Furthermore, in the front seat of the black sedan were the dark silhouettes of three uniformed cops.

Now this joker had seen the face of violence in many make-ups. The quick, insensate leap across the river Styx was no news to him. He was not naive about the grisly jokes of death.

But what he saw now scrambled his brains. His head was running in all four directions; but his feet were just standing there like a yokel in a carnival harem. He turned around a couple of times as though he were looking for something. For what he didn’t know.

Then he saw the car wheel leaning against the side of the jacked-up car. The wheel had a whitewall tire.

He grabbed the wheel and started running toward Convent Avenue. But the wheel was too heavy, so he put it down and began rolling it like a kid does a hoop.

That stretch of Convent Avenue goes down a steep hill toward 125th Street. When he came into Convent Avenue he turned the wheel down the hill. The wheel bounced over the curb and increased speed as it went down the hill. He kept up with it until it came to the next crossing. The wheel dropped from the curb and crossed the street. He stumbled slightly, and the wheel gained on him. When the wheel hit the next curb it bounced high in the air, and when it came down it went away like a supercharged sports car.

He looked down the hill and saw two cops standing beneath a street lamp at the intersection of 126th or 127th Street. He put on the brakes and skidded to a stop, made a circle and went up the cross street he had passed. He disappeared into the night.

The wheel kept on down the street and knocked the legs out from underneath the two cops, knocked down a lady coming from the supermarket with a bag full of groceries, swerved out into the street, passed through the traffic of 125th Street without touching a thing, bounced over the sidewalk and crashed through the street-level door of a tenement facing the start of Convent Avenue.