Damage by Mark Feggeler Page A

managed to hang on until the ambulance got there."
    "Sheila!" the other waitress yelled, startling them all. "Ain't you watching your order?"
    "Oh, shit," Sheila hissed. She hustled away to the kitchen, but not before telling Ray not to go anywhere.
    Her sudden disappearance, combined with Walter's resentment toward Ray for having commandeered the conversation with such a tantalizing tale, dropped them into a silence stirred only by the rotating of the ceiling fan above them. Ray closed his eyes for a moment to enjoy the lovely calmness. Recollections of the morning he had just described jostled uneasily around in his head. There was Evan Wallace, stiff as a piece of firewood on the hearth, all his blood drained out of him like a deer ready for the taxidermist. And his wife, Correen, visions of her broken and bloodied at the base of her luxurious home, like a cardinal that fell from its nest, mixing with visions of her vivacious and striking in her simple red dress at the groundbreaking less than twenty-four hours earlier. He wondered if she were still clinging to life at the hospital, assuming she had even survived the ride there. He could see her propped up in bed, tubes and wires sustaining her and monitoring her condition.
    The distant sound of a man's voice cut through the fogginess of his thoughts. He tried to ignore it, to keep his attention on the patient before him, but the voice persisted.   Then his chin sprang up from his chest and his eyes popped open.
    "Huh?" Ray mumbled.
    "I told you wake up, Sleeping Beauty," Walter said. "Your food's here."
    Ray rubbed his eyes and checked his phone. At most, he had dozed for a few minutes. He examined the chili cheeseburger and onion rings before him. Maybe because he was over-hungry, or the remembrance of the morning's details had turned his stomach, he found himself no longer interested in eating. He picked at one of the onion rings and ate it slowly just to see if his appetite might return once a little sustenance entered his system. He looked around. Two new tables of customers had Sheila momentarily distracted. The wind appeared to be picking up outside. Pine trees in the municipal park across the road swayed from side to side, pushed along by the breeze kicked up by passing eighteen wheelers.
    "You think there's any way I can avoid Becky today?" Ray asked.
    Walter wiped egg yolk off his plate with his final bite of toast. "Man up and quit being such a pussy. The quicker you get it over with, the better it is for all of us, especially today."
    "What makes today different from any other?"
    "Because she and Charlie aren't talking to each other again," Walter said. "They must have had some big blowout over the weekend. She showed up an hour early and in a piss poor mood this morning, then you dicking around with that story didn't help matters."
    "I did the best I could given the circumstances," Ray said defensively.  
    "It sucked and you know it," Walter admonished. "She barely had time to fix your typos, so it went to press pretty much the way you sent it in."
    "It did suck," Ray admitted and rubbed his temples. "That's not the worst of it. Redmond confiscated the new camera. Kept saying it was evidence from the scene of the crime."
    "You lost the camera?" Walter's eyes widened and his face lit up. He broke into a loud, prolonged guffaw that drew the attention of the seven other people in the Greasy Spoon. He laughed until tears welled in his eyes. "You are so screwed!"

Monday, Part VIII

    Walking through the Greasy Spoon parking lot to the sidewalk, then immediately right and through the Citizen-Gazette parking lot, Ray felt naked without the camera strap tugging at his neck. Instead, he carried a plastic container filled with the cheeseburger and onion rings he hadn't eaten. He paused at the door, took a deep breath, and entered.
    The sales department was empty except for Melissa, the classified ads secretary, who thankfully was busy on the phone. The receptionist's