The next day I visited Bunny Cote at a local drugstore where she worked as a cashier. I wanted to talk to her about Mousy’s accident. Unfortunately, the store was mobbed and Bunny was having trouble with the cash register, so she told me to come by her house later.

“Where do you live?” I asked.

“Pollet Av.”

“Where’s that?”

“I don’t know. I’m wicked sucky with directions.”

“Do your best.”

“Okay, my street’s the one just past that phone booth.”

“What phone booth?”

“You know, the one by McDonald’s.”

“All right,” I said, “a phone booth near a McDonald’s. That narrows it down to the planet earth.”

“Right off Broad Street. Listen, I can’t shoot the shit right now. Just come by here later if you want to talk.”

I returned at nine, and Bunny told me all she knew. Tommy the Wire said she’d been milking it for all it was worth. Mousy had picked her up at work. She said that he’d seemed depressed. “He wasn’t hisself,” she said. “Like he was axing me all these weird questions.”

“Like what?”

“Like, you know, religion stuff and spacey shit.”

They spent the evening sitting in Mousy’s car at the Hilltop parking lot “listening to Ziggy Stardust and fooling around.” At 3 A.M. Mousy was preparing to make a left turn in front of my house when something caught his eye. A small shiny object in the parking lot half a block away.

“I knew it wasn’t nothing,” Bunny said, “but Mouse thought it was a diamond or something.”

“A diamond?”

“Yeah. We were both real stoned.”

Mousy switched off his blinker, drove through the intersection, and turned into the parking lot. Kicking on his high beams, he was bummed to see that his “diamond” was a Pepsi can. He pulled a quick U-ey, fishtailed out of the lot, and hit the pole.

“It was really weird,” Bunny said. “Almost as if like the pole was sucking us into it. The pigs said that the tire come off when we hit, but it felt like it come off before we ever come near it.”

As I was leaving the pharmacy, Bunny said, “Ain’t it a kick in the pants, though. Kid would’ve had it made.”

“What do you mean?”

“You know, he had a job at one of those power plants, he was moving to Jersey, his uncle was getting him a trailer to live in, things were really looking up.”