My pal Nate Southard's book Drive is now available, and I wrote his intro:

Back when I was cutting granite, I met The Psychic Cop.

You must have heard that song by the B-5s… "Love Shack"? Chances are, you heard it coming out of your car radio, as you drove fast from here to there. Remember that bit "I'm headin' down the Atlanta Highway, lookin' for the love getaway"? C’mon; of course you do. Well, the Atlanta Highway is a real road, and one day, I was heading down it. Going to the mall to pick up my girlfriend from her job at the bookstore.

Never did have a problem going in to pick her up, and I was never late. It wasn’t because I was particularly punctual, or that I was gentlemanly and thoughtful to the point of not making her wait. No, it was because I thought then, and do now, that there’re worse things you can do than browse a bookstore. I just like books. So I’d head in a bit early and look at the Harlan Ellison novels, and page through the odd Heinlein, and give a ruffle to the Philip K. Dick. Me, I’d be fine, in a well-stocked bookstore.

But this one day, when I showed up, the place was awash with the local constabulary. Seems as though, before I got there, there’d been a bit of shoplifting, and my girlfriend and her manager were filing a police report. None of my business, yeah? But I was sort of hanging about on the periphery, anyway, just to soak up the vibe. It was like a particularly slow episode of Hill Street Blues, you know? Just wanted to see the details, and I had an excuse to be there, so I hung around.

As one of the cops took statements, his partner gave me the eye. You know what I’m saying? I’d been around enough of Our Nation’s Finest to see this in action, and I still pay attention. One of the things that makes me good at what I do is that I pay attention to details that most folks let slide. And believe me, the devil’s in the details. That’s where the fun is.

So anyway, this one cop started paying attention to me, because maybe it looked to him like I was paying a little too close of attention to the scene, you know? I don’t blame him, really. But so we got to talking.

"Do I know you?" he said.

"No, I’m pretty sure you don’t," I replied. Never had seen him before.

"I ever stop you? Give you a ticket, recently?" The cop is staring at me, maybe a little hard.

"Nope," I said. Back then, I was a solid, tax-paying citizen, living with my folks as I saved up money to go back to college. Straight-and-narrow; that was me.

"Where’d you go to high school?"

"Back East, man. I’m a Yankee. I’m telling you, you don’t know me."

The cop sort of looked askance. If he hadn’t have been taking notes for his partner, I’d have bet you his arms would have been akimbo, too. He looked like that kinda guy.

"All right; OK," he said, and went back to what he was doing. My girlfriend finished up her statement and we went on our way and had a nice night. Next day, same thing. I headed up the Atlanta Highway from her apartment, towards the bookstore, to pick her up after work. This day, though, it was raining pretty good. Not a downpour, but not a sprinkle, either. Raining pretty good.

So I was sitting at a stoplight in my Oldsmobile Starfire GT I’d bought with my rock-cutting money, and it’s idling a little hard. It was a cheap, old car, and I was saving every penny I made to get back to school. I wasn’t real fond of cutting big hunks of rock into smaller pieces of rock so rich guys could get richer, yeah? So maybe I didn’t do the upkeep on the Starfire like I ought to have, but who could blame me, right?

At the red light, I looked over to the side of the road and I saw two cop cars doing the 1-Adam-69. You know? One car facing east, and the other facing west, so the drivers can talk to each other? So I didn’t think anything of it, and the light turned green and I hit the accelerator. I travelled forward a quarter mile or so, and the tires lost the road. Ever hydroplane? It’s not very fun. The car’s just out of your control, and that’s not good. Hurtling metal you don’t have a hand on just isn’t good at all.

Well, this had never happened to me before, and back then I was still a pretty green wheelman, so I did what every inexperienced driver does when hydroplaning, and I just jumped on those brakes. I mean, I was all up on those things. I couldn’t have locked it up harder if I was Fred Flinstone jamming my bare feet on the pavement. Of course, this is the worst thing you can do, and it sent my little Starfire into a spin across four lanes of highway trafffic, across the divide, banging the DO NOT ENTER sign from the turnaround up over the top of my hood, and spinning, uncontrollably, by the two cop cars in a circular skid of hot rubber and steam. I went down into the median and up towards the oncoming traffic and I think I maybe saw a guy in a pickup go by, just for a second, there, thinking about that girl in sixth grade who taught him French as I went by him in a sixty-mile-an-hour hot metal spin.

Finally, miraculously, I stopped in a skein of mud and weeds and tire and rain, heading pretty much in the direction I’d first intended, albeit in a small depression of dirt between lanes instead of on an actual road. Still. I hadn’t hit anything except the sign and I was in one piece myself, although I gotta admit I was white-knuckling the steering wheel, even though I thought I had had a handle on it.

I heard sirens and I looked up to see those two cop cars heading my way.

By the time they got to me, I had got untangled from my seatbelt and was standing there in the drizzle holding my license and registration. The guys in the two cars jumped out and ran towards me.

"Holy crap!" the first cop said. "I thought you had had it, for sure. You wouldn’t believe it. You missed that pickup by inches! I thought this was it, for the rest of the day, for us. Nothin’ but paperwork."

The second guy drove up, and got out of his squad car, slowly. Sure enough, it was the guy from the day before. The cop from my girlfriend’s bookstore.

"I told you I knew you!" he yelled.

And sometimes, that happens, like that cop and me in the bookstore; sometimes you get the vibe off of someone or something that there’s gonna be something heady and dangerous and illicit and sexy and practically unlawful about to happen. That’s the vibe I got off of Nate Southard and Shawn Richter and their work on DRIVE. I knew they were gonna skid by me at sixty miles an hour before I was finished with the first bit they did, and it was all I could do to just white-knuckle it and believe I was in good hands.

Nate and Shawn took care of me, and they’ll take care of you. You can sit back and enjoy, because even though it may seem like it’s all out of control, Nate and Shawn have got a handle on it.

Buckle up.

Larry Young is the author of the ground-breaking science fiction series Astronauts in Trouble, the comic book industry allegory Planet of the Capes, the self-publishing how-to book True Facts, the online comics columns Loose Cannon and Proof of Concept, and the upcoming high-octane action-adventure The Black Diamond. He's also the publisher of the award-winning publishing house AiT/Planet Lar. He’s a married old homeowner now, and drives a 2005 Honda CRV and a 2004 Derbi Boulevard.