Shallow Graves

doctor said, “I’ve got a son works at the IHplant. He’s a manager. He can take some time off and leave a note on your camper door.”
    “Be obliged.”
    Pellam watched the doctor take a small chart from beside the bed and write on it.
    “Who was it? Who hit me?”
    The doctor kept writing.
    Pellam wondered if it was a hit-and-run, wondered who the driver was—some hotshot, a kid, probably.
    Wondered too if it really was an accident.
    Thinking of the mural of crosses on the Winnebago.
    Thinking: Goodbye . . .
    Maybe he should call the sheriff. That’d be the smart thing to—
    The doctor looked up. “She’s outside.”
    “What?”
    “She’s here. She’s been waiting to see you.”
    “Who?” Pellam asked. (Did he mean Trudie? Damn, I hope I called her.)
    “The driver. The woman who hit you.”
    “Oh,” Pellam said. “With a lawyer?”
    “Just by herself.”
    He said, “Can I see her?”
    “You want to see her?”
    “I guess.”
    The doctor said, “Then you can see her.”
    PELLAM’S FIRST REACTION was that she was pretty but not sexy. Pert ’n’ perky, he thought, discouraged. Not his type at all. A girl with a mile-wide smile.
    She was maybe thirty-two, thirty-three, but looked older—something about the teased blond hair, theheavy pale makeup, the fleshy panty hose made her seem matronly. Pellam could picture her as a Miss America contestant, with a baton, sending it sailing up into the height of the proscenium. Her face was blank when she entered the room but as soon as she was over the threshold, she grinned shy crevices around her mouth.
    He was expecting: Goshhowy’allfeelin’?
    But she didn’t sound that way at all.
    “Welcome to Cleary,” she said in a low, sexy voice that almost made him ignore the mask of pancake makeup. She walked right up to the bed and stuck her hand out.
    She saw the scar and it threw her. The facade cracked for a minute then the down-home smile returned. “Meg Torrens.”
    “John Pellam.”
    Her mouth went tight. “I don’t know what to say.”
    Pellam knew what to think: Bummer. He’d done a fast inventory. A cocktail ring that wouldn’t quit, a wedding band, a fat rock of an engagement ring.
    Pellam said to her, “Not a problem. These things happen.”
    (Pellam had a lawyer one time, a former flower child who’d done a pretty good job for him on a legal matter—at a time when he needed a lawyer to do a pretty good job. The ponytailed man’d been real concerned about what Pellam said in public and he’d drummed into his client’s head that there were a lot of things you shouldn’t say to people you might be involved with in court. It occurred to him now that he probably shouldn’t have said, Not a problem. )
    Her eyes were on his scar.
    He said, “You’re not responsible.”
    She blinked.
    He touched his arm. “Not for that, I mean. I’d show you the bruise that’s got your name on it but I don’t know you well enough yet.”
    She said, “That one looks pretty bad.”
    “Happened a long time ago.”
    “I don’t think I want to know how.”
    “I was driving an Olds 88 and firing a machine gun out the window. Somebody shot the car with a rocket. I think it was a rocket. I’m not sure. It blew up.”
    She stared at him, waiting for the truth, then gave a burst of polite laugh, which faded fast. “A machine gun.”
    “An Uzi, I think.” Pellam frowned and thought hard. “No, a MAC-10.”
    He nodded again. Right, a MAC-10. And a rocket. And a terrier that looked a little like a poodle. He didn’t have amnesia. He looked at her. What was her name again?
    “A MAC-10,” he repeated.
    She stared a moment more. She handed him a white plastic bag with handles on it. “Present,” she said. Her cheeks were red and Pellam loved that. As much as he loved freckles he loved blushing women even more. He couldn’t remember the last time he’d seen a pretty woman blushing. In L.A., all women were like Trudie; genetically incapable of it.
    He opened the bag. The present wasn’t wrapped but there was a bow on the box. A new Polaroid camera.
    “What happened to the old one?” he asked.
    “It got kind of mashed.”
    He laughed. “You didn’t have to. The company’ll pay for it.”
    She smiled cautiously, maybe not sure whether he meant her insurance company or his film company. What he’d meant was his company but then he figured it was all going on her tab anyway—camera, the veterinarian’s bill and a little moolah for pain