The Deal Read Free Page A

recover the
patient and restart the journey from where the last one left
off.
    As I got closer, though, I was
actually quite surprised to see the battered and bashed doors of
the emergency vehicle. It only served to make the whole night all
that more bizarre. First, I fucked up with the hit, and
then just to add insult to injury I had to make a deal with the
devil just so I could complete what I had originally started out to
do; only with the added bonus that I get to live forever if I can
pull it off.
    Then there was Lisa. My beautiful
wife. The woman who had given me five years of real love and
not the shit I had to pay for from the girls on the street. My
heart ached for her, it never really stopped aching, but I tried my
best to ignore it, hoping that it would eventually go
away.
    The problem with that way of
thinking is that you simply can’t ignore what your heart feels. If
it wants then you must give it, otherwise you only end up torturing
yourself. It was in realizing that I knew I wasn’t trying to save
myself, I was trying to save the woman who had given me so much and
asked for so little in return a chance to enjoy the heaven she so
truly deserved.
    It seemed totally unfair that she had been in
hell all this time, while I was out roaming the streets and killing
people for money like I had done for so many years before I met
her, and probably would continue to do so even if I did manage to
pull off the impossible.
    I tried to change my mode of
thought and concentrate on the job at hand, which for now was
following the ambulance. This time, I kept a safe distance. The
rain outside was slowly turning to snow as had been forecast
earlier this morning.
    I had to narrow my eyes as the
snow began to fall faster and harder, almost blinding me at times
due to the speed of the car which was fast approaching seventy
miles an hour. The glimpses I caught of the outside world were nothing more than a stream of blurred buildings and the
occasional blurred face of a homeless person scavenging for food or
shelter or both.
    For what seemed like an eternity I
kept a cars distance away from the battered emergency vehicle,
knowing that for some reason the breaks on the Mercedes were not working as they should and if I had to stop suddenly then
it was going to involve hitting something hard.
    That hard object eventually turned out to be a
police cruiser.
    I had been so focused on keeping up with the
Ambulance that I had not been paying attention to the roads as much
as I should have been; so when both my Mercedes and the ambulance
reached the junction just a quarter mile from the hospital I did
not notice that the lights had changed to red just as the ambulance
screamed on through.
    In one sense I was fortunate that
I only clipped the front of the cruiser, and I could see the look
of shock on the driver's face as his cop car spun until
it was parallel to mine before crashing into the side of my car
with a loud thud.
    The air was filled with the sound of glass
shattering and I could hear the angry voices of the officers inside
the cruiser. I quickly glanced at the dashboard clock, there was
now only twenty minutes left until the deal had to be completed or
I was looking at an eternal life of damnation.
    ‘ Don’t you dare try and pull away,
boy.’ I turned to see the passenger of the cruiser, an
overweight, mustachioed man with a bright red face,
struggling to reach for his service revolver. His partner, on the other
hand, was too busy trying to get the car
to start again.
    It was as I watched him that I realized I
could still feel the soft purring of the Mercedes engine vibrating
through the chassis.
    A quick glance through the broken windshield
and I could see the red and blue lights of the ambulance dance of
the nearby buildings like a cheap laser show as it continued on its
path to the hospital.
    I realized I had to make a quick decision: If
I remained where I was I was busted and the deal would be broken.
If I put my foot down