to one side. He cranked the wheel the other way and the car swerved back, careening in broad swales across the pavement. But he was too close, moving too fast. He heard the dog hit the car, felt the impact, and watched it slide up across the hood and through the windshield, exploding the glass inward and all over him.
The car went off the road at an angle, did two three-sixties through the sand along the shoulder and came to rest against a Joshua tree, which promptly collapsed and disappeared into a massive cloud of dust. The air was thick with the smell of burned rubber and steaming antifreeze. The world went abruptly still and silent.
Moments later, when he emerged from his daze, Hank screamed a litany of obscenities, slammed his shoulder against the unmoving door, and then crawled from the car through the empty windshield hole and sat on the hood. Steam rose up around him and he ran his hands over his body, feeling for anything strange. He seemed all right. He tried to shake off the adrenaline and focus.
But there was sand all over him—dirt, everywhere—and panic seized him. He brushed at his pants and shirt, nearly frantic, but the brushing only moved it around. He stopped himself and took a few deep breaths. There was nothing he could do. When his anxiety subsided, he surveyed the view in all directions: nothing but sagebrush and a fading sunset. All he could do was shake his head.
This is just great, he thought. Wonderful.
Hank turned back and looked inside the car. Sitting upright in the passenger’s seat, as if posed, were the remains of the coyote. The contorted body, caked with blood and broken glass, looked out at him like a macabre family dog waiting to go for a ride. But the real kicker, the show-stopper, was the mangled but complete human leg hanging from its mouth.
Even better, Hank grinned. Fucking perfect.
He shook his head and bits of glass tumbled from his hair. This was no way to start a job. He stood up on the hood and scanned the desert. Absolute desolation. No lights. No sound. Nothing.
Where would a coyote get a leg? What were the odds of it stepping out in front of his car given all the surrounding space? What if Hertz hadn’t placed the governor on the Subaru? Then he would have driven by this very spot sooner and the accident never would have happened. Was Hertz to blame? Was the Hertz executive in an office suite somewhere who had approved the policy requiring the governors to blame? Or was this the perfect example of an accident—a truly random event that was the culmination of endless chains of cause and effect that no one could untangle? Perhaps everything that occurred at any given moment was equally random? But then, if resulting from causal relationships, nothing was really random at all—the universe, frozen at any particular moment, could be wound backward to its beginning and forward to its conclusion like a massive clock. Events were random only because the human brain was so limited. Or, perhaps causal relationships were manufactured by the brain as a way to organize the world, but in fact did not exist at all. Quantum mechanics had something to do with it. Neutrinos.
Hank shook the thoughts from his head. What did they matter? The situation was baffling. So overwhelmingly improbable, in fact, that he could hardly process it. But it didn’t matter if he could get his mind around it. The situation was what it was. Given that his car no longer worked, it was an improbability he would have to deal with when someone finally found him. Comprehension was irrelevant; action was everything.
Could he drag it off into the brush and hide it? Perhaps. But then how to explain the wreck? If a state patrol or policeman came by, they might see blood in the car. Hank leaned down and into the car, studying the edge of the window, the dashboard, the fabric of the seat. There was blood everywhere, bits of hair too. The dead coyote seemed to leer at him, the gnarled head only a foot away from Hank in the dying light. He grimaced at the bloodless color of the leg, which hung down between the two front seats, its dusty toes resting cold and bloated on the gearshift.
There would be no way to clean it up. Better to leave it. A cover-up would only make him look