"Good evening Mrs. Royster. My name is Hank Bristol. You don't know me but my wife Becky works for your husband. I don't know how to say this but I just found out that your husband and my wife are having an affair."
"That son-of-a-bitch!" She exploded, "I knew it. I told him if he cheated on me again I would cut his dick off and divorce him."
"Here's your chance. He has a room at the Suites Hotel in Cedarburg. He's there all alone because my wife had a traffic accident driving up and is in a hospital.
Norrmally the trip to Milwaukee takes about ninety minutes. I made it in sixty-five. I parked by the emergency room entrance and tried to find someone to help me. I saw an open door and charged in.
There were better than a dozen people in the waiting room. The only woman working had three people standing at her station; two were dripping blood on the floor. They ignored me as I pushed the doors open and plunged into the hospital. I followed the signs to reception.
When I found the front desk a young lady asked who I was there to see. She typed each letter as I spelled my last name then called someone. She spoke in a hushed voice but I could make out her asking if Becky was still alive. She smiled a nervous smile, "I'll have someone here in a minute to take you upstairs."
A young girl, we used to call them candy stripers, walked into the lobby with a serious look on her face. "If you could please come with me Mr. Bristol."
Carole must have spread the word about the accident and my phone hadn't stopped ringing. I ignored every call. "I'm sorry but could you please turn your cell phone off." A state trooper had walked into the room. "Good evening Mr. Bristol. I need to ask you a few questions."
"They estimate you wife was doing at least 75 when she plowed into the subcompact. Her full sized SUV crushed it into a small pile of wreckage. They never had a chance. He showed me a video of the mangled wreckage. The gas tank on the car she crashed into ruptured and exploded into an inferno. I had to sit down. The officer kept talking but I was oblivious to what the words meant. Eventually he stopped talking. I threw up into a wastebasket.
Time dragged by. I tried to stop looking at the damn clock but I still hear it ticking every second as it passed into eternity.
I tried to refocus my thoughts to how I would reign down vengeance on Royster.
Finally, after three hours and fourteen minutes a doctor entered the room; his scrubs had splotches of blood on them. He sat me down and gave me the graphic details. It didn't look good. When he was finished he offered to escort me to her room.
I was more than a little shocked when I saw Becky. Her body was wrapped in something that looked like gauze and tubes and wires made a nest around her. Her head was wrapped up with two little slits where her eyes should have been. I could see tears welling up in the darkness then running down what was left of her cheeks.
It was several minutes before she realized I was standing there, staring at her.
She began to make noises. I think she was trying to say I'm sorry.
"I've spoken with a state trooper. If you live you will be charged with three counts of vehicular manslaughter. The woman you killed was seven months pregnant. She burned to death trying to rescue her two year old son from his car seat. You will also be charged with murdering her unborn child. Impossibly, the pupils of her eyes grew huge. I could see a terror in them as she glimpsed eternity in hell.
A moment later a seizure gripped Becky. Her eyes grew gray. The sound from the machine monitoring her went from a regular beep to an ominous flat tone. All hell broke loose as people flooded into the room trying to wrestle her back from the banks of the River Styx. It was too late she had already paid Charon, the ferryman of Hades, a coin for passage. Becky had left the world of the living and joined that of the dead.
