The Camaro idled in the empty road, its engine chugging loudly like an animal catching its breath. I thought the windshield would be cracked, but it was unmarked. So was the hood. Besides losing a couple of inches of tire rubber and brake pad, the car seemed to be doing fine.

It was as if nothing had happened at all.

As if.

I didn’t want to look in the rearview mirror. I stared at Albert, Alex’s stupid grinning orange University of Florida Gator logo air freshener instead. Albert wasn’t offering any suggestions. I sucked in a hard breath, like a diver before going under, and finally looked.

The biker lay in the middle of the right lane behind me. He was facedown on the asphalt beside my skid marks, his thick gray braid half undone, his arms flung out in a Christlike spread. Traffic cones and stanchions from a work area along the side of the road were scattered around him like nailed bowling pins. He wasn’t moving.

When I noticed the dark, inky splotch in his gray hair and on the street beside his head, various parts of my body started to shake simultaneously, my knees, my hands, my lips. I let out my sour, rum-scented breath and covered my face with my quivering hands. My trembling, clenching fingers clawed at my skull like a rock climber searching for purchase.

“What have I done?” I asked myself between hysterical gulps of air.

Killed a man, came a stone-sober answering thought in response.

You just killed a man trying to save his dog.

I glanced up at the open road through the windshield. It curved away out of sight in the moonlit distance, beautiful, dreamlike, beckoning like the Yellow Brick Road in The Wizard of Oz.

That’s when the cool, rational, very sober-sounding voice in my head delivered two words, a sound bite, an ad slogan.