The law of unintended consequences says that you make a choice and something unexpected happens. Makes sense, unless you’re me. In Mercy Watts’ world, some dude I don’t know makes a whack-ass choice, and I end up in a basement hunting turtles for six hours. That’s right. Turtles. ‘Cause it’s me and I live in St. Louis. Grandparents keep turtles in their basements. I swear to God, it’s a thing.
Turtles happened because exactly one week ago, I was mid-way through the annual Bled baking day, which is actually three days long, but let’s not quibble. Decades ago, my godmothers, Myrtle and Millicent Bled, started baking for friends and family at Christmas time and it’s gotten a bit out of hand. We now bake for staff at the Children’s Hospital and all the families stuck there over the holidays. I’m sorry to say that’s a lot of kids and we can’t hire anyone to help. It has to be friends and family so on the first weekend in December I was trying to figure out how to roll gingerbread effectively with one arm in a cast. Like so many things, it didn’t work out for me.
My gingerbread was wafer thin on one side and super fat on the other. It seemed like I was pushing down with equal force, but, clearly, I wasn’t. I sighed and looked up at Stella Bled Lawrence’s portrait. She watched my failure with pale blue eyes over the stacks of Christmas tins that reached up to her nose. The breakfast room was what my mother called the staging area because we did all the packing and labeling in there. The enormous kitchen was where all the action happened, but not that year, not for me. I got exiled with a lump of dough, wax paper, and a rolling pin, because I was in the way and pretty much useless. I thought I’d prove them wrong, but thirty minutes later the opposite was true.
I’d first broken my arm while doing a favor for family friend Big Steve and rebroken it three weeks ago during another favor for Myrtle. I’d looked into the death of The Girls’ childhood friend Sister Maggie with some pretty unexpected results, including breaking my nose, uncovering the origin of the serial killer network with ties to the Kansas graveyard, and, last but not least, the answer to the question of what Stella had sent back from Europe on the eve of WWII. People had died because of that secret, my great grandparents, just for starters, and it was in Great Grandma Agatha’s purse, hidden away in the St. Sebastian police station attic, that we found it. Stella had shipped back the liquor cabinet that had been tucked away in my parents’ butler’s pantry and right under our noses the whole time.
Three weeks had gone by and we still hadn’t gotten in that cabinet and not for lack of trying. Getting into my parent’s house when it was empty was more of a challenge than you’d think. My mother knew everything I was doing, but my father, the great and difficult detective, didn’t.
After serious problems with the FBI and the media, Dad was trying to rebuild his business and the way he’d chosen to do it was a problem for us. My grandad came out of retirement as did Avery Sampson and Leo Frame to help him. The geezers had a system and it included our kitchen table, just about twenty-four hours a day. My mom had to sneak out of bed at three in the morning to search the cabinet because that was the only time nobody was looking and even then Dad turned up, asking what she was doing.
Mom didn’t find anything, no secret compartments, nothing, but it was the dead of night and her eyesight wasn’t great after her stroke so she may have missed something. Bled baking day was our last shot for the next week at getting in that cabinet and searching it completely. My dad was off tracking a rapist in Hannibal, and Avery and Leo were in Memphis chasing down leads in a missing persons case. My grandad was the only conceivable problem. He was home recovering from a broken ankle. He’d slipped off a curb and broken it in three places, revealing that he had osteoporosis, but he wasn’t buying the diagnosis. In Grandad’s opinion, osteoporosis was a woman’s issue akin to menopause, not that he uttered the word menopause. He’d rather break the other ankle than refer directly to anything that had something to do with a woman’s nether regions.
Because he didn’t believe his doctor or me, Grandma J had to take away his car keys, relegating him to the couch with orders to eat and sleep while she helped us bake. He wasn’t happy and threatened to walk over to my parents’ house so he could get at work files. I wouldn’t put it past him. Did I mention that Grandad was a workaholic? The man could not not work. If he wasn’t hobbling out to an Uber, he was probably taking apart the plumbing looking for hairballs or oiling hinges that didn’t squeak or attempting to break into his office to go through old files, looking to unearth clues in unsolved murders from his father’s and grandfather’s time as policemen. He coveted those ancient cases and collected more whenever he had the chance like some kind of ghoul. Occasionally, he tried to rope me into finding out what happened to Maude in 1921, but I always managed to slip the net, which is why I was trying to make gingerbread. Grandma J said I should hang out with Grandad since we were both broken. Nope. Not falling for that. I’d rather roll gingerbread badly for seventy-two hours than be picking the lock on Grandad’s office and looking into Maude’s mysterious end. If I’d known turtles were coming, I’d have chosen differently.
Instead of balling up my dough for another attempt, I texted Chuck, “Are you in yet?”
“Almost,” he wrote back.
“What’s taking so long?”
“Carlson had a breakdown. Delayed. Be in in a minute.”
That damn Carlson. He was always having a breakdown and it wasn’t about work either. Carlson was the squad-designated wreck. On his third divorce and in a custody battle that made Brexit look like a tiff, that idiot got some woman he met at the DMV pregnant and then to cope, he started gambling. The squad put him on a desk and then leave, but he kept coming to work, trying to explain that he was really okay and could do the job while snotting all over the place.
Yesterday, my parents’ house was empty, too, but Chuck and his partner, Sidney, had to lure Carlson out of the station with the promise of chili dogs and ended up sitting at a bar for four hours, listening to how all these women shouldn’t hate him, because Chuck was afraid he might hurt himself, and we missed our first chance to get in the liquor cabinet. If he ruined our second chance, I’d start hoping one of those women would take him out and protect the rest of womankind from the plague that was Daniel Carlson.
“In?” I texted.
“No.” Chuck was irritated with me, but I couldn’t help it. We were so close. Whatever had The Klinefeld Group coming after us since WWII was in that cabinet and I was on the edge of insanity with the waiting.
I slammed my rolling pin onto the dough and bent over, putting my casted hand’s fingers on the wood and trying to inch it forward evenly. I should’ve just said yes to the doc when she said I could take the cast off a couple of days ago. The rebreak wasn’t bad and had healed well. She assumed I couldn’t wait to get it off and she wasn’t wrong, but something held me back. I didn’t want that cast off. There was this weird attachment, a need for the cast that I couldn’t explain, and I said no. The doc shrugged and said to come back in a week. I wasn’t at all sure I’d want it off in a week, but I said I would. I told Chuck and everyone else that I had to keep it on. Nobody doubted me except Fats Licata, my sometimes bodyguard and newly-minted best friend. Fats raised an eyebrow, but quickly got distracted by morning sickness.
She was in the second trimester now, but her nausea wasn’t letting up. If anything, she was getting worse. I could hear her in the kitchen, where she’d gotten the honor of rolling the cinnamon rolls with her two good hands, making noises like a drowning yak. The Girls were trying to get her to take a break, but Fats Licata didn’t take breaks. What she lacked in delicacy, she more than made up for with size and determination.
“I can do it,” she said. “I just have to breathe.”
“You don’t have to do it,” said my mom. “You’re pregnant. Relax. Put your feet up.”
“I can’t do that,” said Fats.
She was right. She couldn’t. I’d never seen Fats relax. That wasn’t a thing for her. We went to a movie last week and she did squats while we were in line and bicep curls during the movie, when she wasn’t in the bathroom throwing up, which was at least half the time.
“Please, Fats,” said Clarence, the little nun who’d gone to St. Sebastian with us and had turned out to be a good friend to a woman who didn’t have female friends before us. We were an odd trio, I’m not gonna lie.
“Make way!” yelled Aunt Miriam and I only had a second to step aside before Fats came barreling through the breakfast room with wild eyes and both hands clamped over her mouth.
I heard her run to the nearest bathroom and prayed she made it. Sometimes she didn’t. It was that bad.
My mom walked in and leaned on the table. “Can’t you talk to her?”
“About what?”
“This isn’t normal.”
“Correct,” I said.
“What did the obstetrician say?” Mom asked.
“That it should be getting better.”
“It’s not.”
“Nope.”
Mom glared at me and wiped her frosting-covered hands on her apron. “You have to talk to her.”
“And say what?” I asked.
“Isn’t there medication?”
“She won’t take it. She’s afraid the baby will be affected and grow a nipple on her forehead or something.”
“That’s not going to happen,” said Mom.
“When I said that, she said, ‘That’s what they said about Thalidomide.’”
“What does Fats know about Thalidomide?”
“Everything. She’s been researching.”
“Oh, Lord.”
“Exactly.”
The sound of retching echoed through the Bled Mansion for a second time and Clarence came in wringing her hands. “Is she okay?”
“I’m going with no,” I said.
“Can’t you do something?”
“I got her to drink ginger tea.”
Clarence bit her lip and then said, “I don’t think it’s working.”
“It works,” I said. “But not enough.”
“You should go in there,” said Mom.
“Why me? I haven’t had a baby.”
“You’re a nurse.”
“I was a nurse. Now I’m a licensed PI, whose father doesn’t trust her to do more than background checks.”
Mom came over and hugged me fiercely. In a strange way I think she was mourning the loss of my nursing career, but I don’t think she was ever that into it. She just didn’t want me to follow in my father’s footsteps, that much she knew, but I had to earn a living. With all the events of the last few months, I was persona non grata in the nursing world, not because I sucked, but because I was a disaster waiting to happen and everyone in St. Louis knew it. Nobody wanted to hire me, at least not until I could be normal for a while and not get a clinic rammed with a tractor or something else equally ridiculous. So in a moment of weakness I agreed, after a tremendous amount of badgering from my dad, to take the PI license test. Now I was employed by my dad and, in his words, working my way up. It didn’t matter how many cases I’d cracked for him in my so-called spare time or how many murders I’d solved, I got to start at the bottom as a glorified file clerk. I was bored out of my mind, making less money than I did as a student nurse, and just about ready to pay the Columbia clinic to take me back.
Clarence came over and hugged me, too. “You’ll be a nurse again.”
“I don’t know,” I snuffled, getting all weepy.
“You will,” said Mom. “Or I’ll make your father give you something good.”
That did it. I was an adult and my mom had to help me get a decent job. I started crying for real and that’s when Aunt Miriam came in and smacked my legs with her cane. “I never heard so much caterwauling about good news.”
“Good news? What’s the good news? Fats can’t stop barfing. We have less than forty-eight hours to fill these tins and we’re not even close. I can’t get a real job and…”
She gave me the stink eye. “And what?”
I was going to say we can’t get inside the liquor cabinet, but Aunt Miriam was in the dark and she had to stay that way or else. “Nothing. I just feel rotten and useless.”
“You are useless.”
“Aunt Miriam!” exclaimed Mom.
“I mean with baking, but I have a job for you.” Aunt Miriam glared at me and whatever the job was I wouldn’t like it.
“Oh, yeah?” I asked. “Is it clean out the gutters or unclog a toilet?”
“Don’t be ridiculous. You can’t even roll dough.”
“Then what?”
Aunt Miriam pulled a large bottle out of her apron pocket. “You can make yourself useful by getting some more vanilla.”
“We’re out?” I asked. “That’s a lot of vanilla.”
“We have some,” said Mom.
“Aaron says it has to be his cognac vanilla.”
With that, my weirdo partner, Aaron, trotted into the breakfast room wearing a pink hairnet and a frilly apron that once belonged to The Girls’ mother. He was pulling on my hoodie, which is to say Chuck’s hoodie, and it hung halfway to his knees.
Mom stepped in front of him. “Oh, no. Back you go.”
Aaron stopped, looked to the left, and said, “Vanilla,” before attempting to bypass my mother.
“We’ll get it. You are not leaving us with that crazy Baumkuchen.”
Aaron look confused, but that was nothing new. The only thing I was confused about was why we were making Baumkuchen. It’s a German cake that’s baked in layers and takes four hours. Like we didn’t have enough things with delicate timing.
Mom turned him around and Aunt Miriam stripped off the hoodie before handing it to me.
“Go and hurry.”
“My dough will get dry.” The gingerbread was kicking my butt. It could not be allowed.
“That ship has sailed, Mercy,” said Mom.
“Fine,” I said, but before I could zip up, Fats staggered into the room. She was pale, sweaty, and her usually perfect hair had come loose from its slicked back ponytail, sticking out around her face like wilting petals on a flower. If it hadn’t been for her tremendous size and the hot pink leopard spandex she was wearing I might not have recognized her.
“I’ll go,” she wheezed.
“Not happening,” said Mom.
“You can go to bed,” said Aunt Miriam, primly tucking a few ginger hairs back into her veil.
“We have work…to do.” Fats tried to lean casually against the doorframe, but instead sort of toppled into it and the wood made a worrisome snapping noise.
I went over to check her temperature and heart rate. Not great but not sick, in the regular sense anyway. “You have nothing to do but drink tea and rest,” I said.
“No, I’ve got to get ahead of it,” said Fats.
“Ahead of what?”
“The sick. I need some exercise.”
“The last thing you need is exercise.”
She straightened up and, for a second, looked normal, minus the sweaty. “I’ll go and you roll the crap out of that gingerbread.”
It’s you and me, gingerbread. Let’s do this thing.
“Hey!” My cousins, the Troublesome Trio, stuck their red heads in the door to the kitchen.
“Are we taking a break?” asked Sorcha aka Weepy, although she didn’t weep much anymore since becoming engaged.
“No,” said Mom. “Don’t get any ideas.”
“I’m not getting any ideas. I love this.”
Jilly looked like she thought she was crazy, but my cousins were thrilled to be included in something Bled for the first time and weren’t complaining…much.
“What about lunch?” asked Bridget. “Rodney says he has some crab that he wants to use up before it goes bad. Crab cakes?”
Crap on a cracker.
Before I could squash that, Fats made a horking noise and ran for the bathroom again.
“What did I say?” asked Bridget.
“Crab,” we said in chorus.
“I thought it was coffee that made her sick.”
Aunt Miriam shooed my cousins back into the kitchen saying, “It was. Now it’s crab.”
“Does that mean I can have a latte?” asked Sorcha.
I didn’t catch the answer since Aaron tried to dart past me and I had to grab him by the apron. “You have to do the Baumkuchen.”
A timer, one of about twenty-eight we had going, went off and I turned him around. “I’ll get it.”
“Sto-Vo-Kor,” he said.
“I know.”
“Six months.”
“Of course,” I said, not really knowing what he was referring to, but I figured the meaning would become apparent. Or not. Whatever.
Mom pushed him back into the kitchen toward the enormous La Cornue stove with its multiple ovens all fired up. “And take Pick with you. He hasn’t been out for hours.”
“Anything else?” I asked sarcastically.
“Hurry. We’ve got the next batch of sugar cookies to do.”
I saluted my mother, wrapped my crusty gingerbread dough in the wax paper, and headed for the library. Pickpocket, Chuck’s giant poodle, was curled up on a cushion next to the fireplace. He desperately needed a haircut, so it really just looked like someone dropped a pile of black curls in the dog bed. I couldn’t make out so much as a foot.
“Time for walk,” I said, picking up his leash.
Nothing.
“Walk.”
Pick didn’t move. I didn’t even get a wag and he loved walks. To be fair it was flipping freezing out and he was a poodle with poodle-type sensibilities.
“Come on,” I said. “I gotta put on your booties.”
Taking Pick out for a walk was a whole thing. Booties and a red-checked jacket. He was adorable, but it was a pain.
The poodle opened one dark eye and then firmly closed it before putting a paw over his face.
“Fine, but don’t come crying to me if you have to pee five minutes after I get back,” I said.
Nothing.
I tossed his leash on the settee and went to the receiving room to try and suit up in my puffer coat, hat, and scarf. It was freezing, but I wasn’t convinced the five-minute walk over to Aaron’s bakery was worth the effort to get my jacket over my cast, so I forgot the coat and stuck with the hat and two scarves.
I went out the back of the Bled Mansion, leaving the incredible smells of fifteen different kinds of pastries behind and dashed through the rose garden to the stables that would soon be my home. Chuck and I had decided to move into the apartment above the stables, but, true to form, The Girls had insisted on renovating it for us. The sound of sawing and hammering echoed down the street as I passed though the stables and went into the alley, slipping on the ice but catching myself in the nick of time.
My phone buzzed and it was Chuck. Finally.
“I’m in,” he said.
“Nobody’s there?” I asked.
“Who would be here?”
“No idea, but I never count my dad out.”
I heard a door close and a zipper unzip. “Yeah, you never know with Tommy. I was half-expecting him to be at the table with your Grandad.”
“You and me both,” I said.
“I’m going to make a coffee. I’m freaking freezing.”
I rolled my eyes. “Will you just search the cabinet?”
“Maybe I should make sure nobody’s here.”
“Nobody’s there.”
“You just asked me if somebody was here,” said Chuck.
“I was paranoid.”
“Well, now I’m paranoid.” He paused. “Wait.”
My stomach twisted. “What?”
“I heard something.”
“It’s probably the Siamese.” I turned the corner toward Sto-Vo-Kor. “You can take them.”
“I…don’t think it’s the Siamese unless they gained a hundred pounds,” said Chuck.
“Get out.”
“Let me see who—”
A voice behind me called out, “Mercy!”
I turned and a man rushed at me. I put my hands out to fend him off, but I slipped when I stepped back, falling on my back. I knocked my head on the concrete and the wind rushed out of my lungs with an oomph. He was on me, shoving a wet rag over my face. I was screaming and clawing at him, but he was bigger than me and had the advantage. My vision narrowed and he started dragging me by my hoodie, keeping the rag over my face. Then he had me in a chokehold and I was lifted, thrown into something. The rag came off my face for a second. A trunk. He shoved me down and pressed the rag back over my face. I must’ve blacked out for a second because the next thing I knew, he’d flipped me over and was grabbing at my arms.
“Son of a bitch,” he said as he twisted my casted arm behind my back and tried to force my hands together, muttering obscenities and attempting to tie me up. I screamed with everything I had, he let go, and I looked over my shoulder to see with blurred vision a man in a parka with the hood up looming over me.
“Fuck it!” He slammed the trunk.
I don’t know what happened or how long it was happening. I remember sort of rerealizing where I was, so I must’ve passed out. The car was moving. Fast. Highway speed.
This was one of those times when being Tommy Watts’ daughter comes in handy. Dad was always worried about me getting kidnapped when I was little. He dealt with some pretty bad guys during his police career and some of them got out of prison. Dad lived in fear that I’d be taken in retribution, so he trained both Mom and me in self-defense. It didn’t work out in the alley, but his training included how to get out of a car. I still had my glass-breaking tool in my purse at the mansion, not that it would’ve helped me in a trunk. Luckily, trunks were big in Dad’s training and I did not appreciate it at all. What eight-year-old wants to spend Saturday afternoon being tossed in various detectives’ trunks to see if she can escape under different variables? I got timed and graded. Dad didn’t reward. Living was my reward, he said. But Mom was all about the reward. I got so much ice cream for those trunks, so I learned it. I can learn anything if Ben and Jerry’s is on the line.
So without any thought at all, I started searching the trunk and used Dad’s annoying breathing techniques to calm myself. The trunk was empty. No tools or rubbish of any kind, but it was dirty and smelled of trash and tools. Not new, not a rental, but maybe it would have a trunk release anyway. They’d been required forever.
I looked for the glow-in-the-dark lever but didn’t see one. Then I felt around where the release would normally be, but, when I found the spot, the lever had been clipped off.
Stay calm. Dad taught you what to do.
I felt to the edge of the trunk liner and tried to pull it down so I could maybe get ahold of the wire. I couldn’t do it. The cast rendered my hand useless and I couldn’t do it with only one. I wasn’t strong enough.
Taillight it is.
“Alright then. It’s a good thing I’ve got boots on,” I said to myself.
I angled myself with my feet toward the right tail lamp and started kicking. The plastic cracked. Encouraged, I kicked with both feet at the same time. Something snapped and I had daylight. I turned myself and began prying at the plastic covering. I yanked out the light apparatus and peered out to the road whizzing away under the car. It was a highway and a busy one at that. There was a truck directly behind us and another vehicle in the left lane that we were passing. I stuck my hand out of the taillight and instantly horns started honking. I waved frantically and wished I knew sign language or something. All I could’ve done was given a thumbs-up or an okay sign and that was hardly helpful.
The car started swerving, jerking in and out of lanes. Then slowing and speeding up wildly. The other drivers must’ve been trying to stop him. I loved them for it but prayed they didn’t cause a crash. I didn’t know what the survival rate was for crashing in a trunk and I didn’t want to find out.
It seemed like forever before I heard sirens and the guy behind the wheel was panicking. I was rolling around in that trunk like a number ball on bingo night. Then there was an abrupt swerve, an acceleration, and we were going up. An exit ramp. More sirens from every direction and then he touched the brakes before flooring it. There was a bump followed by a weird thwacking and slappy sound. Strip spikes. They’d punctured his tires, but that changed nothing. He kept speeding to who knows where, toward who knows what, as the tires peeled away.
Who is this idiot?
A sudden thump and then the sound of metal grinding filled the trunk. I covered my ears as best I could. We were on the rims and I could smell the burning metal.
Oh, come on, dude. It’s over.
Apparently, the guy in the driver’s seat didn’t agree because we yanked to the right and were going over rough ground. I was bumping up and down so fast. Now I know how popcorn feels.
What was the point? Driving through a field was not an effective escape route. I knew it was a field because I’d accidentally driven into a cornfield in high school when we were out at a party and everyone was yelling directions in a panic because we were going to miss curfew. I took a turn too fast and drove into the bumpy furrows. It stopped me, but it didn’t stop this guy. We were going slower and slower, but we were still going. It seemed like miles and miles of bumps.
And then he stopped. I was actually surprised when he did. It’d gotten to the point where I’d started to think it would last forever. I know, I know, that’s crazy. Hey, I was locked in a trunk. Don’t judge me.
The sirens surrounded us and people were yelling. Then gunfire. Three shots and then nothing. I could hear people yelling but couldn’t make out what they were saying. I hoped to God a cop wasn’t hit, but I didn’t really think that was a possibility. It was probably fifteen armed-to-the-teeth cops against one moron. I liked our odds.
I laid there patiently for a while until it seemed the reason for the chase had been forgotten. Namely, me.
Is somebody going to open this damn trunk?
I started yelling and yelling, working myself into a fury. I could’ve been bleeding out. Choking to death on my own vomit.
Over my caterwauling, I heard a click and the trunk popped, flooding my prison with blinding light. I blinked up at a large figure looming over me. Was it possible the cops had not won the day and this was the moron getting ready to axe me to death? I didn’t think my heart rate could go higher, but it did. It really did.
“Calm down,” he said. “We’ve got you.”
I shielded my eyes. “Calm down? Are you serious? I’m kidnapped here.”
“You’re alive, aren’t you?”
“So I have to be calm unless I’m dead? Is that what we’re saying?”
He chuckled and reached for me. “You’re alright. Come on.”
I slapped his hands away. “Get off me, ya dickhead.” I climbed out of the trunk on my own and I’d like to say I was elegant about it. But no, I wasn’t. I flipped over the end of the car and lay splayed out on dried corn stalks. There was some small satisfaction of being right on that count. Very small. There were at least five cameras on me. I’d gotten so I could feel the lenses. Bastards.
“Do you want help?” the cop asked.
“EMTs on their way,” said a woman and then she was at my side, kneeling on the crunchy stalks and quickly assessing my condition.
She clicked her walkie and said, “Mid-twenties white female. Head injury. Possible broken nose.”
I felt my face and it was bloody. Dammit. She said some other stuff, but I was thinking about my poor nose. How many times can you break a nose before it gives up and decides to look like meatloaf? I know the head injury should’ve been my first concern. But I had a head injury, thinking straight wasn’t my thing just then and I’m vain. There I said it.
“Check it out.” The other cop held up a rag and sniffed it, making a face. “Jesus, what the hell is this?”
“Bag it, Derek,” she said.
“Yes, ma’am.”
Then there were other cops talking about the suspect who was dead. A guy squatted by my head. “Mercy Watts. First major crime in three years and it’s you.”
He said it like it was my fault and I wanted to say, “Drop dead,” but I was getting more and more dizzy. It came out like a croak.
“Ah, shit,” he yelled. “Where’s that ambulance? We can’t have Tommy Watts’ daughter dying on us.”
Die?
I croaked again.
“She’s not going to die,” said the female cop. “She’s tough. She’s been here before.”
To be fair, it was my first straight-up kidnapping. Even thinking that isn’t a good sign. When you say “first” it means you expect it to happen again and I pretty much did.
“Alright. Alright. Let’s not get worked up,” he said. “You survived to wreck shit another day.”
I hate you.
“Jesus, Dustin,” she said. “She’s the victim.”
He stood up and walked away. She put her hand on my forehead and said, “The ambulance is arriving. You’re fine. You’re going to be fine.”
I managed to croak out, “I hate him.”
“Yeah, I know. He’s not usually like that. I’m Sam, by the way. Samantha Samuelson.”
I held up my good hand. “Mercy Watts. I think I’m going to throw up.”
Sam turned my head for me and I threw up just as the EMTs turned up in an amazing display of professional and unprofessional behavior. They assessed me, got me on a gurney and IVed, all the while discussing how I’d managed to get myself in this fix. I was kinda out of it, but I’m pretty sure one looked inside my hoodie and whistled.
They rolled me over to the back of the ambulance and I got a glimpse of a clump of cops standing around a body lying in the field, toes up. It was the oddest sensation. He was trying to kill me, I assumed, and he ended up dead. How did this happen? Dustin thought it was my fault. Was it? My head injury must’ve been bad because it seemed reasonable. I made that dude kidnap me.
“Alright,” said one of the EMTs. “You’re going up and in. It’s okay.”
They slid me in, strapped the gurney down, and away we went with siren wailing, bumping slowly over some soon-to-be irate farmer’s field. Three weeks. It’d been three weeks since something crazy happened to me. Not a record, but still.
The EMTs chattered back and forth and, in a stunning move, got out their cellphones.
“Dude, Justin isn’t going to believe this. She is Marilyn Monroe.”
“It’s totally whack.”
“We are so gonna trend.”
“Number one, baby.”
They wouldn’t.
They would. Two EMTs in the back of an ambulance took selfies with me, a head injury with nausea and blurred vision, and started posting to Instagram.
This cannot get any worse.
One EMT held up his phone to the other one and said, “Hey, that weird stuff on her face really shows up. I didn’t even use a filter.”
Crap on a cracker.