The Doctor's Wife Read Free Page B

him.
     
     
    “Up north. My daddy had a cow farm. But that’s all gone now. Anyway, he’s dead.”
     
     
    The wind sweeps the snow along the street. Snowbanks, gray from exhaust, hunker like inert animals. It begins to sleet and the streets clear of people. Even the hookers disappear, their faces smeared by the hard wind. Cars twist and scatter on the ice.
     
     
    Ooms adjusts the vent so the heat hits him in the face. “I got rolled last week; they took my coat. I got a sister down in Florida. I ought to just go down there, but we ain’t spoke in years. Don’t need no coat down there, don’t need no heat.” He snorts into a scrap of newspaper and coughs a few times.
     
     
    “There’s some whiskey down there if you want it.”
     
     
    “All right.”
     
     
    “In the bag down there. That’ll warm you.”
     
     
    “Yes, ma’am.”
     
     
    He takes out the bottle, gulps it down. “That’s good,” he says. “That’ll do the trick.”
     
     
    “Have as much as you like.”
     
     
    “All right, then. Don’t mind if I do. Course I don’t drink much as a habit. Don’t have the taste for it.”
     
     
    She knows this is a lie. “Unlike my husband, who can’t get enough of it. But he can’t get enough of most things.” She smiles. “It’s a personality disorder. He’s just a big spoiled baby.”
     
     
    “I got married once. Long time ago. She left me. That’s when my life took a turn.”
     
     
    Walter Ooms coughs and wheezes, spits out the window. It is a distraction, she realizes. His way of changing the subject. Stopped at a traffic light she spots a squad car in the Stewart’s lot. Two cops drinking coffee, laughing over some joke. The circumstances were beyond my control, she imagines telling them. The light changes and she turns onto the interstate ramp. The highway is dark, thick with snow.
     
     
    “Cigarette?” she offers, and he takes it readily, lights it up, drags deep. Ooms is a man who takes what is offered him, no matter what. He is shorter than her husband, wiry and nimble, a man accustomed to being on his feet. His face is smooth, glossy. He has the lazy eyes of a crook.
     
     
    “Won’t be much longer now,” she tells him.
     
     
    He smokes and nods, watching the road, his face going light and dark under the drooping highway lights. Riding in the car through the darkness with the strange man, she begins to feel a deepening sense of dread. It hums in her ear like a ghost. It makes her weak, her belly taut with fear. There’s no turning back now.
     
     
    She gets off the interstate and heads down Valley Road, where they’d staged the accident. Now the car is dark and silent except for the distraction of the wipers, and her heart begins to pound with anticipation. The road runs parallel to the highway, an obscure shortcut with no posted speed limit, overlooked by police. Winding, heart-squealing curves and no guardrail, a thirty-foot drop on one side into a valley of trees so thick you can scarcely see the cars flying by on the interstate. One or two houses high on the hill, secluded in dense pockets of overgrowth. The houses are dark, and the road is empty. Three miles into it she pulls over and cuts the lights. Shadows swirl and scatter on the windshield. “Out,” she says.
     
     
    “What for?” He looks around blandly. “Hey, lady, what is this?”
     
     
    “You want your money or not?”
     
     
    “I already done said I did.”
     
     
    “I got five hundred dollars in my wallet, you interested in that?”
     
     
    “Well, now, that depends.” He looks around at the wild darkness. “I hadn’t counted on working outside, out in the cold and whatnot.” His eyes graze her breasts, her legs. “I think that’s worth a little something extra, don’t you?”
     
     
    For the first time she notices tattoos up his forearms, barbed wire around both wrists. A keen whine begins to churn in her chest. She thinks of reaching under the seat for her