The Lazarus Heart by Poppy Z. Brite Read Free Book Online Page B

shit is the worst," Frank said.
    Linda nodded, flicking the butt of her cigarette out the window of the squad car as he answered dispatch.
    "Yeah, we're only a couple of blocks from there now," he said into the radio handset, and turned the car around. Now, whenever he thinks back on the four or five minutes before they reached the maze of tenements bordering St. Louis No. 1 Cemetery, it always seems that there was some vague sense of foreboding, something more urgent than the usual dread of getting himself in between two people who hate each other as bad as married couples can. But that's probably bullshit and he knows it, like someone seeing St. Paul in a bowl of gumbo just before they almost choked to
    death on a crab shell, making something out of nothing for the sake of consolation. "I know you must have heard this a hundred times in training," he said to Linda,
    talking fast like he always did when he was nervous, "but this mundane shit is a hundred times more dangerous than, say, robbery calls or drug busts. At least you go into those expecting someone to take a shot at you or something. Shit like this, you just never fucking know what to expect."
    "I hear you," said Linda, trying to sound tough and sure of herself. The way that Frank remembers it, he wished she really did.
    A small crowd had already gathered by the time they pulled up outside the graffiti- covered red brick building, people in the muddy yard and a few standing in the street looking at something on the blacktop. Distrusting, resentful faces turned toward them as they got out of the car. Frank remembers thinking that at least the rain had stopped.
    "What the hell you gonna do about this?" a woman said, a short woman almost as wide as she was tall, with mint-green curlers sprouting from her hair. Frank could hear a man's voice from one of the apartments, loud and crazy.
    "You folks need to go on home," he started, and then he heard Linda gasp, the sound someone makes when they've just seen something a hundred times worse than they've ever imagined anything could possibly be.
    "Don't you be tellin' me to hush up and go away," the fat woman scolded, strident, angry. "I done asked you what you gonna do about this!" But Frank had already turned his back on her, was staring at Linda standing on the other side of the car, one hand over her mouth and her voice filtered through her fingers.
    "What is it?" he asked. "What's wrong?" But she was already pointing at the thing he'd noticed in the street as they'd pulled up to the curb. A fucking dead cat, he thought. Jesus, she better not be pulling this scene on me over a goddamn dead cat in the fucking road.
    Linda fumbled for her cigarettes, lit one and inhaled frantically to keep from vomiting, a trick he knew well. "Frank!' she mumbled, "Oh, God. Oh, look at it."
    He stepped around the back of the patrol car, trying to keep his eyes on the restless onlookers and the general direction he'd heard the man's voice coming from, trying to get a better look at whatever his partner saw lying in the street.
    It wasn't a cat. He saw that a second later, a glimpse of the small brown body between the figures huddled around it, naked skin and sticky red smeared across the blacktop. The baby was maybe six months old, and Frank didn't have to ask to know that a car had run over its head.
    Linda was leaning against the car, coughing, repeating, "Oh, God, oh, God," over and over like a prayer between puffs, like maybe there was some way to forget what she'd just seen, a trick that would allow her to unsee it. Someone in the crowd laughed then, a dry, hard laugh that Frank remembers as clearly as the broken body. And then the first gunshot and he could move again, the spell broken. He remembers yelling at Linda to get her shit together, pull it together right then or he was going to kick her fucking ass.
    "I'm sorry," she whispered, wiping her mouth and reaching toward her holster. "But Jesus, Frank..."
    "There ain't nothin' you