“Enters the picture with tires squealing. Maxie hears the shot that killed Blum loud and clear. He looks out the window of his parked car in time to glimpse Blum’s Mercedes skidding onto the shoulder and the taillights of the second vehicle speeding away. So he jams his 320 HP Camaro SS into drive and swerves out from behind a rhododendron bush onto the state road in rubber-burning pursuit of the taillights. Problem is, Max isn’t alone, and he isn’t sober. Although he’s married with three kids, in the passenger seat is a twenty-one-year-old he met an hour earlier in one of Ithaca’s college bars and with whom he was having awkward, drunken sex in his car behind the rhododendron. He has the accelerator floored now, the Camaro’s doing about a hundred and ten—but he has no plan, no cell phone, no rational idea of where this is going. This is pure, primitive, animal pursuit. The young woman starts to cry. He tells her to shut up. The guy ahead of him is getting away. Maxie’s out of his mind now on alcohol, ego, and adrenaline. He reaches under his jacket, pulls out his .40-caliber Glock, lowers his window, and starts firing at the vehicle ahead of him. An insane thing to do. Insanely high-risk, insanely illegal. The girl is screaming, Maxie is losing it completely, the Camaro is fishtailing.”

“You sound like you were in the backseat.”

“He told the story to a lot of people. It got around. Hell of a story.”

“A hell of a career ender, you mean.”