The Passenger Seat

From the back cover

Picking her son Leo up from school, a mother watches a Porsche send the boy flying twenty-five feet through the air. As Leo bleeds on the asphalt, the driver, Tiffany, stays in her car to touch up her lipstick and calls Mr. Sterling for help. Within minutes, six bodyguards seal off the intersection and block the ambulance, insisting nobody leaves until liability is determined.

When the mother cries that the injured child is Victor Sterling's own son, Tiffany laughs it off as a shakedown. Victor, meanwhile, phones home to check on his wife and son, and the nanny Martha lies that they are watering flowers in the greenhouse. Kneeling in the street, the mother is told to lick Tiffany's shoe clean before the ambulance may pass.

Her dignity gone and her son fading, she lunges at Tiffany, and the bodyguards answer with a baton and a crushing blow to her knee.