Hondo rose and hopped over the guardrail. The camera zoomed closer and showed the unconscious woman driver slumped in the narrow gap between the crushed roof and the bottom edge of the driver’s side window.
Flames flickered reddish-yellow in the back seat behind her and thick black smoke streamed out of the broken windows. The few other people starting forward to help ran back when they saw the fire.
Hondo tried the door handle once, but it was bent and crumpled, as good as welded shut from the force of the wreck. He ran to a nearby delivery truck that was jackknifed and wedged among a dozen other vehicles and he slid open the side panels, revealing cases of Budweiser.
He took a case and ran back to the burning car. He shook the case, then dropped it and used his knife to punch holes pop-pop-pop fast into the cans and use the spewing froth to put out the flames nearest the woman.
When he tossed the last can away, Hondo put his foot against the side of the car and grabbed the door. He pulled, and the muscles in his back and shoulders swelled and quivered with the effort, but he got a corner loose, and pulled and bent it open and down like someone using a can opener, until he had an opening large enough to reach inside to the woman.
“See,” I said, “Just opening a darn car door.” The corners of Hondo’s mouth went up a quarter inch.
**
The woman was wedged inside. Hondo bent the steering wheel toward the passenger’s side until it touched the dash, then he cut through the seat belt with one quick slice of his knife. He picked her up and moved away from the burning car. Hondo made five steps before the gas tank blew and sent orange and yellow flames through the Firebird’s interior.
Oily smoke billowed out and enveloped Hondo and the woman, hiding them from view for five or six seconds before the wash from the helicopter’s rotors blew the smoke away in two curling patterns.
Hondo emerged between them still carrying the woman. Her arms hung loosely around his neck and her head rested on his chest like a sleeping child. A long, Laura Croft-style braided ponytail dangled behind her head. Steven Spielberg couldn’t have set up a more dramatic shot.
Hondo knelt and lay the woman down, but before he could let go she pulled his head to her and kissed him on the lips. She held the kiss for several seconds, then pulled away and fainted. Hondo stood again, his torso and legs streaked with grease and smoke. The camera held on him as the scene faded to black.
I said, “Okay, since I’m already well established in the movie industry-”
Hondo said, “On your last job you worked one day as a PA on a Gillette commercial.”
“Like I said, since I only work with the best in the business, I was wondering how much we’re getting paid for this little bit of cinematic fluff.”
“You think a Budweiser commercial is small time?”
I shrugged my shoulders. “It’s so, I don’t know, commercial.”
Hondo leaned over and whispered an amount in my ear.
I said, “Great googly-moogly, I feel a Hawaiian vacation coming on.”
“Not until we find her.”
I said, “It was that darn old kiss, wasn’t it.”
He wouldn’t look at me, “She’s running. She probably needs help.”
I nodded, “I imagine. That truck hitting her car wasn’t an accident. Otherwise, you’d think a person you rescued from a fiery death might at least stay around to thank you.”
“You’d think,” Hondo said.
“How did she disappear from the scene? There were cameras and cops and a big crowd of people all crowded around. Only thing I can imagine is Criss Angel was there and Mindfreaked her to Cancun.”
“My guess is she crawled between some cars and then got up and moved into the crowd. Police said the Firebird had been taken from a car lot so recently that a stolen report hadn’t gone out yet.”
“Any prints?”
“No, fire pretty much took care of any forensics.”
“How about the pickup that hit her?”
“Drove away and the news crew never got a clean shot at the license plate.”
“You get an uncut copy of the news film?”