Just as His Worship Mayor Cass Tamburlaine was about to take the first steamy bite of Chili-dog, he noticed, almost out of the corner of his eye, a long black car screaming along Queen Street, approaching at an unusually high speed from the east.
Cass didn’t think much about it—except how there were never any cops around when you needed them—until the car suddenly veered onto Nathan Phillips Square, raising a cloud of pigeons, and, narrowly missing a woman out strolling with a baby carriage, hurtled along the sidewalk in front of the long stretch of chip-wagons, where its front fender clipped the shoulder of Cass’s aide, Jeremiah Flood, catapulting him high into the air, his strawberry-petroleum sundae arcing into the air above his head like a vanilla shooting star.
Cass had instinctively flattened himself against Maximilian’s chip-truck and watched in panic as the huge black car—its windows tinted black as well—hurled itself by him at what must have been seventy miles an hour, scraping along the side of the aluminum truck next to Maximilian’s and them bouncing back out onto the street, where it somehow negotiated a sharp left turn at York Street and disappeared.
“A Chrysler Imperial!” thought Cass, his terror turning into outrage, his recent danger now reorganizing itself as nostalgia. “A 1956 Chrysler Imperial!” he repeated wonderingly, as if he has just been sideswiped by three tons of black metal ghost.
Maximilian suddenly reappeared at the window of his truck
“What the hell was that?” he asked Cass.
“A 1956 Chrysler Imperial—the one with the gunsite taillights. You never see them anymore!”
“I wish I hadn’t seen this one.” Laughed Maximilian.
“Call for an ambulance, Max,” said Cass. “I think Jeremiah’s in a bad way.”
