A Mouse With Teeth
It’s about 275 miles from Vegas to L.A. We got about a hundred of them under our tires before Joy went crazy.
We were driving along, talking about how pretty the desert and mountains were. She went quiet and just started answering whatever questions I’d put to her with short, one word sentences. Finally, I looked over at her. She had her head down and her purse in her lap.
“Joy, baby, what’s the matter?” I asked. She just shook her head and didnn’t move or say anything else. We were passing through some high hills or I would have pulled over and stopped, but I reached over and took her chin gently in my hand. “What’s wrong, sweetie? Do you need me to stop? I’ll have to go on a bit until we get off his hill, but I can –”
“Yes. Yes, you need to stop,” she was very forceful. I looked over at her and she had a small gun, some spitball-shooter I’m sure, pointed at me.
“Where’d you get that, doll face? You better put it away before something happens.” I tried not to show her how nervous I was. Anyone gets nervous with a gun pointing at their head.
“No, I don’t think I need to put it away. I want you to pull over. Now.” She held the gun a little higher, with both hands a little tighter. She wasn’t watching the road.
I pulled over. I pulled the car sharply to the right and we veered off the edge of the hill. It wasn’t a high hill, just a hundred feet or so. The car rolled, though. I popped open my door just before it flipped the first time and the car threw me out. I rolled down the hill after it, hitting rocks and brambles on the way down. One of the doors came off and I slammed down on it at one point.
Finally the car and I both ended up at the bottom of the hill. I was the only one that was going to move, though. I walked around the car, checking it out. It was smashed down on the driver’s side. The top and the hood were both caved in. The driver’s side door was the one that had come off and all the windows had broken out, too. It was a miracle I hadn’t been cut to shreds on one of those. I cared less about how I had survived and more about why I had been forced to drive off a cliff.
I peeked in through what was left of the front windshield. Joy lay on the ground visible through the driver’s side door. It looked like both of her legs were broken, but she still had the gun in her hand. I couldn’t tell if she was alive or dead. She didn’t move, but she could have just been knocked out. I climbed part way in through the window to move her. When I did, I saw the blood. At some point she had pulled the trigger on the gun. The bullet had hit her in the neck. Between the shock of the crash and the shock from the blood loss, she had died quickly.
I wasn’t sad.