off the cliff at a hundred miles an hour!
Billy is still too young to play with his Colt Savage doll, but he likes to chew on it.
Mark decides to see if Colt Savage and Black Blaze can withstand the attack of his atomic bomb firecrackers.
Jessica is mad at her brother. She sees his Colt Savage doll and stomps on it as hard as she can.
Tyrone is bawling. He pulled the arms off his Colt Savage doll, and he can’t make them go back on.
Richards Justin collapsed on set, and only heavy sedation finally stilled his screams. It quickly became apparent that his seizures were permanent, and he remains under sedation in a psychiatric institution. Doctors have attributed his psychotic break to longterm drug abuse.
Nothing excites the public more than a fallen hero. Richards Justin: The Untold Story, by Candace Thornton, rose quickly on the best-seller charts. Reportedly she was recently paid well over a million for the film rights to her book.
Shrapnel
It looked like the wreckage of a hundred stained glass windows, strewn across a desolate tangle of wasteland in a schizophrenic kaleidoscope.
The hood of the ’78 Marquis buckled in protest as Harmon shifted his not inconsiderable weight. He smeared sweat from his face with a sweatier arm and squinted against the piercing sunlight. Even from his vantage point atop the rusting Mercury, it was impossible to achieve any sense of direction amidst these thousands of wrecked cars.
At some point this had been farmland, although such was difficult to envision now. Whatever crops had once grown here had long ago leeched the red clay of scant nutrients. Fallow acres had lapsed into wild pasture where enough soil remained; elsewhere erosion scourged the slopes with red gashes, and a scrub-growth of pine, sumac, honeysuckle and briar grudgingly reclaimed the dead land. Grey knobs of limestone and outcroppings could almost be mistaken for the shapeless hulls of someone’s tragedy.
Harmon wished for a beer—a tall, dripping can of cold, cold beer. Six of them. He promised himself a stop at the first convenience store on the highway, once he finished his business here. But first he needed a fender.
“Left front fender. 1970 or ’71 Montego.”
“I think it will interchange with a ’70-’71 Torino,” Harmon had offered—too tired to explain that the fender was actually needed for a 1970 Cyclone Spoiler, but that this was Mercury’s muscle car version of the Montego, which shared sheet metal with Ford’s Torino, and anyway the woman who ran Pearson’s Auto Yard probably knew all that sort of stuff already She had just a dusting of freckles, and wheat-colored hair that would have looked striking in almost anything other than the regulation dyke haircut she had chosen. The name embroidered across the pocket of her freshly washed but forever grease-stained workshirt read Shiloh. Shiloh had just finished off a pair of redneck truckers in quest of certain axle parts incomprehensible to Harmon, and she was more than capable of dealing with him.
“Most of the older Fords are off along the gully along the woods there.” Shiloh had pointed. “If they haven’t been hauled to the crusher. There’s a row of fenders and quarter panels just beyond that. You wait a minute and Dillon or somebody’ll be here to look for you.”
The thundering air conditioner in the window of the cramped office might have been able to hold the room temperature at 80 if the door weren’t constantly being opened. Harmon felt dizzy, and he further felt that fresh air, however searing, was a better bet than waiting on an office stool for Dillon or somebody.
“You watch out for the dogs,” Shiloh had warned him. “If one of them comes after you, you just jump on top of something where they can’t get at you until Dillon or somebody comes along.”
Hardly comforting, but Harmon knew his way around junkyards. This was an acquaintance that had begun when Harmon had decided to keep the 1965 Mustang of his college days in running order. It had become part hobby, part rebellion against the lookalike econoboxes or the Volvos and BMWs that his fellow young suburban professionals drove each day from their energy-efficient homes in Brookwood or Brookcrest or Crestwood or whatever. Harmon happened to be an up-and-coming lawyer in his own right, thank you, and just now his pet project was restoring a vintage muscle car whose string of former owners had not been overly concerned with trees, ditches, and other obstacles, moving or stationary.
It was a better way to spend