a pop as it punched a hole in the window glass and a thunk as the bullet lodged in the leather seat.
“You move pretty past for a chubby guy.” Even though he was shouting, it still sounded like he meant it as a sincere compliment. “You’ve got to sit up though. I can’t get a good angle if you’re lying down like that.”
Neither could Stanley steer, nor see out the window.
The Mustang clipped the back of a truck.
The killer went flying off the hood. Stanley hadn’t had time to put his seat belt on, which was good in that it had kept him from getting shot in the heart, but bad that he wound up bouncing off the dash and getting squished against the floorboards as the car went spinning wildly through an intersection.
The Mustang rolled to a stop.
Wiggling, Stanley found he was mostly stuck, but the only thing truly injured was his pride. It took him a few seconds to scramble back up so he could see out the windows. There were other cars stopped in the intersection, and some immediately started honking angrily at the interruption. Other drivers were staring, concerned or surprised. Panicked, he looked around for the gunman, but there was no sign of him . . . until he spotted the lump lying in the road fifty yards away. The mugger had gotten tossed like a beanbag and, from the look of things, had bounced off the side of a bus hard enough to leave a man-sized dent in the sheet metal. Momentum was a hell of a thing.
Hands shaking, eyes blinking rapidly, Stanley just sat there, astonished to be alive.
And then the killer sat up again.
“Aw, come on!”
Despite being super messed up, the man took one look at his surroundings, saw that he’d been flung into a bus, and then gave Stanley a very approving thumbs-up, as if to say, Hey, man, good job eluding certain doom. Respect.
“How are you so cheerful?” Stanley screamed.
The Mustang’s engine had died. The right front fender was smashed, but the car was otherwise still in one piece. He tried the key, and surprisingly the engine started up with no problem. People had come running to see what was going on, some toward the Mustang and others toward the guy who was miraculously alive after being hurled down the street at ludicrous speeds. So Stanley laid on the horn to warn them to get the hell out of his way.
The thing was, since the bad guy was directly in his path, Stanley didn’t really have a good way around him, but he could go over him.
Even though Stanley considered himself a peaceful, reasonable, nonviolent man, it turned out that when emotions were high, the decision to run over another human being was a surprisingly easy one to make.
So never laying off the horn, Stanley put the hammer down. Everybody else got out of the way except for the one he was aiming to squish. It turned out that even somebody who was seemingly indestructible still took a minute to shake off hitting a bus. Right before impact the guy actually smiled and shrugged, like Oh well, that’s how it goes sometimes.
Bump bump.
Six blocks later, Stanley finally slowed down a little. His heart was racing, but at least it didn’t have a hole in it. That had been close! Since he was in a stolen car and had just committed a hit-and-run, he probably really needed to call the police. So Stanley got his phone out and dialed 911.
“Nine one one. What’s the nature of your emergency?”
“This maniac robbed me but then he tried to shoot me but the gun didn’t go off so I ran but then my boss hit him with a car and he got really messed up and I thought he was dead but then he got back up so I stole that car and he jumped on it but then I hit a truck and he fell off and now I’m calling you!”
There was a long pause, as if the dispatcher lady needed a moment to digest that panicked run-on sentence. Only the voice that