EIGHT
“Sir?” Exitus needed to socialize more often; he lived far too many lives inside his head. He drifted like a glass bottle in the ocean.
Officer Welsh, who had settled the squad car up against the curb sometime during Exitus’s roaming thoughts, shut off the engine, took the keys from the ignition and threaded a finger through the keyring. He unbuckled his seatbelt and exited the car, the merry tinkling of those metal keys sounding no less sinister than the laughter of clowns.
Exitus’s stomach lurched as the driver’s side passenger door opened, Officer Welsh leaning down with one hand on his equipment belt and the other on the roof of the car. “Tough Break, Kid,” he repeated. “The thrift shop where you’re getting some fresh clothes? I’ve only been talking about it the last three minutes.” He moved so that Exitus could stumble out of the vehicle.
“Right. Sorry. I must not have been paying attention.”
The dried mud on Exitus pants acquired at the crime scene, forgotten to memories and odd police officers, began to crack and fall away as he moved. Soon flakes dusted the floor of the squad car, then the pavement as Exitus left the torture box on wheels to follow Officer Welsh to the resale store dubbed Tough Break, Kid, housed in a dull-looking building on what might have been the only street in town.
Once inside the store, Exitus understood why the thrift store would want to call itself Tough Break, Kid.
The place resembled what might happen if one were to take every last possession of a shopaholic and cram it all into a space no bigger than a cheap New York apartment; there was hardly any room to breathe. It was a wonder they had even gotten through the door, for there were items stacked on the floor, leaning against walls, taped to windows, even hanging from the ceiling. In fact, the thrift store was so overwhelmed with junk that Exitus was half-convinced he’d stumbled upon a rift in time and passed into his bedroom back home. It even smelt like his bedroom.
“Sweet mother of—”
“Eugene!”
A pile of fabric—or drapery or clothing, it was hard to tell what with the mound being so great—stirred violently. “Eugene!” it called again, its voice slight and surprisingly feminine. “Adrian called to say you’d be here. I was expecting you sooner.”
“The traffic was horrendous,” Officer Welsh quipped to the mound teetering on a creme-colored loveseat. “This boy here needs some pants, Darla.”
The mound stirred a second time, eliminating a stocky woman no taller than Exitus’s elbow. “So I was told. You’re the kid that found Adam,” she said as she walked toward the apparently non-human (and therefor unqualified to be a “who”) Exitus and Officer Welsh. “Sucks to go like that, huh?” Darla shuddered. “And I thought Mikey’s car crash on I-35 was bad.”
She stopped before Exitus, a pricing gun in her hand. It was the kind with the needle and barbs, and Darla thrust it out toward Exitus’s gut. “You know the car split in two? Each half took a piece of him with them. How do you suppose something like that happens?”
Exitus backed away from the tiny woman and her gun, crashing into an armoire in the process. “I, uh. I really don’t know.”
Darla smiled and turned to address Officer Welsh. “He’s cute.”
“He’s also muddy. Getting flakes all over your floor.”
Darla waved the observation off. “Just area rugs.” In fact, every inch of the floor was covered by an area rug—sometimes two or more. The rugs were overlapped in such a way that the floor resembled queer-colored ocean waves. It was a miracle that the furniture wasn’t in a broken heap on the ground.
“Hey.”
Exitus looked up in time to see Darla sock him in the arm.
“Hey,” she said again. “What are you, a 36 regular?”
