Read My Life as a White Trash Zombie for Free Online Page B

or seven different kinds, but I knew them well enough that I didn’t need them to be in separate, labeled prescription bottles. Good thing, since I didn’t have prescriptions for any of them.
    Resisting the urge to snag the Vicodin out, I settled for a Xanax instead. I only had the one Vicodin, and there was no sense wasting it when all I really wanted was some help getting to sleep. I returned the other pills back to the bottle, replaced it in its hiding spot, and washed the Xanax down with a beer from the mini-fridge in my room.
    Flipping off the lights, I crawled under my blankets and waited for the lovely wave of relaxation to wash over me.
    Twenty minutes later I was still wide awake.
    By six-thirty I was forced to admit that whatever I’d taken must not have been Xanax.
    I scowled into the darkness. Well, this sucked . Since I didn’t know what the hell I had taken, I didn’t dare try to see if something else would do the trick. I’d hit my OD quota for the month already, thank you.
    I stubbornly stayed in bed. At some point after eight I finally fell asleep, still waiting for the Xanax to kick in.

Chapter 5
    Despite the failure of Xanax, I managed to get a good night’s sleep, and actually got out of bed when my alarm went off. As soon as I made it in to work, my training began in earnest. Nick was an obsessive-compulsive, anal-retentive jerk with no social skills, but he took his job damn seriously and was hell bent on making sure I was totally prepared for anything. For the rest of the week I was drilled, instructed, trained, and learned to fucking death, but I gritted my teeth, managed to keep from bitch-slapping Nick, and actually got the hang of the whole thing faster than I ever expected. It helped that there wasn’t much about the job that was particularly difficult or complicated. The van drivers were also called bodysnatchers, and that’s basically what our job was: Go to the death scene, grab the dead person, stuff’em into a body bag. And if there were ever any doubts or questions, the investigator was there to clear things up.
    I’d braced myself for all sorts of gross or weird stuff when it came to the dead people. Rotten bodies, bizarre suicides, that sort of thing. I was ready for it. I was determined not to freak out, no matter what.
    What I wasn’t prepared for was the cops.
    Cops everywhere, and me trying to keep from looking all guilty and spastic every time one happened to glance my way. I kept having to remind myself I wasn’t in trouble, wasn’t being hassled—I had no reason to instantly get all defensive. And for the most part the cops and detectives ignored me, or at least didn’t give me anything more than the grunt and nod that they gave various other non-cop types who happened to be on the scene.
    I’d been on the job for a whole four days before I managed to run into the two detectives who knew exactly what kind of loser I was.
    It was Detective Abadie who recognized me first. We were in the front yard of a two-story house in a nice-as-hell gated subdivision. The overweight and out of shape guy who owned the house had apparently decided that having a half-million dollar house meant that he couldn’t afford to hire someone to clean out his gutters. Now he was dead with what looked to me like a broken neck after the ladder had slipped. He’d taken the plunge into his fancy landscaping—complete with rock garden. But hey, his fucking gutters were clean.
    Abadie’s dark eyes scanned the area, skimmed across me and then came back, narrowing. He took in the insignia on my shirt—his mouth pursing as if he’d eaten something bitter. Meanwhile I pretended to be focusing on something intensely interesting near the body so that I didn’t have to meet his gaze. But I could still see him nudge Detective Roth and whisper something. It wasn’t too difficult to figure out the general gist of what he was saying. The burly detective turned around, but to my surprise a smile spread