9

Whoever they were, they were efficient. There was nothing obvious that caught my attention. They hadn’t tossed underwear on the floor or washed the dirty dishes in the sink, but someone had broken into my apartment and conducted a pretty careful search. People like me, active people with a disability, share the everyday world with other people, but we live entirely different lives. For convenience, I’d made some adjustments in the apartment, but unless you are living with restrictions, you wouldn’t notice them. The glass that I always left near the edge of the kitchen counter so I could reach it easily had been moved back several inches. The bottom drawer of my desk, which I leave a tiny bit open because it tends to catch and it’s hard to get leverage to pull it out, had been closed. The chair next to my desk had been moved, probably because whoever had gone through my computer needed it to sit on, but when they put it back they failed to leave sufficient space between the side of the desk and the wall for Mighty Chair to slide past. The lids on my pain pill bottles, which I always leave partially opened, had been tightened. The search had been thorough, and unlike those agents who had visited Jenny, these people did not want me to know they had been there.

Jenny was the only other person who had a key, which she used when she got home before me, but she would have told me if she had stopped by. And she wouldn’t have tightened pill bottle lids.

I knew they were looking for anything that would lead them to the source of the video. In an odd way this was exciting. I’d never thought I would be involved in something so vital to national security that the government would break into my apartment. Not only was there no link to the video there, there was nothing that could compromise me or embarrass me. As boring as it makes me appear, I literally had nothing to hide—I mean, unless someone was really desperate to know what I’d bought my mother for her sixty-fifth birthday. The most interesting things on my desktop were what I laughingly referred to as “my business records” and my tax returns, courtesy of H&R Block.

I clicked through my computer, although I had no idea what I was looking for. It just seemed like a smart thing to do. It’s what every TV detective would have done. I assumed they copied my address book and maybe my emails. I smiled at that thought: Some poor schmuck was going to have to waste a day looking through several thousand emails I hadn’t gotten around to erasing. I suspected they had planted a listening device somewhere, but I didn’t bother looking for it. Unless it actually looked like a bug, I wouldn’t be able to spot it.

“Cher, call Howie,” I said.

My apartment had been “tossed,” I told him. I smiled as I said it. “They ‘tossed’ it, Howie!” I loved speaking noir. “You believe that? Do they really think I’m stupid enough to leave evidence like that on my computer?”

Silence.

“Oh, come on, Howie. That’s not funny.” If there were listeners on the line, as I had to assume, I hoped they got a laugh out of it.

Howie had a guy who had some kind of whoop-de-do device that detected electronic bugs. He’d get him over to my apartment first thing. “I never thought I’d say this in real life,” he told me, “but be careful. There’re a lot of crazies out there, and you’ve made some enemies.”

“That’s okay,” I responded, “I never thought I’d get to tell someone my apartment had been tossed.”

Jenny was in an Uber on her way over when I reached her. “Guess what,” I said, “they tossed my apartment.”

“They what? Who did what?”

Jeez, some women can take all the fun out of a home invasion. Rather than meeting at the apartment, we met at Uri’s Portable Chef, a restaurant and delivery service known for its deliciously healthy home-style cooking. (And no, this is not a paid testimonial, although if Uri wants to send some of his Filipino chicken adobo up here no one would turn it down. Wink, wink.) She was carving our initials into the construction timber tabletop with a knife provided for that purpose when I got there. She greeted me by blowing wood chips onto my lap. “Very mature,” I said.

Over the organic chicken I told her about my visitors. Yes, I was sure. No, I wasn’t going to call the police. “What am I going to tell them? Somebody moved my cheese?” And finally, it probably wasn’t a great idea for her to stay there with me that night. “Bedbugs,” I said, admiring my own cleverness. If the place had been wired, I didn’t want her on tape.

I had Van, so I dropped her off. When I got settled, I called to make sure she was okay. Actually, to make sure we were okay. As we started to hang up, I blurted, “Hey, Jen…”

“What?” I was silent. “What?” she repeated with a hint of irritation.

“I mean, you were kidding, right? You know how I feel about you, don’t you?”

She wasn’t going to make it easy for me. “Honestly, sometimes I’m not so sure.”

I took a deep breath and almost went for it: “I really care a lot about you. I mean, a whole lot.”

That probably wasn’t what she was hoping to hear, but it was a step. “Me too,” she responded.

When I went to bed that night, I left a lamp on in the living room. I also took the shade off my bedside lamp; if someone came into the bedroom, I could turn it on and the bare bulb would briefly blind them. And then I took my pistol from its secure place, checked to make sure it was loaded, the safety was on, and a bullet was chambered. I slipped it under my pillow.

I lay in bed with my eyes closed, but there was no way I was going to sleep. It wasn’t fear—I still could handle whatever came my way. But man, it had been a long time since I’d been so lonely. Why couldn’t I tell her that I loved her? I wondered. What the fuck was wrong with me?

I thought about one of my first stories. I had interviewed an Indian shaman who was making a nice living predicting the future at parties. “Parlor games,” he called them. Everyone goes home optimistic about their future. But he told me a story I’ve never forgotten. He was lying in bed with his wife; the lights were on, but his eyes were closed. In that brightness behind his eyes he saw blackbirds flying around her. But when he opened his eyes, the birds were gone. He knew then that she was an evil woman. And as he later discovered, after she’d emptied their joint accounts, she was. That’s when he understood he could see reality with his mind far more clearly than with his eyes.

However, he complained, he had once traveled too deeply into his mind, all the way to the end of his subconscious, to the dressing rooms in which his dreams were putting on their makeup and costumes. In his opinion, that journey was too dangerous for the unenlightened to make.

He also had given me a gift, a mantra. I’m not going to tell you what it was, but to my surprise it often proved valuable. When my mind was churning with unsettling thoughts, the demons still lived there, I used it to calm down. It often helped me relax into sleep. Not this night, though. There was nothing calming about what I saw that night. I was confronted with the true objective of the Wrightman government. The future in my mind was far more ominous. I was seeing a repressive government that clamped down on individual rights—with the tacit approval of the distracted majority. It wasn’t the historic fascism that we had fought and defeated. It was the irrational buffoonery of the Trumpsters. In this form of fascism, people weren’t being lined up against walls and shot; rather, they were being restricted in what they could say or write or post. Or by extension, think. Anyone who broke those rules was silenced, shunned, or in the extreme, “separated.”

And here was the most chilling part: Few people objected to it. Instead, they appeared to embrace it. They continued to proudly profess a strong belief in democracy, but a democracy in which the rights of the individual had to be sacrificed for the good of the many. This wasn’t a nightmare. It didn’t spark my fears. I didn’t start sweating. I’d left most of those fears behind years earlier. This just seemed so patently obvious that I was astonished my eyes hadn’t seen it.

Whoever had broken into my apartment did not return that night or the nights that followed. I eventually put my gun back in its place. The overwhelming police—and militia—presence eventually defused the protests. Several governors declared state emergencies and temporarily suspended habeas corpus, arresting and holding hundreds of people without charging them or granting them their right to representation. In defending this action, those state’s attorneys cited Article One, section 9, clause 2 of the Constitution: “The Privilege of the Writ of Habeas Corpus shall not be suspended, unless when in Cases of Rebellion or Invasion the public Safety may require it.” The attorneys claimed that out-of-control antigovernment demonstrations qualified as acts of rebellion and constituted a direct threat to the public safety.

Numerous lawsuits were filed, but before they could be adjudicated, all the prisoners were released without any charges being filed, making those lawsuits moot. I had to admit, it was a clever strategy. Most of the same lawyers then filed civil lawsuits claiming their clients’ constitutional rights had been violated, demanding multimillion-dollar damages. Those cases immediately got bogged down on the badly overwhelmed calendars of local courts.

More troubling, an embargo was declared prohibiting any print or electronic platform from publishing any information about scheduled demonstrations. When The New York Times challenged that directive, its site was suspended for a day, and its distributors, both brick-and-mortar and online, were threatened with expensive legal action that might shut them down if they circulated the paper.

This time no demonstrations were held to protest the crackdown on demonstrations.

Not surprisingly, Wrightman was given credit for doing exactly what he had promised during his campaign: he had restored order. Once again, his approval ratings stabilized, then began rising. A submissive Congress began granting every White House request without holding public hearings or full disclosure. Essentially, they handed him a blank check.

At the Pro we worked through the turmoil with a growing sense of frustration. The administration’s relentless effort to change the subject had finally taken hold. The nation had moved on. Stories about the terrorists no longer dominated the front page, replaced by events like a sex scandal on the PGA tour, which allowed a delirious media to use words like balls and strokes in suggestive headlines. The contest to design the most attractive memorial for each terrorist site had practically become a national obsession. At Pearl Harbor, there was strong support for building a new bridge-like visitor center over the now-sacred wreckage of the old bridge-like visitor center. In Louisiana a recirculating river two feet wide by one foot deep along which lighted candles would float following the path of the flood past the ruins of Morgan City had been approved by the state legislature. In New York, a tastefully subdued pattern of lights that would change throughout the entire length of the Lincoln Tunnel was the favorite.

International tensions also had wound way down. Most nations were so pleased at the restored predictability in relationships and trade that they avoided provocations.

This passive acquiescence gnawed at my soul. It became a sore spot between Jenny and me. One night, after we’d finished watching the final episode of the The Crown’s eighth season (Queen Elizabeth II had survived!), I asked, “When did we become this nation of spectators?”

“Oh, it’s not that bad,” she said dismissively. “Please pass the remote.”

In my best Joe Pesci, “You think I’m funny?”

Eyes closed, face scrunched up, she gave me that “do we have to go through this again?” look. “What do you expect people to do? Go fight the terrorists themselves?”

“Isn’t that what we have those 300 million guns for? All that militia stuff?” I hadn’t told anyone about my night visit to the shaman’s world. But I sure hadn’t forgotten it, either. “Don’t you get it, Jen? We’re seeing exactly what the government wants us all to see: peace, security, and great television. But that’s not what’s really going on. That’s not the real story.”

“You know what, Rollie, sometimes you just need to take one deep breath and relax. Really, Wheels, it’s okay to enjoy Schitt’s Creek.” She leaned over and kissed me, a really sweet patronizing kiss. “Life goes on, you know. As painful as it is sometimes, life goes on.”

Well, except for the victims, I thought. For the victims, this is a bitch. Jenny was right, though. I have to admit that most often Jenny was right, the world had moved on. By late September, Detroit had become last summer’s news. Or “olds,” as Howie referred to it. “If it isn’t new, it’s no longer news.” Within a period of a few weeks, a Belgian submarine had disappeared in the Adriatic and a joint naval force that we had formed with the Chinese had located the damaged vessel and made a daring rescue of its crew. A North Korean defector claimed the food crisis inside that country had become so bad that farmers in rural areas had resorted to cannibalism, while Kim Jong Un had suddenly begun promoting tourism. Putin was hinting that he planned to annex Ukraine unless American sanctions were removed while still bemoaning the loss of his “good friend President Trump.”

I’d made changes to deal with this new reality. I installed surveillance cameras in my apartment and linked them to Mighty Chair. I set up a bright red dye-pack trap that would paint any intruder with indelible ink. And at night I felt myself holding on to Jenny just a little more tightly.

I’d moved on, although there remained an unfinished pang in my heart. It appeared no one was going to pay for what happened in Detroit. I wrote several good stories and came within one coffee cup of topping the tower record. 7/11 was taking its place as another sad day on America’s calendar to memorialize each year. My involvement in it might have ended there for me, and I might have let it go and gone on to a long and semi-distinguished career in journalism, at the end of which I would write a fine and unpublished memoir. That might have happened. But then my phone rang.

It was a dreary December day. There was light snow in the forecast. The early afternoon light was the pale yellow of faded newsprint. The landline on my desk rang only occasionally, most often with an announcement that my excellent credit score had earned me the right to go deeper into debt. So when it did ring, I expected to hear a recorded woman’s voice gleefully informing me that there was no problem with my credit. Instead a man asked in a mildly accented voice, “Is this Stone?”

There was a tremble in that voice. Whoever it was, he was hesitant about making this call. “It is.”

“I need help, man.” It came in a rush. “Please, you help me.”

The voice of a stranger reaching out for help was a siren song no journalist could resist. Of course, it was also the opening line of an infinite number of bad detective novels. In various forms I’d heard the same plea several times before; they had ended up being about as exciting as the early bird special at IHOP. “Okay, if I can,” I said. “But I can’t guarantee this call isn’t being tapped, so be careful what you say.”

“They’re after me,” he said urgently. “You need to help me.”

And that is the second greatest line a journalist might hear. “Who’s after you?”

“Everybody.” There was an urgency in his voice. “They all looking for me.”

“Everybody is a lot of people.” He was beginning to sound like another one of the crazies.

Then he explained, “They killed my friends. You know, in that house. In Detroit, that house there.”

I pressed the mute button, then ordered, “Cher, record.” I took a deep breath and pressed the mute button a second time. “Go slow,” I said. My heart was playing a rumba. I knew who this guy was; two men had driven from Detroit to New York to complete a drug deal. The remains of one of them had been scraped up in the tunnel. It had been assumed that the second man had died in the tunnel with him; the fact that his remains hadn’t been identified wasn’t surprising. Not after the explosions and fires.

“Look, you got to help me, man. I’m not no terrorist. It was just drugs that we was doing. That’s all. That terrorist shit, that’s fucked up.”

I had learned how to handle panic on some very distant streets. Without having to think about it, I switched into calm mode. “How can I help you?”

In a tone somewhere between desperation and frustration, the man pleaded, “I don’t know. You the reporter. Get me out of this shit.”

Elijah Amram, I remembered, that was the name. “Does anyone know where you are? Are you sure people are looking for you?”

“Fuck yeah, mon. They been crawling over my peeps. They all scared. Nobody wants a help me.”

“I know who you are,” I said, with a coolness that even surprised me. “Do you know exactly who is searching for you?”

“I tole you man, everybody. They all fucking looking for me. I gots to keep moving.”

It wasn’t much of an answer. “Okay. All right. Listen to me. I want to help you, but I need to know more. Do you know where I am?”

“Shit, yeah, you in Washington.”

“Can you get here?”

He laughed at that question, the lilting laugh of an immigrant. “I already here, mon.”

“Okay, here’s what I want you to do.” In most situations the best protection for someone with knowledge of a dangerous secret is to go as public as possible. Then it is no longer a secret. This is my advice to you: If you are privy to a potentially blockbusting secret, call a reporter immediately. In fact, call me. I still can be reached. I thought about asking Amram to come to my office, but instead I suggested we meet close by. We were still receiving the occasional threat and I didn’t want to invite someone I didn’t know into the office. After I had confirmed he was legit, I could bring him inside.

I picked that location because it was easily accessible and it fulfilled my journalistic fantasy: In homage to Woodstein and Deep Throat, we would meet in a parking garage. There was a public garage a block away from the Pro; I parked Van there when I drove to work. I told Amram to meet me on the fourth level in an hour. Among the many lessons the military had drilled into me was that before meeting someone you didn’t know, stake out the territory.

I turned down Howie’s offer to send someone with me. We agreed if this was legit, I would bring him back with me and we would try to talk him into surrendering to law enforcement. Howie said he would speak to Lindsey the lawyer to protect the Pro from any potential claims of harboring or cooperating with a fugitive—although we couldn’t figure out how a supposedly dead man who had not been indicted could be considered a fugitive.

The promised snow was just beginning to fall as I walked over to the garage. I pulled up the collar of my trench coat; not as homage, I was just cold! The vibrancy that once activated Washington’s afternoon streets was gone. Instead it felt like the whole country had been lulled into the same kind of complaisant stupor as a hive of yellow jackets in the hard days of winter.

The garage had the architectural elegance of every municipal parking garage in every city in every state. Its cement ramp spiraled up six stories. The outer walls on each level were slightly more than four feet high. There was a roadway about two cars in width between parked cars. A folding billboard out front advertised the early bird special: $25 for all day if entering before six A.M. I usually got there about an hour early on my way to the gym. Van was parked where I’d left it, in a handicapped spot on the first level. I took the elevator to the fourth floor, then rolled slowly and carefully down the wide ramp, braking often until I reached the third floor. The light mist snaking in over the half walls made the visibility uneven. Certain areas were illuminated by caged industrial lighting, while others lay in deep shadows. I found a spot in the shadow of a inside retaining wall and waited there. I was out of the flow of traffic but still able to look over the wall to spot anyone driving up the ramp.

The garage was quiet. It was used mostly by people who worked in the area, people like me who parked there in the morning and departed at the end of the day. The shops in the area served mostly the locals—office workers; employees of a coffee shop, a florist, a CVS—so there was limited in-and-out activity. A couple of cars wound up the ramp to the upper floors and drifted slowly past me. Occasionally I heard the mechanical banging of the elevator rising or descending. An intermittent gust tickled me with a touch of wetness.

I waited, my emotions coiled, ready to spring. Okay, that is so completely not true. What I actually did was sit there trying to deal with my boredom. You rarely see that part of police work or investigative journalism in movies or on TV. That’s because boredom is, well, boring. I’d learned different tricks to keep my mind occupied while waiting. At times the toughest challenge is staying awake. I read an old James Lee Burke book I had on my phone; I responded to emails, checked the news, and sent a funny meme to Jenny.

Several minutes after the scheduled meeting time I heard someone walking up the ramp. He came around the corner into the light. He was a thin, dark man, his skin the color of old asphalt. He was wearing an open green military coat and khaki pants that sagged below his waist. A black nylon shirt hugged his sinewy upper body. He had on white high-top sneakers with no socks. I wondered if that was a drug-world fashion statement. His hair was close-cropped, and he had a short beard. He paused and looked around. “Stone?”

I stayed in the shadows. “Yeah.” He turned toward my voice and saw me. “Who are you?”

“Amram. I’m Amram.”

I kept my hand on Mighty Chair’s control module. I had several options available if needed. I moved a few feet closer. “What do you need from me?”

He waved his empty hands. “I need you to help me.” It was as much a demand as a plea.

“Tell me who’s after you.”

His tongue ran across his lips. He moved closer, walking in the center of the ramp. Cars were parked diagonally on either side of him. He was about twenty feet away. “The drug guys. They want their money. The government people too. The FBI come to my sister’s house. They tell her they lookin’ for me.”

I heard a car winding slowly up the ramp. “Were you living there?”

“That was my house,” Amram said loudly and defiantly, angrily pointing his index finger toward me. “My house. But we weren’t no terrorists in there. No fucking way. Those are crazy fuckers, those terrorists. I heard them when they call me a terrorist, and I think, What the fuck, man? you know. I’m Muslim, right?” He sneered at the insult. “So I gotta be a terrorist. I’m telling you the truth, Stone, we had the drugs. We come to New York…”

The squeal of tires twisting on damp cement caught our attention. We both turned. A black SUV careened around the corner, its engine roaring. Amram turned. The SUV accelerated. “Run!” I screamed. By the time he understood what was happening, it was too late. The SUV plowed into him, flinging him into the air. With a horrific thud, his body slammed into the rear of a parked white van. The back of his head smashed against its rear window, his blood spattering across the rear gate. His body dropped to the cement floor. He lay there faceup, eyes open, mouth open. Rivulets of blood winding down the gate dripped onto his face like melting red icicles.

The SUV raced past me, the parked cars preventing the killer from angling into me. The SUV’s windows were deeply tinted, so I couldn’t see the driver. It skidded to a stop at the end of the fourth-floor ramp, its rear end rising like a bucking horse. Smoke churned from the spinning wheels. I smelled the burning rubber. The driver jammed it in reverse, slammed it into the rear wall, bouncing off it as he turned.

I ran. I punched the control lever. Mighty Chair’s wheels spun briefly before gaining traction. Then I burst forward. I started racing down the curving ramp. As I reached the first corner, I hunched my shoulders and shifted my weight, leaning into the turn as if I were cutting through packed snow on the slopes. I could hear the SUV turning. There was no room for it to turn without shifting back and forth, so the driver was making his own room, banging and smashing cars out of his way, pushing them into the retaining walls.

Mighty Chair wasn’t aerodynamic, but it did hold a line and cornered well, for a wheelchair. Y’s imagination was paying off. When he’d built it, he’d been playing mad inventor, envisioning video-game scenarios, James Bond escapes, neither of us believing any of that would become necessary. Or that one winter afternoon it might save my life. I had just reached the third level when I heard the SUV crashing down behind me. Its wheels shrieked as the driver drifted into the corners, bouncing off walls like a pinball bouncing off bumpers, but it kept coming.

Incredibly, I heard Cher’s stern voice warning me, “Rollie, Mighty Chair wants me to tell you this speed is not safe.”

Sorry, Cher. Y had added an auxiliary motor to Mighty Chair, but I wasn’t going to outrun an SUV. I twisted to see where he was, and as I did, I had the odd thought that Y should add a rearview camera. There were several nifty tools already built into the chair that might have helped, like spewing silicone, but I had dismissed that as another one of Y’s Bond jokes and hadn’t bothered to memorize the program code. I could slow down and ask Cher to find it, but the one thing I could not afford to do was slow down.

I whirled around the next bend, trying to hug the inside wall. I’d run several wheelchair races, so I had some idea how to maximize and control my speed. But racing chairs were designed for speed. Mighty Chair was the real thing. Gravitational forces buffeted me from side to side and I was struggling to stay in the seat. I slipped my left arm under the armrest and curled my fingers over the front of it, holding tight.

The SUV was gaining; I heard metal crunching and glass shattering as it bounced off parked cars and slammed into a wall, then a long shriek as a metal piece sliced into the cement. It must have dropped the muffler because suddenly the engine got a lot louder. And a lot closer. A beast was hunting me.

When you’re running for your life, you don’t think, you react. Everything I did was pure instinct. I’d never ridden a wheelchair downhill at maximum speed—in fact I had never heard of anybody who had—but turn by turn I was figuring out how to survive. I was careening from side to side, shifting my weight from side to side to maintain my balance as if I were slaloming downhill. Cher was making all types of warning sounds. This was Chair to the max. I guessed I had two turns, about 250 feet, and a tollgate to get through before the SUV hit me. In that instant my mind flashed back to the last time I’d been sprinting to save my life. I could see that open door in front of me. I could see kids racing in front of me. I could see that bright sunlight framed in that doorway. I never got there. The house had collapsed around me. Somehow, though, I’d gotten a second chance. Make it or die.

The SUV was getting close. I could hear it, smell it. The crunching, scraping, ripping sounds echoing through the garage got louder. I went for speed, pushing the lever all the way forward, turning into the last straightaway with every bit of speed Chair could generate.

The scene in front of me was not promising: The ramp split into entrance and exit lanes separated by the ticket kiosk. Black-and-white-striped gates blocked both lanes. The gates were about four feet high, I estimated, not nearly high enough for the back of Chair to slip under. I leaned way to my left, hoping there was sufficient room between the end of the gate and the wall for me to squeeze past.

Just as I did, a dark blue SUV entering the garage stopped at the ticket kiosk and a woman reached out to take a ticket.

I leaned all the way to my right. Several years earlier, when I was learning how to navigate the world in a wheelchair, I had to fill out an insurance form. It required all the basic information. Two questions stumped me: height and weight. Months earlier, that had been an easy question, six-two, 215 pounds. But on this form I responded five-five, 550 pounds. It was at that moment I accepted how completely my world had changed.

Five-five goes into four feet only with great damage. I had one chance, I figured. I pulled up on the seatback control and Chair’s back started dropping. I grasped both arms and pushed back on it as hard as I could, willing it to move faster. It was going to be tight; if I hit the gate with my body or my head, I was a dead man rolling. Even if the gate just clipped the top of the chair, it would flip backward and I was still a dead man.

Every inch, every tenth of an inch, would make the difference between life and death. The SUV swung around the final turn. In that instant the driver must have realized he had run out of ramp. He slammed down hard on his brakes, which caused the rear end to spin slowly around until the front and rear wheels were parallel and the side of the SUV had become a metal wall sliding toward the kiosks—and still gaining on me.

Bad for me. I faced even worse problems than he did. My brakes might be able to stop Chair—but not me. The science about that was pretty simple: A body in really fast motion tends to fly through the air in really fast motion when the Chair in which he is riding stops suddenly.

The woman in the SUV got her ticket and straightened up in her seat, then looked straight at me as the gate went up to let her enter. While it sounds like something you’d read in a book, our eyes met. She saw me sliding directly toward her and, I’m guessing, she also saw the black wall of sheet metal a few feet behind me. Rather than thinking, she reacted. How she did it, I swear to God I will never understand, but somehow she slammed that SUV into reverse and gunned it. The SUV rocketed back, slamming into the side of a cement mixer stopped in a long line at a traffic signal.

The gate began closing. I went for it, twisting my body as far to the left as possible. Chair’s right wheel lifted off the ground. It moved an inch. Making it required the kind of perfect timing, and magic, that it took to race through a moving revolving door without touching it. I slipped under the gate. I was barely in control, my seatback still partially reclined, heading directly for the spinning cement mixer.

Admittedly, the fact that I’m telling this story does eliminate the suspense. Once again, I got lucky.

The whine of jagged metal scraping along concrete had alerted pedestrians. They were running for safety even before I came hurtling out of the garage into the street. I heard screams and saw them scrambling as I tried desperately to regain some balance. Chair’s right wheel hit something and bounced into the air like a racing car hitting a speed bump.

I didn’t know what the SUV was doing. Later I learned that it had slowed when its tires went flat, and finally skidded sideways into the kiosk.

I held on. There was nothing else I could do. My fingers dug into Chair’s arms. I had slowed down, but not enough. I saw the cement mixer directly in front of me. I closed my eyes.

Suddenly, something slammed into my side, like a tackle hitting a running back. Mighty Chair was jolted, then whipped sideways. Stuff was falling all over me. Chair slowed, bounced, tilted, then regained its wheels, finally spinning to a stop. My heart was blasting. I forced out a huge puff of air. I was alive. Alive. It was a surprise to me too.

I had no idea what had happened. “Y’okay, Rollie?” I heard a man asking with concern. “You ’live in there?” I heard sirens, a lot of them, loud and insistent. I opened my eyes. Everything was black.

I reached up toward my eyes. I pulled a flannel shirt off my face. I was covered with clothing. I picked off some of it, while other pieces fell off. People were standing around me, looking down at me with curiosity. I heard a distant voice ask, “What happened to him?”

I kept looking around, trying to figure that out. The blue SUV and the cement mixer were blocking the street. They were entangled. In the garage entrance the SUV was wrapped around the kiosk, smoke pouring from its undercarriage. The broken kiosk was dutifully spewing tickets. Firemen were rushing toward the wreckage, pushing spectators out of the way. Nothing was making sense to me. People were shouting, trying to shake me back into the moment with questions; their voices were jumbled. I had no answers.

Then I saw a supermarket shopping cart, a small one, lying on its side. A lot of clothing had fallen out of it and scattered on the street.

Reality slowly came into focus.

I figured it out. As I came flying out of the garage, an instant before I’d kissed that mixer, I’d been hit by something, or I hit something and got pushed to the side. Amazing. It was one of the people leaning over me, one of my street guys, one of my buck-in-a-cup people. Another veteran. I couldn’t remember his name. He’d been wounded too, but his wounds were storm clouds in his mind.

Son of … Jesus, this was the man who’d saved my life. When I burst out of the garage, everybody else was running away, but he came running to help. He either pushed his cart into me or maybe abandoned it, but Chair had hit it. It had gotten caught up in the wheel enough to turn Chair a few inches and slow it down. Then somebody had grabbed hold to bring it to a stop. Maybe this guy. It didn’t matter.

I looked up at him, shook some confusion out of my head, took a deep and delicious breath, and said, “Yeah, I’m okay.”

And then the tears came.