In the soft, blue-tinted light they looked like things that couldn’t happen, not even in Harlem on ground-hog night.

He looked at the license of the big gold car to steady himself. It was a dealer’s license. He felt a momentary reassurance. Must be a publicity gag.

All of a sudden a woman came out of nowhere. He had just time enough to see that she was an old woman dressed in solid black, her silver-white hair shining briefly in the headlights before she was hit by the golden Cadillac and knocked down.

He felt his scalp crawl and his kinky hair stand straight up beneath his fur-lined cap. He wondered if he was dreaming.

But the Cadillac took on speed. That was no dream. That was the thing to do. Just what he would have done if he had run over an old woman on a dark, deserted street.

He hadn’t seen the Cadillac actually run over the old woman. But there she lay and there it went. So it must have run over her. It made sense.

Anyway, he wasn’t flipping his lid. Now the question was—should he get this other wheel or should he scram with the one he had? He had an order for two. He needed the money. That little chippie he was so crazy about had told him the palm needed greasing. She didn’t say palm, but it meant the same thing: money—the one lubrication for love.

If the old lady wasn’t dead, she was past caring. And it wouldn’t take him but ninety seconds to have this wheel off...

He was starting to bend over to his task when the next sight froze him. The old lady had moved. He noticed it at first out of the corners of his eyes; then his head jerked up.

She was getting up. She had her two hands on the pavement and one knee up, and she was pushing to her feet. He could hear her laughing to herself. He felt the goose pimples breaking out down his back, and his scalp began to crawl like a battlefield of lice. If this kept up, his black kinky hair was going to turn out white as bleached cotton and straight as the beard of Jesus Christ.

He was watching the old lady, his brain trying to absorb the impact of what his eyes were registering, when the second car turned the corner. He didn’t see it until it went past.

It was a big black sedan with the lights off, traveling at a hip-tightening clip, and it made a sound like someone blowing suddenly in his ear.

The old lady had got both feet planted and was standing bent over, bear-fashion, with all four feet and hands on the ground, just about to straighten up, when the big black sedan hit her in the rump.

He never knew how he saw it; the street was black dark, the old lady was dressed in black, the car was black. But he saw it. Either with his eyes or with his mind.