Free at First Sight (2008) by Stephen Cannell

chance I had of deluding myself later that I had done it by mistake.
    But hold it. Let's throw a flag at that for a minute. Maybe there is another side to all of this. Maybe there's a sliver of emotional salvation hiding in this human tragedy.
    Let's accept, for the moment, the pure insanity of driving six hundred miles to get here just so I could look at another man's wife through his living-room window. Maybe once I'd followed Chandler to that drugstore and he'd started toward me in the parking lot, I'd had no other course of action. Up till then, I had used bad judgment, but had committed no crime. Once he advanced on me, waving his arms in a threatening way, maybe then I had simply panicked, reacted .. . hit the wrong gear by mistake and run him down. After all, it was a rental car. I was unfamiliar with the gearbox. Maybe I had acted out of pure self-preservation. Maybe I had accidentally hit him, then realized that there was no explanation for my being in Charlotte. Knowing I would be an immediate suspect in a vehicular assault, maybe then and only then had certain brain synapses, bred into me by thousands of years of natural selection and Homo sapiens survival instincts, kicked in. I had done the only thing left to do under the circumstances. Back up, park on his chest, and finish the job, ending any chance for his survival. Kill or be killed. Law of the jungle, primal and pure.
    On the surface, I liked this second scenario a hell of a lot better than the first, but I didn't trust it. I knew it was bullshit--a cheap rationalization for murder. But in those first moments of fear and confusion after I left the parking lot, I clung to that rationale like a man clinging to the side of a life raft. I was in a swirl of white water, wallowing and swallowing, adrift in a confusing storm of emotions.
    The first hour after I ran Chandler Ellis down was pretty much time lost. The best way to describe it is to say it was reminiscent of one of my old interplanetary drug hazes back when I was ghost-busting on acid. I was in a daze, my reality strobing and morphing into shapes, sounds, and colors I didn't recognize at the time or remember well later. All the while, I was driving the damn Taurus. Miraculously, I didn't hit anybody else. My mind was elsewhere, skipping over facts, landing on half-truths, bouncing and flying like a flat stone hurled against the tide.
    And then I found myself sitting in the car parked next to a shimmering lake. I didn't know its name, or the time, or even where the fuck I was . . . somewhere near the Township of Salisbury, still in North Carolina, I think. A full moon lit the water. My head was throbbing; my neck and shoulders ached from having clutched the wheel in a vice grip for almost two hours. My whirling mind began to slow and I grabbed for it, trying to regain control, but only managed to hold my turbulent thoughts for a second before they snapped loose, spinning off wildly again. Like sparks flying off a miller's wheel, tiny particles of reason finally floated down and landed around me.
    Had anybody seen me do it? Somebody in the market? A drunk lying in the shadows? But before I could focus on these questions, my " thoughts were spinning again, catapulting over broken memories and the verses of old songs, which I chanted mindlessly as I sat there.
    Then another grab for sanity. The car. Was Chandler's blood on the car? As that lucid, worthwhile question lingered, I suddenly hear d m yself chanting, "Oh God, oh God, oh God," as if the Supreme Deity would have anything to do with me now.
    Once more I grabbed. This time I managed to hold my tortured thoughts.
    I locked onto something important. Tire treads.
    I remembered a documentary I saw on A&E dealing with the new forensic science being employed by police departments. Investigators could trace a car using tire tracks. They could make random pattern matches. Isolate something called "unique identifiers." They could graph the imperfections in the