Robert Asprin's Dragons Run by Jody Lynn Nye Page A

garbage truck heading the wrong way down Toulouse straight toward a black sedan. He got one glimpse of Fox Lisa behind the wheel of the car, her face bleached white by the truck’s headlights. She turned her head to look back over her shoulder. The car leaped backward with a refined roar, but the truck continued to bear down on it. Fox Lisa couldn’t back away swiftly enough. Griffen dashed to catch up with the truck.
    “Hey!” he yelled, trying to attract the driver’s attention. “Stop!”
    CRASH! The truck piled into the car, crushing the hood. The windshield burst, spraying chips of glass all over the street.
    Griffen ran toward the car. He glanced behind him at the pale, shocked faces lit by the streetlamp.
    “Get the driver!” he shouted.
    Malcolm leaped up onto the step beside the driver’s door. With a powerful wrench, he tore it open.
    “There’s no one in it!”
    Griffen had no time to concern himself with the mystery. The car was bent into a rough W, with the hood mashed almost vertical. He tugged at the passenger door of the Lincoln. It was bent so much it couldn’t open. Penny and Fox Lisa, their laps draped with deflated air bags, hammered at the handles, trying to escape. Griffen pulled at the back door. It popped open. He leaned in and grabbed Penny’s hand.
    “Unbuckle your belt,” he ordered. She clicked it open. When it retracted, Griffen pulled her over the seatback and thrust her outside, into the arms of the waiting crowd. Jerome was there. He picked her up and carried her to the sidewalk. “Fox Lisa, are you all right?”
    “I’m fine,” she said. Her voice trembled. She undid her own belt and climbed over the seat by herself. She ran around the rear of the car to Penny and threw her arms around her. “You okay, darlin’?”
    Penny looked shaken, but she stood tall, pushing both Fox Lisa and Jerome away. “I’m fine.”
    She regained her composure so swiftly, Griffen was astonished, until he saw pocket cameras appearing by the dozen in the hands of the crowd. Flashes popped off, making him wince, but he stiffened his expression into one of open concern.
    Malcolm appeared at their side. He took Penny by the arm.
    “You may need medical attention,” he said. “This way.”
    “Yes. I’m all right!” she called to the onlookers.
    Fire trucks crowded onto Toulouse from Rampart Street behind a city police car. Firefighters in heavy rubber coats surrounded the two vehicles and prepared to pull them apart. An ambulance siren wailed and clucked. The revolving lights splashed on Burgundy, and a couple of uniformed paramedics came jogging around the corner with a stretcher on wheels between them.
    “Anyone hurt?”
    “No,” Griffen said.
    “Yes,” called a man’s voice near the bar. “This guy’s unconscious.”
    “Go,” Malcolm whispered to him.
    Griffen followed the paramedics through the wall of people to a spot just a few yards beyond the Irish pub. On the narrow sidewalk, a heavyset black man in green city coveralls lay on his back, eyes squeezed closed, an expression of horror on his face.
    The medics knelt on either side of the patient. The elder, a tan-skinned beanpole of thirty or forty, pulled back the black man’s eyelids and felt for a pulse in his neck.
    “Got a flutter,” he said. “Rapid but steady. Skin’s cool.”
    The younger, a black woman in her twenties, applied a stethoscope to his chest.
    “Shallow breaths,” she said. Together, she and her companion rolled him onto the stretcher and pulled him toward the waiting ambulance.
    Griffen ran alongside. “What’s wrong with him?”
    “Can’t tell yet. Are you a relative?”
    “No. I was in the bar over there when the crash happened.”
    The beanpole eyed the mass of twisted metal.
    “He must have been thrown clear, or he might have jumped for it when the truck went out of control. We’ll know more after we get him to the hospital and get him stabilized.”
    A couple of tow trucks attached