I looked at the young man. He was standing there, staring at her breasts which he had so unnecessarily uncovered, his underlip hanging away from his teeth.
“You!”
He gave a little start “Uh… can you give us an I.D.?”
“Sorry, no.
He covered her up. As he started the drawer back in, the lights went off. He pulled the door out and swung it down and clicked it in place. As we headed back out I said, “Why don’t you go get yourself a live one?”
“Huh?” He turned the room light out, pulled the door shut. He rubbed his mouth with the back of his hand. “Sure, buddy, if I could find one of those. Even that messed up you can tell it was built like it wouldn’t never quit. About the only thing didn’t get mashed was the tits, but you can tell it had everything to go with them. A stack, buddy.” He sat down, winked, picked up his Playboy and said, “See you around.”
It had happened a few minutes after midnight on a downtown street. The proprietor of the corner magazine store was a real expert, the kind who raises his voice to let everybody within fifty feet enjoy the analysis.
“Nighttime, friend, this street is dead, everything closed, but you know this town, it’s a real fast north-south street, hardly any lights, and all stop streets coming in. I opened up real early, and this morning before I opened up, friend, I went and took me a good look and figured it out. Now those kids were going like hell, no getting around that. So right in the middle of this block that woman, more than likely a little drunk, she comes tottering right out in front of them. At that speed, the kid driving didn’t have a prayer of stopping. So what is the logical thing for him to do? What would you or I do, friend? What we would do is swerve toward the curb and cut around behind her. Right? So she sees those headlights coming like hell, and instead of keeping going, and she would have been okay if she had, she spins around and tries to get back where she came from. Pow! So he was going full speed, and where he caught her was about two feet from the curb, caught her with the right side of the front of that stolen car. There were still some little bits of glass sprinkled around there at the point of impact, and the places where the cops put sand or something on the blood. I paced it off, and that poor woman went thirty feet through the air, and they hosed it clean later, but this morning you could see where she hit the front of the Exchange Building just below a second-story window, and she bounced off of the stone front, a glancing blow like, and she landed dead in the middle of the sidewalk another fifteen feet further on, so all told it was forty-five feet from where she got hit to where she came to rest, and friend, you can bet your bottom dollar that poor woman didn’t feel a thing. Once you figure it out logical, you can see why there aren’t any skid marks at all, and anybody in that car feeling the thud of how hard she got hit, they’d know there was no point in trying to find out how bad she was hurt. One time five or six years ago I was night-driving over across the state, heading west about ten miles this side of Arcadia on State Road Seventy, straight as a string, no traffic, going about seventy, and a doe came running out of no place and I hit her dead square on, must have knocked her twenty feet into the air. Took out my headlights, smashed the grill and the radiator and buckled the hood up. I fought that car in the dark and got it stopped without rolling it, way off next to a range fence maybe fifty feet off the road, lucky to be alive. I tell you, that’s a real sickening sound, that thud when you hit a living thing. But neither my doe or that woman knew what hit them.”