When she walks over toward him, her heart's beating so hard she's sure it must be showing through her blouse like she's got something alive in there trying to get out, and she knows just what they've always meant when they say in the movies, "I felt like I was walking on air." Only it's a kind of bumpy air, like any minute something might catch her heels and make her fall on her face and turn the whole thing into some awful slapstick routine, the story of her crummy life. And sure enough, just when she gets close enough to pick up his smell (which is something between pepper steak, hot bathwater, and a Christmas tree — buttered popcorn can't touch it), her knees go all mushy, and she thinks, wobbling, oh boy, here we go again — but he reaches out and steadies her with just the lightest touch on her elbow, and then, as though there's some secret signal between them, they turn and (she checks to make sure she's still got her ticket stub, you never know, don't burn your britches, as her girlfriend likes to say) step out onto the street.
Her hands are trembling when she reaches for the cigarette he offers her, and there's a kind of fog swirling around (it makes her think of steamy train stations and damp farewells, though in fact she hasn't even said hello yet) or else she's going blind with mad passion, very likely, and she's just trying to think of something brainy yet romantic to say — like, "Isn't destiny wonderful, I agree, but it's sometimes, you know, kind of weird, too, am I right?" or, "When you looked at me in there, I felt like I was stumbling on air, me and my big feet," or maybe just, "How did you guess, yum, my favorite flavor," wondering to tell the truth what kinds of cigarettes they sold nowadays, not having tried to smoke one of the things since way back before she became a cheerleader her third year in high school — when four guys step out of the shadows and grab her and start dragging her toward the curb. "Hey!" she yelps, any language fancier than that escaping her as her feet leave the ground. She twists around toward her erstwhile lover-boy, hoping, if not for a heroic rescue, at least for a little sympathy, but he only smiles mysteriously, takes a drag on his butt, flips it away, and, trailing wisps of fog and cigarette smoke like a kind of end-of-reel tease, disappears back into the movie house.
A black unmarked car with thick windows pulls up and they push her into it, two of these blue-suited meatsacks squeezing in beside her in the back seat, another jumping up front with the driver, who is hunched over the wheel in a cloth cap and a coat with the collar turned up around his ears, like something she has seen a thousand times, yet never seen before. The fourth guy flops a jump seat down in front of her and sits facing her with a machine gun pointed straight at her belly, which even in her present panic she realizes is what has gotten her into all this trouble in the first place. Maybe he can even hear it growling because, as they roar away from the curb, he tells her to shut up even though she hasn't said a word and couldn't if she tried.
It's scary enough that she's jammed into this car with a bunch of muscle-bound maniacs who, if they aren't gangsters, sure act like it, a gun poked at her stomach and the car going about a hundred miles an hour through the thickest downtown traffic she's ever seen around this place, running lights and swerving around oncoming cars and generally scaring the pants off anybody who has time to see them coming (someone who looked a little bit like her mother just went leaping backwards through a plate glass window back there — this is no joke!), but she's also got the distinct impression that the driver, who should have his eyes on the road ("Yikes!" she yips as the side of a huge bus looms before them and the guy with the gun gives her a jab with it and says: "I thought I told you to shut up!"), has them on her instead, staring darkly at her through his rearview mirror, like either he's got designs on her, evil or whatever, or he's trying to tell her something. "There's somebody followin' us," he snarls suddenly, as though to hide what he really wants to say.
The other guys whip out their weapons and roll the windows down. "Step on it!" the one with the gun on her yells and now they really get going, jumping curbs and racing the wrong way down one-way streets, taking corners on two wheels, tires screeching, crashing right through newsstands and flower carts, beating speeding engines to train crossings, leaping roadworks and gaping bridges, the gorillas beside her meanwhile leaning out the windows and blasting away at whoever it is that's following them. No one's paying any attention to her now, if they weren't going a thousand miles an hour she could just open the door and step out and never be missed — no one, that is, except the driver, who is still eyeing her through the rearview mirror like he can't get enough of her. Is he crazy?
Then suddenly one of the bruisers beside her slumps to the floor with a big hole where an eye should be, making her clench her teeth and pull her lips back, and the guy in the jump seat, looking like somebody just yanked his plug and let all the blood run out, shoves her toward the empty window and yells in a high nervous voice: "You think it's funny? You just stick your head out there for a while!" She shrinks back at the same moment that the gunman on the other side of her spasms and flops against her like a bag of dirty laundry (and where are they now? they seem to be racing along the edge of some cliff!), and she tries her best to erase the grimace, but the squeaky guy just screams and pokes her with his machine gun again. His finger is jittery on the trigger, his eyes rolling around like he's about to lose his taffy, and the driver, squinting at her in the mirror, gives her a little go-ahead nod as if he might have something in mind, so what else can she do?
They're going so fast her eyes tear when she sticks her head out and she can't see a thing, but she can hear the squealing tires and howling sirens and the bullets ricocheting off the side of the car. As for those two hours in the beauty parlor this afternoon, forget it, it's a good thing it's her own hair or it'd all be gone by now. Whenever she tries to pull back inside, she can feel that fruitcake behind her prodding at her fundamentals with the pointy end of his tommy gun, pushing her further and further out the window like he might be trying to unload ballast, as her girlfriend likes to say when she has to go to the ladies'. Then amazingly, amid the roar of rushing wind and gunfire and speeding wheels, she seems to hear someone whisper, "Jump!" right in her ear. What? She catches just a glimpse through her windblown lashes (those aren't her own, and — zip! — they're gone) of the brim of his cloth cap, leaning out the window toward her. "Now!"
The car seems to swerve and the next thing she knows she's all alone out in midair some place (out of the corner of her eye she sees the gangsters' car leave the cliff edge and go somersaulting explosively far below), and then she's falling. She doesn't know how long she keeps falling, maybe she passes out for a second, because it seems like almost the next day when she hits the water — which is cold as ice and churning like an old washing machine and wakes her up right away if in fact she was asleep before. She flounders in the swirling waves, wishing now she hadn't always been so self-conscious in a swimming suit and had at least gone to the pool enough to learn something about how you stay on top of this stuff and keep from swallowing so much of it. What's worse, when for a moment she does manage to get her head above the surface, she can see she's being swept toward some kind of rapidly approaching horizon, which even she in her landlocked innocence knows can only be the edge of a waterfalclass="underline" the roar is deafening and she can see spume rising from below like the mist they use in those films about dying and going to the other world. Well, out of the frying pan and down the drain, as her friend would say: she holds her nose and gets ready for the plunge.