It’s dark out but the Impala has a little light on over the license and we can all read it, plain as day. H. Of course, I still might’ve been able to tell something was wrong from all the darkness swirling around the car. It's as bad as I've ever seen it.

As I watch, the darkness deepens. Something’s happening to make it worse. I see Rigby’s hand going for the radio to call the station and I knock it aside.

The darkness recedes.

“What the fuck?” says Rigby and the car swerves a little he’s so surprised.

He reaches again and the dark blooms over the Impala like an evil flower. It's so dark there now that it becomes difficult to see.

I switch the radio off as Rigby raises the handset to his mouth.

“Sorry,” I say. “Something’s wrong.”

“What did you do?” asks Rigby.

“Nothing,” I say.

Rigby nods at the car. “Is this you? Huh?”

I shake my head. “I wasn’t pushing, I swear.”

“Helluva coincidence.”

I don’t know what to say to that.

“Okay, why can’t I use the radio?” Rigby asks. His face is flushed and he looks pissed. “There could be a kid in that car that needs help.”

“I think that is the car,” I say. “It's got bad luck all around it and I saw the dark kinda concentrate each time you went for the radio.”

Rigby looks thoughtful.

Laura says, “Maybe he's got a radio too. Or a police scanner.”

Rigby nods. “Yeah, that’s what I was thinking. Maybe if he hears me calling it in he'll panic. If he wasn’t going to do something like that then there’d probably be no reason for things to go dark over there, right?”

“I have no idea,” I say. “I’m new to this too, but that sounds right to me. Can we just, I dunno, follow him? See where he goes?”

“Every minute that kid is in the car with him,” Rigby explains. “Is another minute that something could go wrong. For all I know he's hurting the boy right now as he's driving.”

“But I can push things. Make that less likely?”

“Ben, things tend to happen around you whether you’re pushing or not,” says Rigby.

He’s right.

My God, this is the rest of my life. And that? That right there? That pisses me off.

“I got an idea.”

Rigby glances at me. He’s frowning. “What?”

“We’re only three cars back but he’s not running yet,” I say. “He’s thinking we haven’t seen him, right? Otherwise, you’d be calling it in or doing the siren and lights thing.”

“I probably wouldn’t do the ‘siren and lights thing’ right now. That could escalate a situation like this, but that might be what he’s thinking, yeah,” says Rigby.

Laura taps on the plexiglass divider. “Don’t you forget you’ve got Beth back here, Arthur,” she says. “And I have Detective Smythe’s number in my phone. Want me to call her?”

“Yeah, but tell her to keep things off the radio and tell her why,” says Rigby.

I hear her dial.

“You going to tell me your plan?” says Rigby.

That would be a bad idea but I have to tell him something. I say, “Hang back here and look for an opportunity to get up there without setting him off.”

“You want me to ‘get up there?’”

“Alongside him, yeah.”

“Alondra? Hi!” says Laura from the back seat. “Yep, it’s me. We’ve got a thing….”

“Why do you want to get alongside?”

But I’m tuning him and Laura out to concentrate. There’s too much dark around the Impala and, as I watch, pitch-black tendrils swipe out at random intervals at the scenery, the other cars, at nothing. Maybe what I’m seeing are different awful possibilities if things go wrong. Maybe those are on the verge of coming true. I can't have that.

I start to push.

Light begins to tussle with darkness over the kidnapper's car like two blurry rabid octopuses wrestling over a giant maroon oyster.

Octopi?

Who cares? I'll look it up later.

The light’s a little stronger, pushing the dark away back to wherever it goes, and this makes sense. The bad possibilities are random, generated by the kidnapper in the car, and even he just wants to get out of there. He doesn’t want anything bad to happen. Nobody here does, so I figure that just makes it a bit easier for me. There's no opposing will.

Stolen from its rightful author, this tale is not meant to be on Amazon; report any sightings.

I hear Rigby say something. Then he exclaims.

We’re in the right lane, same as the kidnapper.

Kidnappers? I should keep in mind there might be more than one in the car with the child. And what is it with me and kidnappers all the sudden?

I see a growing light from behind. It’s not me. The lights are electric and then our car shudders as someone passes us on the left at, like, warp speed.

“There’s our opportunity,” says Rigby. He hits the lights and siren and we lurch into the left lane after the speeder.

Rigby’s got the handset in his hand, calling it in. He risks a glance at me.

I give him a nod. I’m ready.

I press the button to roll the window down.

We’re getting closer to the Impala and I’m really starting to push now.

I look ahead as we're all sucked down into our seats from the acceleration. I see guardrails up ahead on either side of a small bridge as the land to either side of the road falls away toward the river. We’re surrounded by farmland now. There are combines in the fields like sleeping monsters. Huge bales of hay looking like tombstones for giants.

The speeder has passed the Impala and shows no signs of slowing down.

Laura is talking to Smythe. “They know we’re not going after the speeder, right? Wow, he’s flying!”

The window is down. The rush of air is loud. The Rigbys have to shout to be heard. The baby starts to shriek.

I have to be careful. If I telegraph my move Rigby is certain to stop me.

He’s glancing at me, his eyes growing rounder and more scared as we get closer to the Impala. It's clear he has no idea what I'm about to do. Good.

I can see into the car a little now. From what I can see from the back of their head, the driver is either a man or a tall woman with a short haircut. Is this the kidnapper? My instincts say yes, but I just got the damn things. I ask myself if I’m sure.

I’m sure. I feel it.

We’re passing.

I see the driver turn his head. The lights of the cop car do odd things to his face. When it's red, he looks like he’s angry. Like he wants to murder the world. When it's blue, he looks sullen and put-upon. There’s an odd discoloration below his left ear. It’s not a bruise or a tattoo, but it looks familiar to me. I can’t remember why.

When my window is even with the Impala’s front tire, I take the shotgun out of its holder, point it out the window at the hubcap, and push for all I’m worth.

I hear the Rigby’s shouting and there’s a flash of light and then the photo-negative thing, like what happened in the convenience store.

The Impala swerves away, off the road. The tire I was planning to blow runs up onto the guardrail of the low bridge and the Impala flips out of sight.

I’m pushing and pushing.

Laura is screaming.

Rigby is shouting.

Our car shrieks as it's brought around in a one-eighty and I'm thrown against the door. The other two cars pass through the smoke of our tires and are gone. We pull over at the beginning of the bridge to block both of the lanes on this side of the road.

The shotgun is ripped out of my hands and rammed down back into place. Rigby is red-faced and showing his teeth. For a moment I think he’s going to hit me. He gets out of the car instead.

I follow behind, still pushing.

I manage to keep from tumbling down the steep incline. I’m impressed by this because most of my attention has been stolen by what’s happened to the Impala.

It’s upside down on the back of one of those huge hay trucks, wheels still spinning.

Rigby is hurrying toward the back when the trunk whumps open and something big falls out of it, which Rigby catches. The cop stumbles and falls on his ass.

The ground is soft and moist. It sucks at my shoes as I go to help Rigby.

He’s got a boy in his arms. Ruffled, caramel-colored hair, rosy cheeks. The kid can’t be more than seven. He’s got a death grip on the cop and he’s shaking.

Rigby is rubbing the boy’s back as I help him back to his feet. He pushes the boy into my arms without a word.

I take him.

We’re both watching the driver’s door.

It’s closed and looks undamaged. I can see one square-looking hand resting against the glass.

“Is he okay?” I hear Laura ask. She’s above me, looking down over the guardrail.

“Seems okay,” I say, but I try to get a look into his eyes. It’s no good, the kid won’t cooperate. His chin is digging into my neck and won’t budge. “Are you okay?” I keep asking him.

“I don’t see anything wrong,” says Laura. “Can you get him up here?”

It takes a while, but I do. The climb back up to the road is treacherous and I’ve got the added weight of the child.

Laura checks him out. She says, “I don’t see anything but some bruising.” She moves around behind me to look at the kid’s face. “Are you okay, little boy?” she says. Her voice is so kind.

The boy reaches for her and Laura takes him. She talks to him. Soothes him.

I go over to the rail.

Rigby is sitting on the hay by the driver’s door looking up at me. “You are out of your damn mind,” he says.

“The boy’s okay, we think,” I say.

“The driver’s out cold. Alive and unresponsive. I’ve already called for an ambulance. No one else in the car,” says Rigby. “Nobody else with guns. No other children. No explosives or weapons rolling around with their safeties off.”

“I didn’t—.”

“Didn’t what?” says Rigby. “Didn’t think about what you were doing? Didn’t consider all the possibilities? Ben, you’re in the possibility business now. What the fuck were you thinking?”

The adrenaline leaving me this time has a much different effect. I’m shaky and I’m pretty sure I’m going to be sick. It’s the guilt. I feel stupid and wrong.

“I was going to shoot the tire,” I say.

“Shoot. The. Tire,” says Rigby. “Like in the movies. Ben, is this a movie?”

I can’t say anything.

“Shoot into a car. On the highway. At speed. With a kid in the trunk?” says Rigby.

When I don’t reply, he sighs. “You can do things, I know. But this… should have turned out better.”

“I pushed too hard, I think,” I tell him.

“Too hard?”

“Yeah. I think that sometimes when I push things, things push back. Like a backlash. It happened in the convenience store.”

“You look like you’re going to fall down. Sit on the guardrail and stay there,” says Rigby.

I sit. I stay.

“Laura have the kid?”

I nod.

We hear sirens.

“The sheriff is going to fucking kill me.”

He doesn't though.

I think he's going to fire Rigby. I think we all do, especially when Rigby tells him about the shotgun. How I’d grabbed it. And Sheriff Abernathy turns bright purple when he hears the story, but it turns out the boy we saved is the nephew of the Mayor of Akron, and no one had been hurt. I hadn’t even fired the gun. So, Abernathy sends Rigby home on a three-day suspension and I go back to the station. In handcuffs.

In the back of the sheriff’s own cruiser.

He says nothing at all to me the whole time, though I do get my share of penetrating glances in the rearview mirror.

I haven’t barfed but it’s been a struggle.

I tell myself I was trying to help. That I did help, but I’d scared the living shit out of everybody around me doing so. I should have been able to think of something better. I’m smarter than that. Maybe if I’d had more sleep.

The truth is that I did what I did. I didn’t think of anything else. Nobody did. The kid is safe. The kidnapper is alive, caught, and being treated at the hospital. All that should help how I feel, but it doesn't.

When the sheriff locks me in the holding cell, I feel right at home. The light and the dark are barely present here. I lay down on the cot and I’m asleep before the weight of my head dimples the pillowcase.