The Lesson of Her Death

these things. The blue-haired woman piloting the Volkswagen, the driver whose eyes gaped in the mirror, the trees, the birds startled and fleeing from Jamie’s own speed—nothing was of the least importance. He smiled and struggled to pedal fast enough to keep up with his trilling wheels, propelling himself faster and faster.
    Fifteen yards
…
    The car waiting for the green light was a Nissan and its license plate number was DRT 345.
    Ten
…
    An old skid mark in the shape of a sine curve crossed both lanes.
    Pedal pedal pedal pedal!
…
    A wooden crate that had contained Rock Island peaches lay shattered by the roadside, wads of blue tissue paper bleeding into the ground.
    …
faster than light
.…
    The southbound Taurus station wagon, doing about sixty-five, began its skid thirty feet from where the bike was entering the intersection. The gray vehicle’s end drifted to the left as the frozen wheels howled. The driver steered into the skid expertly, which had the effect of moving the car into the oncoming lane and aiming the grille precisely at where the speeding bicycle would cross the highway.
    The front-seat passenger lowered her face below the dashboard.
    The baritone Detroit horn blared.
    The driver flung an arm over his eyes.
    Ping
.
    Jamie Corde had an impression of fingers snapping beside his head as he passed in front of the station wagon. The bumper missed his rear tire by no more than six inches. Their combined speed was close to one hundred ten miles an hour.
    His ears filled with the horn and the endless scream of the locked wheels. Then he was past Route 116, dancing over what was otherwise a risky patch of pebbles and transmission fluid as confidently as if the road were a smooth, banked racetrack. He relaxed his numb legs and coasted. Horns shrieked behind him and he knew he was getting cussed out by at least one station wagon full of people.
    But what could he do except keep going, leaving them far far behind?
    Jamie Corde continued to pedal—furiously to keep his speed up. As he approached the school he stood high on the pedals. He gazed up into the sky and breathed in hot oily air, waving a fist above his head, laughing and howling like a desert-loco cowboy.
    Jim Slocum opened the candy bar and took a bite, pressing the candy up against the roof of his mouth. He dropped a dollar on the counter.
    “Be right with you, Officer,” the young woman behind the counter said.
    “Take your time.”
    Slocum leaned against the counter in the Sweets ’n Things shop at the Oakwood Mall. He took another bite of Milky Way, which was still his favorite candy bar. Always had been, always would be. The door to the candy store opened and Slocum watched a teenage boy enter. Fat. Wearing grimy clothes. Blond hair long and stiff with spray or grease. Slocum recognized him asPhilip Halpern. The boy glanced at Slocum in unconcealed surprise. He walked to the wall of glass canisters of penny candy and began to fill a bag.
    Slocum was put off. He felt angry at the boy for his weight and his lack of willpower. He wanted to say, “You keep eating like that you’re gonna stroke out by the time you’re twenty, son.” He kept these thoughts to himself though. Like all New Lebanon deputies Slocum had answered domestic violence calls at Creth Halpern’s shabby bungalow. The father could be frightening—his eerily confused eyes as much as his temper. The ex-sailor would slouch on the couch picking at a flap of skin from his right-hook knuckle and smiling at the bloody streaks on the dented front of the Kelvinator.
    His wife, pungent with gin, holding ice to her pretty face, would look up with a drunk’s sincerity and say, “We was fooling around is all.” Philip, himself sometimes bruised, usually hid in the bedroom. There was a daughter too. Slocum bet she’d be knocked up and Remington-married by the time she was sixteen.
    Boy, you stay that fat, they won’t let you join the Army and what’re you gonna do then?
Jim Slocum was convinced that all emotional troubles could be cured by varsity football or basic training.
    The clerk’s customer left the store.
    “Miss,” Slocum said to her, “I’m asking all the merchants here in the mall if they were open late on Tuesday night.”
    “This have to do with the student girl who got killed?”
    “Yep, sure does.”
    “Is this fellow, you know …” Two furrows of concern appeared on the young woman’s brow.
    “How’s that?”
    She touched her heavily