"Dammit!" he said, more to himself than to her. Adrenaline coursed through him again as his heart raced. A shiver ran the entire length of his body. He tried to shake it off. "I really wish you dead people wouldn't do that."
Then he heard it again, only barely. A cold fear gripped him. Ray stooped to get closer to Correen Wallace's face. He couldn't be sure he heard anything. He watched her back. It didn't appear to be moving. He cautiously reached out to touch her arm again. Yes, it was deathly cold, but the skin also was supple. She exhaled a third time, this time an unmistakably shallow effort, followed by the weakest sputtering attempt to draw a breath. In his panic to react, Ray stumbled backward and caught himself on his open hands. Immediately, stinging pain from tiny shards of glass cutting into his palms and fingers shot him upright.
"Billy!" he screamed, stopping short in his run to the front door when he realized his cousin was perched above him at the porch railing. "Call for an ambulance! She's still alive!"
The deputy walked to the steps and met him halfway. He wore a doubtful expression and shook his head at Ray as he approached.
Ray bounced around like a dog eager for his master to take him for a walk.
"What the hell are you waiting for? Call nine-one-one!"
Billy sauntered slowly toward the fallen woman, never taking his eyes off her, until he stood several feet away looking down at her from his full height. He exhaled slowly, then turned to Ray. "I told you," he said. "It's just gas escaping from the body. There's no way she could have taken a fall like that and lived to tell about it."
"Listen to her!" Ray demanded. "I'm telling you she's breathing. Fine! If you won't call for help, I will."
He pulled his cell phone out of his pocket and fumbled to find the button to unlock the screen.
"Ray," Billy warned. But, before he could take a step, a faint moan softer than the cooing of a dove caused him to spin him around and take a step away from the house. The two men stood silent and motionless, breathlessly waiting for the next sign of life. This time, the discernible sound of a woman's voice rose up to them. Correen Wallace was trying to say something. Ray approached and knelt by her side, lowering himself cautiously so as not to drive bits of glass into his knees. He gently brushed her blood-crusted hair away from her mouth and leaned in close.
Her left eye fluttered open. She stared at Ray through the swollen skin around the socket. Her lips trembled as she struggled to draw enough air into her lungs to speak.
"Help me," she said with a clarity that should not have been possible given her condition.
For a moment, Ray couldn't tell who was in worse shape, Mrs. Wallace or Billy. At the sound of her call for help, all color drained from Billy's face. He began to sway like a tall, thick tree in the wind. Seeing his cousin dumbstruck prompted Ray to once again attempt unlocking his phone. He eventually succeeded, spreading blood from his diced hands on the screen as he pressed at numbers on the virtual keypad.
To snap Billy out of his reverie, Ray sent him into the house to retrieve damp rags or paper towels, anything he could use to wash away the dirt and blood from Mrs. Wallace's face. His jacket already covered her upper body. He wanted to cover her legs, as well, but he couldn't stand the thought of touching her misshapen limbs and risking further damage to them.
Ray waited by her side, smiling weakly whenever she managed to look up at him, until the ambulance arrived.
Monday, Part IV
It took exactly eleven minutes for the whining sirens to make themselves heard in the distance and another three before the ambulance wound along the long dirt drive through the Wilkston Creek community and crunched to a halt on the gravel parking area in front of the Wallace's garage. Time dragged during the wait. Ray was certain he would watch Correen Wallace die right there in front of him while they waited. He forced himself to remain calm for the sake of the injured woman.
The ambulance had blue lettering that declared it had come from Tramway Regional Medical Center, the only hospital in the county and not a bad one by rural North Carolina standards. The ever growing retiree population meant a constant influx of potential donors to fund expansions and attract physicians, although many of the doctors were more interested in tee times at the twenty-seven local golf courses than they were in keeping on schedule with their patients' appointments. This particular ambulance was part of a recent upgrade Ray had written a feature article on a few months back after attending a dedication ceremony in which hospital administrators and board members christened five new vehicles with bottles of champagne. While the ambulance offered the latest in portable medical technology, the team manning it that morning did not inspire confidence.
The driver, an enormous man whose oversized uniform shirt was too small to contain the bottom roll of belly fat that hung down over his belt, breathed heavily from the effort of exiting the vehicle. From the passenger side, his minuscule partner had to scoot herself as far down the side of her seat as possible and leap the rest of the way to the ground. She quickly made her way to the patient and shooed Ray away while her partner chugged around the ambulance, opened the back doors, and struggled to remove a stretcher. Once he finally managed to get it out, he dragged it behind him through the gravel and across the grass.
The squat female technician cursed loudly when she got her first sight of Correen Wallace. She looked doubtfully at the two men. "You tellin' me she's alive?"
"Jesus Christ," Ray muttered under his breath.
"Ma'am, can you hear me? Ma'am?"
"Yes, she can hear you," Ray barked. "Everybody within a fucking mile can hear you. Now that you've tested her hearing, can you actually do something other than yell at her?"
The woman's fat partner let the stretcher drop and advanced toward Ray, his sweaty face turning even redder.
"You watch that mouth, friend," he puffed, stopping short of Ray only when Billy awoke from his trance and stepped into his path. He pointed at Ray. "Tell him to watch his mouth."
The medics got to work, which involved several trips to the ambulance for additional equipment and prolonged discussions that involved the female technician asking her partner far too many questions using words such as "should we" and "how do I" to reassure Ray they might actually know what they were doing. They eventually extricated their patient from under the bushes and positioned her face up on a board. Several times, Correen Wallace was jolted to consciousness and shrieked in pain. Ray couldn't watch. He was certain they were going to finish her off before getting her into the ambulance. Only when they lifted the board and placed their patient atop the stretcher, the female medic failing to control the motion of Correen's twisted legs, the fat man dripping sweat despite the cool morning air and the light breeze, did Ray step in to help.
For his part, Billy was useless. He stood around staring at Correen in disbelief for several minutes after they realized she wasn't dead, while Ray called for the ambulance and tried to comfort the poor woman. The unflappable sheriff's deputy who had given Ray a hard time inside the house about overreacting to Evan Wallace's trip through rigor mortis seemed to mentally check out when it came time to deal with a victim who wasn't dead. He didn't even call for additional support from the Tramway County Sheriff's Department until Ray prodded him to do it.
"Don't you need to get a detective out here?" Ray had asked. "Or a forensic unit, or something?"
After unsuccessfully attempting to maneuver the heavy stretcher through the sandy soil, the medics decided to retract the wheels and carry the stretcher to the ambulance. The site of the them trying to hold their patient level was enough to set Ray in motion again to lend a hand. The driver stood at the head, hoisting up with a jerk before his partner had a firm grip on her end of the stretcher. Correen Wallace's eyes shot open and scanned her surroundings as she began to slide down toward the foot of the stretcher.
"Put it down!"
The female medic shot her partner a nasty look.
"You wait for me this time. You, loud mouth! Where's your friend, the cop?"
Ray called for Billy who was already in motion heading toward them at a brisk pace.
"You two take the head," she told Billy when he reached them. "Me and loud mouth will take the feet. Everybody grab a corner and lift only when I say so."
They carried the stretcher across the lawn and along the path to the back of the ambulance. The metal bar drove tiny splinters of broken glass further into Ray's palm. He thought about mentioning it to them, but he didn't want to delay their efforts to get Correen Wallace to the hospital. The fat man returned to pick up what equipment he could find and chugged back to climb into the driver's seat. His partner closed herself into the back of the vehicle with their patient. Ray watched the ambulance disappear into the canopy of trees, it's flashing lights and screeching sirens announcing to the squirrels and hibernating box turtles in the surrounding woods to stay clear of the road.
"They should have grabbed your gun and shot her for all the good they did," Ray groaned, but when he turned to continue complaining he just managed to catch a glimpse of Billy disappearing into the house.
Monday, Part V
The stocky detective in the snug grey suit from the break room was first to arrive, almost five minutes before the next deputy and nearly twenty minutes before Sheriff Redmond. He climbed out of his unmarked vehicle and took in his surroundings. Ray waited on the porch with Billy, ready to follow his cousin to greet the detective, but Billy didn't move.
"Is the body gone?" the detective asked.
"No," Billy replied.
The squat man then walked the length of the gravel path to the porch, his nose pointed down and eyes scanning the ground as he went, before he stopped at the foot of the steps and surveyed his surroundings. He looked up into the house through the open front door behind Ray, then over his shoulder to where shafts of sunlight breaking through the low clouds lit the barn, then right to the driveway from where he had just come, and left to the matted grass and trampled camellias in the courtyard beyond the porch. His attention finally came to rest on the mix of tan soil and clay in patterned clumps on the porch steps.
"How much of this dirt was here before you two entered the house?" he asked, looking up.
Ray stood at the top step staring down at the detective's shiny, bald head. A glance at his sneakers revealed they were caked with red clay along their sides. Billy lifted his foot to find he also was guilty of contaminating the crime scene. The detective shook his head.
"Stay where you are," he ordered.
Perhaps pent up nervous energy was finally getting the better of Ray, because he had to stifle a laugh when it dawned on him how much the detective sounded like his Aunt Cecelia, Billy's mother. He distracted himself from the similarity by trying again to recall the detective's name. Mitchell? Willard? He simply could not dredge it up from his memory.
"Is that where the body was found?" the detective called when he reached the far corner of the porch. He pointed in the general direction of the spot where Correen Wallace had landed.
"No," Billy said. He pointed over his shoulder at the door. "The body's in there."
"That's where we found Mrs. Wallace," Ray added when he realized Billy wasn't volunteering information about the shattered glass and ravaged shrubberies in the courtyard. "It looked like she fell from that window on the third floor."
The detective cocked his bald head and stared at Ray like he was trying to reach a conclusion about him. He continued studying the scene from its periphery, then turned and looked at them with wide eyes as though he'd had an epiphany.
"Who was in that ambulance I just passed?" he asked.
"She was," Billy said.
"Mrs. Wallace," Ray said.
The detective craned his neck to look at the window and his head followed what must have been the woman's trajectory down into the bushes. He took several cautious steps closer, carefully choosing where to place his feet.
Ray leaned close to Billy. "What's his name?"
"Detective Daniel Pritchard," Billy answered.
"Pritchard!"
It came out a little more loudly than he intended. The detective gave him a quizzical look.
"Nothing," Ray said dismissively.
When it seemed the detective had collected all possible data, he stepped away from the shards of broken glass glistening like dew in the grass, carefully removed his polished wing-tip shoes, placed them side by side below the bottom step, and joined the other two men on the porch.
"Did you two come straight here after you left Whitlock?" he asked.
With a slow start, Billy explained how they were responding to a complaint about excessive noise the dispatcher had handed him when he went on duty. He detailed the route he had taken and, by Ray's recollection, gave an accurate accounting of their activity since arriving at the Wallace farm.
"Is that correct?" Pritchard asked Ray.
Ray nodded.
"There's nothing you want to add?" Pritchard said.
"No," Ray answered, surprised by the question.
"Deputy Merrill covered it all."
All three men turned to face the driveway as two more police cars emerged noisily from under the trees. A woman in a beige uniform stepped out of the passenger side of the first vehicle holding an unwieldy camera that, by comparison to Ray's new digital model, looked like something out of a 1950s sci-fi movie. She loaded a roll of film into the back of it, gripping it by the thick shaft connecting the ridiculously oversized flash. Pritchard called instructions to her from the porch. She immediately set to work photographing the alcove where they had found Correen Wallace.