AllFreeNovel
Share Us
My initial thought is that Adrian got into another fight. It wouldn’t be the first time. None of this would be the first time, actually.
But for some reason I can’t explain, that story doesn’t feel right tonight. The look on the policewoman’s face is all wrong.
“What happened?” I croak again. My voice isn’t quite as steady as it was when I asked the same question a moment ago.
“Do you know an Adrian Cooper? We found your number on his person.”
That’s a weird sentence. Why would she say it like that?
“I don’t understand.”
“There was an accident, ma’am,” the cop says, her eyes lighting with sympathy. It’s the engineered kind of compassion, though. The kind that’s trained into you in the academy. Just another mask to put on to get her through her shift. “Mr. Cooper was involved. I’m afraid you’re going to have to come down to the precinct.”
I shake my head to get the bizarre pieces of this story to settle into place. “If he got hurt, shouldn’t I go straight to the hospital?”
Her eyes gloss over. More of that manufactured sympathy. Double-thick, dense and horrifying, like glue I can’t get off my fingers. “Ma’am, I’m afraid Mr. Cooper didn’t make it. We’re going to need you to identify the body.”
I close my eyes as the breath catches in my throat.
There it is again: that visceral sharpness that comes with the bad moments in life. I clock every insignificant detail and know even as I’m doing it that I’ll remember these things for the rest of my days.
The gleam of the cop’s silver gun.
The impersonal disinfectant tang of her uniform.
The way her eyes keep flitting to the dried blood I can feel caked on my cheek.
“It’s not Adrian,” I say confidently. “He’s not dead.”
“Ma’am, I’m sure this must be shocking for you—”
“He can’t be dead,” I repeat.
“If you would just come down to the precinct with me and identify the—”
“Fine,” I spit. I’m being catty, but only because I know she’s wrong. They made a mistake somewhere along the way. Adrian isn’t dead; he’s snoring and drooling on some cheap, scratchy motel bed. Or maybe he didn’t even make it that far. Maybe he’s curled up in the nearest ditch, behind a godforsaken hedge, in someone’s backyard. He’ll be back in the morning, repentant as always. I don’t know what I’ll do then, but I know one thing for sure.
Adrian. Isn’t. Dead.
She drives me to the station. It takes exactly thirteen minutes. I watch every single one of those minutes tick past on the clock set in her dash. My knee is bouncing—the hurt one, not the good one—which is strange. I tell myself I’m just tired. It’s late and I’m exhausted in the way that only repeating the same cycle again and again can exhaust you.
“I should prepare you,” the cop tells me as she walks me through the precinct to a claustrophobic stairwell in the back. “The Accident resulted in a head-on collision that toppled both cars and ignited an explosion. The top half of his body was burned pretty badly.”
We go down and enter the morgue. It’s freezing cold in here. I wrap my arms around myself, teeth chattering. She’s still talking, but I’m barely hearing her. I’m too busy smelling.
I’ve always been good with smells. But you don’t have to be good to recognize the charcoal stench of burned flesh. It clings to the walls of this place. Makes me want to hurl.
“Prepare yourself, ma’am. We’ll do this as fast as we can.” Then she’s pulling the blue sheet off the form stretched across the metal table.
My stomach turns, but it’s not a personal kind of horror. It’s the human instinct to recoil from something awful, something rotten, something wrong.
But after the initial wave of nausea passes, I can breathe again. Whoever this poor, barbecued soul on the table is, he’s not my Adrian.
“Like I was trying to tell you, he can’t be—”
The words die on my lips when I see the corpse’s hand.
The ring on one finger, to be specific.
