Body Surfing

end up spending the daylight hours in a coma. The least she deserved was a smoke before dealing with yet another crazy hillbilly.
    Just as she reached for her pack, however, her thigh buzzed. God, sometimes she hated technology. A cell phone was a snide little angel watching everything you did with a disapproving frown on its face. Whatever happened to privacy? Whatever happened to being alone?
    Her thigh buzzed a second time.
    “Jesus Christ, I’m coming .” Her feet pinched as she jogged up the sidewalk. Why on earth had she decided to wear a pair of $750 Ferragamo fuck-me pumps to a three A.M. emergency call? If someone bled on them, she’d kill the poor bastard herself.
    The phone buzzed one more time as she pulled it from her pants. Mohinder probably. She could swear the rings came closer together when he called. Damn idiot couldn’t handle a routine psychotic break on his own. A most interesting case , she could hear him saying in that hoity-toity British accent, as if he hadn’t grown up ina slummy Mumbai apartment. I really thought a second consultation was in order .
    “Consult my ass,” she grumbled now, flipping her phone open.
    She stopped in her tracks.
    “Hmph.”
    She felt a faint tingle in her thighs, as if her phone were still in the pocket of her skin-tight Jil Sanders. Instead of an incoming call, the screen promised “6 NEW MESSAGES.” Only one person texted her with that kind of insistence.
    Larry.
    Lawrence Bishop was an EMT with Riverview, which was less an ambulance service than a hearse-cum–paddy wagon of last resort. He and Sue had been having a thing for almost eight months now, ever since he’d dragged a twitching nineteen-year-old into the ER and said, “Crack or crazy? You decide.” He’d helped her wrestle the kid into an examination room, then volunteered to stick around “just in case.” She was acutely conscious of his eyes on her—blue eyes, the color washed out from two decades of weed and acid. The teenager was virtually aphasic. The only word he seemed capable of saying was “Beetles!” (or, who knows, maybe Beatles), which he screamed out at irregular intervals. The blistered lips and powder burns on his fingers were more informative, however, not to mention the pipe the EMT had taken off him, and after she sent the boy upstairs to detox she asked the paramedic if he wanted to get a cup of coffee. In answer, he kicked the door closed, then produced a tiny glassine containing a few white crystals. “Is that crack?” Sue asked, outraged, but also strangely excited. “It’s got a helluva lot more kick than a cup of coffee.” The EMT smiled wickedly. “My name’s Larry. I’ll tell you again when we’re finished, ’cause I expect you’ll have forgotten by then.”
    He was the filthiest man she’d ever met. He’d sneak up on her, stick his fingers in her panties and then suck on them like a lollipop, call when he knew she was making rounds and leave long, graphically detailed messages about what he planned to do to her that weekend—promises he always made good on. Sometimes he texted her fifteen-second movies of himself masturbating that he shot while he was driving the ambulance. Given the hour, not to mention the fact that he was working weekend graveyards (which is why, when you got right down to it, she’d worn the Ferragamos and the Jil Sanders), it was one of Larry’s videos she expected to see when she clicked on her inbox.
    Instead a nearly unrecognizable silver blob flashed on the small screen. A car. The remains of a car. Not a piece of glass was left in the windows, not an inch of metal uncrumpled. The hood itself had been ripped in half, which Sue recognized as the work of the Jaws of Life. Although who could have lived through whatever caused so much damage? The pile of metal looked less like a wrecked automobile than a beetle God had crushed beneath his heel.
    The successive pictures each got closer to the vehicle. Sue found herself wondering when Larry had had time to snap them. Hadn’t he been saving people? Or had there been no one to save? She saw the oil and glass glistening on the roadway, the blood saturating the upholstery of the seats, tattered bits of clothing blowing through the air like confetti. In one of those small ironies that made you think there really is a god—and that he gets his kicks out of fucking with us—the six empty beer cans that had presumably been the accident’s catalyst were all pristine, despite