The Third Hill North of Town by Noah Bly Read Free Book Online Page B

them down, or it would be too late. He didn’t want to hurt the crazy lady, but if he could just get hold of the wheel once they came to a full stop he was pretty sure he could aim the car into the little ditch at the side of the road if she tried to take off again.
    His mouth was dry, and his heart was beating so loudly in his own ears he could barely hear anything else. He leaned forward and put his feet flat on the floor, readying himself to move as fast as he could. Julianna pulled up level with the stop sign and ground to a halt. The white pickup across the road from them stopped, too, and she waved politely at its driver, indicating that he should go first.
    And Elijah, seeing his chance, popped up into the air behind her like a flushed pheasant and launched himself over the seat.
     
    Sometimes Sarah Towpath’s husband, Cecil, made her so damn mad she couldn’t see straight. She’d been giving him a piece of her mind for what felt like eternity now, but it was like talking to a lump of coal.
    If he had just put his foot down three years ago, their gullible granddaughter, Tina, would never have married that jackass Wally. But all Cecil had said was, “It’s her life, Sarah. Let her live it, for God’s sake.”
    But just look what had come of that asinine strategy: Their granddaughter was working her fingers to the bone to support a useless, moronic slug of a man, that’s what. And Sarah, who had seen the whole miserable train wreck coming from the second she’d laid eyes on her future grandson-in-law, couldn’t even get Cecil to admit he’d been wrong.
    She took a deep breath, preparing to fire off another volley, but before her tongue could get up and running again, she happened to glance across the road and see a car facing them at an intersection. A tall woman was at the wheel; her head was almost touching the ceiling of the cab.
    My, she’s got a pretty car, Sarah thought, admiring the cream-colored roof and the shiny brown hood. Why can’t we have a pretty car like that, instead of this nasty old truck?
    She started to say as much to Cecil, but her words were swallowed in a scream of shock. Right before her eyes, a young black man had just lunged over the front seat of the pretty car, and was viciously attacking the tall white woman driving it!
    “Cecil!” Sarah wailed. “Do something!”
     
    Shortly after Dr. Edgar Reilly had purchased his 1959 Edsel Ranger, he went through a belated midlife crisis. He found himself wanting to own a car with some “muscle,” and the Edsel’s Super Express V8 engine, though by no means lacking in the get-up-and-go department, wasn’t quite muscular enough to offset the decline of his youthful self-esteem. Rather than purchasing an entirely different car, however, Edgar had asked a gifted mechanic to make a few “modifications” to the engine, to satisfy his newfound lust for speed.
    And the mechanic, who loved a challenge, had outdone himself. The specifics of the transformation were lost on Edgar, but he listened in a delighted trance as the mechanic uttered mysterious, manly words like “camshaft,” “differential,” “headers,” and “intake manifold” by way of explanation. Such terms were meaningless to Edgar, but he could sense the masculine potency in them, and each syllable was a balm to his aging soul.
    Julianna knew nothing of this, of course (she had been going at a good clip down the highway, but hadn’t yet goosed the accelerator) and it wouldn’t have meant a thing to her even if she had been aware of it. But prior to this overhaul, Edgar’s Edsel could only do a standing quarter mile in 15.2 seconds. Afterward, it could do the same distance in 11.4 seconds.
    In other words, when given proper inducement, it could haul ass.
     
    Elijah made it halfway over the seat in his brash bid for freedom, but his crotch caught on the seatback just as his hands seized the steering wheel.
    “Oof,” he grunted.
    Julianna was too surprised to say