Excerpt:

Prologue: The Harvest

She knelt on the pavement by the woman’s form, the car horn still blaring, headlights forging a path through the rain limning the body in dancing motes. She had not meant for it to be a female this time. It was upsetting to her, but what was done was done. Naught to do about it now, as her grand dad would say, the old bastard. He was a piece of work.
The street was other wise empty, devoid of strangers rushing to the scene to help. To help? They weren’t going to help if it meant leaving their cozy little living rooms and TV sets on a rainy night. No, they weren’t even looking out of their windows if it meant missing the final episode of “Left Alive.” Stupid shows like that ate up their lives, she thought angrily, pressing the woman’s fingertips around an opened bottle of gin, then around the neck of the bottle. She jerked at the little lace collar of the woman’s linen shirt, now lost it’s crispness in the rain and the blood that stained it. She jerked again for no reason. She left the lifeless form, walked over to the wreckage. Almost as an afterthought, she splashed a little of the gin on her own collar, and tossed the bottle into the floor board of the front seat of the wrecked car.
It was always hard to prioritize in these situations, whether to get the body out of the way and into her vehicle first or to stop the horn first. After all, if any busy body did show up on the scene, she would always look like she was clumsily attempting to render aid, whereas attending first to the horn so it would not disturb the neighbors left something to be desired in the rendering aid department.
And she had to stop the horn before she left the scene, which took a little doing, especially in the rain. They hadn’t given her much information in the way of these things, she had been left pretty much on her own to deal with the petty details. And short of professional assistance, her methods were probably more time-consuming. With the limp shape bundled up into the passenger seat and buckled in to place, she reached behind the passenger seat to the floor and pulled out a worn blanket and an old tee shirt. She tucked the blanket around the form and balled up the tee shirt to put behind the head. Past experience had taught her that a few seconds wisely spent to make her prize more comfortable looking was good for sticky jams with cops.
She was breathing heavily. Heaving dead weight up into that seat was more work than she planned for. Then she reached into the car pocket on the passenger’s door and retrieved a small LED flashlight, screwdriver, rubber gloves, and a small tube of silicone dielectric. The hood on the other vehicle was more mangled than she had realized, and trying to push it up was more of a job than she had anticipated.
Frustrated, she returned to her vehicle, slipping the items into the pockets of her rain coat. She pulled the crowbar out from under the passenger side seat. The woman’s bloody legs were in the way. “Damn it, you silly bitch. Don’t make this hard on me!” She always carried a crow bar but hadn’t anticipated having to use it on this night.
Crossing swiftly back to the wreckage, she pulled on the gloves wedged it in between the hood and what was left of the grille, and strained until she felt the hood give with a sudden creak. The blaring of the horn was about to do her in, the noise constant and unyielding, bearing down on her like some form of torture.
She turned the light on and shone it around the engine compartment locating the battery. Gripping the light with her teeth, she wedged the screwdriver under one of the terminals and levered it up. The blaring of the horn ceased, and the headlights died away. The relief was instant but short-lived in the face of the rest of her task.
She reached into her pocket and pulled out the tube, unscrewing the cap in increasing haste. The small black cap slipped out of her gloved hand and she swore again, squeezing the goo out onto a latexed finger. She swabbed it around the terminal post, thick as she could, and jabbed the hardware back down on top of it. With the side of her gloved hand, she smoothed off any signs of the silicone and in one quick movement, pulled both gloves off, balling them up, one inside the other. These she stuffed down in her pocket, dropping to her knees to search for the missing cap. She could leave nothing at the scene, she had been told that much. No links.
She shone the light around on the rain blackened asphalt, widening her arc. She grasped at a dark object, a pebble, and dropped it. She slid the flat of her hand around on the ground, lightly at first, feeling for the cap. Nothing. She reached farther under the car, starting to panic, aware of how much time was passing while she wasted seconds looking for a stupid cap. With one hand clutching the torn bumper, she half lay on the ground, bumpy asphalt snagging at her stockings, reaching, searching in a wider arc for the cap. Nothing.
Had she heard a different sound? Abruptly she raised her head, smacking it on the under carriage of the car. Were those sirens? She scrambled furiously one last time for the cap, and then squirmed out from under the car. The cap was black, it would never be seen. Never be linked to the accident.
She recited her mantra. “Gloves light driver tube, gloves light driver tube,” feeling for each in her pockets. The capless tube squished as she checked for it, the goo slimed over her fingers. She shuddered, scraping them against the lining of the pocket to get it off her. A hot bath, that was what she needed. Or a long shower. This time she also had to remember the crow bar, and pulled her light out again to find it in the engine compartment. Locating it, she yanked it out and then reached up to push the hood back into some semblance of place. Too late, she remembered just feeling for the gloves in her pocket, realized her fingers were gloveless. She wiped at a smear using the front of her rain coat and then hurried to her vehicle, put it in gear, and tore off in the opposite direction from which she had come.
She hated these work nights, when she had to drive a big lumbering thing that she wasn’t accustomed to, but there was no help for it. If she was to get her part of the job done, she had to be in something that wouldn’t kill her in the process. Hence the pick up truck or Jeep, or as tonight, a Hummer. Horrible vehicle, too wide and lumbering and leagues of engineers and designers could not make it sweet.
She turned a corner and regained a more normal speed. Now was the very tricky part. She had done all her prep work, and except for the stupid cap, all had gone well. She had handled a difficult situation as best she could, and the best that you can do is all that’s asked of you. That’s what her mother used to say, and although her mother had never improved a bad situation for herself or her kids, she had said many wide things.
Driving around with a body stolen from the scene of an accident wasn’t the best time to be pulled over by a cop, though. Best to avoid that sort of thing.

The sirens were getting louder, though, and she had turned away from the direction of their dispatch. She thought she would be in the clear. It was seeming less like it. Her mind raced. A few more quick turns, a right, another right, a left. She tried to follow a Z pattern when she was alarmed. She had a few little tricks like that. When things got really tight, it was easiest if she could follow some sort of pattern that she had already memorized. That was not the time to improvise. That was the time to follow a pattern.
Accordingly, she pulled the Hummer over in a nicer residential area, and parked behind a Lexus SUV on a street line with cars. Why any one would leave a car like that parked on a street was more than she could understand, but there you go. That was the price of living in these now hip neighborhoods. They used to be where someone’s grandmother lived, she thought bitterly, until the rich yahoos bought them up and renovated them and turned the neighborhoods all retro cool. And drove the property taxes so high that folks who’d lived there fifty years could not afford to stay. Rich bastards.
She reached over to tuck the balled up tee shirt more snugly behind the woman’s head. It was still quite dark out. No moon meant it was harder to work but it was better overall that way. Less for others to see—or identify. She slipped her purse over her shoulder, got out and locked the doors and began to walk down the street. Once she was a block away from the vehicle, she checked her watch. The luminous dial glowed at three fifteen. Good timing, the bars would have been closed for an hour. She began to pick her steps carefully, swaying a little as she walked. The job was almost over. She still had at least a couple of hours before daylight, plenty of time for delivery, and then she could resume the pursuit of her own projects before the next time. What a relief. She sagged against a tree, not an act this time, and contemplated how many more of these she would have to do.

Eight blocks later, a cruiser pulled up beside her. The cop leaned out the window, pacing the Crown Vic alongside her gait. “Nice night for a walk, lady?” he called out. She tried to ignore him, lost in her own thoughts. “Hey, lady!” his voice was sharper.
She looked over at him and stopped. “Nice enough,” she said. “Thought I would get some fresh air.”
“You don’t look like that air is doing you enough good,” he said.
“It’s clearing my head,” she replied. “I just have a lot on my mind.” Could he see she had begun to tremble? What was that all about? She’d been through this before.
“You been drinking?” Enough of the chit chat, he cut to the point.
“Some,” she said. “A little, but I’m okay now.” She very much wanted to say and thank you for asking, but thought the better of it. Damn cops. You had to be careful with them, they were so sensitive if you made fun of them. Or their authority.
“Seems like you mighta had a run in with someone, eh? Someone got a little out of hand with you?” His voice sounded almost concerned.
“What? Oh, no, that.” She looked down at her wet skirt, torn stockings, scuffed shoes. When she had been looking for that stupid cap. A dark stain bloomed where her pocket was inside the coat. A greasy spot from the capless silicone. Crap. Her hair was mussed up, a wet line across the front to her coat where she had leaned over to crow bar the hood. Crap. She hadn’t noticed when the rain had stopped.
“You want to tell me about it? He try to hurt you? He succeed?” the cop pressed her.
“No! No, I—” she wasn’t sure where to take this. “I just left the party. I just left so—”
“I get it, missy. I get it. You got some ID?”
She fumbled in her bag, her hands visibly shaking by this time. She handed him her wallet, opened to reveal her driver’s license. It suddenly occurred to her she should have a fake.
“So, Doris Wilhelmina Strutpole? That’s a lot of name for a little gal like you.”
That’s a lot of mouth for a little man like you, she thought to herself. “Dora’s fine,” she said.
“Maybe we should go talk about this somewhere else, somewhere you won’t be so chilly. What would you say to that, girl?”
“Here is fine with me, sir,” she said with a meekness she was beginning to feel. “I’d rather not go anywhere else right now.”
“Well now, gal, I am just not so sure—”he began, but she cut him off.
“Nothing happened, officer. It was just a party, I shouldn’t have gone but I did and now I am not there and I just want to get a cab.” Her mind raced, what would work? What would be believable? Always have a grain of truth, that’s what her Paw Paw had said, a good lie has got to have a grain of truth. And his always did.
“Whyn’t you tell me about this party,” the cop was asking her. “Right here, right now, whyn’t you just tell me all about it?” He suddenly didn’t seem like he was about to dislodge himself from his comfortable seat behind the wheel of his cruiser, and it occurred to her she could do or say whatever she wanted. Within reason, of course.
“It was a small party, a dinner party. I have clients in this neighborhood. Sometimes they like to show off my work and I become the ‘guest of honor.’ It is an honor, I guess. But I think they just like to show off that they have their own—” She thought about the woman’s body in the Hummer, lost her train of thought.
“Their own what?” his voice came through. “What is it you do?”
She thought. No, just stick with the story. “I’m a seamstress, really. You know, I help them fix up their houses. They call me their designer. That’s all. And after a job, a lot of them like to have a little party to show off. That’s all. Really.”
“But one of them got out of hand, eh, is that it? You wanna tell me about that?”
“No.”
“Girl, I can’t help you if you won’t let me. Just tell me about him. You look like a nice girl, but you need help.”
He wasn’t going to leave it alone. She had to get out of there, he was starting to waste her time. She had to deliver before daylight, before things started to get really sticky. “Sir, I can’t. I really can’t. There’s nothing to tell, in the end nothing happened. You got to believe me.” She appealed to a working class universal. “I can’t prosecute. I don’t have to like them, but I really need these people. The jobs. These times are hard, and if there’s trouble with one, well, they all stick together, you know? I gotta have the work.”
His face softened, she could see in the glow from the streetlight that it worked. He knew working class. He would let it go.
“You’re still out in the middle of the night, girl. Let me give you a lift.”
“No, no, I’ll call a cab. That’s what I always do, don’t want these folks to know what a ratty car I drive. I’ll call a cab right now, I just wanted to get a bit of fresh air first.” She whipped out her phone and flipped it open, jabbed at the keypad, put it up to her ear. “Yes, I need a ride. Where—” she covered the phone and looked at the cop.
Right on cue, “Corner of Elm and Westhaven,” he said.
She repeated it into the phone and snapped it closed. His radio squawked, she could only hear the last part of it “Code 2, driver GOA” and he spoke into it, looking away from Dora.
“You stay put,” he said. “Cab’ll be here soon, but I got a 11-83 I gotta get to. You stay put,” he repeated.
She nodded dumbly, and he rolled up his window and screeched off. She wondered if that call could have been about the ‘accident’ she had participated in. If so, they were awful slow to get the call.

1 November 2008

She knelt on the pavement by the woman’s form, the car horn still blaring, headlights forging a path through the rain limning the body in dancing motes. She had not meant for it to be a female this time. It was upsetting to her, but what was done was done. Naught to do about it now, as her grand dad would say, the old bastard. He was a piece of work.
The street was other wise empty, devoid of strangers rushing to the scene to help. To help? They weren’t going to help if it meant leaving their cozy little living rooms and TV sets on a rainy night. No, they weren’t even looking out of their windows if it meant missing the final episode of “Left Alive.” Stupid shows like that ate up their lives, she thought angrily, pressing the woman’s fingertips around an opened bottle of gin, then around the neck of the bottle. She jerked at the little lace collar of the woman’s linen shirt, now lost it’s crispness in the rain and the blood that stained it. She jerked again for no reason. She left the lifeless form, walked over to the wreckage. Almost as an afterthought, she splashed a little of the gin on her own collar, and tossed the bottle into the floor board of the front seat of the wrecked car.
It was always hard to prioritize in these situations, whether to get the body out of the way and into her vehicle first or to stop the horn first. After all, if any busy body did show up on the scene, she would always look like she was clumsily attempting to render aid, whereas attending first to the horn so it would not disturb the neighbors left something to be desired in the rendering aid department.
And she had to stop the horn before she left the scene, which took a little doing, especially in the rain. They hadn’t given her much information in the way of these things, she had been left pretty much on her own to deal with the petty details. And short of professional assistance, her methods were probably more time-consuming. With the limp shape bundled up into the passenger seat and buckled in to place, she reached behind the passenger seat to the floor and pulled out a worn blanket and an old tee shirt. She tucked the blanket around the form and balled up the tee shirt to put behind the head. Past experience had taught her that a few seconds wisely spent to make her prize more comfortable looking was good for sticky jams with cops.
She was breathing heavily. Heaving dead weight up into that seat was more work than she planned for. Then she reached into the car pocket on the passenger’s door and retrieved a small LED flashlight, screwdriver, rubber gloves, and a small tube of silicone dielectric. The hood on the other vehicle was more mangled than she had realized, and trying to push it up was more of a job than she had anticipated.
Frustrated, she returned to her vehicle, slipping the items into the pockets of her rain coat. She pulled the crowbar out from under the passenger side seat. The woman’s bloody legs were in the way. “Damn it, you silly bitch. Don’t make this hard on me!” She always carried a crow bar but hadn’t anticipated having to use it on this night.
Crossing swiftly back to the wreckage, she pulled on the gloves wedged it in between the hood and what was left of the grille, and strained until she felt the hood give with a sudden creak. The blaring of the horn was about to do her in, the noise constant and unyielding, bearing down on her like some form of torture.
She turned the light on and shone it around the engine compartment locating the battery. Gripping the light with her teeth, she wedged the screwdriver under one of the terminals and levered it up. The blaring of the horn ceased, and the headlights died away. The relief was instant but short-lived in the face of the rest of her task.
She reached into her pocket and pulled out the tube, unscrewing the cap in increasing haste. The small black cap slipped out of her gloved hand and she swore again, squeezing the goo out onto a latexed finger. She swabbed it around the terminal post, thick as she could, and jabbed the hardware back down on top of it. With the side of her gloved hand, she smoothed off any signs of the silicone and in one quick movement, pulled both gloves off, balling them up, one inside the other. These she stuffed down in her pocket, dropping to her knees to search for the missing cap. She could leave nothing at the scene, she had been told that much. No links.
She shone the light around on the rain blackened asphalt, widening her arc. She grasped at a dark object, a pebble, and dropped it. She slid the flat of her hand around on the ground, lightly at first, feeling for the cap. Nothing. She reached farther under the car, starting to panic, aware of how much time was passing while she wasted seconds looking for a stupid cap. With one hand clutching the torn bumper, she half lay on the ground, bumpy asphalt snagging at her stockings, reaching, searching in a wider arc for the cap. Nothing.
Had she heard a different sound? Abruptly she raised her head, smacking it on the under carriage of the car. Were those sirens? She scrambled furiously one last time for the cap, and then squirmed out from under the car. The cap was black, it would never be seen. Never be linked to the accident.
She recited her mantra. “Gloves light driver tube, gloves light driver tube,” feeling for each in her pockets. The capless tube squished as she checked for it, the goo slimed over her fingers. She shuddered, scraping them against the lining of the pocket to get it off her. A hot bath, that was what she needed. Or a long shower. This time she also had to remember the crow bar, and pulled her light out again to find it in the engine compartment. Locating it, she yanked it out and then reached up to push the hood back into some semblance of place. Too late, she remembered just feeling for the gloves in her pocket, realized her fingers were gloveless. She wiped at a smear using the front of her rain coat and then hurried to her vehicle, put it in gear, and tore off in the opposite direction from which she had come.
She hated these work nights, when she had to drive a big lumbering thing that she wasn’t accustomed to, but there was no help for it. If she was to get her part of the job done, she had to be in something that wouldn’t kill her in the process. Hence the pick up truck or Jeep, or as tonight, a Hummer. Horrible vehicle, too wide and lumbering and leagues of engineers and designers could not make it sweet.
She turned a corner and regained a more normal speed. Now was the very tricky part. She had done all her prep work, and except for the stupid cap, all had gone well. She had handled a difficult situation as best she could, and the best that you can do is all that’s asked of you. That’s what her mother used to say, and although her mother had never improved a bad situation for herself or her kids, she had said many wide things.
Driving around with a body stolen from the scene of an accident wasn’t the best time to be pulled over by a cop, though. Best to avoid that sort of thing.

The sirens were getting louder, though, and she had turned away from the direction of their dispatch. She thought she would be in the clear. It was seeming less like it. Her mind raced. A few more quick turns, a right, another right, a left. She tried to follow a Z pattern when she was alarmed. She had a few little tricks like that. When things got really tight, it was easiest if she could follow some sort of pattern that she had already memorized. That was not the time to improvise. That was the time to follow a pattern.
Accordingly, she pulled the Hummer over in a nicer residential area, and parked behind a Lexus SUV on a street line with cars. Why any one would leave a car like that parked on a street was more than she could understand, but there you go. That was the price of living in these now hip neighborhoods. They used to be where someone’s grandmother lived, she thought bitterly, until the rich yahoos bought them up and renovated them and turned the neighborhoods all retro cool. And drove the property taxes so high that folks who’d lived there fifty years could not afford to stay. Rich bastards.
She reached over to tuck the balled up tee shirt more snugly behind the woman’s head. It was still quite dark out. No moon meant it was harder to work but it was better overall that way. Less for others to see—or identify. She slipped her purse over her shoulder, got out and locked the doors and began to walk down the street. Once she was a block away from the vehicle, she checked her watch. The luminous dial glowed at three fifteen. Good timing, the bars would have been closed for an hour. She began to pick her steps carefully, swaying a little as she walked. The job was almost over. She still had at least a couple of hours before daylight, plenty of time for delivery, and then she could resume the pursuit of her own projects before the next time. What a relief. She sagged against a tree, not an act this time, and contemplated how many more of these she would have to do.

Eight blocks later, a cruiser pulled up beside her. The cop leaned out the window, pacing the Crown Vic alongside her gait. “Nice night for a walk, lady?” he called out. She tried to ignore him, lost in her own thoughts. “Hey, lady!” his voice was sharper.
She looked over at him and stopped. “Nice enough,” she said. “Thought I would get some fresh air.”
“You don’t look like that air is doing you enough good,” he said.
“It’s clearing my head,” she replied. “I just have a lot on my mind.” Could he see she had begun to tremble? What was that all about? She’d been through this before.
“You been drinking?” Enough of the chit chat, he cut to the point.
“Some,” she said. “A little, but I’m okay now.” She very much wanted to say and thank you for asking, but thought the better of it. Damn cops. You had to be careful with them, they were so sensitive if you made fun of them. Or their authority.
“Seems like you mighta had a run in with someone, eh? Someone got a little out of hand with you?” His voice sounded almost concerned.
“What? Oh, no, that.” She looked down at her wet skirt, torn stockings, scuffed shoes. When she had been looking for that stupid cap. A dark stain bloomed where her pocket was inside the coat. A greasy spot from the capless silicone. Crap. Her hair was mussed up, a wet line across the front to her coat where she had leaned over to crow bar the hood. Crap. She hadn’t noticed when the rain had stopped.
“You want to tell me about it? He try to hurt you? He succeed?” the cop pressed her.
“No! No, I—” she wasn’t sure where to take this. “I just left the party. I just left so—”
“I get it, missy. I get it. You got some ID?”
She fumbled in her bag, her hands visibly shaking by this time. She handed him her wallet, opened to reveal her driver’s license. It suddenly occurred to her she should have a fake.
“So, Doris Wilhelmina Strutpole? That’s a lot of name for a little gal like you.”
That’s a lot of mouth for a little man like you, she thought to herself. “Dora’s fine,” she said.
“Maybe we should go talk about this somewhere else, somewhere you won’t be so chilly. What would you say to that, girl?”
“Here is fine with me, sir,” she said with a meekness she was beginning to feel. “I’d rather not go anywhere else right now.”
“Well now, gal, I am just not so sure—”he began, but she cut him off.
“Nothing happened, officer. It was just a party, I shouldn’t have gone but I did and now I am not there and I just want to get a cab.” Her mind raced, what would work? What would be believable? Always have a grain of truth, that’s what her Paw Paw had said, a good lie has got to have a grain of truth. And his always did.
“Whyn’t you tell me about this party,” the cop was asking her. “Right here, right now, whyn’t you just tell me all about it?” He suddenly didn’t seem like he was about to dislodge himself from his comfortable seat behind the wheel of his cruiser, and it occurred to her she could do or say whatever she wanted. Within reason, of course.
“It was a small party, a dinner party. I have clients in this neighborhood. Sometimes they like to show off my work and I become the ‘guest of honor.’ It is an honor, I guess. But I think they just like to show off that they have their own—” She thought about the woman’s body in the Hummer, lost her train of thought.
“Their own what?” his voice came through. “What is it you do?”
She thought. No, just stick with the story. “I’m a seamstress, really. You know, I help them fix up their houses. They call me their designer. That’s all. And after a job, a lot of them like to have a little party to show off. That’s all. Really.”
“But one of them got out of hand, eh, is that it? You wanna tell me about that?”
“No.”
“Girl, I can’t help you if you won’t let me. Just tell me about him. You look like a nice girl, but you need help.”
He wasn’t going to leave it alone. She had to get out of there, he was starting to waste her time. She had to deliver before daylight, before things started to get really sticky. “Sir, I can’t. I really can’t. There’s nothing to tell, in the end nothing happened. You got to believe me.” She appealed to a working class universal. “I can’t prosecute. I don’t have to like them, but I really need these people. The jobs. These times are hard, and if there’s trouble with one, well, they all stick together, you know? I gotta have the work.”
His face softened, she could see in the glow from the streetlight that it worked. He knew working class. He would let it go.
“You’re still out in the middle of the night, girl. Let me give you a lift.”
“No, no, I’ll call a cab. That’s what I always do, don’t want these folks to know what a ratty car I drive. I’ll call a cab right now, I just wanted to get a bit of fresh air first.” She whipped out her phone and flipped it open, jabbed at the keypad, put it up to her ear. “Yes, I need a ride. Where—” she covered the phone and looked at the cop.
Right on cue, “Corner of Elm and Westhaven,” he said.
She repeated it into the phone and snapped it closed. His radio squawked, she could only hear the last part of it “Code 2, driver GOA” and he spoke into it, looking away from Dora.
“You stay put,” he said. “Cab’ll be here soon, but I got a 11-83 I gotta get to. You stay put,” he repeated.
She nodded dumbly, and he rolled up his window and screeched off. She wondered if that call could have been about the ‘accident’ she had participated in. If so, they were awful slow to get the call.