On one hand Spokane Washington to Vancouver is around two hundred and fifty miles by the wind. Unfortunately if like poor old Shingle you never learned the trick of riding the finnicky blighter you’ll be going another hundred and fifty out of your way to use the solid tar and rock that man put down. When you’ve been given an ultimatum by your lady that you’re frozen if you don’t make that in the next six hours you don’t stop for much, and you sure as sunrise don’t slow down.

On the other hand though my daddy was a carpenter and he always told me the fastest way to get a job done was doing it right the first time. I get the feeling sometimes, itching right up my neck hair like the sound of half a dozen police sirens, that if I’d listened to him better I’d have put less tables together twice. Maybe have outstanding warrants in less states too.

“Shingle my man,” Slim asked curiously as I drove, “are you planning on doing something about all that racket or just hoping they get bored and go home?”

“I’m thinking, I’m thinking.” I growled out, keeping the accelerator floored. “Aren’t these burning cars supposed to be able to outrun anything mortals make anyway? What kind of bum ride did you stick me with Slim?” I glared one baleful eyeball at the speedometer which flatly refused to edge its way up over the hundred mile an hour mark.

“She’s not a bum ride.” The voice in my head sounded mildly offended. “She’s a ’57 Chevy and she’s mint. One of the finest specimens on my lot. I figure I can’t affect the meat suit I’m wearing on this spin but I can at least make sure we’re cruising in style.”

“And you didn’t add even the littlest bit of extra fire?” I asked, exasperated.

Slim sniffed, a truly impressive feat as he didn’t have access to anything resembling a nose at the moment. “It would ruin the authenticity.”

“I swear Slim.” I said, the car rattling around me, doing the best it could to keep the pace our pursuers demanded. “I swear by my lady and my fire and the rocks on this road that the next time I phone you up I am writing out a frostbitten contract.”

“So what you’re saying is you’re going to look me up again?” The demon’s voice replied brightly. “Wonderful, we always have such fun on these impromptu trips. I really would suggest doing something though. Soon enough they’re going to call to someone ahead of you on this route and I will be terribly put out if I spend my sixty days in some grody mortal jail.”

I growled inarticulately and swerved towards the side of the road, beginning to slow. A plan was forming. It wasn’t a good one. It was one of those plans that start with “hold my beer,” and end with an emergency room visit from a disappointed parent. Sometimes. Sometimes they just end making conversation with fish while wearing concrete pontoons, but I wasn’t exactly spoiled for choice.

“Interesting.” Slim said as I coasted to a stop and turned off the car, the sirens blaring around me like a passel of overexcited basset hounds who just heard the W-word. “So our new plan is to let ourselves get caught. That sounds like a wonderful way to get where we’re going on time.”

“Unless you’ve got something useful to contribute then can it Slim,” I replied. “This next bit’s tricky.”

I said earlier that everything starts with fire, and while that’s technically true it’s only about halfway down the rabbit hole. If you follow Mr. Fuzzy Boots down another foot or two what you realize is that it all starts with heat and fire happens to be a convenient source. Any heat ‘ll do in a pinch. You can pull it from air, water, metal, even your own body if you happen to be truly desperate and moderately suicidal. But of the utmost interest to old Shingle in this very particular moment was metal.

So as the gendarmes closed in and started hooting and hollering loud enough to put Slim’s kin to shame, I closed my eyes and reached for the heat around me. I reached for the overworked engine blocks, the powder in the guns, the tiny electronics in the phones and radios, and even the traces held by the early morning mist just beginning to settle on the concrete. I reached out and I pulled, hard.

Now the problem with this absolutely brilliant concoction of mine, was that all that fire I was coaxing had to go somewhere. As the invisible roaring flame leapt out for me from all directions the law man behind me yelled something about my right to remain violent and pulled me bodily around the car towards the trunk so he could frisk me.

“Law man,” I said, as the temperature in the air around us spiked from September in Washington to Summer in California, “I know you’re just doing your job, but you got to understand that I’m just doing mine. You just let me go my way and everything’ll be breezy.”

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Now maybe this law man wasn’t the quickest monkey in the banana patch, or maybe he’d just had a bad night, but he wasn’t having none of it. “Are you drunk or something?” He yelled. “You threatening an officer? Get your hands behind your back right now.” The beefy cop, at this point thoroughly lacking in gruntles, grabbed for my arm with one hand and went for his cuffs with the other.

This combined with the continually rising temperature, climbing quickly to levels of, “I’m going to throw up,” and beyond that into dangerous, “How high does a fever have to spike before it cooks a human brain?” territory, may have made me panic a bit. Not enough to let it all go and cook the frozen fool, but enough that I drew back and cracked him a solid one across the jaw.

Old Shingle might not be much to look at, but I’ve been in scraps since I was knee high to a grasshopper, I know how to throw a punch. I may have also channeled a bit of that excess heat into strength, just to give it a little extra Irish. Couple that with the fact that the ground we were standing on was starting to frost over from my pull and experienced law man or not, his feet went out from under him and he went down on his tuchus.

His buddies weren’t none too pleased with that, so they all started getting in on the shouting and pulling guns on me. I’m sure there was an awful lot of “Get down on the ground,” this and “We will shoot you,” that, but I wasn’t real concerned with them just then. I’d pulled way too much heat, way too quickly.

My vision started to swim and tunnel and I couldn’t tell if that was the heat-waves I was giving off or my poor noggin threatening to secede from the union. “Shingle?” Slim asked, sounding genuinely worried. “My man? Don’t you go dying with me in here. You know how much paper work I have to do if I lose one of you fools during a ride along.”

Well now, how could I ignore a request phrased that politely? I didn’t have time to make my runes for a real working, and there was no way I could channel what I’d drawn into speed or power before it cooked me. I did the only thing left I could think of, the second thing every kid is taught not to do from the day he gets a mentor in the magic business. I vented.

I turned my back to the frazzled policeman and expended all that stored energy and probably some of my own body heat to boot in two roaring gouts of flame. They jumped from my hands like hungry serpents, blistering me as they went. Their force burned, twisted, melted, and otherwise desctructificated the back end of my vehicle accompanied in glorious counterpoint by shrieking sounds of demonic despair and the clack-clack of frozen guns failing to give me a terminal case of high speed lead poisoning.

Everyone was screaming. It all seemed to come from an awful distance off though. My skin was halfway between numb and warm and I couldn’t feel it but my blistered hands were trembling. From second degree burns to hypothermia in nothing flat with just a hint of system shock thrown in for spice.

I stumbled my technically-not-drunk way back over to my ride, conveniently the only one whose fire I hadn’t stolen, and fumbled with the keys. It took three tries but I got the car started again and turned the heating on inside full blast as I eased my way out in to the blessedly light early morning traffic.

The car bumped and crackled and complained, but held together as I made my suddenly sedate way north to keep my appointment. All was quiet on the home front for a ways, violent bouts of shivering that forced me to pull over or take the car off the road completely and returning searing pain in the palms of my hands notwithstanding.

Then Slim spoke up, in a quavering almost tearful tone. “Why?” He asked. “I mean, I’ve tried to take your soul when I thought I could get it, and I’ve pushed at you once or twice from beyond, but that’s just business. Always thought I treated you pretty fair at the end of the day. So why Shingle? What’d my darlin’ ever do to you to deserve something like that?”

I chewed the side of my lip, biting down hard to give the pain somewhere else to run so it would stop concentrating in my hands for a moment and let me think. “First off, the car’s mine according to our deal, so if I want to drop it in the nearest trash compactor then by rights that’s where we’re headed.”

Slim stayed silent at that, and after a moment I continued. “If I shot anywhere else I was going to kill one of those fools. If I shot down then I’d toast my own legs, and if I shot up they wouldn’t be able to fool themselves later into thinking I had a flamethrower or a bomb or something and I’d get in real trouble.”

Wizards aren’t useful for much, but they got rules about that sort of thing. Much as I’d like to tell them where they can stick those they got me outnumbered by a few orders of magnitude. One of the lessons my daddy did manage to teach me was not to pick fights you can’t win.

“Besides,” I added, as the demon in my head continued to sulk. “License plates gone now, and it’ll be few hours before they can call in a Chevy with a melted backside. Should be enough time to get me where I’m going. After that’ll have to take care of itself.”

At that Slim chuckled, and spoke in a voice he rarely bothers with. It’s the one that reminds you as friendly as he might act betimes he’s been around longer than religion or light. It’s flat, and it’s cold, and it don’t sound like nothing that’s even pretending to be human.

“Almost forty years of letting tomorrow burn to save today.” He said, and those words in that tone froze my blood solid in my veins. “And where’s it got you Shingle? A head full of tricks, a soul full of cracks, and naught to your name but a pair of boots and a half-melted hunk of metal. Drive, human. Accounts will settle themselves in time.”

What do you say to that?

I drove.