Microstory 217: Wreckless (Part II)

This is a microstory. You'll have to read it to find out what it's about.

I grew up on a farm, and so I’ve been driving heavy machinery since I was eleven years old. When I moved into the city, about the only thing I could do to make money was driving. I drove a cross country truck for a couple years, a cab for a couple more, and I even spent several months as a chauffeur for fancy people. But at the end of the day, I decided to go with tow trucks. I looked into a few different companies, but landed on one that requires every driver to have experienced precisely zero vehicular collisions in their lifetime. I’ve always been a pretty outgoing guy, but I’ve also been told that I have a very calming and comforting voice. They never send me out to tow vehicles that have been abandoned for one reason or another. No, I’m the dedicated people person. Whenever the company gets a call from someone who sounds particularly frustrated or distraught, or if it’s a repossession with a strong likelihood of encountering the owner, I go in. And man, do I love what I do. For me, this is just any other day, but for our clients, this could be an extreme inconvenience. It’s my job to get them where they’re going safely, making sure that the process is as smooth as possible, and I take it very seriously. These aren’t just numbers on a clipboard; these are people, and their feelings matter. Today is a weird one, though. The call doesn’t go through dispatch; it goes straight to my cell phone. I remember immediately the man on the other end of the line, along with his little red sedan. I didn’t have to work on his car when we first met. He had run over a cooler that had fallen onto the highway. He thought that it had punctured something under his car, but the fluid appeared to have been coming from the cooler instead. Still, we kind of hit it off, and I gave him my card. Now he’s a bit frenetic, but he says something about hitting two cars at the same time, and that there was a pedestrian in the middle of it. I hop into my truck and carefully speed off. I’m nearing the intersection, close enough to see what the client is talking about, when a bus runs a red light and crashes into me, costing me my job.