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he hadn’t been able to find one. He wasn’t exactly sure what traction control was or even where he’d heard about it. TV commercial, probably. Whatever it was, it sounded good to him. When it had first started snowing hard, he’d pulled into a rest stop and looked for the switch.
    Good luck. There were a whole lot of knobs and switches on the dash, way too many, in fact, but not one of them said anything about traction control. It was no wonder Detroit was going down the toilet. Nobody had a clue how to work the damn cars anymore. Somehow, a few years back, some genius in Motown had decided everybody in America wanted dashboards to look like the cockpits of a 747. Now, they all did, and nobody had a clue what button did what anymore.
    He’d looked around inside the glove box for some kind of a manual, but of course there was none. Just his rental contract and a folded map of North Dakota, which he did not need, and his .38 snub-nose, which he hoped he would not need. He really did not have time to dick around with this car anymore so he’d pulled back out onto the I-94 highway and kept on heading west, hoping for the best.
    Maybe traction control was even standard on this thing, automatic, he told himself now, speeding up a little. But about an hour ago, he’d almost skidded into a ditch. Twice. The road conditions were so bad back there it had been like trying to drive a friggin’ schoolbus across a frozen lake.
    The car, a black Mustang coupe rented at the Bismarck airport Hertz counter, had a good heater, at least, once you finally found the knob that turned it on. He’d come across it only by accident, looking for the traction-control thingy, just like he’d finally found the button that turned the radio on. At least a previous renter had punched in some pretty good radio stations. Must have been some fuckin’ electronics engineer or jet pilot or something who’d done that. Whatever happened to two knobs, over and out?
    There was an all-night talk show out of Chicago he’d been listening to. Pretty good reception, and the show was good, too, called The Midnight Hour with your host, Greg Noack. Tonight’s topic was capital punishment, of course, because tonight was the night old Stumpy was going to ride the needle.
    Everybody in the country, not just Chicago, was talking about Charles Edward Stump, a.k.a. Stumpy the Baby Snuffer. Yeah, talking about Stumpy’s impending execution, et cetera. This case had gotten media attention worldwide, not just the tabloids, either.
    Mr. Stump was, in fact, the reason Fyodor Strelnikov, known since childhood as Paddy, was driving through the Badlands of North Dakota on this most miserable night in December. The execution was scheduled to take place at midnight tonight, which was, he saw, looking at his watch, exactly two hours and six minutes from now. Stumpy’s sayonara party was going down at Little Miss, prison slang for the Little Missouri State Penitentiary just outside the town of Medora, North Dakota.
    Distance to the joint from here was approximately sixty-seven miles.
    Paddy snugged the pedal a little closer to the metal. He had time to do what he had to do, but he didn’t want to cut it too close. Get in, make his delivery, and get the hell out of this friggin’ state. You had to figure the joint would be mobbed, all the protesters and media crawling all over the place. He stuck the needle on 100 miles per hour.
    “The real question is, is Charles Stump insane?” a caller said on the radio.
    “ Insane?” Greg Noack said. “Anybody who kills eight newborn infants in their incubators while their mothers are sleeping in the maternity ward down the hall is completely off his nut, man!”
    “That’s my point exactly, Greg. Stumpy’s not guilty by reason of insanity. Can’t right-wing geniuses like you and Rush Limbaugh understand that!”
    And on and on like that the calls went. The armies of bleeding hearts were out in force on the airwaves tonight.