The New One

This is what I do while in class at Field Med.



The windmills churned round again.

On the ground the blood had almost entirely soaked into the dust. Standing by the door, like a blood-soaked gargoyle, she finally let the gun fall onto the driver's seat. As if the falling gun had restarted time she began to move. Using the tire iron from the jack she pushed the carcass off the cliff. The car started with the whisper of luxury and in the backseat the case with the 400,000 hundred dollars bills glowered accusation.

Pulling back onto The Strip an hour later she barely even glanced at the gaudy extravaganza. So focused was she on her mission, she never saw the two-seat bicycle taxi that killed her.

The collision was quick and the taxi driver barely even noticed the sleekness of her Rolls. He didn't have any customers, so it was only the loss of one resident Las Vegan. But she was through the windshield before she knew what happened and dead before the case in the backseat hit the floor.

James Lauer had given up years ago. He knew he hadn't ever accomplished anything. All his pleasures and perfections were vicarious. After High School there were a couple of years when he thought that something might happen for him, but nothing ever did and the slow movement West had finally landed him here. Vegas offered him a good disposable income. He sustained off the gullibility of tourists. The move towards a more family oriented Sin City had been a boon to him. All the brightly colored shirts and fear of looking stupid made perfect sense to a business model that covers all the angles. A suit, not a flashy one, a smile, thank God Dad was an orthodontist, and a guarantee of successful gambling skills taught in one hour increments and two hour "Intensive" courses. It all added up to money, if not in the bank, then at least under the carpet in the living room.

As he ran to the wreck though, all he could think about was the woman who's flown through the window. As the rolls had passed him, sitting on his bench, eating his late dinner ham and cheese, he'd been awed by her. She was, without question, a specimen of perfection.

It was a split second and she never saw him. His firing synapses had only just hit their receptors when her head hit the glass. Just as his heart leaped in his chest, the rolls leaped over the taxi and all the bits of perfection came crashing to earth.

So James ran.

He got to the wreck and took it in with a glance. The woman was obviously dead. She had obviously died and bled and torn all at once. The only thing left to take in was the case in the backseat. It was lying open, as if it had been placed that way, full to the top with tightly wrapped hundreds. A true child of the Media Age, the phrase, "unmarked, non-sequential hundreds" immediately tolled through his mind. He was later discouraged to find them to be both marked and sequential. Nonetheless, the case retained its emotional allure. Money does that.

Looking around him with a speed and intensity that he had rarely found before, he opened the rear passenger door and took the case. With another swift glance around, and a more tender on at the bloodied angel in the street, he closed the case against his leg and walked off.