The driver looked like he’d been trying to climb out the window, but, held back by the seatbelt I guess, his head had been thrown out sideways though the glass. They couldn’t see him from the road, but he was pretty cut up. His head and his shoulder and one arm, upside down, hung out.

His head moved. He’d been slashed across the eyes. Even so, I recognized him.

It was Mr. Jonas.

“Hey, kid!” the policeman yelled. “Get the fuck away from there! It might go up any minute!”

Inside the car, the music halted.

“This is Edward Sawyers, interrupting our program, to bring you a special bulletin. Minutes ago—not long ago, a bloody and terrifying massacre occurred at the Piewacket Bar and Grill in the Lower Frontwater area. The bartender, Raymond W. Arnold, identified the assailant as seventeen-year-old Dennis Harkner. Mr. Arnold made this statement from his stretcher while being carried to the ambulance: ‘We all knew Denny. He used to come into the …’ What? Excuse me? Oh … yes: Raymond W. Arnold was dead on arrival … huh?… dead on arrival at Frontwater District Memorial Hospital of shotgun wounds in the chest, neck, hip, and groin. I’m sorry; back to Mr. Arnold’s statement, before … he died, I guess. Yes … ‘We all knew Denny. He used to come into the bar all the time, for about the last three months, even though we knew he was under age. He didn’t drink anything. He would just stand around and listen by the jukebox. Sometimes, maybe, somebody bought him a Coke. A few times I let him sweep up. But he was a nice boy and didn’t drink anything at all.’ According to the first reports here—and I have the second report to read you right afterwards—allegedly young Harkner left the bar shortly after quarter past five, removed a shotgun from the cab of a truck belonging to one Franklin Hargus and, returning to the bar, fired into a crowd at the counter, killing one Alvin Riley, a member of the Phantoms Motorcycle Club, which had stopped there for beer. Harkner fired again, fatally wounding one Jerome Townley, president of the club. When two other members tried to get the gun away from him, he managed to club George Townley, Jerome Townley’s younger brother, to death. ‘By this time,’ states Alice Danatto, wife of Anthony Danatto, also in the bar at the time of the shootings, ‘We were all just terrified. Oh, wow! And he wouldn’t let us leave. We watched him, standing beside one of the guys he’d just shot, astraddle the one he’d just clubbed, reload and shoot Ray, point blank—that’s the bartender, Ray.’ Dennis Harkner, seventeen-years-old, has been identified as a runaway from Womack County in Southern Pennsylvania.”

I heard a siren behind me on the road.