A bouncer ran up and grabbed If’s door handle. Johnny pressed the gas pedal, and the bouncer was left spinning on his back in the street like a break dancer.

If peeled her dress over her head as they cleared the southbound tollbooth for the Sunshine Skyway. The bridge began to ascend, and If unzipped Johnny’s pants with her teeth. He knew he had to hurry. He reached over the top of her head and pressed buttons to call up the exact song he wanted on the stereo. It had to happen perfectly, the right spot of the ideal tune playing at the precise moment they crested the bridge for the maximum view. He punched the controls quickly for Lynyrd Skynyrd’s “Free Bird.” But the part of the song he wanted was the fantastic guitar solos toward the end, and they were almost to the bridge’s apex. Shoot, he thought, it’s all happening out of synch! It’s falling apart! Maybe if I slow below a hundred. He digitally fast-forwarded through the song until finally, almost at the last second, everything was aligned. He wanted to tweak the volume up a little, but If’s increasingly bobbing head made it hard to reach. To make it louder, Johnny would have to mash her face down really hard leaning over her. Screw it, he thought, I’ll live. The song’s guitar triplets screamed from the Alpine speakers, and Johnny scanned the panorama of distant lights from ships and beach towns, and his pre-orgasmic ego said, “My sphere of influence.” Then it was back to shaking and moaning and trying to keep track of the steering wheel.

Johnny didn’t see the parked car until it was almost too late. A white Chrysler New Yorker without emergency flashers sat half in the breakdown lane, half in Johnny’s lane. Johnny screamed and swerved left into the retaining wall. The Porsche scraped the cement barrier for three hundred yards, spraying a dramatic shower of sparks, but it helped slow the car without wrecking. There was no harm except extensive body damage and a socially awkward moment after they stopped when Johnny found If’s head turned a little too far in an undesigned direction and inextricably wedged between the seat and the bottom of the steering wheel.

“Hold on, let me get some tools from the trunk,” Johnny said and hopped from the car.

If tried to wiggle loose. “Hurry! It hurts!”

Johnny lathered the sides of her head with grease used to pack bearings, and her head snapped free with the sound of a finger popping a cheek. They stood for a silent moment of relief, catching their breaths, then realized they had forgotten about the parked Chrysler that had started it all. They turned and looked back up the bridge.

C hester “Porkchop” Dole was flipping channels on his TV and complaining about the lack of quality programming when he accidentally glanced up at the safety monitors.

He screamed.

Chester dove for the radio and knocked over the microphone. He’d never used the radio in six years at the bridge. He pressed buttons and switches until he got deafening feedback, and pressed more until it stopped. He keyed the mike and begged for help without protocol. He forgot to release the microphone button to hear a reply. When he heard no reply, he panicked and gripped the button harder. Everyone in the greater Tampa Bay area who owned an emergency scanner turned up the volume.

“Help! Help! I’m at the bridge! Oh, please! Why won’t anyone answer me! Why are all of you doing this! For the love of Jesus! Fuck me!” Followed by long, loud crying.

On the wall was monitor number five, and on the screen a man in a tux and a young woman in a strapless evening dress with a large, dark stain on the side of her head walked apprehensively up the bridge. Ahead was a white Chrysler New Yorker with scorch marks down the side, parked southbound. The Chrysler’s passenger stood between the vehicle and the bridge railing. He flicked a Bic lighter and held it to a strip of rag hanging out of a wine bottle and tossed it in the open passenger window.

A fireball. The car crackled and was engulfed, sending swirls of sparks up into the bridge’s suspension.

As Johnny Vegas watched a lunatic Molotov his own car, he thought the man might as well take a flamethrower to Johnny’s romantic life. He hadn’t lost his virginity yet. Some decent oral foreplay, but that wasn’t official under Queensberry rules. When the Chrysler’s driver climbed onto the bridge railing, Johnny’s heart skipped. Pleeeeeeeease don’t jump. It’s almost impossible to get a woman amorous after something like that. Men, sure. They’re in the mood after mass executions. Literally, there is no wrong time. But Johnny knew women were different. He had been on the business end of enough aborted trysts to know that far less than this can throw a woman’s emotions tottering out of that carefully nurtured trajectory needed to get her through the window of opportunity and into the sack.

A highway patrol car skidded to a stop behind the Chrysler and the trooper jumped out. “Why don’t we talk about this?” he said calmly. Back on the patrol car’s radio, Johnny heard a frantic, sobbing voice: “Oh, sweet God in heaven! Please, somebody answer me! Mother! Mother, where are you! Why did you leave me, Mother?”

Back in the safety booth, horror swept up the spine of Chester “Porkchop” Dole, and a cold, sallow flush hit his face. Dole could handle the drama on the bridge. What unraveled him was the knowledge that the smooth boulder of fate was about to roll over his nineteen years of public service. The safe routine of his job had been varied, the universe altered.

A journeyman state employee, Dole had the bureaucratic survival instincts that told him how to lateral most responsibility, dodge most blame, cover most ass. But there was one error so costly it was to be avoided above all else. It was known as Death-by-Headline. No matter what you do in public life, no matter how gravely you blow it, make sure it’s in a nebulous way that takes a lot of obscure argot to explain. Even if you get a bunch of people killed, as long as they die in eight-syllable words with no convenient puns, alliterations, rhymes or homonyms. There’s nothing worse than screwing up in a way that makes a snappy, pants-around-the-ankles newspaper headline that wins some poor copy editor the hundred-dollar prize for the month.

Dole saw just such a headline coming together on the screen. The Chrysler’s driver, dressed in a complete Santa Claus outfit, leaned forward, spread his arms wide and dove off the Sunshine Skyway bridge.

“Shit!” Johnny Vegas said under his breath as Santa disappeared over the side. Then a light went on in his head. He would turn this to his advantage. Yes, he thought, I’ll console her. I still have a chance to hump her till she craps the bed by being incredibly sensitive and caring.

Johnny took off his coat and draped it around If’s shoulders. He patted her head and leaned it against his chest. “Now, now,” he said, “everything will be all right.”

They turned around and started walking back to the Porsche. They heard a deep air horn from behind. A semi tractor-trailer had come upon the scene too fast and couldn’t stop. Johnny and If pressed themselves against the guardrail as the truck blew by. The truck ran over the Porsche, flattening it out like a beer can, and dragged it a quarter mile.

First there was silence, then the sniffling started, and Johnny closed his eyes for what he knew was coming. If’s crying erupted, building in hysteria until she emitted a shrill, warbling sound previously only heard in rutting minks.

T he ends of The Little Mermaid slippers poked across the front-door threshold and into the moderately humid eighty-two-degree December morning. Mrs. Edna Ploomfield, a little older than the temperature, bent down on the step of her Beverly Shores condominium to get the paper. She read the top headline, “Sad-Sack Santa Swan-Dives in Seasonal Sunshine Skyway Suicide.” She turned back into the house, closed the door and shuffled across the living room to the kitchen. The television set was on the local morning show Get the Hell Out of Bed, Tampa Bay! As she passed the set, state safety officer Chester “Porkchop” Dole was on the screen being interviewed live about his vain but heroic efforts radioing for help after keenly observing the Skyway jumper. It was such an impressive TV performance that Dole probably would have salvaged his career. Except he was absentmindedly holding his “Ask someone who gives a shit!” coffee mug prominently for the cameras.