SIDE ORDER OF FRIES - CHAPTER EIGHT

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?”

SIDE ORDER OF FRIES - CHAPTER SEVEN

SEVEN

There really wasn’t anything like being chauffeured around town in the backseat of a police car. The smell of warm leather, the stink of crime and stale coffee. The hard, uncomfortable seats and the geometric pattern of safety mesh painted onto the back of the driver’s head. No, there wasn’t anything like it. It was fresh, it was exhilarating—it was absolutely horrifying, and Exitus hadn’t even been apprehended!

He got to wondering, sitting there in the hoodlums’ section of the police car, about one of his high school buddies.

Niles Bleu had been even more disturbing than the beautiful Agatha Freeland, she of the love affair with Pinhead. He was infamous for his rather macabre antics, which ranged everywhere from realistic eyeballs in the urinals to an actual dead rat in the English teacher’s thermos (Ms. Matthews never did come back after that, the rumor being that she’d suffered a nervous breakdown in the staff room of such magnitude that even a lobotomy couldn’t calm her down).

Surprisingly, Niles had been Exitus’s closest friend, and while Exitus couldn’t even handle a look at Spaghetti Os without feeling violently ill, he’d relished the joy on Niles’s face whenever he’d caused some fright-related heart attacks.

That oddly placed pride might have stemmed from the fact that he and Niles were such opposites; a goth boy afraid of butterflies (which strangely drew an awful lot of followers, as if Exitus had been Jesus or something—a fact not lost to the unhinged maniacs firebombing the local outreach center for victims of rape, incest, fear and teenage stupidity) and the tiny lad whose Bible seemed to be Turn of the Screw. Niles Nathaniel Bleu was the complete antithesis to Exitus (a kid who resembled a wee vole and was only popular because his first name just so happened to lack a second D) and for that Niles had been like a celestial being.

A celestial being who brought a corpse to Senior Prom.

Now, he wasn’t an actual corpse (the smell would have been too foul), but some random guy off of the street who’d willingly accepted the role. It would have been shocking enough if Niles had simply come with a man (Niles was all for the ladies, mind, one-hundred percent; he’d only wanted to press a few buttons), but he had never been one to let sleeping dogs lie. If he saw a stick setting on the ground beside a dosing lion, the man wouldn’t have been able to walk by. Niles would be the dope on the front page of the newspaper (above the fold) who’d gotten mauled to death after he’d repeatedly poked the lion in the eye with the stick. So, a corpse to Prom it was. He and the willing participant….

Oh, Hell. It was Exitus.

Agatha Freeland had denied Exitus the fortune of going to Prom with him and so, seething and cursing the world and all of its female inhabitants, he had agreed to Niles’s dastardly plot. Of course, he’d gotten a little bit drunk first—it was kind of hard playing the part of the walking dead whilst sober—and then he didn’t get just “a little bit” drunk either. Exitus had gotten so drunk that when, on the TV, a man appeared with a skull tattooed on his left hand Exitus had said, “man, I gotta get me one-ah-ose”. Niles had agreed. So Exitus and his best friend had walked down to the local tattoo parlor (in the basement of a friend of a friend of a friend’s nephew’s girlfriend’s uncle’s friend) and gotten himself tattooed. On the inner lip. While that friend of a friend of a friend’s nephew’s girlfriend’s uncle’s friend had smoked a joint and coughed a few times into Exitus’s mouth and snorted and spat and asked how one does exactly spell “this here word ‘cause it looks all wrong, man”. By the time it was all over and done with, Exitus not only had the word “TOAD” tattooed on his rapidly swelling lip, but he’d also somehow gotten high while Niles came out of the place with virgin skin and no foreign substance in his mouth other than some pills found rolling around the bottom of a toolbox drawer.

He’d said, “Dude!” after swallowing those half dozen pills. “We gotta fuck you up real good now!”

But in the end Exitus had made a damn fine corpse. The make-up and costume were superb specimens which could have been stolen from the archives of The Night of the Living Dead and he hadn’t even needed to memorize any dialogue (which was a blessing, for his lip looked like something found in a cabinet of curiosities under the heading “Disease and Other Malformations”). At least the expression on everyone’s faces were to die for—until the point where the police showed up, and then everyone was laughing hysterically.

The principal had suspected Niles of using any number of things for quite some time, but never actually had the proof to come right out and make an accusation. What luck, when Exitus the Corpse and Niles the Vile showed up in the gymnasium drunk and high and hopped up on barbiturates! The cops were summoned midway through the first quarter of the night (before the halftime show of the Prom Queen/King elections, but not after spotting Agatha and berating her with speech slurred from drink, slowed from weed and squashed from a massively swollen lip).

That car ride, also in the backseat with a police escort, had been not so much terrifying as unnerving.

Always prone to such unpleasant upheavals, Exitus had vomited onto the floor. He’d felt much better after that, though his lip stung something awful. With his head hanging down toward the floor, he noted the smell of the vehicle (like the Wronki one he’d find himself in five years later): that mandatory odor of warm leather, crime and stale coffee. And vomit. And the halitosis of Niles, who’d never once in how-many-years been seen brushing his teeth, who was sitting next to Exitus with a wide grin on his face. His eyes had been shining with, yes, the light of excitement but also with drugs and drink. When he spoke, it was in rapid time with his words crudely stitched together with fishing line. Exitus couldn’t understand much of what his best friend had been saying, but he caught the profanity and some sort of strange reference to foam puppets.

Exitus never did see Niles after that night. Occasionally he’d gotten letters, written in a tight and spidery hand which always asked for money or for promising news that someone else back home had also crawled down into a black festering pit of existence, and then the letters stopped.

The obituary never did show up in the newspaper or as a small throw away spot on the news, but Exitus always liked to hope that Niles Nathaniel Bleu had passed away quietly in a mosquito net-covered cot somewhere in the underbelly of Africa after finding God and devoting his life to bring meaning to the lives of AIDS orphans. Unlikely as world peace, but there was room enough to wish.

Sighing, Exitus brought himself back to the present, to the police car and the garrulous officer in the driver’s seat who was taking his passenger into town.

“You never did tell me,” the officer began. His name was Welsh, or some other nationality on the continent of Asia. “Why pick such a strange name to answer to?”

There was a loose piece of stitching on the seat. Exitus picked up the thread and started to finger it. “Not as strange as Pilot Inspektor.”

“Still,” Welsh pressed, turning left by the skeleton of an old tractor. “Why would you want to be called something like that, have people think of you as a lunatic?”

Exitus hoped to God he was no longer anything like that idiot kid he used to be, running around dressed as a corpse with a gnarly lip, because—Christ.

“But it just might be a lunatic they’re looking for,” Exitus suggested.

Welsh—a grown man, a police officer—tittered.

In spite of his fear of the situation he was in, Exitus rolled his eyes. Laka, his beloved plastic hula girl, surely would have done the same. She even would have added a sardonic quip, but Exitus had no talent for such things. He could play a mean pair of spoons, but humor was lost to him.

“Who was that?” Officer Welsh asked. “Paul Simon, was it?”

“Billy Joel, actually.”

“No, I’m pretty sure it was Paul Simon. Billy Joel did ‘Kodachrome’. You know—” and Lord please help him, he began to croon “—‘Kodachrome, they give us the night’s bright colors. They give us the greens of summers, makes you think it’s a sunny day—oh yeah.’ That was Billy Joel.”

“Billy Joel’s the freaky-looking face on the Piano Man album. Paul Simon’s the one who had the tiff with Art Garfunkel, and those lyrics are a wee bit incorrect….”

Welsh frowned into the rear view mirror. “How old are you?”

“Twenty-three, sir.”

“Exactly. I’ve got twenty years on you. I think I know what I’m talking about.”

Exitus put up his hands in surrender.

Welsh must not have liked silence, for he started right up again with a new subject. “What brings you to these parts?”

In case the car was bugged, in case the truth might indeed set him free, Exitus spoke without lies. “I’m passing through on my way to the Mustard Museum up north.”

“That’s a fun place. Took my wife there on our first date. The trolls scared her so bad she almost didn’t want a second date.” Welsh winked into the rear view mirror. “But she couldn’t resist my charms.”

“No? Well…. Yeah, I’m on my way there.”

“You like those queer roadside attractions, huh?”

“Very much so. It keeps life interesting.”

Welsh stopped at an intersection. Turned right on the red light more quickly than Exitus had the other day; the road had been deserted, so he’d taken a glance at his map and soon found himself nearly pummeled by a very angry woman in a Beetle who was late for her tanning appointment.

“Any good ones, or are they all like the World’s Largest Ball of Twine?”

This was a very long car ride. No wonder the diner never got any business, it was way out in the middle of nowhere!

“No, they’re all different. Only a week ago I went to The Rock. It’s suppose to look like the head of Beethoven, but it more closely resembles a platypus. The guides say it dropped out of the sky one day, but if you look closely enough you can just make out the ruts where the thing was rolled into place. It’s neat, though. They even sell shirts. ‘I’ve been to The Rock!’”

“That was a great movie.”

Exitus had fiddled with the seat stitching so long that he had pulled it out of the seat. He spun it around between his thumb and index finger. “Sir?”

“The Rock. It’s a great movie. Sean Connery and Nicholas Cage, they break into the San Fransisco penitentiary in order to stop a madman from raining a deadly virus on the city.”

“Bombing it, you mean?”

“Bombing?” Welsh laughed. “No, it was a virus. They bad guy, see, wanted to destroy San Fransisco and so he created a plague-like virus to wipe it away.”

No wonder they weren’t getting anywhere; Officer Welsh was senile in his forties and had forgotten where exactly the town of Wronki was located. They were driving around in ever widening circles talking about pop singers swapping songs and a movie with the wrong plot line.

“Nitroglycerin. The bad guy wants to destroy San Fransisco by blowing it to smithereens and puts Nitroglycerin into a dozen or so highly unstable glass containers the size of billiard balls, which are then strung together like pearls.”

Outside of the police car, the town of Wronki sprang up into an unassuming portrait of quaint little buildings with quaint little people strolling about the quaint little streets.

“That was the virus.”

If this were happening five years ago, with Niles Bleu in the backseat and not Exitus, Officer Welsh might have received an impromptu education in pop culture. But Exitus was not Niles (junkie Niles, dead junkie Niles, reformed junkie Niles, or dead reformed junkie Niles (pick a fate)) and so he lapsed into a kind of annoyed stupor. Annoyed because of the idiot driving him into the center of a town too small to be placed on a map and too far away from the diner to justify the diner’s existence, and annoyed because his hearse had been taken away from him to be searched for evidence of a crime he hadn’t committed and he was fairly certain that people couldn’t just do that, take away people’s vehicles and homes just because they were the sole witness to a crime.

Officer Welsh began to whistle, as if knowing that Exitus was dangling on frayed nerves and whistling the tune of “Kodachrome” (badly, worse than when he sang the song) would finally make the boy scream and confess to the murder of Adam the Cook, killed by his prized golden cow.

Why use the cow as a bludgeon, anyway?

Why ever get a golden cow in the first place?

Hours before Adam had met his maker, as Exitus sat in the diner taking soda water to the sweet-smelling ketchup spot on his only jacket, the cook had recounted the history of that evil cow.

The evil cow named Harold had once been bundled in loud pink wrapping paper and placed inside of a box. That box had been wrapped in equally garish orange wrapping paper and placed inside of another box, and so on with different screaming colors for another ten boxes. That large package was placed in front of Adam’s bedroom door eleven months ago, on the morning of his 28^th birthday. Poor guy thought he was getting a jet ski, but instead….

“Yeah, there was Harold. After all that time unwrapping box after box, I get a cow. It was a gag gift, really. I was kinda heavy as a kid, everyone called me ‘Heifer’. Like the cartoon character, you know?”

Aunt Lily was not one for cartoons (there was far too much violence for her taste). It had been a downright miracle she’s allowed Exitus’s precious Fraggles into the house, and so a show about a wallaby, his dog, some angry frog neighbors, and his best friend Heifer were all but forbidden in the house. So Exitus watched the show in Uncle Monty’s shed, but for the life of him he couldn’t remember the name of the show. Something’s Something Life, was it?

“It kinda sucked, actually, seeing a sodding cow at the bottom of all those freaking boxes. I was pissed.”

Pissed, he’d lifted the cow out of the box. As he did so, his fingers dislodged something taped to its underbelly and a single ticket fell away from Harold and back into the box.

“But that’s not the thing. The thing is that the ticket was to a taping of Rocco DiSpirito’s show. Rocco-motherfucking-DiSpirito, man! Only my culinary hero, only the greatest chef alive, only—”

Rocco’s Modern Life. That was the show Exitus had watched in secret in Uncle Monty’s shed. That was the show with the cow named Heifer and the wallaby named Rocco, which of course segwayed into the show ticket. Adam took the cow with him to the show. With that cow he had attracted the attention of his culinary hero and got Rocco DiSpirito’s autograph, only to be killed by that signed golden cow a month before his 29^th birthday.

“Tough Break, Kid.”

SIDE ORDER OF FRIES - CHAPTER SIX

SIX

The Crime Scene Techs were an ornery bunch; they came speed walking onto the scene, large make-up-type cases in their hands that seemed to cause the smaller of them to list to the side. All of theme were glowering, as if burdened by the fact that they were so rudely taken away from their Sunday morning activities. A group of two entered the diner (after putting booties over the rubbers which encased their soiled shoes) while a group of three stayed behind in the parking lot. They took photographs, notes, plaster impressions of the tire tracks, and bagged all kinds of evidence which Exitus could not have seen with an electron microscope. All the while, they grumbled over the state of college basketball and how the state school had failed to make it to the finals—again. They spoke of those “vampires on Wall Street and the idiots on Main Street who single handedly created the recession mess the country was in for buying houses they knew they couldn’t afford; don’t people have brains anymore and why aren’t the citizens of this great country of ours put through rigorous IQ tests before buying so much as cheese in the grocery store?” To which the tiny blonde woman (the one who was bent like ivy toward the sun from that heavy case of hers) shrugged her shoulders and sprayed some kind of plaster or paint into a hole in the mud.

The third party member, not one for talk of politics, took it upon himself to shake down Exitus.

Because he had entered the diner, would it be all right if the team took a few snapshots of the bottom of his shoes—you know, for protocol? As if Exitus Quick had already been tried and convicted of the crime without any due process or even a change of pants, which had hardened into a chaffing nightmare. He could barely move without the mud-laden legs rubbing his skin and twisting the denim around his thighs, and now they wanted him to lift his legs so they could take pictures of his shoes?

Officer Cassidy, who had not moved from Exitus’s side, screwed his face into an expression that would have terrified even Pinhead. In fact, Exitus would rather have been off on a play date with the Lead Cenobite, the Black Pope of Hell, the Angel of Suffering, the Dark Prince of Pain (the rather disturbing object of Agatha Freeland’s affection, Exitus’s unrequited love all through high school), the once-human Captain Elliot Spencer turned sadist from Hades in the Hellraiser movies—than in the parking lot of Lidia’s Diner, surrounded by angry crime scene techs and a police officer better suited to the Strong Man tent of a freak show.

Exitus had to perform a strange dance whilst lifting his leg and leaning against the hearse, but he managed to stay upright long enough for the crime scene tech to take photos of his shoes.

Then came more questioning. By the time Exitus had recited his story enough times to satisfy Officer Cassidy, he felt as though all of his internal organs had been sucked out through a straw. But that wasn’t the worst thing. The worst thing, the thing that made him want to run off to an Indian market and buy a cursed puzzle box and raise Hell (ask Pinhead what was so appealing about him that made a girl like Agatha Freeland pull the psycho card and worship him), the thing that made Exitus want to crawl into a hole and die—arrived not long after Exitus came close to face planting in the mud after losing his balance from hopping around on one leg.

There was a screech of tires out on the road, far enough away from the diner to not send up smoke but close enough to still be deafening, and Exitus shrank a little bit lower into himself. The media had come, or so he assumed; however, the media tended not to scream:

“Get out of my way, Harold! This is my diner and if you don’t let me through you’re going to be pissing through you nose. Do you understand me?”

Officer Cassidy actually flinched. More than that. It was like watching a jell-o mold of a man quiver after being flicked by Sasquatch.

Exitus turned to see a large red-haired woman walk toward Officer Cassidy, being escorted by a mouing crime scene tech. She was followed by the atrocious girl named Becca he had met yesterday and a brunette man with a face of granite but the swagger of Donald Duck.

“What the Hell is going on here?” the red-haired woman asked, although her shrill tone of voice made everything she said sound like a statement; Exitus could only guess when it came to punctuation. “I’ve got a person lying dead in my diner and another one missing and some strange kid hanging out in my parking lot and no one thinks to call me directly? Emmy Jackson’s the one who told me. She nearly drove right into my screen door, the hapless girl, and here you people are standing around? What the fuck is going on?”

Becca was past the point of sobbing. Her eyes were red, her face swollen and her clothes thrown on in a blind hurry; she looked like Death after an allergic reaction to happiness. She was clutching her stomach through the tent-like fabric of her sweatshirt (no doubt Adam’s) and looked ready to vomit. Exitus was quite sure that the pouting crime scene tech beside her was more than ready to whip out the barf bag he might have stored in his back pocket.

The brunette man, the walking contradiction of silliness and seriousness, looked even worse than Becca. His eyes had a vacant sheen to them, while his skin was paler than that of a goth chick Exitus had seen once who’d tattooed her entire body white (which looked nice right up until the moment the ink turned pink because the girl hadn’t thought to research white ink and how her body might tolerate it). Anyway, the guy looked bad. He was sweating and his lips were cracked, as if he had done all the vomiting for Becca before arriving at the diner.

Then, of course, there was the screaming red-haired woman (who had not shut her mouth yet, leaving Officer Cassidy to stand and quiver and pray to God for a sinkhole to form below him and swallow him whole). She was none other than Lidia, Becca’s mother and owner of the fine eatery with its floors now being washed with blood. Unlike the two kids in her troupe, she looked perfectly fine (albeit a little peeved). A tall woman of healthy frame, Lidia had a face that could have been plastered onto Russian Mafia recruitment posters. Her eyes were a hard golden color squeezed into sharp points as she berated Officer Cassidy (shot vulgarities in Exitus’s general direction) and gesticulated with her surprisingly strong-looking hands while doing so. In short, she was one terrifying woman and Exitus felt utterly ridiculous for ever being afraid of Laka, the plastic hula girl looking out at the day’s events from her position on the hearse’s dashboard.

“So,” she continued on in her only-dogs-may-hear-it octave range, “why haven’t you carted this fat sonuvabitch off to jail yet?”

Exitus blinked, affronted. He was not fat. Sure, he didn’t have a surfer’s 32-inch waisted body—but he definitely wasn’t fat. Lidia wasn’t exactly slim….

Officer Cassidy remained in silence, his mouth agape, and waited for Lidia to keep motoring along. She didn’t. She stood with her hands on her hips, a toe rapping the mud.

“Be—because, uh.” Cassidy cleared his throat. “Because there isn’t any proof he’s done anything, Lidia.”

“That’s bullshit and you know it, Adrian! Just look at him. He’s a heathen!”

Exitus shoved his hands into the pouch of his sweatshirt, fingered the bar of soap he had yet to use and hoped he didn’t smell all that badly.

Officer Cassidy sighed. Becca stared ahead, comatose. The unnamed brunette bit his lip. The unhappy crime scene tech had gone.

“Lidia,” Cassidy began. “One of your employees has just been killed. Mary is missing. Don’t you think there are more... well, productive things to do in this situation instead of impeding the investigation?”

Those pointed eyes threw daggers. “‘Impeding the investigation’? God, Adrian, you were just as obtuse when we were married! How’d you make it through the police academy, being this stupid?” That last word was in such a high pitch that it was nothing but a sharp ringing, so Exitus could only snatch at what she might have truly said. He imagined it to be clean.

Lidia’s ex-husband turned to the crime scene tech who had reappeared beside Becca. “Have you got everything you need from Mr. Quick here?”

There was a delighted grin on the man’s face. He must have been enjoying the show. “Yes. But we’ll need to keep the hearse. I’ve got Shamus calling ahead for the warrant.”

Officer Cassidy nodded, then addressed Exitus. “You may go—but don’t leave town.”

“How can I, sir?”

The Strong Man smiled. “There’s a motel in town. I’ll have one of the officers take you there.”

Exitus shifted uncomfortably. “I don’t really have any money, sir.”

That was met with a frown from Cassidy and a tut from Lidia. “Noelle owes me a favor,” he said. “I’ll just have to call it in a little early.”

Genevieve sat peacefully in the early morning sun, her chrome shining and black paint glowing in the orange light. Exitus gave her a pat. “Can I take some clothes?Practically everything I own is in there.”

“He lives in that thing?” Lidia screeched. “He’s homeless. Isn’t that illegal?”

Officer Cassidy had a hand on his gun, possibly weighing the options of shooting his darling ex-wife. To Exitus he said: “I’m sorry, but you’re the only suspect we’ve got right now. You don’t have a lot of breathing room.”

At least the man was honest. But was all of what was going on here following legal protocol?

“There’s a second hand store in town as well as the motel. I’ll have Darla put your things on a tab.”

How wonderful. Aunt Lily was going to have a heart attack when she found out about this.

Oh, dear Lord.

He was going to have to call Aunt Lily.

SIDE ORDER OF FRIES - CHAPTER FIVE

FIVE

Wronki. Exitus was standing beside Genevieve, parked in the muddy lot of Lidia’s Diner, which was located on the outskirts of Wronki, Wisconsin. He knew this because the car pulling to the curb of the back road had the words “WRONKI POLICE” printed on the side.

It parked in front of the driveway, lights rotating silently. For what seemed like ten minutes nothing happened. The lights went round and round, no one was purged from the vehicle and nothing happened. It took so long for something to happen, in fact, that Exitus was able to go over what had gone on numerous times—and he still couldn’t make sense of it.

He got out of the hearse and slogged through the mud, grumbling over his shoes and still grumbling he ascended the diner’s stairs. So, hearse—mud—stairs. Okay, not hard to understand. But then the door came, that menacingly innocent door holding such nightmares behind it. Crime show nightmares. With blood and body and—

Exitus shook his head. Better to relive the walking. The vomiting even. He ran his tongue across his teeth, battery acid still thick in his mouth. The taste was nauseating and Exitus could only hope he wouldn’t lose his stomach in front of the local law enforcement.

As the fuzz finally exited the car (two of them: Bonnie and Clyde done good) Exitus burped a rancid bubble of acid which burned away his esophagus. Swallowing was painful and he winced as the police marched over to him. As Exitus watched them advance toward him, he noticed that they were staring hard at the ground. They were walking in a tight line and stepping in areas of mud clear of tire tracks, footprints not their own.

So small-town police weren’t all backward hicks after all.

With the grace of a ballerina, the larger of the officers progressed slowly to the crime scene. He looked like a major league catcher: huge thighs, barrel chest, broad shoulders and the arms of a steroid-riddled gorilla. He had the reddened, puckered face of a man consuming pickled eggs doused in tequila.

A wispy, doe-eyed kid played the part of the sidekick. Exitus noticed with slight embarrassment that this officer was in fact a he and not a she. The womanly thin man walked as though he hadn’t quite gotten a hold of moving through thick mud whilst wearing an equipment belt. He tripped along as he cordoned off the front of the parking lot with crime scene tape.

“Son?”

Exitus felt the blood drain from his face; he had never so much as gotten a detention in his twelve years of schooling and now he found himself being addressed by a man of the law. He opened his mouth to speak, watched as a moth flew out to play with the morning.

The human gorilla creaked his way in front of Exitus, his hand on his gun. Exitus saw this and squeaked.

“It’s all right, son.” He stood before the boy named death and stared hard at him through his puckered face.

Exitus blinked. All right? All right? He shook his head. This was most certainly not all right. Not all right at all. He watched as the man-who-looked-more-like-a-woman finished with the tape and began to look around, study the mud. In his hands was a leather-skinned pad he must had taken out of a pocket when Exitus had been preoccupied with the giant in front of him. Bonnie/Donnie proceeded to take studious notes as he marveled over the tracks in the mud. He might also have made notes about the debris in the parking lot, had there been any.

“Your call was quite frantic….” The elder officer trailed off, his attention caught by Genevieve.

Not moving his gaze away from the notetaker, Exitus began to tap the middle finger of his right hand against his thumb. “Of course it was frantic. I stumbled across a murder scene, how could I not be fanatical about it?”

The officer (Cassidy proclaimed his tag) looked back to Exitus as he pointed to the hearse. “This your—” he cleared his throat “—vehicle, eh?”

Nodding, Exitus turned to look at the inhumanly large officer. “Yes, sir.”

“Interesting mode of transport.”

“I like it.”

The younger officer was now at the foot of the diner’s stairs. He closed his notepad and shoved it back in one of the pockets of his utility belt. After scraping off his shoes, the young gun used his baton to open the door Exitus had not closed completely in his rush to leave and evacuate the contents of his stomach. Carefully, Bonne/Donnie slipped inside the diner.

Cassidy’s puckered face became severe. “I don’t know your face, son, and I know everyone’s face.”

Exitus felt as though the blood in his veins had been replaced with turpentine. He was the poster boy for UNCOMFORTABLE. “I just arrived here yesterday, sir.”

“Yesterday.”

“I slept here, sir.”

Taking out his own notebook, Cassidy began to jot down words in chicken scratch. “What’s your name, son?”

“E—Tod Quick.”

“Todd.”

He leaned forward to see his name, his tapping finger moving at record speed. “One D, sir.” Call him naive, but he’d always assumed that people would know how to spell his name (in his travels he had noticed that a lot of men spelt their name T-O-D—probably inciting laughing riots in the German-speaking world).

“One D.”

“Yes, sir. But I go by Exitus.”

The officer frowned, pulling his pinched face down and taut. “Exitus?”

“Yes,” he replied, nodding. “E-X-I-T-U-S.”

Cassidy shifted his monstrous shoulders. “Are you high?”

“What? No. No, sir, I’m not high.”

“Drunk, then?”

Exitus vehemently shook his head. “It’s not wise to drive a three-ton vehicle while inebriated, sir.”

“Huh.” The mammoth officer jabbed his pen at Genevieve. “Your name is Tod-With-One-D ‘Exitus’ Quick and you slept in that thing overnight. Through a murder which you just so happened to come across this morning.”

“Wish I hadn’t.”

“Called it in?”

Exitus waved a hand at the dripping rhododendrons. “Come across it.”

The young officer with the strained gait and womanly lines tumbled out of the diner, a handkerchief over his face and a musical dry heaving penetrating the square of cotton. Apparently, Bonnie/Donnie was not only unaccustomed to an equipment belt but murder scenes as well. He burped-coughed-mewled his way to the party of two beside the hearse.

“What’s the story, Rory?” Officer Cassidy asked, looking away from the weird kid he’d been questioning.

The patch sewn into Bonnie/Donnie’s navy shirt branded him with the name of Vadkowitz. “It’s pretty bad in there,” he gurgled, the handkerchief shoved back into a spare pocket but the disgust still apparent.

Officer Cassidy jerked a thumb at Exitus. “I gathered as much from Tod-With-One-D over here.”

Vadkowitz fiddled nervously with his holster, igniting a comedic image in Exitus’s mind of a bumbling cop accidentally aggravating the gun’s hair-trigger temper. “It’s Adam Monaco in there… all over in there.”

The elder policeman grew a waxy shade of pale.

“Did him in with Harold,” Vadkowitz explained, and didn’t Exitus just know that cow was evil? “He probably died after the first blow. All the others were superfluous.”

Waxy pale transcended to a brilliant translucency. “The others?”

Vadkowitz nodded. “Split Harold right in half.”

Exitus didn’t know much about law enforcement procedures, but he was fairly certain that the information Vadkowitz was relinquishing in front of him was rather sensitive.

“The money’s gone, too. As is Mary.”

Cassidy nodded sickly. “Call for backup. And put out an APB on Mary, just in case.”

Vadkowitz charged to the patrol car in an all out sprint, his awkwardness vanished and replaced with shock and disbelief. Because the Dead Fall air—and suddenly that tern seemed mildly inappropriate—was so thin Vadkowitz’s voice carried easily across the parking lot. However, Exitus wasn’t able to hear it.

Cassidy spoke loudly over the frantic voice of his partner. “To reiterate, Mr. Quick?”

Mr. Quick leaned again the hearse, his palm pressing heavily into Genevieve’s waxed flesh for support. He had broken out in a cold sweat, his knees weak and his mind burdened with an acute difficulty separating dream from reality, past from present.

Exitus was Toddy Toad once more, standing on the RV steps with the door wide open and his miserable cold forgotten. The lollipop had slipped from both his mouth and his finger, kissed the pavement with a decisive crack.

His parents splayed across the road like two dancers attempting the Rumba in a prone position... covered in—

“Tod? Tod Quick? Son, are you all right?”

He blinked to find himself sitting on the ground, his legs folded uncomfortably beneath him. His left hand was still reaching out for Genevieve, as if she were a flotation device and Exitus trapped in the middle of a stormy sea.

Officer Cassidy bent down to help Exitus to his feet. Although suspicious of the vagrant, he was nevertheless concerned for this possible witness’s health. “ I asked: Are you all right?”

“I’m breathing,” Exitus responded in his usual manner when faced with such a question, a question Aunt Lily knew enough to never ask (unless she was frazzled, having waited a good eon for her nephew to pick up the phone). “I’m breathing,” he repeated, “so I guess, in the vast scheme of things, I am all right.”

Cassidy frowned, but not in response to Exitus’s health report. A high-pitched ringing was cutting through the morning, a dual chorus of ding!s that Exitus might have imaged if not for the officer’s blatant use of profanity. The red-faced monolith turned to look at the road.

“Sweet mother of…. I thought I told that girl to get rid of the police scanner.”

Confused, mind bogged down with death, Exitus swiveled his head toward the noise.

Riding across the grass and into the mud puddle that was the Lidia’s Diner parking lot, nestled onto a beaten old bicycle, was the object of Officer Cassidy’s frustration.

The woman came to a stop beside the hearse, eying it with a dubious wonder. When she had shaken off the awe, she dismounted the bike and fetched a small notebook from the large basket attached to the handlebars.

“Emery Jackson,” the gorilla-like officer said gruffly. “What brings you here?”

“Murder most foul,” the woman responded with a flourish, if such things were possible and with her, with skin the color of spun molasses, Exitus did not doubt that she could even cut a steak using the cadence of her voice alone.

Officer Cassidy brought a hand to his brow. “Really, now Emery, I wish you wouldn’t do this.”

“And I wish you’d start calling me Emmy like everyone else does, but I guess that’s not happening either.” She looked again at the hearse and then to Exitus, covered in mud from the knees down. She looked slightly puzzled. “You’re not Jake.”

Exitus shrank away from the woman’s intense stare. Back went his index finger to tap rapidly his thumb.

“He’s not a corner,” Officer Cassidy explained. “Just drives that hearse around for fun.”

Emery Jackson opened her notebook and, with a pen pulled from the spiral binding, began to jot down notes. “He the killer? How many bodies? Any apparent motive?”

Again, Officer Cassidy rubbed at his brow. “I’m not disclosing any information at this time.”

Emery Jackson frowned, drummed her pen against the face of her notebook. “This is huge,” she said. “With a story like this I might finally get out of the recipe section.”

The mud on Exitus’s lower half was quite cold. It was hardening into a cumbersome cement and he would have really enjoyed a change of wardrobe.

“—pity you, honestly I do. However, this is not a vehicle for career advancement.”

“A time-frame then?”

“I can’t give out any information at this time. You might as well go home.”

Emery looked as stubborn as a mule, as indefatigable as a barnacle, as beautiful as a swan (and possibly just as vicious). Turning on her heel, she pointed her notebook at Exitus. “What about you?”

“Drifter,” Cassidy explained dryly.

Pen flew across paper, circled and underlined. “Name?”

“No name, poor kid. Born without a tongue and doesn’t even have working arms to sign with.”

“Cassidy—”

“Now you look here, Emery. We’ve got a hell of a scene going on here which you’re trampling all over. We might need whatever impressions there are in this mud, but unfortunately you just took one out with your bike. I need you to go back home and wait for Sheriff Hardell’s news conference. If you want to pester us then you’re more than welcome.”

Maybe Exitus had been a little hasty in calling Emery Jackson indefatigable, for she wilted under the harsh light of the officer’s words.

“Pestering? Pestering? Hey, I’m only doing my job.”

“Your job, Miss Jackson, is to find a page’s worth of recipes before the Wednesday edition goes to print.”

The drying mud on Exitus’s legs was no longer hideously awkward.

Emery managed to both wilt further and bristle like a deneedled porcupine. The girl was truly amazing.

Faintly, in the distance, came the sound of a swarm of police sirens.

Officer Cassidy sighed. “Please, Emery. This is no place for you.”

“I’m not going anywhere. Someone has to break this story.”

“Yes, and it’ll be the hoard of television news cameras hurdling here from all directions. It’ll be the vultures who won’t be able to contain themselves on the other side of the crime scene tape, who won’t be able to wait to break the news that a gruesome murder has just played out in the Town Where Nothing Ever Happens. There’s your headline. You have a head start on them, now go.”

For the first time since arriving at the scene, Emery looked to the Airstream. Wheels and cogs turned audibly.

“I have a lot of work to do here, Emery. Please.”

Her mouth moved, but for a moment only silence passed through full lips. Then: “It wasn’t a customer, was it?”

“There’s a reason why you’re stuck in the cooking section, Emery.”

Bright eyes dulled. Exitus knew such because Emery Jackson returned her attention to him. “Who are you?”

The din of the sirens was at a fever pitch now. Officer Cassidy yelled, but it was doubtful that he did so to be heard over the wailing of backup. “Emery Rose if you don’t get to stepping right now—”

“Just tell me who it is. I’m going to find out eventually, anyway.”

“Adam. It’s Adam in there and if you don’t leave this instant you will be the one to tell Judy personally that her son is dead!”

Emery backed away, her arms pinwheeling in such a manner one would think she’d been forcefully shoved by the massive bulk that was Officer Cassidy. She threw her notebook into the basket on her bike, mounted the rusting hunk of metal, and pedaled out of the parking lot (mindful to follow the path she had taken in) as fast as the mud would allow.

“As for you,” Officer Cassidy spat at Exitus (and, really, he did spit).

He threw up his palms, stupefied by all the people in crisp uniforms exiting their cars and swarming around the bony structure of Officer Vadkowitz. The many people, the rotating lights, reminded him so much of his parents, and he wanted desperately to be back home with Aunt Lily.

“Start your story again, from the top.”