Lexi Crane braced her feet against the dashboard of a more-than-pristine 1967 Mustang and tried to hold herself and a few other things in place.  She was about ten minutes from having a baby.  Less than that, if the feeling of urgent, agonizing pressure in her belly was any indication.  Of course, she'd be happy to have the birthing process over with, but for the moment, she willed it to just hold its horses for just a couple more minutes because the hospital was twenty minutes away, and this wasn't just any '67 Mustang, it was the actual car that had been driven in the movie, "Bullitt," star of one of the most famous car chases in history, and squirting a baby out onto Steve McQueen's irreplaceable upholstery was not Lexi's idea of a good thing.  She was trying to remember how to breathe, and kept forgetting.

The way things were looking, though, she might not have much choice in the matter.  The baby felt as determined and committed as his father could be.  Lexi looked over at the soon-to-be-proud-papa in question, who was surfing the Mustang through traffic with a calmness that belied the entire situation.  She knew there could be a galaxy full of stuff going on behind Ren's green eyes, and once he got behind the wheel it wouldn't show.  He launched the car calmly up an on-ramp, already going twice the speed of highway traffic, and cut immediately into the fast lane.  Lexi braced herself against the g-forces, putting her hand on the window.  The thing in her belly seemed to be getting larger and closer to the surface with every lurch.  "Oog," she said.

"I know," Ren replied, not taking his eyes off the road but seeming to give her a sympathetic look just the same.  She could tell he felt every contraction an instant after she did.

Up ahead, the traffic became a sudden dance of brakelights.  Rush hour.  There was no way they'd make it, no logical way, no rational way.  Then again, Ren was driving.  "Are we going to make it?" Lexi asked, her voice husky.

"Of course," her husband said, a grin cracking his stoic face.  Light flashed on his glasses as he cut into the left breakdown lane without slowing, then magically found a hole in traffic between a bus and a cement mixer.  He braked hard, downshifted, and shot back across two lanes.  Lexi tumbled halfway over in her seat, banging her head on the chrome console.  "Sorry," Ren said.  Steve McQueen's legendary Mustang was splitting lanes, millimeters from the cars on either side as the stopped commuters flashed past.  They squirted into the holes that opened up between the cars as they inched forward, and hopped from hole to hole without having to slow down.  "All the time in the world," Ren said.

Lexi wasn't so sure.  She had fallen off of the seat into the footwell, and couldn't see out the windows any more, could only feel the car seesawing left, right, left, and then rising as if they'd left the ground.  A moment later--WHAM--the Mustang returned to terra firma, and the back of Lexi's head hit the metal dashboard hard enough to dent it.  Hard enough to dent both, maybe.  "Maybe we should let the baby drive," Lexi joked.  The rough ride was nothing--they'd be talking about how they made it to the hospital through traffic in seven minutes flat for years.  They'd tell the story at the kid's sixteenth birthday, if he could just hold on.  "I don't want to have this baby in the car, Ren," Lexi said.

"It would be poetic.  Think of how much the tabloids would love it.  'World's foremost car girl gives birth...in a car!'"

She laughed in spite of her discomfort.  Talking to him could make any pain go away.  "I don't think it's up to me any more, sweetch," she gasped, trying not to hyperventilate.

"Sure it is," he replied, eyes still on the road.  "The whole thing is in your hands.  But I wouldn't wait too long, if I were you.  Hold on."  The Mustang lurched again, left the ground again.  This time, they dropped like a stone, as if Ren had jumped off of a goddamned building.  Maybe they'd just driven off the I-75 overpass?  But that didn't make any sense, they'd land in a railyard which didn't go anywhere.  Either way, she trusted that Ren knew what he was doing.  Trusting him was second nature, especially when he was driving.  Lexi closed her eyes, and felt the wheel suddenly in her hands.

And landed in bed.  The sensations--distended belly about to explode, aching head, falling--persisted for a few moments, and then she realized that she was stretched out, not curled up in the footwell of a car they'd never owned, and the feelings vanished (except for the aching head).  Her body seemed to collapse back into its proper shape, and Lexi felt a powerful jolt of relief as she realized she wouldn't actually have to give birth.  She had been dreaming, of course, she wasn't pregnant.  Had never been.  It wasn't possible; she and Ren hadn't even been married. And besides, he was dead.

It was easy for her to think about it bluntly in the muzzy, half-asleep moments while the dream melted around her.  Ren was dead, she was alone, and the company, all twenty-four of the cars they'd built, and the one hundred ninety eight cars they had collected were all gone, sold off without her permission.  All she had was a big old run-down house and a bunch of cats, see your local retailer for details.  As the dream faded completely, the bitter hollowness that had been Lexi's constant companion for the past six months returned.

The bed sank slightly under someone's weight.  Lexi opened her eyes, saw Nikki sideways, and sat up with a smile.  "Hellopers," she said to Nikki, happy to see her in spite of the pain in her head, which hadn't gone away with the dream.  Nikki was fully dressed, and wearing all black as usual.  Her long skirt completely hid the cast on her leg.  The powder-white and kohl-black makeup she wore didn't quite cover the fantastic set of bruises on her jaw and cheek.  Had something unpleasant happened to Nikki?

Yes, of course it had.  Lexi put a hand to her head and felt blood and flour crusted in her hair.  Her head hurt because she'd been whacked in the face with the toaster. Her face was tight with dried blood, too.

Where was Doctor Edward, for that matter?  Lexi looked around the room, saw him crossing it to close the window.  As he went, he tossed a piece of clothing to Nikki.  Nikki handed the shirt to Lexi.  Wups--she was topless.  Some mornings there was too much to process.  Lexi hated being waked up before she was ready.  She decided in that moment that she would call him Eddie, like Nikki did.  He couldn't be Doctor Edward to her any more.

"Molly is here," Nikki said.  There was a strong desire in her midnight blue eyes to wipe Lexi's face clean, but she didn't.

Molly?  That made no sense at all.  Not that she wasn't jitterly happy to see Molly, of course, they'd been best friends since eighth grade and Lexi had wanted Nikki to meet Molly for most of the four weeks that she had known the little goth-pixie, but Molly lived in Boston, which, last time Lexi had checked, was about eleven hundred miles from her house in Arcadia, Michigan.  But, whether she understood how or not, Molly was here, and that was just wonderful.  "Good.  There's a lot to do.  I've been having nightmares about it all night."

"It's mostly cleaned up," Eddie said.  He was talking about the mess in the kitchen, which Lexi remembered destroying while running for her life.  In fact, she'd trashed half the house.  In retrospect (and with the threat of violent death now safely past), it had been kind of fun.

"I'm not talking about that.  I'm talking about more important things."

"Such as?" Eddie asked.

"None of your business," Lexi shot back, then pulled the shirt over her head.  She thought about the dream some more; the baby, the car chase, her dead fiancé.  When she was more or less dressed, she scratched her tangled hair, bounced off of the bed, and dug into one of the piles on the floor.  Everything in her room was still knocked over.  It didn't matter; she knew where everything was.  She came up with a pair of socks, black ones with sunflowers on them, and pulled them on.  "Happy feet," she said to Eddie.  "Feet are happy."

His eyes went to Lexi's face.  She gave him a smile that would have given a charging rhinoceros pause, although it might not have melted the heart of a sociopath bent on slaughtering innocents.  Lexi was too tired to put that much energy into it.  Eddie looked tired, too.  Nikki didn't look exhausted at all (even though her right leg was in Lexi's ill-fitting walking cast), but then she had her ice-queen way of not letting anything seem to touch her.  Lexi smiled to let him know that she knew he was tired, too.  The smile pushed whatever button inside Eddie that it needed to.  He returned the smile.  "What else?"

"Nikki needs to go to the hospital, so they can look at her leg."

"I'm okay," Nikki said.

"Shut up, I know you are.  Molly can take you, because I'll bet Mister Doctor Edward doesn't like her much."  Molly could be more than a little bossy, especially when she was worried about Lexi which she no doubt was if she'd come all the way from Boston unannounced, and that briskness rubbed people like Eddie the wrong way ninety percent of the time.

"You got that right," Eddie grumbled.

"I know the type," Lexi said, sharing a conspiratorial look with Nikki.  While Nikki and Molly were gone, Lexi had stuff to do.  They had to load a truck.  Now that all of the killing and violence were finished, she had to finish Ren's car.

Problem was, the car's body wasn't here.  It was in the barn slash warehouse (whose "Crane-Packard" sign had been taken down) near her father's old house, near Detroit.  And that was where Eddie came in.  He wasn't a doctor or an electrician by trade.  Lexi wasn't sure exactly what he did, but he seemed to be good at solving any problem that arose, and so she told him hers.  "I have a powertrain, suspension, and interior in one place and a body in the other, Mister Doctor Edward Sharp.  I need to get them together."

Eddie nodded.  He liked solving logistical problems like that; Lexi could see the wheels turning already.

Molly caught the last of this as she entered the trashed master bedroom, but any question she might have had was preempted by the sight of Lexi.  "Jesus wept, Lex, what happened to you?" she gasped.

"Had a rough night," Lexi said.

"You've got blood all over your face.  It's dried in your hair.  Can I run you a bath?"

"Later, honey; we'll talk business later."

The calmness in her voice had a similar effect on Molly to the one it had on Eddie.  She sat on the bed on the other side of Lexi.  Lexi could have purred, flanked by her friends as she was.  She assumed that they'd already introduced themselves.  "Are you hurt?" Molly asked.

"Not anywhere that you can reach right now."  She'd know what that meant.  Lexi took a deep breath, inhaling Molly's perfume.  Since she hadn't been chased, kicked, or thrown down steps like the rest of them, Molly looked fresh and clean in a way that even Nikki couldn't manage right now.

Molly closed her eyes for a long moment.  "Okay."  When she opened them, her big brown eyes were bright with unshed tears.  "Okay, how do I help?"

Lexi smiled wryly.  "That's what he just said.  Can you run Nikki to the hospital?  I have to find a way to get Ren's car finished."

"Don't you want to clean the house first?" Nikki asked.

"She's got a point," Molly said.  "I have seen the aftermath of many a frat party.  I have seen what second-graders can do with fingerpaint and far too little supervision.  I even saw a Spartan Foods semi truck after it had been hit by a train.  And I'm still staggered by the magnitude of what I've seen this morning.  Judging by the mess, you made enough noise to chase any ghosts away forever.  I'm going to be pissed if I came all the way out here and you've scared the ghosts off." 

"She hasn't," Nikki said.

"That sounds like a voice of experience," Molly said.  "I'll run you to the hospital, and let Lex and Eddie lift heavy things while we're gone.  Lex, if you stand the fridge back up, we can make breakfast, assuming there's any usable food left in it.  On second thought, never mind.  I'll bring something back, okay?"

"Okay," Lexi said.  She stood up and rotated her head, cracking her neck audibly.  "We have work to do, Mister Doctor Eddie.  Big fish to fry.  Sacred cows to tip."

"You sure you're okay?" Eddie asked, looking at her with concern in his eyes.

"What, I switch from depressed-loopy to manic-loopy, and everyone thinks I'm broken?" she asked. 

"You..." Eddie shrugged.  "You had to do some pretty unpleasant things last night."

Lexi smiled at him again.  "I'm purposefully not thinking about it," she said.  "You?"  It was over, and she was fine.  Well, fine-ish.  Right now Lexi just had to finish the car.  That was all that mattered.  "I assume you want to stay here for a while," Lexi said to Eddie.  She cocked her head and heard the front door close as Nikki and Molly left.  "In the house, I mean."

"A little vacation would be nice, yeah."

"Apologize to me, and you can stay."

"I'll do better than that," he said.  "Ian's going to be nuts trying to find a way to keep a lid on you, now that you know what he did.  This thing is out of his control, and he doesn't know what to do.  What he's going to want is someone that he trusts to be here, to keep an eye on you.  To be honest, I'm sure he'd rather wash his hands of you entirely, but that would mean losing access to your money."

Lexi sighed.  "He wasn't this much of an asshole when Ren was alive."

"He's just in over his head.  He's a decent guy.  I've known him long enough to say so."

"He's an ass-weasel, and don't try to tell me different.  I'd sail a U-boat up his cakehole if I had one."

"I think he's aware of that; you shot an arrow at him, remember?"

"Fine.  But he's not welcome here."

"I'll keep him at bay for you."

That made Lexi smile.  "Playing both ends against the middle, are you?"

"Just because my friends hate each other doesn't mean I can't help them both out.  It gives me a warm, Christmassy feeling inside, believe me you."

She poked his considerable belly.  "If you put on a Santa suit, I'll bake you a Christmas pudding," she said.  "In the meanwhile, I'm going to go get Glen to help me finish this car, if you'll feed the cats while I'm gone."

"Take Molly with you?" Eddie asked hopefully.

"Of course.  She'd smother you in your sleep otherwise."