How It All Goes Down
Heaven for Cars
- Alex is so busy trying to put these puzzle pieces together that he can hardly pay attention at school the next day.
- The one detail he can't shake is the seat-belt thing—the "more Alex thought about it, the less he believed it" (2.5)—and he decides that the only way to find out for sure is to see the car itself.
- Alex goes to the school office and looks through the phonebook for automobile junkyards. To his surprise, he finds J.B. Stryker Auto Wreckers… the same name that he saw on the van after the funeral.
- That night, Alex rides his bike to the address and sneaks inside. He passes a dozing guard and watches another man crushing cars with a giant metal crane.
- It's then that Alex sees his uncle's BMW. To his surprise, it doesn't look like it's been in an accident—the only thing the car was hit with was a "spray of bullets" (2.27).
- Alex hears voices approaching and hides in the BMW. Suddenly, the car shudders and is lifted into the air. Uh oh… The car is being dragged into the compactor, which will make short work of our fourteen-year-old hero.
- Alex barely makes it out in time. His luck is short-lived, however, as he's stopped from escaping by the man he saw with a gun at Ian's funeral.
- Luckily, Alex is—quite literally—a karate kid, so he gives the man a kick to the gut that would make Bruce Lee proud and manages to get away.