Free Now Let's Talk of Graves by Sarah Shankman

piece.”
    Zoe, who had dozed off, groaned, “Oh, lordy.”
    *
    G.T. didn’t know what had come over her.
    Usually she just followed the calls on the ambulance’s radio. That’s what she was supposed to do. But tonight, for the past half hour, she’d had this itchy feeling. A little voice inside kept whispering things.
    “G.T., where the hell you think you’re going?”
    That wasn’t the little voice. That was Arkadelphia Lolley, who was her partner tonight. The 300-pound white man from Tallulah bit down on his words real hard, the way people from north Louisiana did.
    “We supposed to be sitting right here till we get a call to go. Covering our section. What exactly is it you have in mind? You hungry? Is it some oysters that you want? A po’boy?”
    “That’s what’s on your mind, Ark. I can’t even begin to explain what’s on mine.”
    “Well, I just hope you tell ’em it was you who was driving when they call us in and chew us out for not being where we supposed to. What we gone do we get a call we can’t get to in time ’cause you got some weird bug up your butt? ’Specially after we lost that little bitty sucker yesterday got up and ran? You think we ain’t got enough trouble?”
    “It’s me who’ll do the explaining,” G.T. said, thinking that that was going to be awfully hard to do. She could just hear herself saying: Unh-huh, and then this voice in my head said: This here’s the goddess speaking, get yourself on over to Uptown. Right. Left. Left. Right. Now keep on heading toward St. Charles. Good girl.
    Like I was her baby child.
    *
    All of a sudden Church stopped. He gave no signal, no warning, just braked right in the middle of an intersection.
    “Oh, my God,” Kitty moaned as they pulled on around, double-parking a little way up in the next block of St. Charles. “Oh, Lord, what now?”
    Kitty and Sam and the driver jumped out. Zoe stayed put.
    Church stumbled from the Mercedes, leaned against its side.
    “He’s two blocks from home,” Kitty muttered, lifting her pink silk that was already ruined in the quickening rain. “You’d think he could wait to take a leak.”
    “And that he could get out of the middle of the street,” said the driver.
    It was then that the Buick charged from out of nowhere. Or at least that’s how it seemed in the wet, moonless night. The thirty-year-old car with the grille full of chrome teeth lunged from the river side of St. Charles like a charging dinosaur.
    “Church!!!” Kitty screamed.
    And then there was a long silence, the kind that goes hand in hand with disaster.
    Sam had seen hideous things happen before. They were always in slow motion. They took forever. You could reach out and stop them.
    If you could just make yourself move.
    If you could only get there in time.
    Sam ran.
    She pulled up her skirt, kicked off her high-heeled silver sandals, and sprinted full out.
    The face of her lover Sean, killed four years before by a drunk driver, flew through her mind.
    She couldn’t save Sean, but she could save Church. If she could just run faster. Faster. Faster.
    But she wasn’t Superwoman. She couldn’t reach Church in time.
    He was leaning over—maybe to throw up, maybe to tie his shoe. Whatever it was, it was the last thing Church Lee would ever do. The lumbering dinosaur of a Buick chewed right into him and took his head in one bite.
    *
    “Jehoshaphat!” said Arkadelphia as G.T. pulled up to the intersection. “Did you see that? Man popped up, his head squashed just like a watermelon. Holy jehoshaphat!”
    *
    The driver of the dark Buick threw the car into reverse. Rubber fried. The big car swerved, just missed a royal palm. It grazed the rear of G.T.’s ambulance. There was the sound of tinkling glass.
    “Oh, my Lord!” Arkadelphia groaned. “We’re in for it now.”
    G.T. threw her door wide and jumped out.
    The Buick straightened, tapped the ambulance again in a second pass, then roared across the grassy boulevard divider which