Programmed for Peril

when quarry’s 4 x 4—oh, he was such a sport !— would reach the long, deserted stretch between the junkyard and the motor home park. So he had set the timer installed last night to cut oif quarry’s engine just about there, give or take a few hundred yards. Champ was nothing if not a reasonably precise man.
    He came around a comer. Drat! Construction. Yellow-hatted men swarmed like workers around a queen bee of an asphalt-laying machine. One-lane traffic was controlled by a flag woman. When delay is inevitable, sit back and enjoy it. Study her buttocks beneath the loose Day-Glo safety vest. Imagine peeling off tight bleached jeans, panties, and setting whiz-bangs upon white flesh. He would threaten her with dribbles from that pot of hot asphalt. He imagined the upward-curling steam stinking of methane-chain compounds, heard her screams of fear. But in the end he would press nothing hotter than his kisses against her body’s seven portals. In time she waved him ahead, fingers curved fetchingly around the flag rod.
    Seven minutes wasted.
    He picked up speed a bit, but not so much as to draw the attention of troopers. He would arrive at his quarry’s stalled vehicle more than five minutes late. Surely that wouldn’t matter.
    But it did.
    The Good Samaritan drove a Volvo. He had pulled it up behind the 4x4. The two men bent over on either side of an open hood. Champ killed the engine and glided the Blandmobile behind the Volvo. Speedy action was required. And little cat feet, too. He kept both in his bag of tricks. From the backseat he pulled a baseball hat. Go, Pirates! He pulled the bill low. Ready, set, allons!
    Mr. Samaritan was a hirsute man in his late twenties handlebars and Custer-style locks. Champ angled his ap! proach to partially hide his shadowed face from the 4x4 driver. “What’s the problem?” he growled.
    “Just died as I was going along,” the 4x4 driver said.
    “Oh, that! It’s a classic problem with these nineties. I know how to fix that.” Sly Champ, the auto authority!
    “All right!” Mr. Samaritan said.
    “This is all you need to get it going again.” Champ brandished his tool.
    Mr. Samaritan frowned. “Just that piece of wire?”
    “Works wonders. Watch.” Wait for that lone car to pass. Now the deserted road stretched out as comforting as written permission.
    He lowered his hand into the engine well, stiff wire angled down. Then the moment of truth! Don Champ de los Enfernos in the corrida, leaning over the horns of the bull, sword searching for that exact spot on the hide guaranteeing sudden death. Yes! The upward thrust of the wire, the left hand rising behind Mr. Samaritan’s head. Reflexive avoidance was a no-no. Bull’s-eye! Or was that man’s-eye? Whatever, four inches of wire foraged in gray matter.
    Champ whipped out the wire, let Mr. Samaritan slump down between the car and the road.
    The 4x4 driver stood paralyzed, frowning. He wasn’t sure what he had seen. He should be running, Champ thought. But he suspected the fellow wasn’t that much a man of action. As he hurried around the front of the car the driver took a few backward steps. For the first time he looked Champ in the face.
    “You’re Carson Thomas!”
    Oh, sublime mask! I am not Carson! “And you’re Foster Palmer.”
    “Oh, my God! You know who I am?” Heavy shadows worked their way across the Loathed One’s wide face. “Carson Thomas...”
    “My fame precedes me,” Champ said. “Get in my car. We have important things to do.”
    “No!”
    Champ read his fear as easily as Sunday’s Beetle Bailey strip. It had been fermenting for weeks within his WASPy skull. “Get in!”
    The Loathed One hesitated. Champ was on him in an instant, bending his fingers until he howled. ‘‘Get in!” he ordered.
    “My hand!”
    “Your neck if you resist.” Champ’s grin was sun bright. He winked. “Or maybe your eye.”
    “W-what did you do to him?”
    “Sent him on a journey to eternity.”
    “Why?”
    The bone of that question fell with a clatter onto the plate of Champ’s mind. Why, indeed? He could have found another, gentler way to get the Loathed One into his car, one that would have left no corpse. He... hadn’t thought. But he always thought. His intellect was premier among his strong suits. He was getting tangled. Tangled! First he had crept into Queen of My Heart’s bedroom, running mad risks and inviting terrible events that would be followed by Carson’s sure, certain