Crime Machine Read Free Page B

something—hurling his outrage into the night.
    Then the smooth road and the lights of town in the distance. She patted her pockets again for her cell. Definitely gone. She must have lost it when she jumped. Moonlight on the flat white surface of Trout Lake, the road itself in the deep shadows of trees and hills. The speed limit was80 kilometres, but she pegged it at 120. You couldn’t go faster on these curves. It was a perfect speed trap, of course. The cops often staked it out, hoping to lasso the drunks weaving back to town from the Chinook.
    The steering wheel was sticky with blood. Her knee was hurting, and not in a way that was going to fade any time soon. The blood had soaked down nearly to the cuff of her jeans. That was probably going to need stitches. You are in trouble ten different ways, she said, and if you’ve got some plan for getting out of it, I’d really like to hear it right now—preferably before Mr. Murder decides to come after me.

2
    W HEN SHE GOT HOME, SAM PARKED the car in the garage and inspected the damage to the rear end. The left signal light was shattered and there was a bullet hole in the trunk. Three inches higher and her brain would have been all over the windshield.
    She went into the house and removed her coat and boots in the dark. Her mother always slept with her bedroom door open. Sam had to be silent moving down the hall and into the bathroom. The right leg of her jeans was stiff with blood below the tear in the knee. She opened the cabinet above the sink and found a bottle of Tylenol with codeine left over from a tooth extraction. She shook two into her palm and swallowed them, scooping water from the faucet to wash them down.
    Her left hand was cut, a two-inch gash at the base of her palm. It wasn’t bleeding too badly now. She got some gauze and tape and an old face cloth from the closet by the toilet, then had to go back for the rubbing alcohol. Tremors shook her thighs as she got into the tub. She peeled her jeans down halfway and sat on the edge of the tub to extract her left leg.
    She took a few deep breaths and held the last one and rolled her jeans off the cut in her knee. Tears sprang to her eyes and she started to sobbut managed to keep it quiet. She pulled her jeans off the rest of the way and rolled them up. Blood welled from her knee. She ran water over it and watched the red and pink swirl into the drain. She washed her cuts with soap and water and dried them with the old face cloth. The alcohol was cold and it stung, but it felt clean.
    The cut in her knee needed stitches, but there was nothing she could do about that. A trip to the emergency room would require an explanation, and she might run into someone who had been shot or had done the shooting. She dried her feet and went back to the linen closet and dug around and found an ancient box of Kotex that her mother had got a couple of years ago for some medical reason she hadn’t cared to discuss with her children. Sam taped one tight to her knee.
    It took some effort to clean up the mess and she kept expecting her mother to tap on the door the whole time, but she didn’t. Sam turned off the bathroom light and limped past her brother’s bedroom door into her own room and shut the door. She hid her rolled-up jeans and the box of Kotex under the bed. She switched on her bedside lamp and sat on the edge of the bed with her left leg stretched out straight. Pootkin was curled up on the end of the bed. She raised her black head and blinked and went back to sleep.
    The top of the bandage was already showing red. Every time Sam bent her knee, that cut was going to open.
    The tremors had subsided, the codeine beginning to work a little. It’s going to take a roomful of scientists, she thought, to calculate exactly how much trouble I’m in. If Mr. Gun saw the licence plate on my car, it’s probably game over. But it was dark, he was far back and he was trying to shoot me, so maybe he didn’t catch it. Presumably, when