A lot.
To what are you referring, specifically?
The level of alcohol consumption.
How do any of you still have livers?
It IS Halloween.
So?
The whole point if you’re even approaching 21 is to spend it shitfaced.
How else are you going to stay warm in your thong?
I didn’t respondto that last message, but I took his point.
The number of people I’d seen in far, far less clothing than the nearly freezing temperatures warranted was shockingly high. People in what I assume were supposed to be cave-person outfits, people in bikinis and Speedos with tuxedo patterns, ‘sexy’ insert-noun-here costumes… And I do mean ‘noun’ in the most encompassing of terms—I’d never seen either a ‘sexy tomato’ or a ‘sexy pencil’ costume before. I guess that warranted bonus points for creativity.
Or it would have if I hadn’t been trying to drive through them on my way to various crime scenes. It was almost ten-thirty p.m., and I was headed to the third and in an absolutely foul mood. Roger and Lacy were at their own scenes, and I’d been stuck—as the guy at the bottom of the ladder—driving my own car because Lacy had the van and Roger had the truck, and I had to drivesomething.
I’d texted Elliot back because I needed to just vent atsomeone, and I’d already been told by Hart to, and I quote,Fuck off, this isn’t any more fun for me than it is for you.
I’d texted Hart between scenes one and two, both of which had involved alcohol-related DUIs. The second, at least, hadn’t involved a human fatality, although I’d now had the ‘fun’ new experience of cleaning deer guts off my shoes. And yes, before you ask, Ihadhad on the little booties, but gravel bites right through them, and that particular road was in terrible shape, with as much loose gravel as asphalt.
The driver and passenger had both been taken to the hospital, although the responding fire department team had seemed positive about their chances. They’d hit the deer, hit another car, then careened off the road, flipped the car, and ended up smashed into a tree. The driver of the second car had managed to keep herself right-side-up in the ditch, and although one wheel was absolutely shot, she was okay.
The first one had left two people on their way to the morgue, one of them in a bear costume and the other dressed as a penis, complete with a little rounded pink hat. There is nothing quite as depressing as a dead man in the driver’s seat of a car dressed as a penis and reeking of cheap whiskey and beer.
But I wasn’t going to say it was the worst scene of the night yet, because I’d just been called in to a domestic dispute scene… and they generally only called me to those kinds of scenes when they turned deadly. I was hoping this was going to be the exception to that rule—that a domestic call resulted in revealing a drug cache or a meth lab or something. I’d take a meth lab about now.
I’d texted Elliot back—which was probably a bad idea, given that I hadn’t spoken to him at all since our argument about the digitalis—while stuck in traffic waiting for the meandering herds of drunken revelers to get out of the way. It had been a spur-of-the-moment reply, sent because I needed to say something tosomeone, even if I kind of wasn’t talking to him, and I didn’t have the energy to deal with Noah.
Because Noah would, again, try to convince me to move back to Richmond.Back home, he would say. But Richmond wasn’t home anymore. I wasn’t sure Shawano was home, either—not yet. But I was working on it. I was learning a lot in my fire investigation courses, I’d started actual firefighter training, which, while terrifying, meant that I was converting some of my body’s softness to muscle in a way I’d never been able to do before. There was still softness there—a layer of fat over the hardness of muscle—but I was stronger, faster, more confident.
I felt like I was finally getting used to my body and finding peace in my own head.
Usually.
I was not terribly happy at the moment—the DUIs, drunken partiers, and the case I was driving towards all left me dissatisfied and unsettled. Irritable. Impatient.
I’d wanted to text Elliot back, so I had.
And his response had been the same sort of thing he would have sent me months ago.
As though we’d never argued. Never been on a disaster of a date. Like I’d never moved to Wisconsin and confessed my feelings for him.
Which I guess was exactly what he’d wanted.
It didn’t… hurt, exactly. But it didn’t feel good, either. More sour than bitter, uncomfortable than painful, although I had the feeling that it would start to sting if I kept probing the wound.
Traffic started moving—I had finally gotten past the crowds of drunken hooligans and turned toward one of the lower-income pretend-suburban neighborhoods that had gone up in the 1950s and probably hadn’t been renovated since. The houses were mostly bland shades of pale yellow, off-white, grey, and other almost-non-colors. The yards were little stamps of grass that had seen better days—scrubby brown patches, bits of crabgrass, small gardens that were dying after several days of hard frost.
I wasn’t used to that in October. It didn’t drop below freezing in Richmond until January, usually. Maybe a day or two in December if it was an early winter. The idea that we’d be seeing our breath and watching plants die around Halloween would have meant apocalyptic conditions.
Around me, the houses were growing in size—not mansions by any means, but the slightly-higher-income middle-class sorts of houses that might have been seen as aspirational. More 1960s than 50s. More variation in color. Bushes and winterized flower beds. The occasional cement or ceramic deer.
The house I was going to was glaringly obvious—there were three cop cars, lights blazing, pulled into the driveway and the yard. There was tape stretched across the driveway, wrapped around the mailbox on one side and the end of a decorative split-rail fence on the other. The tape flashed weirdly green-brown and blood red in the alternating color lights from the tops of the police cruisers.
