Chat - Archer Mayor [4]
“No shit,” he muttered, noticing how hard it was to breathe, to actually move his lungs. The window had lowered all the way. He considered shouting, but with the cold air had also come a wider silence, as from a chasm without bottom. He knew this road—it either had traffic or was empty. There were no pedestrians and few homes.
He had to get out.
He moved his feet and found his lower body uninjured. That was good. But even at 100 percent, struggling out the side window of a small car wasn’t easy. And, he knew by now, he was far from 100 percent, just as he knew that wasn’t phlegm in his lungs.
“Ma?” he said, barely whispering by now. “Can you hear me? I got to try to get help.”
Nothing.
He sighed, gritted his teeth, took hold of the steering wheel with his good hand, and pushed up with his feet, hoping to launch himself at least partway out the window.
The pain was beyond imagination. It felt like lava, filling him with heat and blinding red light, exploding inside his head and making him gasp for air. Beyond that, he could feel something fundamental shift within him, as if the cellar of a house had suddenly vanished into the earth, leaving everything above it precariously poised above a void. For a split second, he could almost see himself hovering in the air, somewhere between heaven and oblivion.
And then he, too, collapsed into the blackness and the utter, all-encompassing quiet of a winter night.
Brett: so wut u doing
gIRl: chatting with u
Brett: cool
Brett: u in school
gIRl: nope
Brett: why
gIRl: home - school get out at 220
Brett: oh cool
Brett: so u ain’t got no bf to be hanging with
gIRl: nope broke
Brett: that sucks
gIRl: i guess
Chapter 2
It was postcard serene—trees coated in white snow, hanging low over a tumbling brook whose boulders were collared with sugar halos of ice, sparkling in the sun. The painfully blue sky overhead daubed the darkly rushing water with the hint of a bruise as it emerged, cascading, from a large, cavernlike culvert projecting from under a quaint backcountry dirt road.
Joe Gunther studied that road a moment. It emerged from the woods like a fairy-tale prop, entered the sunshine, its snowy shoulders dazzling in the light, leaped the culvert, and vanished as magically into the darkness of the trees on the far side. There were no railings hemming it in as it spanned the water, not even a curb. In fact, if viewed from a low enough angle, the road appeared to cross the brook as if by the stroke of a paintbrush.
“What do you think?”
Joe glanced over at Sammie Martens, his only female squad member and as close as he had to a lieutenant.
“I think it’s dangerous as hell,” he said. “Bet more than one driver’s gotten white knuckles crossing this thing.”
“Not to mention the odd pedestrian,” she added ruefully.
Joe nodded and grunted his agreement, approaching the edge overlooking the water. Sam joined him to stare down at the swirl and tumble of the stream gushing out below them. There was a pile of boulders right at the mouth of the culvert, then a widening where one of the banks tabled out slightly to form a small beach before the trees downstream crowded in once more and narrowed the channel to create a miniature whitewater chute that raced off around a bend.
At the edge of the snow-clad beach, the water slowed and flattened enough to create a pool—no doubt a popular swimming hole during the summer. Not that Joe had been hard-pressed to conjure up such an image, since floating facedown in the middle of the pool was the body of a fully clothed man.
“You think that’s what he was?” he asked her.
Instead of answering, Sammie merely shrugged.
By the water’s edge, a diver for the Vermont State Police was adjusting the last piece of equipment on his cold-water suit. Before lowering his face mask, he called up to Joe. “You ready for me to go in?”
Joe gave him a thumbs-up.
Another