Sour Candy Read Free Page B

at high speed, had
walked out into traffic where a taxi had ended her
suffering.
    “ I…I almost had her,”
someone said, and Phil knew by the haunted tone of their voice that
whoever it was would also not be sleeping soundly for a
while.
    “ Jesus,” said the paramedic,
who had just dropped to his haunches before Phil with the intention
of attending to him. “Will you be okay here for a few
minutes?”
    Phil nodded, convinced now more than
ever that none of this was really happening, that it was in fact a
bizarre dream.
    “ Thanks, buddy.” The
paramedic hurried away.
    Phil looked down at himself and
plucked the bloodied object from the crease of his jeans. Blinking
away the tears from the smoke and the pain, he turned the thing
over in his fingers and found to his considerable relief that it
was not at all a tooth. No, it was much too soft, much too rough
for that.
    It was a piece of sour
candy.
     
     
     
    3. Acquisition
     
     
    They removed the body, leaving Phil
mired in a chaos of questions he did not think himself fit enough
to answer. The paramedics gave him a thorough once over and
concluded that his injuries were not life-threatening, mostly
bruises and mild abrasions, though his cracked ribs would need
monitoring for the next month or so. Relieved that he wouldn’t have
to add a trip to the hospital to the calamity his day had become,
he found that the police were not nearly so eager to dismiss
him.
    About half an hour after the woman
apparently committed suicide-by-taxi, a pair of detectives showed
up on the scene. A male and a female, they seemed predisposed to
find Phil guilty of something, and while it was not unusual for him
to feel intimidated in the company of police, he had never
experienced such barely veiled hostility on top of it.
    “ You were driving the
Chevy?” the woman, Detective Marsh, asked. Though attractive, she
looked like the very definition of severity. Tall and slender,
dressed in gray slacks and jacket, her auburn hair swept up and
pinned into a bun, she regarded Phil with a coldness he was sure he
hadn’t earned.
    “ Yes, I was.”
    “ And you say the driver of
the Toyota hit you from behind?”
    “ Yes.”
    She scribbled this down in her
notepad, though he had already told them the circumstances
surrounding the accident twice already.
    Her partner, Detective Cortez, a
bullish man with small eyes, badly pockmarked skin and yellow
teeth, inspected the crash site for the tenth time and shook his
head before looking back at Phil. “And you say you know the
deceased?”
    “ Not exactly.”
    “ Not exactly?”
    “ I mean, I don’t know her
name or—”
    “ Alice Bennings,” Cortez
said.
    Phil nodded. He hadn’t
needed to know her name. Hadn’t wanted to, and now that it had been
given to him, it somehow made it worse. A line from a book he’d
read in highschool popped into his mind: The nameless are easier to bury.
    “ Mr. Pendleton?”
    “ I didn’t know her. I saw
her for the first time at the store earlier. Her kid was causing a
bit of fuss.”
    The detectives exchanged glances. Phil
tried to read the look but it was lost on him.
    “ She had a kid?”
    “ Yes. That’s what I tried to
tell the other policeman. She had a kid with her at the grocery
store. He was throwing a fit. I thought of him when I realized she
was who had crashed into me. Thought the kid might have been
hurt.”
    “ There was nobody else in
the car.”
    “ No. I guess she must have
dropped him off somewhere after the store.”
    Cortez looked at his notebook. “Mrs.
Bennings doesn’t have any children, Mr. Pendleton.”
    “ Well then it was probably a
relative or a friend’s kid or something, I don’t know, but if it
wasn’t her kid and he clearly wasn’t here, why are you asking me
about him?”
    “ Because if Mrs. Bennings
was acting as oddly as you claim she was, we need to be sure she
didn’t hurt anyone else, the child included. Now, can you describe
him for us?”
    Despite