Effigy by Theresa Danley Page B

against his chest. Panting, but otherwise unscathed, he watched the Ford’s taillights merge and finally dissolve into traffic. Straining to catch his breath, Peet pulled Lori close. They were safe.
    Just as his muscles relaxed to the anticlimactic silence that followed, the automatic lawn sprinklers erupted with an icy assault of their own.

 
     
     
     
     
     
     
     
    Laboratory
     
    “Who the hell was that son-of-a-bitch!”
    Lori flung the lab door open which would have collided with Peet’s face had his palm not caught it first. Her surging fury surprised him. He’d never seen her so erratic and it caught him off guard. As she hobbled into the lab, he rushed forward and compliantly helped her to the nearest stool.
    “Sit down, Lori, before you hurt yourself.”
    She plopped onto the stool with a huff. “Did you get the license plate on that car? It was a black car. Maybe blue. I couldn’t really tell.”
    “Just settle down.”
    “It was a Honda. Definitely a Honda. Or maybe a Toyota .”
    With Lori seated, though frantic as she was, Peet peeled off the shredded remains of the gravel-specked lab coat. He brushed aside a lock of hair that had stuck to her cheek and noticed a mat of blood near the hairline.
    “Don’t move,” he said. “Let me see if I can find something for that.”
    Lori wasn’t listening. “It was definitely a Toyota .”
    “It was a Ford Taurus,” he said, opening a cupboard. He found a bottle of rubbing alcohol and moved on to the roll of paper towels standing beside a lab sink.
    “It doesn’t matter,” she spat. “I want to know who the hell was driving it.”
    Peet poured some alcohol over a towel. “Let me see your head.”
    Lori’s body trembled, whether out of excitement or just shivering from cold, Peet couldn’t tell. After all, his own damp clothes were giving him a chill. He dabbed at the cut on her head and Lori pulled back.
    “What the hell?”
    Peet stepped in closer. “You want that to get infected?”
    Lori rolled her eyes. She looked downright pitiful. Her neatly wrapped pony tail had been reduced to a heap of limp, wet straw and there was a long scrape trailing the ridge of her left cheek. The collar of her soppy university sweater had been stretched out of proportion, while grass and mud clung to her jeans, her knees bleeding through. She’d lost a shoe and her ankle had an alarming swell to it.
    He dabbed at her scalp again. “Did you get a good look at him?”
    “Hell no!” she blurted sarcastically. “Everything happened so fast. And he was wearing a mask.”
    “Like a ski mask?”
    “No. More like Zorro’s mask. Just around his eyes.”
    “That’s odd.”
    Peet finished cleaning the cut and as he stepped back to inspect his handiwork, Lori snatched the towel and started wiping the street grime from her hands. Before he could stop her, she slid off the stool and hobbled toward the storage room.
    “I can’t believe this,” she muttered. “I can’t freaking believe this.”
    “Lori, would you sit down and rest a minute?”
    She still wasn’t listening. Peet should have expected as much. It was always difficult to sidetrack her once she had something on her mind. With a resigned sigh, he followed her into the devastated storage room.
    Lori was still mumbling to herself as she carefully waded through the wreckage. Peet, too, found the scene unbelievable. For a fleeting moment he tried to convince himself that it was all a terrible nightmare, but he knew himself better than that. His mind could only work with facts which left him little freedom for delusions. Lori, on the other hand, seemed more willing to give fallacy a try.
    “This did not just happen,” she kept repeating as she waded toward the effigy’s empty storage container sitting kilter upon the shelf. She righted it and peered inside.
    “I don’t believe this,” she said, shaking her head.
    The fury returned to her eyes and in one swift movement she pulled the container off