One Day You'll Burn by Joseph Schneider

Author:Joseph Schneider
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Sourcebooks
Published: 2019-12-09T16:00:00+00:00

Chapter 14

The call was passed along to Hollywood Station late the following afternoon. An emergency animal hospital in Toluca Lake had sent a vet out to an address in the hills above Ventura Boulevard, where a dog had been reported seizing in the backyard. By the time the doctor had arrived, the animal was dead. Its owners, she noted, had just returned from their wedding ceremony.

Above the tree line and across the plodding concrete snake of the 101, an orange flare arced into the sky, chased by a cloud of pale smoke. The burst of pyrotechnics signaled the climax of the Universal Studios stunt show, and Jarsdel watched with some longing as the flare cooled and winked out, dropping harmlessly somewhere backstage.

It couldn’t have been more than two miles as the crow flew—a giddy audience sitting enthralled as muscle-bound actors threw looping stage punches, dodged explosions, and plummeted from high scaffolds. Jarsdel knew he could get back in the car and be at the gates of the theme park in under five minutes—plenty of time to spare before the next show, maybe even get a ride in beforehand. When it was over, he could take the backlot tour. He hadn’t done that since he was in grade school and wondered if they still had the shark, the town square from Gremlins, and—his favorite—that big tunnel of churning ice that made it look like you were caught in the barrel of an avalanche.

Jarsdel had only been out of the academy a week before he was called to his first death scene. It was a classic shotgun suicide—barrel under the chin and toe on the trigger. The blast had taken off the front half of the man’s head and distributed it on and around his white faux-leather couch. A piece of skull was even discovered in a nearby fish tank, leaned right up against a mini treasure chest. What remained after the buckshot had done its work wasn’t remotely recognizable as a face—just a splayed mass of pulverized gristle, bone, and bright-yellow fat. On its own, it wouldn’t have been any more upsetting than a pile of roadkill. But the body it erupted from was whole, untouched by the rampage of lead pellets, so the final effect was one of absolute horror, one that lay between what the eye expected to see atop a human form and what it actually beheld.

That had almost been Jarsdel’s last day. It was obvious he wasn’t ready, not for what the job really called for. He was faking it, playing dress-up, and was certain everyone could tell, that they could see it in his ill-fitting uniform and shiny new badge and the way his gun hung awkwardly on his hip. All he wanted to do was run, run back into the arms of what was warm and familiar. He’d tell his parents they were right, that he’d made a terribly foolish mistake, and promise he’d somehow manage to piece his old life back together. Maureen too. They’d only been apart half a year, and he thought he might have a chance at winning her back.

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