“It’s traditional. The man walks on the street side, protecting the woman from the carriages, in case they splash mud.”

“That’s sexist, Brent. And besides, you’re gay.” I switch places with him, skipping around him so that I’m curbside.

Honk-honk!A truck blares right behind my shoulder.

I jump, startled at the loudness of it. The truck’s headlights go by in a double blur. The cars, confused by the roadblocks, are moving in all directions. Suddenly, I feel afraid. I haven’t been watching out for the dark car. I start to tell Brent, but he plows into me, laughing, and replaces me at the curb.

“So what if I’m gay?” he says. “I still count!”

At that moment, just as Brent is dancing toward the street, a car jumps the curb in back of him. It bounds up onto the sidewalk and hurtles directly toward him, ramming into his back with a sickening thud.

I can’t believe what I’m seeing.

It’s the car, the one that’s been following me.

“No! Brent!” I shout, but it’s too late.

Brent’s face freezes in agony and shock as the car lifts him bodily on its grill, like a charging bull gores a matador. His body snaps back against the car and his mouth is a silent scream.

“Stop! No!!” I watch in horror as the car flings Brent’s lithe frame up off the sidewalk. He shrieks as his body literally flies through the air and slams into the plate glass window of a bank. The glass shatters with a hideous tinkling sound and rains down on Brent in a deadly sheet. Then the only sound is the clamor of the bank alarm.

And the screech of the murderous car as it digs out onto a chopped-up Walnut Street and busts up a police sawhorse with a splinteringcraaaack.

I whirl around, squinting frantically for a license plate.

There is none.

The car careens crazily up the street and out of sight.

The coarse wooden toothpick in Detective Lombardo’s mouth wiggles indignantly. “Cheese and crackers! Why do you have to talk that way? I work with cops that have a fifty times better mouth than you.” We’re sitting in the hospital corridor, waiting for Brent’s operation to be over.

“What’s the matter with it?”

“It’s not nice, for a lady.”

“You know, if you’d get as worked up about whoever hit Brent as you do about my language, we’d be in good shape.”

“I don’t have to get worked up to do my job. I know my job. I’m doin it.” He points at me with his spiral note pad.

“Fine.”

“Good.”

“Good.” We’ve been arguing like this for hours. Lombardo arrived on the scene after the ambulance got there because I reported the incident as intentional. He asked a lot of questions and wrote the answers down slowly with a stubby pencil, which he seemed to think constituted the sum total of his job. Lombardo played football for Penn State, but I’m beginning to wonder if they gave him a helmet.

Suddenly, his heavy-lidded brown eyes light up. It looks like Fred Flintstone getting an idea. “Hey, Mary, how about gay-bashing?” Hey, Barn, how about we go bowling?

“You couldn’t tell that Brent was gay.”

“You can always tell.”

“Now what’s that supposed to mean?”

“Just what I said.”

I feel my eyes well up; I didn’t know there were any tears left. “I don’t want to hear that, Lombardo. Keep it to yourself, because you don’t know what you’re talking about. Brent is a great person and so are his friends. Anything else is bigotry.”

“Don’t get me wrong, I didn’t say I don’t like gay people.” He glances up and down the glistening hallway. “I got a brother, you know, who’s a little light in the loafers.”

“Christ.”

Lombardo leans closer, and I catch a whiff of Brut. “All I’m saying is that you can tell. I knew, with my brother. I knew, right off.”

“You knew.”

“I knew. It was his eyebrows. Something about his eyebrows.” He arches an eyebrow, with effort. “See?”

I look away. I’m glad Jack isn’t here for this conversation. I called him the first thing and he arrived in tears. He poured quarters into the pay phone, calling all his friends. They came in a flash and were as loving and supportive a group as I’ve ever seen. I tried to explain to him about the car, but he was too upset to listen. It doesn’t matter how Brent got here, Jack said, only that he gets out. They all went outside a while ago to smoke a cigarette, waiting to hear if they would be going to another funeral this weekend.

“Tom, I’m telling you, the car was meant for me. It’s the same car. I’m sure of it.”

He frowns at the notes on his pad. “You don’t know the color.”

“I said it was dark. Navy, black. One of those.”

“We don’t have the make.”

“It’s a sedan. An old one. Huge, probably American.”

“We don’t know if the driver’s male or female. You said there was no plate.”

“What about the notes? And the calls?”

“I told you, I’ll take the notes from you and I’ll take your statement about the calls.” Lombardo flips the notebook closed and slips it into his back pocket. “Look, Mary, we’ll go to the scene, we’ll investigate. Christ, the uniforms are already there. They’ll talk to the witnesses.”

“There weren’t any. There were hardly any cars. Nobody stopped.”

“So maybe there’s a cab still workin’. We’ll hear somethin’ in a day or two from one of the cars. Meantime the uniforms will scrape some paint off the sawhorse-that might tell us somethin’. Don’t look at me like that, Mary. AID’s pretty good.”

“AID?” The name sounds familiar, but I can’t place it.

“Accident Investigation Division. They do all the workup at the scene.”

I lean my head against the wall, fighting a wave of nausea. AID. Of course. They investigated Mike’s accident. Witness surveys. Scene examination. Analysis of his bicycle shorts for car paint. Even a flyer sent to local auto body shops. Then came the final call, from the Fatal Coordinator Sergeant. Sorry, Mrs. Lassiter, there’s nothing else we can do, he said. Oh, yeah? I thought to myself. How about changing your title?

“Where are the notes anyway?” Lombardo asks.

“Brent had them. I’m not sure where they are, probably in his desk.”

“You wanna take me there?”

“No. I want to stay here and see what happens to Brent.”

Lombardo sucks on his toothpick. “It’s not your fault, you know.”

I don’t reply. My mouth tastes acrid and angry. Of course it’s my fault; the driver was trying to kill me. And I didn’t listen to Brent and file a report, because I was more concerned about my brilliant career. I feel sick and guilty, and most of all, in the dark and twisted pit of my stomach, I feel a powerful fear. I don’t want to lose Brent like I lost Mike.

I close my eyes to the picture forming in my head, the one of the car slamming into Brent’s body. It’s like a nightmare, a waking nightmare, and one that I had on so many sleepless nights after Mike’s death, as I pictured the car slamming into him on his bike. I close my eyes to the horrific visions, trying to squeeze them out. But they bring me to see something, something I hadn’t seen before. I sit up in the plastic chair.

“You gotta go to the ladies?” Lombardo asks.

I’m amazed at what I’m thinking. I face Lombardo, but I can’t say anything. What if? What if there’s a connection between what happened to Mike and what happened to Brent?

“My husband was killed last year by a hit-and-run driver.”

“Jesus, Mary, I’m sorry. Jeez, Mary, if I hadda known. Jeez.” His beefy face flushes with embarrassment.

“What I’m saying is maybe it’s connected to what happened to Brent. Brent was hit by a hit-and-run driver too.”

Lombardo takes the toothpick out of his mouth.

I struggle to make my argument, to find the right words. My brain is tired, so tired, and I can’t think fast enough. “Tom, couldn’t it be the same driver? Let’s say someone is very angry at me, hates me for some reason. They even kill my husband, hit him with a car. They write me hate notes, they call me, they stalk me. They break into my apartment, they break my husband’s picture-”