Free Mortality Bridge by Steven R. Boyett Page A

Harley-Davidson sticker on its rear windshield.
    Niko relaxes a bit. Driving black cab in England and driving the Black Taxi are two very different occupations. “You were on the knowledge?”
    The cabbie glances back at him. “Boy, not too many Americans know that phrase.”
    Both cars thread through sparse traffic down Seventh past jewelry stores, past grand old movie palaces fallen to ruin or converted to swap meets. The State. The Palace. The Orpheum.
    Ahead the Black Taxi fishhooks left onto Wall.
    The cabbie shakes her head. “He should’ve gone down San Pedro. This puppy deadends at Third.” The Checker Cab chortles around the corner and avoids a shopping cart in the middle of the road.
    Police station on their left, listless crowd near the L.A. Mission on their right. A man in a torn shirt steps off the curb in the midst of some tirade and brandishes a crutch at them as they speed past Korean toy marts.
    They’re at Fourth and Wall when the Franklin’s brakelights flash where Wall deadends at Third. Niko thinks the Black Taxi will turn left onto the oneway street but instead it screams a one eighty, headlights sweeping cansprayed doorways and aimless homeless people and scores of soiled sleeping bags arrayed along the sidewalks like the detritus of some apocalypse. The black sedan now faces them with wheelwells smoking like a monster breathing in the cold.
    The radio’s playing some forgotten song.
    “Boy, on the knowledge.” The cabbie shakes her head as the Black Taxi rushes toward them in their lane. Ahead and to their left is Boyd Street but they’ll never make it in time. “For most of a year I slept with a map of London taped to my ceiling.” Niko stiffens in expectation of sudden impact and metal roar. “Hundred percent on my exam too.” The cabbie leans forward and presses a sequence of radio buttons. The froglike headlights grow before them. Niko stomps a nonexistent brake and draws a hissing breath as metal interpenetrates oncoming metal. Molecules that would collide instead find empty spaces in the hurtling metal, empty space of which most things consist. The utter wrongness of this instant realignment tastes of bitter iron.
    The cars pass through each another.
    The sharp planed face of the Black Taxi driver flashes through him and he feels a terrible wrenching at his core, voracious entropy and churning chaos, leaching cancerous famished death that thrills to strip him from the fabric of his being. For a single breathless thoughtless moment he knows what it is to be hulled from self and sealed inside that mason jar.
    And past.
    The cabbie pops a match against a nail and lights another cigarillo. She yanks the wheel and stomps the brake. Niko slides right on the broad bench seat as they power onto Boyd.
    The cabbie grins at the rearview. “And you thought the greenlight trick was something.”
    Nighttime Boyd Street is a corridor of zombies. Shambling figures leached of color who threaten empty air before them with their fists, stand and stare at nothing, inventory shopping carts and grocery bags. Souls consigned to sad perdition before their death has found them.
    The cabbie weaves the big car through their wary ranks like a ship through risky shoals. They ease past vestibular Boyd, then pick up speed as they turn left onto Los Angeles Street. Still accelerating as she cuts right onto Fifth and picks up the Black Taxi speeding west ahead near Spring. Engine valves clatter like raked poker chips. On the radio Jimi Hendrix scratches out the “Steel Town Blues.”
    Traffic lights turn green or stay green for them as they rush down Fifth through the old theater district, once more heading toward the cluster of skyscrapers and Bunker Hill.
    Jimi Hendrix never recorded “Steel Town Blues.”
    They hang a right on Hill and there the Franklin is, waiting at the traffic light at Second.
    “Well well,” the cabbie says. “The fiendly stranger in the black sedan.”
    “Why’s he stopped?”
    The