Kiss by John Lutz Page B

shards of glass fell and sparkled like bright sequins on the dashboard.
    Carver sucked in his breath and dropped low in the seat, scrunched sideways and half on the floor. He did this almost instantly, but not before he saw the white Cadillac filling the rearview mirror. Fear shot through him with the suddenness of the bullet through the windshield.
    With his head just high enough so he could peer over the dashboard, he kept one hand on the steering wheel and used the other to press down on the accelerator. All he could really see was the long expanse of the Olds’s gleaming hood. He tried to picture the straight, narrow street, tried to remember if there were any parked cars. Any oncoming traffic. Tried to forget his fear.
    Hell with it. No choice but to stay close to the center line and go.
    Go!
    The Olds jumped forward, engine roaring and tires screaming. Carver’s heart kept pace with the racing engine. His hip battered against the transmission hump. After a few seconds, he chanced bouncing up high enough to get a fix on what was ahead, ducking back down immediately so he wouldn’t provide a target.
    It looked clear all the way to the intersection. He risked giving the car more gas, picking up speed. Flying low! He was going to make it!
    There was a loud grinding sound and the steering wheel bent his thumb back painfully and jerked out of his damp and slippery hand. The Olds lurched sideways, rocked, shuddered, stopped. The engine died.
    Carver didn’t want to die next, but that seemed to be the idea.
    Wishing like crazy he’d brought his old Colt automatic that was taped to the back of a dresser drawer in Edwina’s bedroom, he lunged sideways and worked the passenger door handle. He shoved the door open, gripped the side of the seat and pulled, gaining enough leverage to help him clamber out the right side of the car.
    As soon as he struck the pavement he was up on one elbow, looking in every direction, tensed for a bullet, trying to figure out which way to roll. He swiveled his head this way and that so violently he hurt his neck.
    The white Cadillac was gone.
    He was alone in the middle of the street.
    It wasn’t the kind of neighborhood where citizens rushed outside at the sound of an accident, even when the temperature wasn’t in the nineties. There weren’t many people living in the degenerating industrial neighborhood at all. He thought he heard a door slam. An old man carrying a bottle in a crinkled paper sack glanced over at him and shuffled on out of sight. A dog began barking incessantly in the next block, as if to warn everyone that something unusual was going down and for God’s sake don’t get involved.
    The Olds was angled at forty-five degrees in the street. Carver used the side of the car for support to lever himself to his feet. The elbow he’d landed on was throbbing, but he didn’t think it was broken. But what the hell, he wasn’t a doctor. Better wait to see if it swelled.
    On the left of the Olds and slightly behind it was an old black pickup truck. Carver had sideswiped it, adding to its lifetime collection of dents. The driver’s-side door was creased, and flakes of rust jarred loose from the impact lay like dried blood on the street.
    No choice but to stay inside the law. Carver kept his palms on the Olds’s sun-heated metal and limped around to the damaged truck. He fished in his pocket and got out one of his business cards, then reached through the truck’s open window and got a yellow stub of a pencil that was lying on the dash. He wrote “Sorry—call me” on the back of the card and stuck it beneath one of the truck’s wipers, then tossed the pencil back inside. He didn’t really expect to hear from the truck’s owner, who might not even notice the new dent.
    The man in the Cadillac had only been trying to frighten him further, he was sure. The bullet that had starred the Olds’s windshield had penetrated the plastic rear window in the convertible top and snapped over