Motor Mouth

whatever bizarre disaster you could conjure up. There was one last crunch and the behemoth bus came to rest on top of a Hummer.
    A headline flashed into my head: Bonnano Motor Coach Humps Hummer on Speedway Boulevard.
    We had fifteen to twenty cars between the motor coach and us, not counting the cars directly involved in the crash, and cars were in gridlock behind us.
    “I really want to run up there and take a look,” Hooker said, “but I’m afraid to get out of the car.”
    “Yeah,” I said to him. “You’d probably have to sign autographs. And then the police would come and take you away and do a body-cavity search.”
    I climbed out of the window and stood on the ledge to see better.
    Caught in the glare of headlights and smoky road haze, a lone figure ran between wrecked cars. He had a chain and part of a handrail tethered to his ankle. Hard to tell from my vantage point if he was injured. He approached a car stopped at the intersection, yanked the driver’s door open, and wrenched the driver out of the car. He angled himself into the car and drove off with the chain caught in the door and the handrail clattering on the pavement. So far as I could see, no one stopped him or followed him. The driver of the stolen car stood in frozen shock. Sirens screamed in the distance.
    I slipped back inside and took the seat next to Hooker. “Rodriguez carjacked a silver sedan and drove off into the sunset.”
    “He did not.”
    “Yep. He did. Still had the chain and handrail attached.”
    Hooker burst out laughing. “I don’t know who’s more pathetic…him or us.”
    I slouched in my seat. “I think we’d win that contest.”
    Beans sat up and looked around. He gave a big Saint Bernard sigh, turned twice, and flopped down.
    “This could take a while,” I said to Hooker. “They’re not going to sort this out in fifteen minutes.”
    Hooker reached over and ran a fingertip along the nape of my neck. “Want to make out?”
    “No!” Yes. But not here and not now. I wasn’t going to give in on a freeway. If we were going to have make-up sex, it was going to be good. It for sure wasn’t going to be in the backseat of an SUV.
    “Just some kissing,” Hooker said. He put his hand over his heart. “I swear.”
    “You’re not planning on doing any touching?”
    “Okay, maybe some touching.”
    “No.”
    Hooker blew out a sigh. “Darlin’, you’re a hard woman. You’re doggone frustrating.”
    “And it’s not going to do you any good to drag out your Texas drawl,” I told him.
    Hooker grinned. “It got me where I wanted to go when I first met you.”
    “Yeah, well, it’s not going to get you there now.”
    “We’ll see,” Hooker said.
    I narrowed my eyes at him.
    “Come on, admit it,” Hooker said. “You want me bad.”
    I smiled at him, and he smiled back, and we both knew what that meant. He held my hand, and we sat there, holding hands, staring out the windshield, watching the cleanup spectacle like it was a television show.
    There were fire trucks and medical-emergency trucks from three counties and enough flashing strobes to give a healthy man a seizure. The medevac helicopter didn’t drop out of the sky, and no one seemed to be rushing around, frantically trying to save a life. So I was hoping that meant no one was critically injured. All but one of the fire trucks left the scene. And one by one the EMT trucks left, some with flashing lights. None of the EMT trucks sped away with sirens blaring. Another good sign.
    Tow trucks and police were working on the outer perimeter of the crash, moving cars. The road was still blocked, but the problem was shrinking. A tow truck inched into the heart of the wreck.
    “They’re going to try to get the coach off the Hummer,” I said to Hooker. “I’m going out for a better view.”
    I was afraid to climb onto the car again. Too many lights now. Too many people looking around. So I stood beside the SUV with my sweatshirt hood up and my hands in my pockets, hunched against the cold.
    After a lot of discussion, the tow-truck driver attached a chain to the coach and slowly winched it back. The rear on the Hummer had been squashed down to about three feet of compressed fiberglass and steel, so the coach didn’t actually have all that far to drop. It came off with a decent amount of grinding noise and a loud
wump
when it hit the ground. It bounced and jiggled a little, and then it went stoic, silently enduring its disgraced condition.
    Now that