What were the words exactly? The bathroom door swung open and he had half his face to the wall, pleading with the receiver in his hand. What was it?

“….juss callin’ cos, ahm not sure if ya know, but Paula’s ah….you see Paula’s er…”

The hitchhiker hears the voice quiver as unsteadily as the bus’s windows rattle over every pothole. The hitchhiker knew at that point. He thinks of the showdown that followed after the driver hung up: two faces set in silent challenge, while at the same time searching for the slightest tic that would give the whole game away. He can’t remember the driver moving a single muscle, locked into a gaze that could find a fissure on the moon. The hitchhiker, on the other hand, knows his poker game to be deficient enough to warrant a “Plan B”, which has increasingly become his “Plan A” as he gives up as many chips as blank stares, and finds that he must reclaim the lost money somehow. So maybe he cracked at the diner. There was, after all, that tidy piece of blond tail brushing by, just at that moment…

“Oh, would you just look at this!”

The woman in the next seat pushes her way through the hitchhiker’s dewy recollections, just at the point where…

“It’s just animals out there these days. Animals.”

She’s pushing a creaseless copy of the Davenport Reporter his way. Usually, the doings of corn-peddlers doesn’t interest him in the least bit, but the front page photo rings an alarm, even if he hasn’t yet fully recognized the figure. The hitchhiker can be forgiven for being a little slow to place the face. After all, the man pictured before him didn’t manage to hang onto it for very long before it was splattered across the two lanes of Route 6, just outside Weston, Nebraska. Above it, the second bold-faced headline of the day: