“Linny, how are you doing?”
“Okay. Got seven hours or so last night, which is a little more than usual. So, all good. I’m worried about you, though.”
“I’m fine, don’t worry about—” She was interrupted by a jaw-cracking yawn. It made what she was saying a bit ludicrous, but she persevered. “I’m fine, too.”
“Seriously? How long have you been awake?”
“I don’t know, maybe eighteen, nineteen hours.” To reduce Linny’s concern she added, “I cooped some last night, don’t worry.” Lies kept falling out of her mouth. There was a fairy tale that warned about this, about how one lie led to other lies, and you eventually turned into a parakeet or something, but Lila’s worn-out brain couldn’t come up with it. “Never mind me right now. What’s the deal with Tiffany what’s-her-face, from the trailer? Did the EMTs transport her to the hospital?”
“Yes. Good thing they got her there fairly early.” Linny lowered her voice. “St. Theresa’s is a madhouse.”
“Where are Roger and Terry now?”
Linny’s response to this question was embarrassed. “Well . . . They waited for the Assistant DA for awhile, but he never showed, and they wanted to check on their wives—”
“So they left the crime scene?” Lila was furious for a moment, but her anger had dissipated by the time her disbelief was expressed. Probably the reason the ADA hadn’t shown was the same reason that Roger and Terry had left—to check on his wife. It wasn’t just St. Theresa’s that was a madhouse. It was everywhere.
“I know, Lila, I know, but Roger’s got that baby girl, you know—” If it’s his, Lila thought. Jessica Elway liked to bed-hop, that was the word around town. “—and Terry was panicking, too, and neither of them could get an answer when they called home. I told them you’d be pissed.”
“All right, get them back. I want them to go to all three drugstores in town and tell the pharmacists . . .”
Pinocchio. That was the fairy tale about lying, and he didn’t turn into a parakeet, his nose grew until it was as long as Wonder Woman’s dildo.
“Lila? Are you still there?”
Pull it together, woman.
“Tell the pharmacists to use discretion on all the speedy stuff they’ve got. Adderall, Dexedrine . . . and I know there’s at least one prescription methamphetamine, although I can’t remember the name.”
“Prescription meth? Shut up!”
“Yes. The pharmacists will know. Tell them to use discretion. Prescriptions are going to be pouring in. The fewest number of pills they can give people until we understand what in the hell is going on here. Got it?”
“Yes.”
“One other thing, Linny, and this is just between us. Look in Evidence. See what we’ve got in there for speed-up stuff, and that includes the coke and Black Beauties from the Griner brothers bust.”
“Jeepers, are you sure? There’s almost half a pound of Bolivian marching powder! Lowell and Maynard, they’re due to go on trial. Don’t want to mess that up, we’ve been after them like forever!”
“I’m not sure at all, but Clint put the idea in my head and now I can’t get it out. Just inventory the stuff, okay? No one’s going to start rolling up dollar bills and snorting.” Not this afternoon, anyway.
“Okay.” Linny sounded awed.
“Who’s out at that trailer where the meth lab exploded?”
“Just a minute, let me check Gertrude.” Linny called her office computer Gertrude for reasons Lila did not care to understand. “Forensics and the FD units have departed. I’m surprised they left the scene so soon.”
Lila wasn’t. Those guys probably had wives and daughters, too.
“Um . . . looks like a couple of AAH dudes might still be around, putting out the last of the hot spots. Can’t say for sure which ones, all I’ve got is a note saying they rolled out of Maylock at eleven thirty-three. Willy Burke’s probably one of them, though. You know Willy, he never misses.”
AAH, an acronym that came out sounding like a sigh, was the Tri-Counties’ Adopt-A-Highway crew, mostly retirees with pickup trucks. They were also the closest thing the Tri-Counties had to a volunteer fire department, and often came in handy during brushfire season.
“Okay, thanks.”
“Are you going out there?” Linny sounded faintly disapproving, and Lila wasn’t too tired to catch the subtext: With all this other stuff going on?
“Linny, if I had a magic wake-up wand, believe me, I’d use it.”
“Okay, Sheriff.” Subtext: Don’t bite my head off.
“Sorry. It’s just that I’ve got to do what I can do. Presumably someone—a bunch of someones—is working on this sleeping sickness thing at the Disease Control Center in Atlanta. Here in Dooling, I’ve got a double murder, and I need to work on that.”
Why am I explaining all this to my dispatcher? Because I’m tired, that’s why. And because it’s a distraction from the way my husband was looking at me back at the prison. And because it’s a distraction from the possibility—fact, really, Lila, not a possibility, but a fact, and that fact’s name is Sheila—that the husband you’re so concerned about isn’t anybody you really knew anyway.
Aurora, they were calling it. If I fall asleep, Lila thought, will that be the end? Will I die? Could be, as Clint might say. Could fucking be.
The good-natured back-and-forth they had always had, the ease of their collaborations on projects and meals and parenting responsibilities, the comfortable pleasure they’d taken from each other’s bodies—these repeated experiences, the marrow of their daily life together, had turned crumbly.
She pictured her husband smiling and it made her stomach sick. It was the same smile that Jared had, and it was Sheila’s smile, too.