He’d not played the game for two weeks now and the last time had been a washout. He leaned back in the T-bird’s bucket seat and thought and let the heat of anticipation wash over him. Vaguely he remembered his mother and father. They’d died when he was ten years old. It had been an accident on the Turnpike. A truck had smashed their car to nothingness. In a way he was a child of speed. The insurance had made him nearly rich and he lived frugally now, except for cars. An indulgent, adoring Aunt had raised him, given him his first car, protected him first from angry neighbors and, later, the police.
A sound brought him back to awareness. He heard a faraway motor, and then he saw the tiny, fast-moving car in his rear-view mirror. He started the T-bird and listened to the sweet motor, the best that money could buy. He fastened his seat belt. Once he would have snarled at the idea of wearing a seat belt, but now the game was so precious that he took no chances and the belt held him firmly as he twisted back and forth.
He waited the other car out and it came past, moving fast, on the borderline of speeding. He caught a furtive glimpse of a lone, male driver who sat stiffly upright, appearing to be almost drawn back against the seat.
He gunned the T-bird out behind and passed the other car and was elated when it speeded up as he went around it. He could almost envision the other driver cursing him as he cut in sharply and pressed the accelerator down. There was no riding passenger in the other car. There was only the driver.
A perfect mark. Oh, Heat that lives within me: Make this one of the good ones.
Jamie made his turn when the distance was right. There was no car behind the mark and nothing in his own rear-view mirror. The heat began to build.
He let the engine wind up until the speedometer read ninety, and he eased, right lane, then left lane.
He saw dust puff from the rear tires of the other car and something inside him screamed: No! Don’t quit on me! The other car came on and Jamie smiled.
At three hundred feet away he slid the T-bird into the left lane, dead at the other car, anticipating what would happen. The other driver would panic now, move out of the path of Jamie’s hurtling car. Then the variation. Jamie would follow, forcing the other driver away from the traveled road, onto the tricky shoulder.
At this moment Jamie liked to see the oncoming driver’s face. He lifted his eyes, and the face he saw seemed vaguely familiar and smiling, but that was impossible. Savagely, with hate, Jamie floorboarded the T-bird.
At fifty feet the other car cut sharply left and Jamie corrected happily, for this was as anticipated, but then the other car cut right again and there was no time to recover. The T-bird was caught slightly broadside. Jamie heard the thunder of the crash and fought the wheel and got the T-bird straightened as his wheels bounced on the shoulder, but one of the wheels hit a rut and he felt the T-bird going. He bent desperately into the seat, felt the top hit on the parched ground, heard the renewed tearing of metal and then it was a roll that seemed endless. The door came away beside him, but the belt held him firmly until all of the crazy, loud motion stopped and there was silence. Jamie reached then very quickly for the ignition, smelling the gasoline smell, breathing as hard as if he’d run a mile.
He could see the other car out of his starred windshield. Its right front end was smashed. The driver had the door open and he was unhooking a complicated safety harness that ran from a roll bar in the car over his shoulders and waist. It was the harness that had given him the stiff look, Jamie calculated.
Jamie unhooked his own seat belt, but the steering wheel was still in the way and his left leg was caught somewhere. He felt the beginning of pain, and the warmth of blood running down his injured leg brought a leaping panic.
“Help,” he called.
The other man came slowly up to the jumbled T-bird.
“Hello, Jamie.”
“I remember you,” Jamie said incredulously. “You’re Mr. Kelly.”
“Can you make it out?” Mr. Kelly asked.
Jamie shook his head. “It’s my leg.”
Mr. Kelly’s eyes sparkled.
Jamie looked at the other man, unable to read him, fighting away fear. “You like the game?”
Mr. Kelly smiled. “Enough to learn to play it. I trained in sports cars and drove dirt track for awhile after my boy died and before I came after you.”
“Maybe...”
Mr. Kelly held up his hand. “If they put you away you’d be back.” He nodded. “There isn’t any way to break you, Jamie.”
“We could play again,” Jamie said. “I’ve never had anyone before who could really play.” He searched within. “It was better than it’s ever been.” And it had been.
“Not ever again, Jamie,” Mr. Kelly said gently.
The fear came up in waves. “If you do anything they’ll find out somehow. You prosecuted me once. They’ll catch you.”
“Not about us,” Mr. Kelly said. “You’ve changed your name too many times.”
Jamie laughed and the fear went away and he was exultant with triumph. “My fingerprints haven’t changed. They took them then. They’ll take them again. They’ll use them and find out.”
Mr. Kelly smiled a curious smile and sniffed at the gasoline fumes.
“I thought about that, too.”
He lit a match.
When the screaming was all over, Mr. Kelly giggled.
Nothing But Bad News
by Henry Slesar
Dillon whirled and shot the bully for the fifth time. Pauline clenched her teeth and said Miss, you bastard, but the marshal didn’t, his accuracy guaranteed by rerun inexorability. Arnold Summerly breathed a fifth sigh of relief, and Pauline said, “For God’s sake, Arnold, didn’t you know how it was going to turn out?” but Arnold was narcotized now by the commercial following the shoot-out.
Pauline reached out to tune in the seven o’clock news, but Arnold’s hand beat her to the dial and spun it to the local channel; it was their own shoot-out, re-enacted every night.
“Arnold, please!” Pauline said. “Let’s watch the news for once, just once. Anything could be happening. Greenland could have declared war on us. The world may be coming to an end. Anything!”
“If it happens, we’ll hear about it,” Arnold said.
“How? How? You never watch the news. You never read a paper. You care so little about the world, what difference would it make if it did come to an end?”
“This beer is warm,” Arnold said. “You’ve been putting the beer in the refrigerator door again. How many times do I have to tell you to put the beer inside?” The screen divided itself into the shape of a heart, and Arnold forgot his pique. The prospect of Lucy in the twentieth year of her pregnancy erased all rancor.
“You’re a vegetable,” Pauline said. “Do you know that, Arnold? You’re an office machine in the daytime and a vegetable at night. A head of lettuce sticking out of a shirt collar.”
At least he had the decency to get angry.
“All right! All right! You want to know why I don’t watch the news? Why I don’t read the paper? Because it’s all bad news. Nothing but bad news. That’s the reason so many people turn mean and rotten, they get to hear nothing but bad news from morning till night. There’s not one nice, decent, cheerful thing you ever hear about, not one thing you can feel good about. That’s why!”
“It’s not true,” Pauline said. “Maybe it seems that way, but it isn’t.”
“Yeah? Yeah? You want to bet? You want to bet, like, that new fur coat you want so bad? You want to bet that, Pauline, huh?”