THE WAY IT WENT DOWN: SINGLE VEHICLE FATALITY

I was coming back from well,  someplace I don't want no one to know about when it happened. We'd seen Tommy off in style, in a Chicago fashion. Too much to drink. Too long. Black suits and full blues and drunk people laughing and talking about times before he turned up in a welded, steel drum with no arms or legs. Too much information. Hey Charley, too much information, man. 

I get it. I really do. I'm sorry. I been drinking. 

Anyway, I alone there knew exactly how Tommy had died. Even Sandy didn't know. I had seen it. Hell, I'd helped stash the drum. I mean...I didn't kill him. WE didn't kill him. Tommy killed himself, in a way, with a little help from a diamond. And I wanted to shout this out at the wake. I wanted to get up and wobble on an uneven bar table and go "HEY EVERYBODY! I KNOW WHAT HAPPENED!" and then just spew it out. Empty myself of this fucking poison in me. This thing that rides me like a fucking addiction. Secrets. Lies. The group. Our little cabal. Join the club!

But I seen things too. I seen a lot, man. 

So, instead, I got up on the table and said, hey guys, Tommy would have been forty-four this Sunday, and he was a good cop and a good buddy, and fuck, I was going to miss him. And it was true. I was. But the Tommy I was thinking of was the Tommy from before the diamond. A Tommy who slept on my couch and told me to fuck off and who brought chicken in a bucket on patrols. AFTER the diamond turned up, Tommy was...different. Tommy was still Tommy, but he just didn't seem to care anymore. I knew he was looking in it, at night. I knew he and Sandy had figured out how that fucker DiThomaso got it to...show things.  

Anyway, this isn't a story about Tommy. Too much information, Charley. Don't I fucking know it? My mouth.

At two, the party breaks up, and I follow Sandy back to the east side. Creeping along behind that clueless fuck, and when she gets home and settles in, I wait, and I drink up. I get a nice buzz on, and then I check the pistol, and I go inside. 

So, it's three-thirty, and I'm drunk and cruising down Hoit right near Sandy's at a dangerous clip, and I think maybe I fall asleep. Adrenaline wearing off, I guess. Fuck, I don't know. I wake like one of those falling dreams, the ground seems to vanish beneath me for a second, and I snap to it, slamming on the brakes and skidding thirty feet to a zig-zag halt, tire smoke drifting around me. And then I hear the horn. 

I step from the car, and then lean back in and get my leather and badge and cap and mag. 

There's a car smashed up on the curb. It looks like it hit the telephone pole and then spun before coming to a stop on the sidewalk. Its horn is blaring. It had swerved to avoid me crossing the lines, no doubt. I put on my hazards and play my light across the window and trot over. 

The woman inside is older. A nurse maybe. White uniform and her face is smashed because the airbag didn't deploy, and she wasn't wearing a seatbelt. There's a stain in the approximate shape and layout of her face in black blood on the windshield, and one of her arms isn't looking right. I pull the door hard (I done this before), and the window collapses into chunks of safe-t glass, but it opens. I can hear her labored breathing and it sounds like one of those regulators on deep sea equipment. Liquid. 

"Help me," she gurgles.

"Ambulance is on the way, ma'am," I say, and I pull down my cap and wave on a car with my mag light. They see the badge and roll on. 

"Help," she says one more time, and the breathing becomes hitched. Like she can't find a rhythm. 

"On the way," I say. I don't have a radio. I'm praying no one has called it in. It's late. It's fucking late. It's under control.

When she stops breathing, I check it. I grab her left arm with my gloves and flop it on the open car door, where it paints a record in blood. Then, I trot back to my car throw my gear in and head out. No one can know about my visit to Sandy tonight, lady, so I'm sorry there — that's on me. But fuck. I didn't do it. Not really.

No traffic cams. No visible cameras on the one building. None of the cars cruised us, just went by when I waved on. My luck seems to be holding. I drive off and turn on the radio.  

On the passenger's seat is the book from Sandy's. Her notes. In my breast pocket is Tommy's diamond. Sorry about that, Tommy.