The abyss gets deeper.
A woman is screaming. It’s a high-pitched note that threatens to break the windscreens of other cars pulling over. Ahead of me a four-door sedan has spun around in the intersection. The front of it is completely caved in. Clouds of steam surround it so I can’t tell if anybody is inside. The screaming is coming from a woman ^ho has pulled over and has probably thought her entire life that she would take action in a moment like this and is quickly finding
she can’t. She has opened her car door, stood up but hasn’t gone any further. Another car is starting to pull over.
I reach the wreck first. I push my arms into the steam and
touch metal, pushing myself close enough to see inside. There’s a woman in there, slumped over the wheel. She looks young.
Like me, she had no airbag. I try opening the driver’s door, but it’s jammed. The woman’s eyes are open; they are rolled into the back of her head and her jaw is pushed forward, either broken or locked, and there is a steady stream of blood coming from the left side of her mouth. I pat down my pockets and find my cellphone but can only stare at it in my hand.
‘Out of the way, buddy,’ a man says, reaching past me. He tries the driver’s door too, then moves around to the passenger side, and it comes open with a loud screech. He looks over at me. ‘You gonna use that thing?’
I look down at my cellphone. It has survived the crash, but
still I can only stare at it.
I have just become the very thing I hate the most. I have
become Quentin James: full-time drunk and part-time killer.
chapter thirty
They want to take me to the police station but my injuries require otherwise. I sit in the back of an ambulance and nobody talks to me. A paramedic tends to my wounds but he doesn’t really seem to be putting any energy into it. Like everybody else he’ll be wishing I was the one who was dead.
After a while a policeman takes a statement from me. He doesn’t know who I am. Doesn’t know my history. I tell him what happened. He tells me that witness reports indicate I ran a red light. That it had been red for at least two seconds before I hit the intersection. He asks if I’ve been drinking. I tell him I have, because he’s going to test me anyway. He pulls out a breathalyser and makes me say my name into it, as though he’s giving me an interview and the breathalyser is a microphone. He looks at the numbers, then writes them down. I know what they’re telling him. I’m way over the limit even though I feel sober. Killing a Woman will do that to you.
At the hospital I’m put up in an emergency ward with dozens of other people. My bed has a curtain drawn around it. The cut to my leg is stitched up and bandaged and I’m told it will leave a scar. There are other cuts over my body too, other scars. The finger with the missing fingernail is cleaned, wrapped in gauze and bandaged. There is a cut at the top of my forehead which gets stitched. Blood is cleaned off my face. Safety glass is plucked out of my knees. My scraped-up palms with tiny pieces of shingle in them are cleaned.
When the nurse is all done fixing me up, she pushes past the curtain and Landry pushes his way in. He is expressionless, as if he can’t be bothered being angry with me any more. It’s worse.
‘Of all the people to be drunk and driving,’ he says.
‘I don’t need the lecture.’
‘What were you thinking, Tate?’
‘I don’t know’
“I tried to warn you.’
“I know’
‘Jesus, don’t you have anything else you can say?’
‘I … I don’t know. I wish I did. Jesus, I feel so numb. So
numb.’
‘The girl’s in a coma,’ he says. ‘It’s serious. Four broken ribs, a punctured lung and her jaw was dislocated. You’re lucky she’s not dead.’
I’m lucky.
My heart starts to flutter. ‘I… I thought she was dead.’
She’s lucky.
Luck.
;er.
“I know. Only nobody felt like telling you.’
I’m too angry at myself to direct any of it towards him.
‘She’s going to be okay?’
‘You better pray, Tate. You better fucking pray’
Nobody comes to see how I’m doing over the next hour, and nobody has made the effort to feed me any painkillers, though the throbbing in my head and from all the wounds is becoming unbearable. Nobody cares about that. They all care about the woman I hurt, and so they should. I want to go and see her. I want to speak to her family and tell them how sorry I am. I can’t, of course. I’d simply be making myself the punching bag for their anger.
Eventually two officers come to get me. They don’t cuff me.
With a bare minimum of words and gestures they escort me out to a police car. I sit in the back for the short drive to the station.