Hi guys and gals. sorry this took so long. But my wife AK had a touch of pneumonia and I dropped EVERYTHING. it’s also flu season and that;s our busiest time at work. but it gave me time to recharge the batteries. The next two stories after this one are gonna rock. They are very dark though so be ready. As usual Kudos to the legendary Barney-R for his editing wizardry. Any mistakes you find are probably due to changes I made during the final read through while removing all of the howevers SS06.

The hum of my Mustang’s engine is fierce. It’s a snarling, growling, angry, metallic symphony of forged pistons reacting to small controlled explosions. All of that harnessed and menacing force is under the control of my right foot.

My supercharger processes enough air to fill a thousand balloons and the whine from it doing its job provides an almost harmonic counterpoint to the engine’s gruff rumble. The whole thing is music to my ears, but frightening to old ladies and small children. It also scares the shit out of environmentalists and small animals. I’m the first to admit that my car is not eco-friendly.

My car is a 2014 Boss 302 upgraded with a Paxton supercharger, forged internals, oversized Wilwood brakes, custom SVE series two rims and an all black paint scheme. Everything on the car is an extremely glossy black.

Every lens, badge and detail on the exterior of the car is black. If Ninjas drove Mustangs ... They’d look like my car.

The needle on my speedometer inches slowly past one hundred, one ten, one twenty and keeps moving. A glance at my GPS reveals that the road ahead of me is almost arrow straight. But a few twisties wouldn’t matter or slow me down.

The newest version of the legendary Boss 302 is the most nimble Mustang ever made. It was designed to be a track car and as such has to be able to handle the curves. The car is much more capable than the new Mustangs even considering their independent rear suspension.

I’d never really liked the new body style, so once I fell into the money, I built the car of my dreams and everyone else’s nightmares.

First I had to find the car. The Boss was no longer being made. It had been a limited edition from the beginning. Once I got the car, I went to work. I upgraded every component of the car’s already incredible suspension. The new air bag suspension system gave me the ability to raise or lower the car with the touch of a button.

That gave me a lower center of gravity and increased the car’s handling even more. Then I added the forged internals and the supercharger which turned an already potent motor into a just plain nasty one.

The car now produced almost nine hundred horse power. Hence the need for the giant brakes. The next thing I did was to take everything unnecessary out of the car. Back seats ... Buh bye. Carpets ... Replaced by a very thin, very durable liner that resembled the car’s leather seats. The padding and sound dampening material in the doors and body panels was replaced with strong but almost weightless aerosol foam that was made by a NASA subcontractor.

The batteries had been moved to the trunk to improve the weight distribution and put more of the weight over the rear wheels for increased traction.

And yes ... I said batteries ... plural.

I’m a sneaky bastard. The car also has two small but powerful electric motors that can drive the car for up to fifty miles without a drop of gas. They also have a regenerative braking system that helps to charge the batteries while coasting or braking.

The large, some would say ugly, wing on the car’s rear deck lid does double duty. Besides providing me with enough down force to add traction and keep the nearly nine hundred horsepower motor from simply impotently spinning the tires like the ... Uhm Hellcats ... Yep that was a snicker ... The wing is a solar panel.

The glass black paint, as much as I love it ... It sucks. I have to wash the car almost every day. Dust, dirt, finger prints ... They’re all my enemies. It sometimes seems like my car gets dirty if I look at it.

Yep, you guess it. I live alone and I obsess over my car.

I have a large beautiful house in a Michigan Suburb that would be perfect for a nice family. That was my dream once. And someday it may be again. But dreams die. Sometimes they wither on the vine and other times they’re ripped, bloody and still beating from the chest of the dreamer.

When that happens it becomes really hard to trust again.

So I find myself here ... Many miles away from my home state, driving through a desert on a stretch of freeway as barren as barren can be.

As a beautiful moon rises high in the sky, the furnace hot temperatures refuse to decline. The breeze blowing in through my open window is warm enough to cook with. I still can’t bring myself to turn on the AC, but I do turn on some music.

Using the steering wheel mounted controls, I press a button and the car’s synch system plays a song.

A raspy and rich voice booms from the stereo as a perfect background for my drive.

“As I ride this lonesome highway, the desert wind across my face

My mind slowly wanders to another time ... another place

When the world was so much younger, with no reason to hold back

And we weren’t so afraid of losing all the things we’d never had.”

The music washes through my mind bringing back memories. I turn up the volume and settle in for a ride.

“Those days are gone forever; it’s time to kiss the past goodbye.

Meet me out tonight on the open road.

Baby we belong together. If I had you by my side.

Meet me out tonight on the open road.”

My name is Eric Johnson and this is the story of how I ended up driving through the fucking desert in the middle of the night based on a tip from the uncle of a woman who’d left me twice. For some reason I just can’t seem to get over her. This all started about five months ago, when I was a completely different person.

Back then my name was Barney Gravel and I was your typical married forty year old guy. I was still crazy about my Mustang but it was a different car.

That one was a grabber orange 2012 Mustang GT. That one had the Roush phase two supercharger and body kit. God I loved that car.

Anyway ... My wife Suzy and I were having a Sunday morning brunch at one of those little sidewalk restaurants that along with the micro-breweries had seemingly popped up all over Ferndale over night.

Just last fall that area had nothing but dusty, old book stores and empty buildings and now it was festooned with trendy little places that hipsters loved.

Suzy ... in one of her, “let’s make our marriage better by doing shit together,” moods had insisted on us having brunch right out on Woodward Avenue as soon as I got done with my Sunday morning run.

It was stupid on sooo many levels. And there were sooo many things I’d rather have been doing.

I mean why would I want to sit right out there in the sun, only inches from the busiest avenue in town, breathing in car and truck exhaust while my legs slowly stiffened up from running?

There were also all kinds of kids doing that thing where they were too busy taking photos with their phones so they could post them to instagram or face book and show all of their fake internet friends how cool they were to actually have a good time.

Years from now they’d have all of the photos to prove that they were here, but they wouldn’t remember anything about it because they never really experienced it. They were too busy taking photos to actually see anything.

And me ... I might as well have been invisible. All of those hot young twenty somethings had eyes only for their beard sporting, pipe smoking boyfriends who themselves were too busy looking cool to notice the incredibly hot young women with them.

At forty and nearly twice the age of most of those young cupcakes, I was next to invisible. None of them even knew I was on the planet, let alone in the next booth. They did notice my car of course. Most of them frowned and commented on how impractical it was and how they hated to drive.

A few of them mentioned that it looked like the kind of car that Uber drivers who were rapists probably drove.

I didn’t give a quarter of an eighth of a fuck about what any of those inbred, Kardashian worshipping morons thought. Every time I saw that car I smiled.

I was also not paying Suzy any attention at all. While she was going on and on about whatever the hell she was blathering about, I was imagining what my car would look like with Piano black SVE series two rims.

Don’t get me wrong, I loved my wife. But we’d been married for more than twenty years. We’d reached that point where we were comfortable with each other and no longer felt the need to go overboard trying to be attractive for each other.

I ran and lifted weights, but it wasn’t for Suzie anymore. It was for two reasons. The first was because I loved the way I felt after a good run or workout. And the second was because I had to stay in shape to look good next to my car.

Suzy ... Not so much. It wasn’t that she wasn’t attractive. But she’d just let herself go.

I guess she thought that she didn’t need to work at her looks. She still had the same haircut she’d had when we met. It was probably my fault.

Suzy is short and built like a fireplug. She has a haircut like ... Okay folks we’re bringin’ back the eighties ... Dorothy Hamil. But yep, Suzy has THAT haircut. At the time I thought it was sexy as hell the way she could shake her head and it would fall right back into place.

Of course it didn’t hurt that my Suzy has ginormous boobs either. And so for the past twenty years, Suzy just flips her hair, opens her shirt and I melt like a Popsicle in mid-august.

So anyway ... There I was on a sunny, warm spring day, sitting in a sidewalk cafe, pretending to listen to Suzy when this shit all started.

I heard a sound that unlike Suzy’s gibberish roused me from my deep thoughts of aftermarket rims. It was the grunting, guttural sound of a high powered motor channeled through a very loud, possibly illegal exhaust system.

The sound snapped my head around the way a Catholic reacts when the pope farts. My quick action was of course met with abject disappointment as I realized that the beautiful sound had come from ... a Camaro.

But my frown turned upside down when I saw HER. No not her barely respectable bug-like car ... Its driver. She’d strangely ... I mean come on we’re in the suburbs but it’s a suburb of Detroit ... Left her car’s motor running.

She was tall. Easily the equal of my five foot ten height. The long hair that fell almost to the small of her back was a rich chestnut brown with highlights of at least a dozen other natural shades blended in.

Her car was a vert. And although I hate convertibles, it fit her. Every guy in the vicinity forgot what they were doing to turn and look at her. I swear the two guys at the table next to us forgot that they were gay and stared at her too.

She’d jumped over the side of her car and was striding purposefully towards the cafe we sat in. She pulled on a pair of genuine Ray Bans and I swear she was looking at me. But then every other guy in the place was probably thinking the same thing.

I felt really sorry for the waiter who’d gotten her carry out order wrong, because the look on her beautiful face spelled trouble for someone.

Her long legged strides brought her closer and closer to us with every step. And the closer she got, the better she looked. Besides that incredible hair, her face, at least what I could see of it behind her oversized wayfarers was fashion model pretty.

Her legs were long and well shaped. I could tell this because her jeans were almost painted on. Her slim hips and well shaped ass were beautiful. She had a tiny waist and two small but mouth watering breasts.

I was in love. Like every guy around me, my mouth had dropped open while almost every woman in the area was on guard and pissed. I say almost every woman because my Suzy had continued yacking away about whatever the fuck she was talking about.

I guess in a way both of us were immobilized. Suzy by ... Shit, to this day I have no idea what she was talking about ... And me by the sight of that goddess walking towards us to get to the door of the restaurant ... Or so I thought.

Yep ... I thought that all the way until things got ill. It was all so sudden. There were so many thoughts going through my head at the same time. I was thinking about shapes and how her inverted heart shaped butt perfectly matched her heart shaped face. I was also wishing that she was driving a real car but glad that she wasn’t dragging one of those tank-like challengers around. Even a woman as beautiful as she was couldn’t make that work.

But all of a sudden she was past the door and right at our table. She smiled at me. It was a beautiful smile. I was so shocked by the smile that I failed to react as she turned and slapped the taste out of Suzy’s mouth.

She hit my wife so hard that Suzy fell over backwards in an awkward tangle of arms and legs.

“That was for my mother,” snarled the goddess. She turned to me and with an expression of almost pity apologized to ... Me.

“I’m so sorry for how much this hurts you,” she said. “You deserve so much better.”

And then she hopped over the railing and sprinted for her car. She hopped over the door, Dukes of hazard style and with shrieking tires burned rubber getting out of there.

My brain wasn’t working at the time although as an engineer I’m supposed to be pretty quick on the uptake. There was simply too much weird shit going on for me to gain any type of mental traction to make sense of it.

I heard the sound of a feminine voice laughing hysterically. I turned and saw the big bearded guy behind me and in shock realized that he was the one laughing. That brought me out of my shock and propelled my body into action.

No one slapped Suzy and got away with it. Okay maybe she did but I had to at least chase her.

I hopped over the railing and ran towards my own car. I’d seen a couple of episodes of the dukes myself. I jumped up and slid over the hood of my car landing lightly on my feet and after opening the door, threw myself in.

As my engine started every eye on the block was on me. The sound, though musical and beautiful to me caused a lot of the onlookers to spontaneously begin speaking Chinese. I swear I heard more than one of them scream, “Fokkkkk!” as the sound of five hundred and eighty unleashed horses ripped the tranquil afternoon air.

Less than a second later the same people were covering their ears and shaking their fists in anger as I shredded my tires. If they thought the Goddess had made a hellacious racket burning rubber on Woodward Avenue nearly a minute before, then my exit must have terrified them.

My tires’ squeals of protest were not unlike the sounds that all three of Cerberus’ heads make when the gates of hell are opened.

And to be honest the bits of rubber from my rapidly disintegrating tires that landed in their lattés and soufflés had probably pissed them off too.

But by the time they’d gained enough sense to protest, I was a block away from the restaurant and gaining on that Camaro with every second.

Strangely enough I could still see her bright red paint. But almost as if she could see a flash of grabber orange getting bigger in her rearview mirror she suddenly turned off of the broad, straight expanse of Woodward Avenue.

Knowing the area the way I did, I knew it wasn’t coincidence that she’d turned where she had. We’d left Ferndale, driven through Pleasant Ridge and were nearing Royal Oak. She was heading for the freeway.

She moved into the turn lane and then made a sharp right. I was almost a half a block away but I followed suit. Once on the freeway the speed limit was much higher and I was sure that she didn’t give a fuck about it. That Camaro would be eating up ground at an alarming rate.

The fact that I’d have bet my left nut that my car was faster went out the window. She’d be driving at or above freeway speed while I was forced to drive far slower and weave my way through city traffic.

But I had to at least try. Maybe she’d get slowed down by heavy weekend traffic on 696.

When I got on the freeway myself a few moments later the music started. The high pitched whine of my supercharger always made me smile. In less than ten seconds I was already doing a hundred and not giving the Michigan State Police who haunted the freeways any thought.

I’d driven about five miles on the freeway when I saw her. I knew that her Camaro was pretty fast but ... God dammit, she was only doing seventy. That was the posted speed limit.

She probably ... Fuck ... It made no sense. I got behind her and slowed down so I wouldn’t pass her and lose her.

She surprised me even further then. She actually put on her turn signal and left the freeway. I followed her, dead set on getting answers.

Almost as if she’d planned it, she left the freeway at Coolidge. I followed her into a nice sized park. There were tennis and basketball courts on one side. There was a high school with a track surrounding a football field on the other.

She pulled into a parking lot in front of a baseball diamond where two teams were playing a game. There were people in the bleachers watching the game and a large hill with a running trail behind the bleachers.

The thought went through my mind that it could be a trap designed to car-jack me. After all, lots of things pointed to it. She’d smiled at me before slapping the cowboy shit out of Suzy.

And realistically, she could have out run me on the road. She had a nice head start. She was already in her car and driving before I even started running for my car to chase her.

And when she got on the freeway, she’d driven almost slowly. If I’d been her, I’d have gotten on the freeway and then got off at the next exit. Anyone chasing me wouldn’t have a clue of when I exited the freeway. They could have driven for hundreds of miles and never realized that I was off of the freeway before they ever got on it.

I mulled over those thoughts as I climbed the hill she’d parked in front of. A cheer rang out from the bleachers as one of the players got a hit and pelted the ball into the outfield.

I paused to watch the kid circling the bases and then high five all of his teammates.

“A baseball fan huh?” she said.

As much as her looks had gotten to me, the voice was better. It was smokey and scratchy at the same time. The tone was like honey and there was so much emotion in that voice.

I wondered why the hell she showed no signs of being afraid. As I looked at her all I could read in her face was concern for me and ... Anger.

It was almost as if she’d been...

“Waitin’ for yuh?” she asked, reading my thoughts. “Ah was.”

“Why?” I asked. “Why did you... ?”

“Bust that whorish bitch in the chops... ?” she smirked. I nodded. “Because if I’d killed her in public, I’d end up in jail or worse.”

“What’s worse than jail?” I asked. “Are your mom and Suzy friends or something? What do you mean I deserve more?”

“Uhm ... Can we deal with one question at a time?” she asked. Again that voice floored me.

“Are you like ... a singer or something?” I asked. She smiled and looked at me like I was crazy.

She took off her sunglasses then, and if I thought her voice was magical those eyes decimated me. She could have gotten up and walked away and I’d have let her leave.

She owned me and she knew it. All of those stupid fucking romance novels that Suzy read had it right. And those dumb assed love songs ... My mind grabbed onto one dumb assed line from an old Jackson five song that was taken completely out of context and had nothing to do with the situation.

Mike had sang, “One glance was all it took.” And as far as I was concerned he never needed to sing again. That one glance had been all it took. All it took for me to forget that I was married. All it took for me to forget that this woman had embarrassed and humiliated Suzy in public. All it took to make me wonder how Suzy had angered her.

“Let’s start with the first question,” she said. “She kept looking away from me as if she couldn’t meet my eyes. On anyone else I’d have assumed that they were lying, but somehow I knew that she wasn’t.

“Hell is worse than jail,” she spat. “Especially when you have no idea what you did to get there. And my mom and ... Your wife are not friends or something but they did have something in common. As for the last one I’d need to show you that. But in order to show you ... You’d need to trust me.”

She looked up and flashed those incredible eyes at me again.

“I trust you,” I heard myself saying. And I knew that I’d meant it. Something inside of me was telling me that she was telling me the truth.

“Give me your phone,” she said. She opened my contacts and added a number, presumably hers to my phone list.

“Expect a call from me tomorrow at around lunch time,” she smiled. “And be ready to meet me and jump down the rabbit hole.”

As we walked back down the hill to our cars, I felt strange. I felt like that awkward time in high school when you’re walking next to the prettiest girl in the school and you hoped and prayed that everyone you knew saw you.

Even stranger was the fact that I had never lied to Suzy or kept any type of secret from her before then. But here I was with just a hint from an absolute stranger, convinced not only that Suzy had kept some sort of secret from me, but that it was a pretty bad one and it involved this girl’s mother.

As we got to our cars, there was a moment of awkwardness. I got the impression that she wanted to say something to me, but she just smiled and put her Ray Bans back over those incredible eyes. I nodded at that. I didn’t want her flashing those peepers at anyone except me.

And she did it again. Almost as if she’d read my thoughts, she looked over the glasses and batted her eyes at me.

I drove back to the restaurant to find Suzy. As soon as she saw me she grabbed her purse and came to my car.

“What the hell was that about?” I asked her.

“I have no idea,” she said. “Did you catch her?”

I’d been watching Suzy’s face as she spoke. You can’t spend half of your God damned life with someone and not be able to tell when they’re lying to you and Suzy was lying.

“No,” I said, lying right back. Two could play that game. “I got stuck at a red light. There was a cop near me or I’d have run it. Add that to the fact that she had a big assed head start on me and there was just no way for me to catch her.”

Suzy actually seemed relieved that I hadn’t caught her.

“I’ve got some ideas. I know every performance shop in town and someone that I know, knows that car,” I said. “It won’t take me long to track her ass down.”

“There’s no need to bother,” she said quickly. “It was probably a case of mistaken identity. She probably thought I was someone else. I have one of those faces that seem familiar to everyone.”

“Then we need to find her and let her know that you’re not the person she thought you were,” I said. “I have to protect you, Honey.”

“That’s sweet, Barney,” she smiled. “Let’s go home.”

When we got home, I refused to let it go. I kept bringing it back up, yet again and again Suzy told me that she had no idea who the woman was or what it was all about.

I could tell that she wanted to get me off of the subject when she came out of our room dressed only in panties and a long shirt. She had taken her bra off under the shirt. She called my name and I looked at her.

She turned her neck one way and then the other. Her hair flew outwards and then settled back into place. As soon as it settled, her hands reached into the open shirt and cupped her huge breasts as if offering them to me.

But for the first time since we met, it didn’t work. I’m not sure who was more shocked, her or me. Maybe it was the fact that Suzy had just flat out lied to me. But all of a sudden I just didn’t see her the same way.

“Put the water balloons away,” I said. “It’s Sunday, I need to wash my car.” Her mouth dropped open in shock. She was apoplectic.

Suzy

It had been a really strange Sunday. It hadn’t gone anything like the way I’d hoped.

I’d heard about those trendy sidewalk cafes in Ferndale and had thought that it sounded exciting and like something I could use to put some of the spark back in my marriage.

To be truthful, Barney hadn’t ever lost it. He loved me as much as he ever did. He was still excited over the same two things he’s always loved. He loved that damned car and my tits.

Twenty years is a long time. Over that time we’d lived in three different houses. I’d repainted ... Well ... We’d repainted this one several times. And we were different too. We thought differently, we acted differently and we even looked differently.

Again ... That was mostly me. Maybe I was the one who’d changed. Barney still looked almost exactly the same as he did in college. It was probably all of that running he did. That and the fact that he had literally no stress in his life. Barney only did things he liked doing.

He loved his job as an engineer. There were occasionally times when he didn’t like a particular project but overall he was doing what he wanted to do. He also loved me to distraction. I occasionally gave him something that he didn’t want to do, but he did whatever he had to do to keep me happy.

I was actually the problem. I was never satisfied. But I had suddenly realized that what I had was simply much better than I ever thought. It wasn’t just the fact that I’d finally seriously listened to my friends snickering about how much they’d love a chance with Barney if something were to happen to me.

It was everything. Three years ago, I’d been so bored with my life that I’d taken a job as a secretary. Norman Driscoll owned a struggling company that at the time had been on its last legs.

In the past year the company had rallied and was no longer struggling. In fact we were doing so well that we were expanding and erecting a huge new office tower in the new construction area about three miles outside of the city limits.

I was one of the few people who truly knew where all of that success came from. And it wasn’t pretty. Norm had made a deal with some people who weren’t what you’d call nice.

Basically the company was no longer struggling, but it was only because we were laundering money from a bunch of criminals. They sold drugs and did whatever else they did for the money. But all of that money, literally millions of dollars a week, came in the form of cash.

With no way of explaining how the money was legally made they couldn’t declare it or pay taxes on it. That meant that they really couldn’t use it without alerting the IRS and other federal agencies.

So, Driscoll took their cash and banked it as if it was coming in from our sales. We then paid the criminals as if they were employees or consultants. That gave them the ability to use their money without fear of government reprisals. Several of them, including their boss, now appeared to be legitimate business men and even pillars of the community.

Their boss, an ice cold, venomous, bastard name Andre Strucker had through his charitable works become associated with the city’s Mayor.

But Strucker was still a murderous, vicious criminal. Driscoll had been forced again and again to do things that sickened him. I felt for him but it was time for me to get out.

Driscoll was locked in because he simply could not let the company that had been started by his grandfather die. I had stayed this long because for the past two years I’d been having an affair with Norm Driscoll.

It had started because as usual I was seeking what I thought was excitement. But also because as a woman in her forties at that time, I’d been feeling unattractive and bored with my life.

Come on, I know it sounds trite and superficial, but women are that way. A lot of our self worth comes from our appearance.

Men are simply not as vain as we are. I’ve seen balding fifty year old beer bellied men marching around their houses, shirtless as if they were God’s gift to the world. Men do not give a fuck what they look like.

A nearly toothless, sway backed, scrawny old man will wink at a fucking super model at a car show and honestly believe he has a shot.

Women are simply less confident in our appearance. Even the skinny bikini types are constantly assessing what they believe are their weaknesses. A recent internet study revealed that even considering the entertainment industry more than eighty five percent of the cosmetic procedures done were performed on women.

A woman with a huge rack always worries about her face, her legs and her ass.

The way Driscoll, a still vibrant man in his fifties, looked at me sent shivers down my spine. I enjoyed the attention. It made me feel so sexy. The fact that my husband gave me and had always given me attention was lost on me. In my mind I saw it the same way Barney saw his fucking car. No matter how fast he made it, he still wanted it faster.