Born of desperation, his boldness nevertheless surprised him. Because a police car might turn one corner or another momentarily, however, caution rather than assurance would be his downfall.
He hoped that these residents were not people with a sense of community, that they had not joined the Neighborhood Watch program. Their police mentor would have coached them to notice and report suspicious specimens exactly like him.
For laid-back southern California, for low-crime Newport Beach, a depressing percentage of these people locked their parked cars. Their paranoia gradually began to piss him off.
When he had gone over two blocks, he saw ahead a Lexus parked in a driveway, the engine idling, the driver's door open. No one sat behind the wheel.
The garage door also stood open. He cautiously approached the car, but no one was in the garage, either. The driver had dashed back into the house for a forgotten item.
The Lexus would be reported stolen within minutes, but the cops wouldn't be looking for it immediately. There would be a process for reporting a stolen car; a process was part of a system, a system the work of a bureaucracy, the business of bureaucracy delay.
He might have a couple of hours before the plates were on a hot sheet. He needed no more time than two hours.
Because the car faced the street, he slipped behind the wheel, dropped the trash bag on the passenger's seat, pulled the door shut, and rolled at once out of the driveway, turning right, away from the boulevard and the gun shop.
At the corner, ignoring the stop sign, he turned right once more and went a third of a block before he heard a thin shaky voice in the backseat say, 'What is your name, honey?'
An elderly man slumped in a corner. He wore Coke-bottle glasses, a hearing aid, and his pants just under his breasts. He appeared to be a hundred years old. Time had shrunken him, though not every part in proportion to every other.
'Oh, you're Debbie,' the old man said. 'Where are we going, Debbie?'
Crime led to more crime, and here were the wages of crime: certain destruction. Mitch himself had now become a kidnapper.
'Are we going to the pie store?' the old man inquired, a note of hope in his quavery voice.
Maybe some Alzheimer's was happening here.
'Yes,' Mitch said, 'we're going to the pie store,' and he turned right again at the next corner.
'I like pie.'
'Everybody likes pie,' Mitch agreed.
If his heart had not been knocking hard enough to hurt, if his wife's life had not depended on his remaining free, if he had not expected to encounter roving police at any moment, and if he had not expected them to shoot first and discuss the fine points of his civil rights later, he might have found this amusing. But it wasn't amusing; it was surreal.
'You aren't Debbie,' the old man said. 'I'm Norman, but you're not Debbie.'
'No. You're right. I'm not.'
'Who are you?'
'I'm just a guy who made a mistake.'
Norman thought about that until Mitch turned right at the third corner, and then he said, 'You're gonna hurt me. That's what you're gonna do.'
The fear in the old man's voice inspired pity. 'No, no. Nobody is gonna hurt you.'
'You're gonna hurt me, you're a bad man.'
'No, I just made a mistake. I'm taking you right back home,' Mitch assured him.
'Where are we? This isn't home. We're nowhere near home.' The voice, to this point wispy, suddenly gained volume and shrillness. 'You're a bad sonofabitch!'
'Don't get yourself worked up. Please don't.' Mitch felt sorry for the old man, responsible for him. 'We're almost there. You'll be home in a minute.'
'You're a bad sonofabitch! You're a bad sonofabitch!'
At the fourth corner, Mitch turned right, onto the street where he'd stolen the car.
'YOU'RE A BAD SONOFABITCH!'
In the desiccated depths of that time-ravaged body, Norman found the voice of a bellowing youth.
'YOU'RE A BAD SONOFABITCH!'
'Please, Norman. You're gonna give yourself a heart attack.'
He had hoped to be able to pull the car into the driveway and leave it where he'd found it, with nobody the wiser. But a woman had come out of the house into the street. She spotted him turning the corner.
She looked terrified. She must have thought that Norman had gotten behind the wheel.
'YOU'RE A BAD SONOFABITCH, A BAD, BAD SONOFABITCH!'
Mitch stopped in the street near the woman, put the car in park, tramped on the emergency brake, grabbed the trash bag, and got out, leaving the door open behind him.
Fortysomething, slightly stout, she was an attractive woman with Rod Stewart hair that a beautician had painstakingly streaked with blond highlights. She wore a business suit and heels too high to be sensible for a trip to the pie store.
'Are you Debbie?' Mitch asked.
Bewildered, she said, 'Am I Debbie?'
Maybe there was no Debbie.
Norman still shrieked in the car, and Mitch said, 'I'm so sorry. Big mistake.'
He walked away from her, toward the first of the four corners around which he had driven Norman, and heard her say 'Grandpapa? Are you all right, Grandpapa?'
When he reached the stop sign, he turned and saw the woman leaning in the car, comforting the old man.
Mitch rounded the corner and hurried out of her line of sight. Not running. Walking briskly.
A block later, as he reached the next corner, a horn blared behind him. The woman was pursuing him in the Lexus.
He could see her through the windshield: one hand on the wheel, the other holding a cell phone. She was not calling her sister in Omaha. She was not calling for a time check. She was calling 911.
Chapter 62
Leaning into the resisting wind, Mitch hurried along the sidewalk, and miraculously escaped being stung when a violent gust shook a cloud of bees out of a tree nest.
The determined woman in the Lexus stayed far enough back that she could hang a U-turn and elude him if he changed directions and sprinted toward her, but she maintained sight of him. He started to run, and she accelerated to match his pace.
Evidently she intended to keep him located until the police arrived. Mitch admired her guts even though he wanted to shoot out her tires.
The cops would be here soon. Having found his Honda, they knew that he was in the area. The attempted theft of a Lexus just a few blocks from the gun shop would ring all their bells.
The car horn blared, blared again, and then relentlessly. She hoped to alert her neighbors to the presence of a criminal in their midst. The over-the-top urgency of the horn blasts suggested Osama bin Laden was loose on the street.
Mitch left the sidewalk, crossed a yard, opened a gate, and hurried around the side of a house, hoping he wouldn't find a pit bull in the backyard. No doubt most pit bulls were as nice as nuns, but considering the way his luck was cutting, he wouldn't run into Sister Pit but instead would stumble over a demon dog.
The backyard proved to be shallow, encircled by a seven-foot cedar fence with pointed staves. He didn't see a gate. After tying the twisted neck of the trash bag to his belt, he climbed into a coral tree, crossed the fence on a
