Chapter 11

I was having a good time playing with the powers I had inherited. I don't mean to give the impression that it was all frivolity. Sure there were some times when it was quite enjoyable to exercise my powers but on the whole I maintained a serious attitude and did not let things get out of hand. I remembered Horatio's warning about abusing the powers and tried my best to channel my efforts down the straight and narrow.

A very good friend of mine in the other existence was Johnnie Millar. I had met him when I was in my mid teens and I must say that he was responsible for keeping me going when adversity would throw rocks at my existence. Where it not for Johnnie I would have met my demise many times over. He was a stabilizing influence on me and gave me the strength to carry on when things looked their bleakest. I certainly owed Johnnie my life which he unwittingly saved on many occasions. I guess what contributed to my being in that field with a gun at my head was the loss of my best friend.

Johnnie had been an adventuresome fellow and would try almost any adventure that most guys would not dare to try. It was during one of those adventures that Johnnie met his maker. He had taken up driving a race car in the SCCA circuit. Johnnie was quite good and had won several trophies and had taken home a sizeable sum of sponsorship money.

Johnnie married his high-school sweetheart and they had two very cute little kids. I was single in that existence so we did not socialize very much beyond the occasional beer after work. Being good friends, however, meant that we shared an interest in sports cars. Another friend of ours, Bobbie Forrest, ran a foreign car repair shop called Continental Sport Cars. We would get together in that shop to work on Johnnie's car. He had an Austin Healey dubbed the bug-eyed sprite. We spent many hours working on Johnnie's Sprite or Bobbie's Formula Ford. We even dubbed our little group the Continental Sport Cars Racing Team. I didn't have a race car of my own so I was made pit chief by default.

Everything was going along nicely until one tragic day when the brakes failed on Johnnie's car. After ten laps he was in first place leading the pack by a comfortable margin. He built up speed on the back straightaway and was approaching turn number three. I noticed that there was something wrong when he did not slow down for the turn. He left the track and flipped over several times, ending up in a big ball of fire. He was killed instantly and there was nothing that anyone could have done.

Bobbie and I got Johnnie's car onto a trailer and towed it back to the shop. We went over the car with a fine toothed comb trying to find some reason for the crash. The first thing that we found was that there was no brake fluid in the reservoir. Then we noticed that the linkage on the hand brake had been disconnected. We checked the hydraulic brake system and could not find anything wrong. It wasn't like Johnnie to fail to check the fluid level before a race. Bobbie filled the fluid, then got in the car and pumped the brakes. He told me that they felt just fine. I was looking around under the car when I spied a small puddle of some fluid on the floor of the garage bay. I got a flashlight and climbed under the car to get a closer look. I told Bobbie to put pressure on the brakes. It didn't take me very much time at all to find a small hole in one of the brake lines with fluid spraying out.

I had Bobbie release the pedal and wiped off the brake line where the fluid was coming out. Sure enough, looking real close I could see a tiny hole in the line. I got a magnifying glass and looked at the hole. It was perfectly round and had no rust or corrosion around it. I deduced that the hole had been drilled deliberately. At that point we decided to get the state police involved because the evidence all pointed to murder. Some detectives came out to the shop and investigated and agreed that it was definitely murder. Unfortunately, with so many people having access to the cars, they could not determine who would have had the opportunity to make the hole. It was determined that it was done at the track and most probably done at night. Johnnie had raced the day before with no incidents. They checked the spot where the car had been parked overnight and found some drops of fluid mixed in with some metal chips. At that point they knew where the act had occurred and that it must have been at night. Search as they may, the police could not come up with any suspects.