There follows the familiar sound of a sack of flour hitting the asphalt, accompanied by a hurt grown. The driver can’t be sure why the hitchhiker seemed to light up when the cop revealed that he is from Fresno, but the reaction doesn’t sit right with the driver. An urge stronger than the force of a hundred hitchhikers slamming into the pickup is telling the driver to take off, leave the two of them to sort out whatever the policeman was sent to sort out, and he can be in Dearborn by nightfall. The keys are still in the ignition, all he has to do is give them a turn and he’s as good as gone. His hand finds the grip of his gun instead.

“Why?”, but there’s no time. He sneaks alongside the truck. The policeman is directly behind it, while the hitchhiker cowers on the pavement between the two. The cop is backing up to firing distance as he reaches for his belt. The cop catches the driver coming at him, barrel first, and draws. There are simultaneous shots, but the cop’s has gone wide.

At the last moment possible, the hitchhiker was able to grab the cop’s legs and bring him down. Far from incapacitated, the cop struggles and kicks in a tangle of beige legs and denim arms. Another blast from the driver’s Barringer is enough to separate the uniformed man from the bloodied hitchhiker.

The latter checks himself for a gunshot wound as well. The driver may know more than he lets on. If he does, then the hitchhiker could have easily lost as much of his head as the cop. There is the expression ‘to lose one’s head’. In the case of the overzealous police officer, it wasn’t so much ‘lost’ as evenly distributed across two lanes of highway. The hitchhiker rubs the hair falling down his neck; as much for reassurance as out of disbelief at the painted highway before him.

“Whatcha got in there? Shot gun shells?” The hitchhiker only now realizes how the blast continues to ring in his ears, and trembles upon every one of his words.

“A lil somethin’ I cooked up m’self. Bullets fron-loaded wi’some-monium nitrate. Splode on m’pact.”

To the hitchhiker’s shocked, if somewhat deaf, expression the driver wants to add, “an don’t you forget it.” Instead, he smirks at the gun and then back at the hitchhiker. Both of them think –how will they ever forget?- how the cop’s head broke up like a pumpkin dropped from on high. Just like that: a stringy, pulpy goo everywhere.

The morning traffic should be starting up soon, and it doesn’t speak well for a man’s innocence to be standing on the roadside with half a policeman. They leave the corpse as it lies and wipe as much brain and fragments of skull as they can from the rear of the vehicle. Their clothes are also splattered. The hitchhiker has one change in his bag. The driver will have to wait for the first shops to open up in Plattsmouth, the next moderately sized city, before he can ditch his shirt and pants. It’s going to be one sickening ride into the city.