'Am I going the right way?'
'Yeah. You turn at the crossing…I'll show you where it is.'
I followed the kid's directions, slowing down when we got close. The bridge was really a concrete overpass between two pieces of rock. It looked like the gap had been hacked out a hundred years ago. No water underneath. No road either, just dark stone. We parked the Plymouth, got out and walked over.
The barrier was stone too. It looked old, weathered, with big pieces chipped away. The railing had a bubble in it, where you could stand and look down— maybe it was scenic in the daytime. The railing was waist–high— you couldn't just fall over, it would take a real commitment.
A car swept by behind us. Not even eleven at night and it was pretty deserted. The paper said the girl went over sometime after two in the morning.
I took out my pencil flash, flicked it over the stone barrier. Nothing. The top of the barrier was flat. It was so clean it looked scrubbed. No graffiti, no chiseled hearts. I bellied up to it, looked down.
Into the Zero.
'Y
ou okay?' It was the kid's voice.
I turned around. 'Sure. Why?'
'You were…standing there so long. I thought you were…'
'What? Gonna jump?'
'No! I didn't mean that.'
'I'm okay. I was just trying to feel it.'
'Feel it?'
'What she felt.'
The kid nodded like he understood. But his hands were shaking. I lit a cigarette. Smoked it through. Snapped the red tip into the Zero.
'You want to drive?' I asked him.
H
e started tentatively, getting the feel of the controls— the way you're supposed to. He gave it too much gas coming out and the Plymouth got sideways on the dirt. The kid didn't panic, just turned the wheel in the direction of the skid and powered right out.
'Wow! This bad boy's got some juice!'
'All right, don't get us arrested now.'
'I'm okay,' the kid said, leaning into a curve. 'Where do we go now?'
'We're done for tonight,' I told him. 'Just head on back.'
The Plymouth reached the main road. The kid gave it the gun, the torque jamming him back against the seat. He adjusted his posture, a grin slashing across his face.
'Okay if I take the long way?' he asked.
I nodded. The kid pulled off the highway, found a twisting piece of two–lane blacktop. He kicked on the high beams, drew a breath when he saw they were hot enough to remove paint.
'Can you downshift it?' he asked.
'Stomp the pedal and it drops down. Or you can flick the lever one stop to the right. But watch it, the rear end gets loose easy.
'This is great! How'd you get a car like this?'
'It was supposed to be the prototype for a super–taxi,' I told him. 'Got an over–cored radiator, oil and tranny coolers, steel–braided lines. It won't overheat even if it sits in traffic for an hour. It weighs almost five thousand pounds— the bumpers will stop a rhino.'
'Yeah, but underneath…I mean, the way it grips and all.'
'There's no beam axle back there, Randy. It's an IRS, understand?'
'Sure. And big tires. But that wouldn't make it grab the way it does. I'll bet this is what a NASCAR stocker feels like.'
'I never drove one.'
'Me neither— they don't have those kind of races around here. But I've seen them on ESPN.'
'You like that kind of racing too?'
'
kind,' the kid said.
He had the Plymouth wailing by then, flitting over the surface of the blacktop. We might as well have been in the West Virginia mountains with a trunk full of white lightning. I reached into the glove compartment, popped a cassette into the slot, turned it on. 'Dark Angel' throbbed through the speakers, darker than the night outside, with more hormones than the monster engine.
'Jesus!' the kid yelled. 'What's that?'
