Body Surfing

dangled just beside it. Garrote the motherfucker! Larry Bishop sang out gleefully—as with Italian opera, he had learned the word from the Gotti capo, who loved to talk about the relative advantages and disadvantages of various methods of “taking someone out” (garrotes were nice because they didn’t make a mess, but you had to know you could overpower your mark until he suffocated). Jasper didn’t want to kill anyone, but he figured that if he could loop the seatbelt around the driver’s neck he’d probably have to stop the car.
    “La donna è mobile,” the aria rolled around again, “qual piùma al vento.” The driver sang along in a rich tenor. The car was awash in sound, and Jasper deepened his breath, giving his muscles the oxygen they craved. “Muta d’accento, e di pensier.” He gauged the distance, saw himself move in his head, jumping, grabbing the seatbelt, looping it around the driver’s neck.
    “E di PENSIER!”
    He leapt.
     
    He felt the driver hit the brakes even before he landed. Jasper slammed into the back of the driver’s seat. He grabbed the seatbelt but it had locked, so he just went for the driver’s throat instead. The man batted at him with one hand while trying to steer the fishtailing vehicle with another. With his left hand, Jasper reached into the man’s nostrils and pulled backwards, and even as the man screamed he grabbed for his tie. He couldn’t get his fingers around the knot, but they closed around something else instead. A necklace of some kind, a pendant dangling by a length of braided leather cord. Jasper grabbed the ornate metal ornament with both hands and fell backward, hanging off it with all his weight.
    He found the driver’s eyes in the rearview mirror.
    “Stop the fucking car, or I’ll choke you to death.”
    The driver’s face was already beet purple. His glasses were askew and his hair stuck out in a hundred directions, but he still had the appearance of being poised. In control. He fixed Jasper’s eyes in the mirror, and then, grimly, lips already going blue, he smiled.
    The car surged forward as he stepped on the gas.
    “What the hell are you doing? You’ll kill us both!”
    The driver managed to nod his head.
    Jasper didn’t back down.
    “I died in one car crash this week. What’s a second one gonna do?”
    The driver swerved in and out of traffic. He clipped one car, a second. Horns blared. There was a shower of sparks as the car scraped along the median rail that divided the north-and southbound lanes of the highway, and still the car gained speed. The driver’s whole face was blue now. His eyes seemed to float a half inch in front of his cheeks, and little balls of light glowed in them.
    “Goddamn it,” Jasper screamed, “just die already!”
    The driver’s lip twitched. Jasper thought he was actually trying to smile. His eyelids sank to half mast. One of his hands fell off the wheel.
    Without any warning, the median rail ended and the car swerved into oncoming traffic. Jasper saw a larger-than-life Toyota logo justbefore the Tundra clipped the left side of the limousine. The tail of the car spun to the right, and then the rear passenger door slammed into the next section of median rail and the car caromed into the air, sideways, spinning like an amusement park ride. Jasper held on to the braided cord with all his strength. His legs whipped around, smashing into the seat and window and the roof of the car, but he didn’t let go.
    There was a crash then, as something (an Escalade, it turned out) smashed into the limousine and brought it to an abrupt stop. Jasper felt something snap beneath the cord and realized it was the driver’s neck. His own body flailed and smashed into the back of the seat, but the padding, and his Mogran physiology, saved him. Like Q., he had come through his accident without a scratch, save for several deep lacerations in his hands, where the ornament on the driver’s necklace had cut into his palms. He stared dazedly at the ornament’s weird crosses and swirls for a long time before he remembered it was attached to someone.
    He looked at the driver.
    One of the struts that held up the roof of the car had raked across the man’s face, which was virtually invisible beneath a caul of blood. The top of his head had been folded back like a blanket, but even so, Jasper figured it was probably the broken neck that had killed him. The driver’s head looped over the seatbelt like a deflated balloon. His nose