Rise Again by Ben Tripp Page A

limbs—it looked as if he was trying to keep on running, even inside the vehicle. His wrists were cut through the skin from the zip-tie handcuffs that bound them together.
    Danny was sweating profusely and so out of breath she could hardly see through the dark purple fireworks behind her eyes. She could smell herself: the sweet, yeasty stink of an alcohol binge.
    “…Three times before he stopped swinging long enough to get the cuffs on him,” Nick was saying. He had an ice pack pressed to his cheekbone.
    Danny had arrived after a brisk ten-minute slog along the mountainside to the Chevron station, and she was still doubled up with her hands on her knees, trying to get her wind back. The police car was parked around behind the gas station, next to the LP tank for filling barbecue cylinders. The deputies had shown some good sense, getting the perp out of sight of the general public before a crowd gathered. Highway Patrolman Park was posted by the corpse. The Bixby twins and their cousin Cub were in the hands of a neighbor. The situation was stabilized, Danny estimated. Now she had to figure out what to do with this maniac who was beating himself to a pulp in the back of the cruiser.
    “You tasered him three times?” Danny said, because she hadn’t been listening.
    “I had to,” Nick said, defensive. In fact, Danny didn’t care if he’d beaten the man senseless with a shovel. Not today. But Nick was conditioned to expect disapproval if any situation escalated out of his control, as this one certainly had. “What are we gonna do?” he added, when Danny failed to reprimand him.
    “I don’t know,” she said, and this was such a rare admission that both Nick and Ted were startled into looking closely at Danny’s blotchy, sweating face. “Quit staring at me,” she said. “Think of something yourselves.”
    All three of them stood there and pretended to think. The manager of the Chevron station, Artie Moys, was leaning against his old Toyota by the trash cans, waiting for them to get the nutcase off his property; until then, it didn’t seem decent somehow to leave the police standing around alone. A couple of tourists were peeking around the hurricane fence, but from their perspective there wasn’t much to see: Through the back window of the cruiser, the perp looked more like laundry bouncing around in a commercial dryer than anything else. But everybody within thirty meters could hear his discordant screams, muffled by the glass but still excruciatingly sharp.
    Danny drew a normal breath for the first time since she’d left the corpse on the hill. She could think. She’d have the deputies hogtie this individual in the free cell back at the Sheriff’s Station, then get the paramedics to have a look at him when they were done fucking around with the dead man in the woods. Maybe they could take the wild man away with them alongside the corpse, or Patrolman Park could drive him down the mountain after them in his slick late-model vehicle. Then somebody was going to have to clean the back of the Crown Victoria with bleach and paper towels. She wiped the sweat off her face with her hands and stood upright, ignoring the pain in her side. Time to make a statement to her minions, outlining the plan. She drew another breath to speak.
    At that moment, the man in the back of the patrol car went limp and collapsed.
    “What the fuck,” Danny said, instead of her prepared statement. She strode over to the car, her legs sore from the hike, and examined the now-still man through the window. He was dead. He had to be. His naked ribcage wasn’t moving. Nobody could scream for half an hour and flail around like he did without gasping for air.
    Danny waited. If the captive was somehow holding his breath as a ruse, she wasn’t going to let what was left of her humane impulses put her in harm’s way. The deputies were exclaiming loudly to her left and right.
    “Shut up,” she barked, and popped the door latch. They all stood