The Next Accident - Lisa Gardner [57]
“No dogs? What kind of self-respecting salvage-yard owner doesn’t have a dog?”
“The kind who’s been turned in to the humane society twice and could no longer afford the cruelty-toward-animal fines. Now he has a security company that drives around in hourly intervals. You see headlights, duck.”
“Cool,” Rainie said and started whistling “We’re off to see the Wizard, the wonderful Wizard of Oz.”
Five minutes later, they’d scaled the eight-foot-high fence and were making their way through the final resting place for thousands of cars. Compacted cubes of metal were piled into rusted-out heaps. Back ends, front ends, bumpers were scattered about like dismembered limbs. The newer acquisitions sat quietly in long lines, fully formed skeletons still awaiting their fate.
“Sheee—it.” Amity whistled, looking out at two football fields’ worth of wrecked vehicles and untold numbers of tires.
“I’d say look for an SUV,” Rainie murmured, “but that doesn’t exactly limit our options.”
“America’s love for the big automobile,” he agreed. “Kind of ironic that we’re about to compare a Ford Explorer with the proverbial needle.”
“Split up?”
“No.”
Rainie nodded and pretended not to hear the concern in his voice. The moon was full, visibility great for a nighttime rendezvous. Still she was conscious of the total hush, the unnatural still of a cemetery-like place. In the dark, abandoned metal took on lifelike shapes, and it was hard not to turn shadowy corners and feel the hairs prickle at the nape of her neck.
They walked in silence, flashlights slicing through the twisted heaps. Every few feet they’d come to an SUV, check for make and model, then keep on moving. One dozen down, five hundred to go. They stumbled upon one particularly crushed compact car and Rainie recoiled at the stench of dried blood.
“Jesus!” she cried, then stuffed a fist into her mouth to keep from saying more.
Vince swept his flashlight over a four-door sedan that had forcefully become a convertible. The cloth seats had once been blue; now they were stained with ugly splotches of brown.
“I’m guessing car versus semi,” he said.
“I’m guessing decapitation,” Rainie moaned and quickly moved on.
The sound of an approaching engine rumbled through the silence. Rent-a-Cop. They ducked swiftly behind a mountain of twisted chassis, still too close to the bloody convertible and Rainie pinched her nose with her fingers to block out the smell. She was thinking of the medical report now, the one Quincy had no doubt read time after time after time. How Amanda Quincy had struck the telephone pole at approximately 35 miles per hour. How the force of that impact pushed the front bumper down and the rear bumper up, launching her unsecured body into the air. Her body had hit the steering wheel first. The column had crumpled as it was designed to do, sparing her internal organs but doing nothing to halt her flight. Next had come the dashboard, bending her body like a rag doll at the waist. Finally came the metal frame of the windshield, not designed to crumple on impact, and now driving deep into Mandy’s brain while the unyielding glass crushed all the bones in her face.
The security guard finally moved on. Amity and Rainie stood. She said, “I know how to find the Explorer.”
“The windshield?”
“Yeah.” And maybe it was horrible, but things moved much faster from there.
They finally found the dark green remnant at the very edge of the salvage yard; Rainie called it a remnant because it certainly didn’t resemble a vehicle anymore. The entire back end had been clipped off, no doubt soldered together with some rear-ended SUV’s front end by the auto world’s equivalent of Dr. Frankenstein. The runners were gone. Both doors and the front seats stripped. The tires shed. What was left looked like a gutted fish head, lying on the gaping back hole where its body used to be while its crushed bumper smiled obscenely in the dark.
“Spooky,” Amity muttered.
“Let’s not linger.”
“I’ll second that.”
Officer Amity opened up his fanny pack and spread out his wares. He was the