Free Highway 24 by Jeff Chapman Page B

trickled in red rivulets across her cheeks. There was no way to stop in time.
    “This is a highway, you fool,” Paul said aloud to the girl. His voice was hushed, quivering.
    Dead grass crunched underfoot somewhere in the distance. He jerked his head around to scan every direction. I’m spooked .
    “Hello?” he called. No answer, which simultaneously reassured and unnerved him. A mouse, he convinced himself, gleaning for seeds. He shivered in the crisp autumn air. A chill rose under his skin. Rising fear of the law and the darkness made his decision easy. He turned back to the girl and her stiff eyes. “I’m sorry, miss. I’m really sorry.”
    He strode the twenty feet to his car, fighting the urge to run, insisting his assumed demeanor translate into a real emotion. Terrified people make mistakes. He gulped deep breaths. Through a force of will he slowed to calculated inhalations. Open the door; key in the ignition; drive. He repeated the phrase again and again, imprinting the mundane instructions into his thoughts.
    When he stopped beside his open car door, he found his hand still clutched her shoe. He raised his arm to sling it back at the body. Fingerprints. DNA. What more could forensics extract from a shoe? He flung it into the passenger seat, where it landed upright with the tapered toe pointing toward the body on the highway.
    The car roared to life as he gunned the engine. He looked up and his hands jerked off the wheel as horror gripped him. A crack no thicker than a hair wove from the top to the bottom of the windshield, a fault line in the glass. A rock, he decided. A rock hit it. That’s common enough . Down the road he sped, just within the limits his shuddering hands could manage. Where to ditch the shoe? A memory hanging out of reach haunted him, something about the shoe, as if he had seen it before. Not that kind of shoe, but that particular shoe. But that was impossible...wasn’t it?
    Red reflectors glowed in the distance, flashing brighter as he passed a hatchback sitting on the shoulder. Her car? Nothing to be done. She had jumped on the road. The moment she launched over the hood was seared in his memory. The clunks rang in his head, louder in retrospect, as her head struck glass and metal. He imagined the skull fracturing like a soft-boiled egg, driving splinters of broken bone into her hemorrhaging brain where her dented head bled out.
    He closed his eyes and shook his head to clear the sickening thoughts of the death for which he bore responsibility. My God, I’m one of those disgusting hit and run drivers. Aren’t they just pathetic cowards? A dull ache spread across his forehead, warning of an incipient migraine. Think positive, he told himself. Damn, that’s what those inspirational speakers the sales managers always trotted out would say. God, he hated those quacks.
    His only comfort was she must have died from the first blow. At least he didn’t make her suffer. No one survived that sort of trauma.
    Find a payphone, call it in anonymously. That was the smart thing to do, get out of trouble, but it did nothing to assuage his guilt.
    The yellow dashes zipped past him, marking his distance from the accident. A sudden chill shook his innards and inched across his skin, extending its fingers down his back as hoarfrost spreads over a window. The ache across his forehead throbbed. Now, I’m getting sick. He figured he deserved some measure of physical pain. A sweet, heavy scent filled the car. Lilacs? Look back . The urge crept into his thoughts. You’re spooked, he told himself. He forced his mind elsewhere, anywhere but that bundle on the road behind him. He focused on the dark pavement emerging beneath the headlights, watched for the mile markers, anything to resist the habit of glancing at the mirror.
    Burnt rubber fouled the air, mixing with the lilac scent. He glanced at the dash to find the temperature gauge read normal. Ignoring the latest smell, he turned back to the endless