The driver can't blame the Warshansky's for wanting to protect their daughter, when he thinks about the savage she dated before him. That low-life beat her then and has murdered her now. Mr. Warshansky was right to get him locked up; yet seeing how the ex-lover vowed revenge, anything less than a life sentence was not enough. His five-year sentence simply allowed his rage to boil to a murderous crescendo. Now the driver must finish where the criminal justice system left off, except this time, there will be no use for a trial.

The problem remains: if the driver were pressed to physically describe Paula's ex-lover, the man undoubtedly responsible for her death, he wouldn't be able to; nor could he identify Paula's murderer by his full, legal name. The driver has only ever heard snippets or veiled allusions to this man. He was such a dark stain upon her life, Paula always changed the subject whenever he came up. The driver had managed, over time, to piece together the story of how she and her father were able to put him away after a particularly violent outburst involving her and a young Mexican man . Apparently, Paula wasn’t as eager as her father to stand witness against him, but this lover had treated her badly enough so that she was relieved –like a freed prisoner herself- when the sentence finally came down: five to eight years for grievous assault.

Paula did mention how this man –never bothering to elaborate beyond a pointed “he”- was hell-bent on revenge. Even before the incident and the subsequent trial, she had made it clear that she did not want the relationship to continue; and that may have been what fueled that fateful attack. He fought, literally, to get her back by any means. When the law intervened, with the help of Mr. Warshansky and his reluctant daughter, and put her ex-lover behind bars, the focus of his rage shifted. If he couldn’t get her back, then he would have to simply make her and her family pay. The prison sentence began shortly before Paula and the driver met. She told him of the ex-lover’s pledges of revenge, but he never fully believed it; not until this morning.

“Goddammed sonnofabitch mutherfucker….” he simmers. The driver is sufficiently woken by the thought of Paula’s murderer -out there in the night just like the driver, at this moment crossing Lord-knows which state line on his way to Michigan. The driver’s hands fuse to the wheel as all the blood rushes from his knuckles. Its leather covering croaks under his unrelenting grip. He does not see a steering wheel but the neck of the man, the lowlife animal, he plans to relieve from its miserable existence. A gasp, a suffocating ball, rises to his throat.