So Abe quits.
“No, Abe, no! I’ll play with my eyes shut, I swear!”
“No way.”
And Abe is napping again when the alarm goes, a high, not-so-loud ringing that squeezes every adrenal gland in his body. He’s up and out and fastening his seat belt before he’s even awake, and only as they zip out onto Edinger and into traffic does his heart rate sink back to a halfway reasonable patter. Another year off his life, no doubt; firemen and paramedics have a really high heart attack rate, as a result of the damage caused by these sudden leaps of adrenal acceleration. “Where’m I going?”
“Proceed northward on the Newport until encountering the Garbage Grove Freeway, west to the Orange Freeway, north to Nutwood and over to State. We have been called to render assistance at a car crash.”
“You’re kidding.”
Abe notices that Xavier’s hand is clamped on the radio microphone so tight that the yellowy palm is almost completely white. And the joky rapid-fire patter has an edge in it, it always did of course, but now it burrs X’s voice to the point where the dispatcher asks him to repeat things sometimes. Xavier needs a long vacation, no doubt about it. Or a change of work. He’s burning out, Abe can see it happening shift by shift. But with his own family, and the dependency of what sounds like a good chunk of Santa Ana’s populace, he can’t afford to quit or to take a long break. Pretty obviously he won’t stop until it’s him that breaks.
Abe concentrates on driving. Traffic is bad where the Garden Grove Freeway bleeds into the Orange and Santa Ana, in the giant multilevel concrete ramp pretzel, every ramp stopped up entirely, it’s offtrack time again, the song of the sirens howling up and down, power sensation as the truck leaps under his foot, the tracked cars on his right flying by in a blur of color, one long rainbow bar of neon metal flowing by, whoops there’s a car offtrack right in their path blocking it entirely, heavy brakes. “Shit! What’s that doing there!”
“Get back ontrack.”
“I’m trying, man, can’t just drive over these civilians you know.” Abe puts on flasher, blinkers, the truck is strobing light at a score of frequencies, should hypnotize the car drivers if nothing else. No break in the traffic appears.
“They think we a Christmas tree,” X says angrily, and leans far out of his window to wave futilely at the passing stream. “Just edge over into them, man.”
Abe takes a deep breath, eases in the clutch, steers right. Xavier shouts abuse at the cars in the fast lane, and finally says to Abe, “Go for it,” and blindly Abe floors it and steers over into the lane, expecting a crunch from the side any second. As soon as he gets past the stalled car on the shoulder he veers back onto the concrete shoulder and guns it, fishtailing almost into the rail. Xavier is waving thanks to the driver who gave them the gap. They’re up to speed again. “We got a dangerous job,” Xavier says heavily as he settles back into his seat. “Opportunities for impaction while attempting to reach our designated destination are numerous indeed.”
Abe sings the last line of their “Ode to Fred Spaulding”:
And he never, exceeded, the speed, limit—againnnn!
Xavier joins in and they cackle wildly as they trundle at eighty miles an hour up the freeway shoulder. Abe’s hands clamp the steering wheel, Xavier’s palm is white-person white on the mike.
X says, “Have you heard the latest Fred Spaulding joke? Fred sees the overpass pylon coming at them, he shouts back into the ambulance compartment, ‘Tell the victim we’ll have him there in a second!’”
Abe laughs. “That’s like the one where he asks the victim what’s the definition of bad luck.”
“Ha! Yeah. Or where he asks him to explain double-indemnity insurance.”
“Ha! ha! Or the one where he says, ‘Have you got insurance?’ and the victim says, ‘No!’ and Fred says, ‘Don’t worry about it!’”
Xavier is helpless at this, he puts his forehead on the dash and giggles away. When he’s done he says, “Wish I didn’t believe in insurance. You wouldn’t believe how much I pay every month.”
“It’s a good bet, remember that.”
“That’s right. You die young, the insurance company says, ‘You win!’” He laughs again, and Abe is cheered to see it. Abe adds:
“And if you lose the bet, you’re still alive.”
“Exactly.”
They reach Nutwood, turn off the freeway and head west to College Avenue, shooting through the shops and restaurants and laundromats and bookstores that serve Cal State Fullerton. Crowds watch them pass, cars skitter over to the slow track or slide into empty parking slots, giving Abe little scares each time they hesitate and almost scatter into his path. Familiar surge of power as they part traffic likes Moses at the Red Sea. Up ahead traffic is dense, stopped, the brake lights go off in his brain, Chippie car lights rolling red and blue in the intersection. “We need the cutters,” Xavier reports from the radio. “Code six.”
Abe sucks down air, he’s breathing rapidly. He drives onto a sidewalk to make half a block, thumps back over the curb and crawls by cars to the sota.
They’re there. Three-car job. Sits, something in the silicon. Or maybe this was a combination of silicon breakdown and human error. College had a green light, cars were pouring through, apparently; a truck fired through its red light on Nutwood and broadsided a left-lane car that was caught against the car in the right lane, the three of them skidding over into a traffic light and a power pole, knocking the poles flat over. Both the cars are crunched, especially the middle one, which is a pancake. And the truck driver isn’t too well off either, no seat belt natch.
Abe is out of the truck and on the move, dragging his cutters over to the cars, where Chippies are gesturing violently for him. Someone’s caught in the middle car, and with all the sparks from the power lines, they fear electrocution for those inside.
There are two people in the front seat of the sandwiched car. Abe ignores the driver as she appears dots, sets to work on the roof of the car to get to the passenger. Again he’s at work, cutting with a delicate touch as the snips shear the steel with great creaks and crunches, metallic shrieks covering repeated moans from the girl in the passenger seat. Xavier slithers in from above and is quickly at work, giving a rapid sequence of very exact commands to Abe above, “Cut another foot and a half back on the midline and pull it up. Farther. Okay, take that sidewall out of the rear door, we can get her out here.” Stretcher set, for a teenager in yellow blouse and pants, all stained blood red in an alarmingly bright pattern. Xavier and the Chippies run her to the truck and Abe works his way into the smashed car to check on getting the driver out. In the right rear door, lean over the blood-soaked seatback—
It’s Lillian Keilbacher. Face white, lips cut, blond hair thrown back. It’s definitely her. Her chest—crushed. She’s dead. Dots, no doubt about it. That’s Lillian, right there. Her body.
Abe backs out of the car. He notes that the car was a new Toyota Banshee, a little sport model popular among kids. Seems he’s gone deaf; he sees the turmoil of spectators and cars around them, but can’t hear a thing. He remembers Xavier, sweating, talking in a near hysteria about the time he turned over a dead kid in a car and saw, just for a moment, his son’s face. He makes a move toward the car, thinking to check the girl’s ID. But no, it’s her. It’s her. Carefully he walks to the curb and sits on it.
“Abe! Where—Abe! What are you doing, man?” Xavier is crouched at his side, hand on his shoulder. “What’s wrong?”
Abe looks at him, croaks, “I know her. The driver. Friend of the family. Lillian, Lillian Keilbacher.”