Rescue Read Free

Hartstone.
    “Not a local.”
    “Blood alcohol point two-four.”
    “Jesus.”
    “Shame.”
    “Shit,” Webster said.
    “What?”
    “I tossed the keys that were on her belt onto the grass.”
    “Find them on your own time.”
    “There was a rabbit’s foot.”
    Burrows laughed. “Lucky girl.”
    After Webster had cleaned the equipment in the basins at Rescue, restocked the Bullet, and hosed off the outside of the rig,
     he got into his car and drove back to the scene. This time he noticed the quiet road, the .2 moon, the farmhouse just beyond
     the place where the Caddy had rolled. A tow truck was pulling onto the road. Nye put out a flare he’d lit behind the tow truck.
     “Why are you back?” the cop asked.
    Never a
How’s she doing?
with the Weasel.
    “I tossed her keys onto the grass,” Webster said.
    “If it was her car keys, don’t bother looking.”
    “No, it was something else.”
    “She oughta go to jail. She could have killed someone. Herself even.”
    “Then jail wouldn’t do her much good, would it?” Webster said as he began to search the depressed grass where the car had
     come to rest. As Nye and his partner got into their blue and white Hartstone Police car, Webster thought he heard a faint
     snigger.
    Webster had his flashlight for the search. He began to crawl around the frosty perimeter. Maybe the rabbit’s foot did work,
     he thought. The woman didn’t kill anyone. She didn’t kill herself.She hadn’t broken her neck. She hadn’t severed an artery. She hadn’t suffered a traumatic amputation.
    The image of the shiny brown hair came and went. Webster wanted to find the rabbit’s foot. He pictured himself returning it
     to the woman named Sheila. In his mind, she still had sparkles on her face.
    An owl called out, and Webster could hear in the distance the whine and downshift of a semi. He turned off the flashlight,
     stayed on his knees, and turned his face away. After he felt the whoosh, he switched his light back on.
    It took him twenty-five minutes to find the keys. With them, he stuffed the rabbit’s foot and the coiled belt into his jacket
     pockets, got back into his cruiser, and let himself shiver until the heat came on. Fuck, it was cold.
    Two hours later, Webster, showered and dressed, said hello to his father at the breakfast table. He lived with his parents,
     trying to save money for a piece of land he coveted. He was pretty sure he could convince the guy who owned it to sell it
     to him when the time came because Webster had helped to save the man’s wife from dying of cardiac arrest a couple of months
     earlier. Normally, Webster didn’t think like that. He and Burrows were a team, and it was usually his partner who shocked
     the patient and pushed the meds. But only Webster had known instantly where the farm was located, having driven past it a
     dozen, two dozen times, just to see the hillside with the view of the Green Mountains. He’d told Burrows over the radio where
     to go and had taken the cruiser. When Webster got to the farmhouse, the woman was barelyresponsive and sweating profusely. After she lost consciousness, he cleared her airway. He started CPR. He worked on her for
     over two minutes before Burrows arrived. They had her on a demand valve, an oral airway in place, and on the cardiac monitor
     inside the Bullet, pushed the meds seconds after that. With that kind of a call, a minute could make a difference.
    Webster’s father, Ernest, ran a hardware store in town and was up at six every morning. A man who believed in routine, he
     ate Raisin Bran and bananas for breakfast, four cookies with lunch every day, and had a nighttime ritual that seldom varied:
     two Rolling Rocks when he got home, the only time he and Webster’s mother, Norah, kept to themselves; then dinner; then a
     half hour with the paper. Another half hour with the catalogs. One television show. Then bed at nine. Webster couldn’t remember
     the last time he’d seen his father