, two cups of coffee, and half of the paperwork when she heard the front door open. A voice echoed down the hall. “Hello? Anybody here?”

“Down here,” she called back. Footsteps approached and Nathan Klimek entered.

“How are you doing?” A broad smile erupted from his tanned, model-like face.

“What can I do for you, Mister Klimek?”

“I saw the lights on and your Jeep out front. I thought you might want to get some coffee or something.”

“I told you. No interviews.”

Nathan Klimek, star reporter for “Straight Story,” a supermarket checkout counter tabloid rag, had hounded her for three weeks for an interview. So had every other newspaper and TV reporter in town.

“Now that the trial is over, I hoped you had changed your mind.” He forked his fingers through his thick, light brown hair, sweeping it back from his forehead.

“The trial isn’t over. Or don’t you need sentencing to write your story? That’s right, I forgot. You make it up as you go along.”

“We stand behind every story we print.”

“Just not down wind.” Her brow wrinkled into a frown.

“You don’t like me very much do you?”

“Perceptive.”

“What did I do?” He gave her a look somewhere between shock and hurt. Practiced most likely, she thought.

“What did you do? Are you kidding? Look around. The chaos that has surrounded this trial.” She waved her hand toward the window. “You broke the story. You opened the door and let the flies in.”

“It’s news.”

“No, it’s not. Not your kind of news, anyway. It’s a tragedy. For the victims, the families, and this town. You made it an international event.”

“People are interested in child murders. Especially if Satanism is involved.”

“Satan, my ass. Garrett is a sicko that hacked up three innocent children. He isn’t possessed or the son of Satan or anything like that. He’s a child killer. Nothing more. But, your paper splashed his story from coast to coast and we have to bear the brunt of the morbid curiosity that followed.”

“But...”

The phone rang.

Sam waved him away and picked up the receiver. “Hello.” She listened for a moment. ”Where?” She exhaled loudly. “I’ll be right there.” She dropped the phone in its cradle and looked at Nathan. “You’ll have to excuse me. Duty calls.”

“What is it?”

“Nothing that would interest you. A traffic accident. But, if one of the drivers has three heads, I’ll call you.”

He laughed, shaking his head. She couldn’t prevent a half smile from raising one corner of her mouth.

He followed her out and she locked the door behind them.

“I’ll see you tomorrow,” he said.

“I’m sure you will,” she said as she jumped into her Sheriff’s Department Jeep.

She fired up the engine and headed north through town, toward the freeway. The call had been from Sheriff Charlie Walker. A major accident, involving a gasoline truck, had occurred on I-40 East four miles west of town. She flipped on the roof-mounted flashing lights and accelerated down the on-ramp, merging onto I-40 West.

A mile from the accident site, she could see a red-orange ball of fire, which lit the night as if the sun had crashed into the desert. As she cut through the wide median, flames seemed to tower above her, licking at the low-hanging scattered clouds, painting their undersides orange. A thick plume of oily smoke churned skyward, obliterating the half moon, which peeked between the clouds, and cast the desert into an even deeper darkness, intensifying the glow of the blaze.

She eased across the eastbound lanes and parked off the roadway. Stepping from the Jeep, she took in the spectacle before her.

The smoldering gasoline truck had consumed most of its cargo and been reduced to a hissing metal carcass, which glowed a cherry red. The flames, though still leaping thirty feet in the air, diminished minute by minute. Two firemen wrestled with anaconda-like hoses and directed thick streams of water at the wreck, which sputtered in protest and released clouds of steam into the sky. The air was thick and rancid with the smell of burnt petroleum, like an old service station, its floor slicked with years of dripping oil pans. The entire scene looked like an Irwin Allen disaster movie.

An overturned Camaro had cut a 150-foot-long trench in the desert floor with its roof before coming to rest against a condo-sized boulder. A rusted station wagon, its right front wheel folded beneath its frame, hugged a droopy Catalpa Willow as if seeking protection much as a child pulls bed covers over its head to escape the troll that lurks in the shadowed corner of his room. A frazzled family of four huddled nearby. Sixty cars lined the freeway shoulder, their wide-eyed occupants coalesced in several groups, some talking, some staring silently, all hoping to see something gruesome no doubt.

She slipped on her leather jacket, stuffed her strawberry blonde ponytail beneath the collar, and tugged the zipper up to her chin to block the cold desert wind. She saw Charlie standing near one of the fire trucks, talking with Fire Chief Manny Orosco. She shoved her hands in her pockets and headed in their direction.

“Sam.” Charlie Walker nodded to her as she approached.

“Charlie. Manny. Jesus, what a mess. What happened?”

“Big rig crossed the median and hit a car head on and exploded. The Camaro,” he yanked his head toward the overturned car, “and the wagon over there got lucky.”

“How many killed?”

“Whoever is in the car under the rig for sure. Two kids in the Camaro and the driver of the rig were taken to the hospital.”

“The driver survived?” Sam looked at the molten mass, which continued to steam and spit, its heat puncturing the cold night air, warming her 200 feet away.

“Thrown from the cab. Or jumped. Found him about fifty yards from the wreck. Banged up pretty good. Unconscious. Smelled like a whiskey bottle.”

“What do you want me to do?”

“Why don’t you get over to the hospital and see what you can find out from the kids and the driver, if he wakes up. I’ll see that the family in the station wagon are taken care of and be along in a few minutes. Not much more I can do here.”

*

Dr. Caitlin Roberts’ head had been on the pillow for a half hour when the phone rang. This year’s flu bug had turned her usually busy office into a nightmare and she did not escape the sniffling hordes until after 7 p.m. Hospital rounds took another two hours. People were always sicker around holidays, especially Christmas, and she had twice the usual number of hospitalized patients to see. Home at 9:30, she wolfed down a tuna sandwich while talking with her husband Ray and her son Ray, Jr. Then a hot shower, a welcome soft pillow, and warm comforter.

She glanced at the clock, 10:30, hoping the call was a wrong number. No such luck.

Ten minutes later, she turned into Mercer Community Hospital’s parking lot, greeted by flashing red lights from the two ambulances, idling on the Emergency Department’s receiving ramp.

Sitting along I-40 and being the only hospital for fifty miles, Mercer Community inherited several dozen major accident victims each year, despite being poorly equipped to handle such cases. Seemed like most of them fell into Cat's lap.

“What’s the story, Rosa?” Cat asked as the automatic doors to the ER hissed open.

Rosa Gomez, the ER head nurse for longer than anyone could remember, led her to the trauma room. “It’s a bad one, this time. Dude trashed his big rig.”

Cat absorbed the scene before her. A large man of about 50 and over 250 pounds lay on the stretcher; a respiratory tech squeezed an Ambu bag, inflating the man’s lungs rhythmically. One arm, strapped to an arm board, hung off the stretcher and received fluid through IV tubing. Sue Tilden, one of the nurses, struggled to place a second IV line in the other arm. Cat glanced at the cardiac monitor above the stretcher where a series of electric blips raced across the screen. Heart rate 130 per minute, but steady.

“What’s his BP?” Cat asked as she began her examination.

“80 over 50,” Rosa said.

The massive man, gray and mottled, splotched with blue-black ecchymoses and bloody abrasions, showed no response to the needle being jabbed into his arm or the tube in his throat. Dark blood, dirt, and gravel covered his chest, legs, and shredded clothing. His pupils, dilated to two oily pools, did not respond to the penlight Cat aimed at them.

She probed and examined his neck without removing the stabilizing cervical collar that the paramedics had placed on him at the scene. Better to wait until X-rays were done before moving his neck. She slapped her stethoscope on his chest. His lungs crackled, gurgled, and wheezed, but his heart sounds were normal.

After securing the second IV to his arm, Sue slipped a Foley catheter through his penis into his bladder, releasing a flow of bloody urine into the attached bag.

Cat mentally ran through a differential diagnosis: massive trauma; head injury with possible intracranial bleed; possible neck injury; lung and kidney contusions; probable intra-abdominal organ damage. At least he still had a stable cardiac rhythm and an acceptable blood pressure given the circumstances.

Just then, the regular monitor blips tripped, wobbled, and fell into a chaotic pattern.

“V-Tach,” Sue shouted.

So much for a stable rhythm. Cat eyed the monitor, confirming Sue’s interpretation of the rhythm, now emergent, lethal.

“Warm up the paddles,” Cat ordered. “Lidocaine 100 milligrams IV STAT.” She smeared the defibrillator paddles with gel and pressed them against his chest. “Clear.” She depressed the red buttons on each paddle, releasing a salvo of electricity. His body lurched, then relaxed.

“V-Fib, now.”

“Great.” Cat recharged the defibrillator and again jolted the man with 400 Watt/Seconds of electricity.

“Asystole.”

Cat looked at the flat-line EKG tracing on the monitor. “Let’s get CPR going.”

Tina Flores, one of the ER techs, began rhythmic compressions of the man’s chest, creating a pattern with the ambu lung inflations--five compressions to each inflation. Though Tina was a large, stout woman, she lacked the strength to adequately compress the trucker’s massive chest and the failing heart that lay inside. Rosa hooked a footstool with her ankle and slid it close to Tina’s feet. Tina stepped up on it, gaining better leverage. She put her full weight behind each compression.

That’s better,” Cat said. “Is the Lido on board?”

“Yes,” Sue said.

Cat continued to eye the monitor. “Give an amp of Bicarb and one of Epi.”

Sue injected Sodium Bicarbonate into one IV while Rosa pushed Epinephrine in the other.

The fire drill continued for thirty minutes but to no avail. Cat pronounced the man dead at 11:22 p.m.

*

Sam stepped through the automatic doors into the emergency department, greeted by the aroma of alcohol, Lysol, and other unidentifiable chemicals, which mixed with the burnt oil smell of her own clothing with nauseating effect. She entered the trauma room as Rosa pulled a sheet over the dead man’s head. Purple feet stared at her from beneath the sheet’s edge. Bad news.

Cat handed the chart to Sue, shaking her head. “Sorry, Sam. He didn’t make it. Head and chest injuries were just too much.”

“Great. There are a few thousand questions I wanted to ask him.” Sam exhaled loudly. “Blood alcohol?”

“Won’t have that until the lab can do it tomorrow. From the smell, I’d guess well over the legal limit. We’ll do a drug screen also. Never met a trucker that didn’t pop uppers. Time is money and sleeping makes nothing.”

“What about the kids in the other car?”

“Few bumps and bruises, scared half to death, but they’ll be OK.”

“Can I talk with them?”

“Sure. Come on.”

Cat led Sam to the minor trauma room and introduced her to Rick and Debbie Freeman, a young couple on their way to Flagstaff, Arizona to visit Debbie’s parents. Two pale and worn faces offered weak smiles as Sam sat down.

“You guys OK?”

“Been better,” Rick said, his eyes puffy from crying. He looked to be about 19, thin, pale, long brown hair in need of washing.

“Has anyone notified your family yet?”

“Yeah,” Debbie replied. Tears had cut snail trails through her dirt-encrusted face and her hair had been tossed in all directions. She wore an over-sized flannel shirt, baggy jeans, and untied black tennis shoes. “My mom and dad are coming from Flagstaff.”