The Chase

And so there I was, walking into a café, walking into my future. Naturally, I didn’t expect it to be my future waiting inside. All I wanted was a nice cup of coffee.

I opened the door to the sound of the jingle bells strung on the inside. A wind blew past me rather violently. It swept up several newspapers inside and carried a small piece of paper around the room and out the door. A rather scruffy man came rushing after it, but it was too late. The piece of paper fell down into a storm drain, forever lost.

“You’ve just killed me,” he said to me as he walked back inside.

“Excuse me?” I asked.

He grunted in annoyance, “I says you’ve just killed me. That there paper was the only proof that I wasn’t there on the night of a murder. They think that I did it. Now I’ve got no alibi.”

I looked into the man’s face and recognized something about it. He had a wart on his chin. I had seen this man before. “Where were you on the night of the murder, then?”

“I was in a car dealership. I had taken one of their one-day-only-sale flyers.”

“It just so happens that I work at a car dealership,” I said. “I may remember you. Come with me to the dealership and we’ll check the tapes.”

He nodded and we walked out of the café to my car because he had walked there.

We climbed inside the new Lexus and I turned the key. The engine purred as we pulled out of the spot on the side of the street. The dealership was maybe fifteen minutes away from the café. It was after several turns that I began to notice a black sedan following us.

“Damn!” my passenger shouted. “They must have seen us leave together.”

“Who exactly is ‘they’?”

“Just drive, kid.”

The sedan pulled along side of us and the driver pulled out a gun and aimed it at me. I floored it and sped quickly away, but the black sedan followed right behind.

We sped past other cars on the city street and I made a quick turn onto the highway. We shot down the road at ninety miles an hour. The sedan was still following us. I pulled off the highway and back onto the city street, nearing colliding with a cyclist.

My heart pumped as I avoided pedestrians carrying groceries and their children. I ran every red light, but the sedan followed right behind.

My passenger shouted, “Would you drive a little faster?!”

I glared at him, “Who the hell are these people?!”

“Just drive, kid.”

Bang! Bang! Bang! Bang!

The driver of the other car fired four shots from behind us. They blasted through my rear window and hit my passenger in the back of the head. Blood splattered on my windshield and he was killed instantly.

“Dear God,” I thought to myself. “What have I gotten myself into?”

The sedan followed close behind me. I eased off the gas a little and took a quick glance back at the black sedan.

Crash!

My car smashed into a telephone pole. I sat there, stunned and pinned by the steering wheel. Pain racked through my chest. My face was bloodied from the broken glass of the windshield. The driver of the other car came up to my car.

He pried open the jammed car door and pulled me free of the steering wheel.

I stood up and brushed myself off.

I said to him, “Great job, Jim. We got him.”