the Mercedes—no brake lights… just kept on trolling… already near the end of the lane… missed out on the miracle entirely.
Slowly the vehicle was backing out of the wall of cars… a big black thing—huge!… slowly, slowly… It was a monster called the Annihilator. Chrysler had started manufacturing it in 2011 to compete with the Cadillac Escalade.
The harsh light from the car on their tail began to withdraw from the Elf’s interior, then subsided sharply. Ed looked back. The driver had put the convertible into reverse and was executing a U-turn. Now Ed could see it more clearly. Yes, the driver was a woman, dark haired, young, by the look of her, and the convertible—godalmighty!—it was a white Ferrari 403!
Ed started pointing toward the rear window and said to Mac, “Your rude bitch is leaving. She’s turning around and going back up the lane. And you’ll never guess what she’s driving… a Ferrari 403!”
“Which means…?”
“That’s a $275,000 car! It’s got close to five hundred horsepower. They race them in Italy. We ran a story about the Ferrari 403.”
“Oh, do remind me and I’ll be sure to look it up,” said Mac. “All I care about the wonder car at this moment is that the rude bitch has gone away in it.”
From behind them rose the wonder car’s omnivorous growl and then the screaming squeal of the tires as the woman burned rubber in taking off back the way she had come.
Ponderously… ponderously… the Annihilator backed up. Heavily… heftily… its gigantic black rear end began to turn toward the Green Elf in order to straighten up before heading down toward the exit. The Annihilator looked like a giant that would eat up Green Elves like apples or whole-grain protein bars. Evidently sensing precisely that, Mac backed up the Elf to give the giant however much room it needed.
“Did you ever notice,” said Ed, “that the people who buy those things never know how to drive them? Everything takes forever. They’re not up to handling a truck.”
Now, at last, they laid eyes on what had become a very nearly mythical piece of geography… a parking place.
“Okay, big boy,” said Mac, referring to the Annihilator, “let’s pull ourself together and move.”
She had no sooner said “move” than the thrashing mechanical roar of a high-speed internal-combustion engine and an angry scream of rubber rose from the exit end of the lane. Godalmighty—it was a vehicle accelerating almost as fast as the Ferrari 403 but coming up the lane the wrong way. With the hulk of the Annihilator blocking their view, Ed and Mac couldn’t tell what was going on. In the next split second the acceleration became so loud, the vehicle had to be practically on top of the Annihilator. The Annihilator’s horn and brake lights screeeeeaming red—shrieeeeeking rubber—the oncoming vehicle veeeeering to keep from hitting the Annihilator head-on—blurrrring white surmounted by tiny blurrrrring blaaaaack streeeeeaks to Ed’s right from in front of the Annihilator—hurtled into the miracle parking slot—laaaaaying down rubber as it braked to a stop right in front of Ed’s and Mac’s eyes.
Shock, bewilderment—and bango—their central nervous systems were flooded with… humiliation. The white blur was the Ferrari 403. The small black blur was the hair of the rude bitch. It hit home faster than it would take to say it. The moment she realized a parking spot was opening up, the rude bitch had made a U-turn, sped up the lane the wrong way, swung around the walls of cars, sped down the next lane the wrong way, swung around the rows of cars at the exit end, sped up this lane the wrong way, cut in front of the Annihilator, and shot into the parking place. What else was a Ferrari 403 for? And what was a passive do-gooder like the Green Elf to do other than good works for the desperately wounded Planet Earth and take everything else like a man… or an elf?
The Annihilator gave the rude bitch a couple of angry blasts of the horn before heading down the lane and presumably the exit. But Mac remained. She wasn’t heading anywhere. She was furious, livid.
“Why, that bitch!” she said. “That brazen little bitch!”
With that she drove the Green Elf forward and stopped immediately behind the Ferrari, which had come to rest on the Elf’s right.
“What are you doing?” said Ed.
Mac said, “If she thinks she’s going to get away with that, she’s got another thought coming. She wants to play games? Okay, let’s play.”