Coffin Ed said, “Watch him close, Digger, he’s going to try some trick.”

“He’s as scared of these corners as we are,” Grave Digger said. “He’s going to try to crash us into a truck.”

“He’s got two up ahead.”

“I’d better get behind him now.”

At 121st Street Grave Digger swerved back to the right-side lanes.

One block ahead, a refrigerator truck was flashing its yellow passing lights as it pulled to the inner lane to pass an open truck carrying sheet metal.

The motorcycle rider had time to pass on the inside, but he hung back, riding the rear of the refrigerator truck until it had pulled clear over to the left, blocking both sides of the street.

“Get a tire now,” Grave Digger said.

Coffin Ed leaned out of his window, took careful aim over his left wrist and let go his last two bullets. He missed the motorcycle tire with both shots, but the fifth and last one in his revolver was always a tracer bullet, since one night he had been caught shooting in the dark. They followed its white phosphorescent trajectory as it went past the rear tire, hit a manhole cover in the street, ricocheted in a slight upward angle and buried Itself in the outside tire of the open truck carrying sheet metal. The tire exploded with a bank. The driver felt the truck lurch and hit the brakes.

This threw the motorcycle rider off his timing. He had planned to cut quickly between the two trucks and shoot ahead before the inside truck drew level with the truck it was passing. When he got them behind him the two tracks would block off the street, and he would make his getaway.

He was pulling up fast behind the car carrying sheet metal when the tire burst and the driver tamped his brakes. He wheeled sharply to the left, but not quickly enough.

The three thin sheets of stainless steel, six feet in width, with red flags flying from both corners, formed a blade less than a quarter of an inch thick. This blade caught the rider above his woolen-lined jacket, on the exposed part of his neck, which was stretched and taut from his physical exertion, as the motorcycle went underneath. He was hitting more than fifty-five miles an hour, and the blade severed his head from his body as though he had been guillotined.

His head rolled halfway up the sheets of metal while his body kept astride the seat and his hands gripped the handlebars. A stream of blood spurted from his severed jugular, but his body completed the maneuver which his head had ordered and went past the truck as planned.

The truck driver glanced from his window to watch the passing truck as he kept braking to a stop. But instead he saw a man without a head passing on a motorcycle with a sidecar and a stream of steaming red blood lowing back in the wind.