Presidential Deal by Les Standiford

offered.
    Wells shrugged. “I sure as hell intended to, but I was in a solid line of traffic and I guess I wasn’t fast enough. The next thing I know the guy’s shooting, the glass is blowing out of my windows, I’m under the dash, one hand on the wheel and crossing myself with the other.” He gave Deal a brief smile as he continued. “
Then
I feel something slam into the side of the van, I realize—insult to injury—the guy’s trying to run me off the road.”
    Wells stared at Deal as if he’d understand the outrage of it all, and Deal thought maybe he did understand. “Just what had this person done, anyway?”
    “I’m getting to that,” Wells said. “Meantime, all I know is he’s an asshole trying to kill me and I just got the van out of the body shop that week, five hundred bucks for a big ding my wife put in there pulling out of a parking space. I mean, I know it’s not rational, but I am pissed. When the shooting stops, I come up out of my seat and I don’t even bother to see if the guy’s still got his gun out, I just pull hard right on the wheel of the van and smack back into him and all of a sudden, there we are, like a couple of billy goats butting head to head, going about sixty miles an hour by this time, chewing a big cloud of dust right down the shoulder of the road.”
    Deal was hooked by now, was reliving flashes of a not-so-dissimilar encounter of his own, on his way to work one sunny Florida morning, when a cretin in a car he’d unwittingly cut off in traffic had pulled a gun and nearly killed him.
    “What was happening with the rest of the traffic?” he asked Wells.
    Wells’s face broke into a grin. “Oh, man, they were flying every which place, just trying to get out the way.”
    Deal felt himself identifying more and more with Wells, this fellow hardhead who was just driving along, minding his own business, when trouble came calling. It reassured him in a way. If he and Wells had found themselves at such a gathering, then surely others in the room had ended up here under similar circumstances. Maybe there should be a special category of the awards, he was thinking; call it “Accidental Heroes.” Maybe he’d feel like less of an impostor, being here.
    “We might have gone on like that until the guy reloaded or we ran out of gas, one,” Wells was saying. “But then I saw we were coming up to this underpass for 1-70.”
    Wells paused, his expression sobering. “I’ll never know if the guy saw it coming, ’cause I know I caught sight of it just in time to hang a big-time left.” Wells shrugged. “My van clipped the support pillar on the rear end, but the asshole took it head-on. His car just blew up, man, burned to a cinder.”
    Wells gave Deal a look. “He’d have been dead already, of course. I hope he was. Even with what he’d done, I’d hate to think about somebody burning to death like that, even him.” There was something almost pleading in his tone, something that made Deal nod in agreement.
    “You were going to tell me what the guy had done,” he reminded Wells gently.
    “Yeah.” Wells sighed. “Turned out he’d robbed some pissant little bank out in Grove City, marched three tellers and the woman manager into the vault and shot ’em in the back of the head.”
    Wells shook his head. “One of them lived, but she’s in a wheelchair, can’t even say hi to her kids. The guy got six thousand dollars. It burnt up in the crash.”
    He was staring at Deal hollow-eyed now. “Thing I can’t figure out,” Wells said, “what the hell have we come to, anyway? I mean, the guy had the money, wasn’t a soul going to contest him for it. He didn’t even have to shoot those women in the first place.”
    Deal shook his head. “I don’t know,” he said. “It’s not the same world I grew up in. I know it must sound dumb, like it’s something my old man probably said in his time, too, but…” He trailed off, feeling helpless before Wells’s answerless