Death wore the seeming of a battered Chevrolet. The child's scream and the screech of rubber on concrete knifed through two seconds of time before snapping, like a celery stalk of sound, into aching silence. The silence of limbo, called into being for the space of a slow heartbeat. Then the thud of running feet, the rising hubbub of many voices. "Give her air!" "Keep back. Don't try to move her." "Somebody call an ambulance." "Yeah, and somebody call a cop, too." "I couldn't help it." It was the driver of the ramshackle Chevvie. "She fell off the curb right.
