Crashed

conservative and a patriot. With eight or nine cars stashed in various garages, available for very short-term lease to any thug who needed one for the night, he’d never once bought Japanese.

Persuading myself I just needed to give Louie some time, I turned the television back on, sat on the end of the bed, and watched the end credits of the show, behind which Thistle Downing scraped some imaginary bubble- gum off the sole of her shoe and then tried to get rid of it after it got stuck between her thumb and index finger. She must have found eight ways to approach it in ninety seconds. I had a feeling they just gave her the basic idea, told her how much time they needed for the credit roll, pointed the camera at her, and turned on the tape while she made the whole thing up on the spur of the moment. She finally returned the gum to the sole of her shoe, which accepted it immediately. Then she limped out of the room, the shoe sticking to the floor at every step. The camera froze her as her foot came right out of the shoe and her sock fell off.

And Louie was right. She was a couple of years away from being beautiful.

So was my daughter.

I wasn’t feeling very good about myself.

I shook it off and grabbed the keys to the rented van, which I needed to return, but that could wait. I could have taken my own car, but it probably would have confused my followers. They hadn’t seemed very good at tailing, and I didn’t want to drive around looking for them if they got off to a bad start and made a wrong turn or something. I stepped out onto the second-story walkway, the July heat still hanging around to surprise me, stood there for a minute to make sure I’d been noticed, and trotted on down the stairs.

When I nosed out onto Sherman Way, I saw the two of them duck down, thereby fracturing Rule Number One: Sudden movement attracts attention. Way behind them, halfway back to the corner, I saw Louie’s black Firebird idling in front of a bus bench. I waited until there was a nice big safe space between me and the nearest oncoming car, and pulled out.

Bingo, headlights behind me. And behind that, Louie’s headlights. All we needed now was some paparazzi trailing us to make the motorcade complete. The DON’T WALK sign at the intersection ahead of me began to blink, so I lifted my foot from the accelerator and waited for it to go yellow. As I slowed for the red, my cell phone rang.

“Are these guys smooth, or what?” Louie asked.

“You mean, aside from how close they’re sticking?”

“They got an expired plate. Talk about amateur hour.”

“Well, they’ve been with me since about four o’clock, so it’s amateur night.”

“Long as we’re talking, I got a nice clean Cadillac Escalade you might like. Only about 28K on it, and I could let you have it for twelve or thirteen thou.”

“Twelve, or thirteen?” I asked, trying to dodge the reflection in the rear-view mirror. In addition to everything else, my followers had their brights on.

“Thirteen,” Louie said.

“What happened to twelve?”

“That was a figure of speech.”

The light changed, and I accelerated, slowly and deliberately, into the intersection. My little parade trailed along behind me.

“You said clean,” I said. “I see that in the used-car ads all the time. What does it mean?”

“Clean means the front end is still on and it’s got four wheels. Real clean means it wasn’t trucked up from New Orleans after spending six weeks under water.”

“I don’t know,” I said, putting on my turn signal and tapping the brakes to get my followers’ attention. I did a hand signal, too. “I’ve never seen myself in a Cadillac.”

“You got a negative self-image, you know that?”

“I could introduce you to a girl named Janice, and you guys could talk about it.”

“Alice would love that.” Alice was Louie’s famously possessive wife, who seemed to think her husband, all five feet of him with his eight-inch comb-over, was the world’s only serious competition to Brad Pitt. “You’re turning, huh?”

“How’d you know?”

“You got that fuckin’ thing blinking about three hundred yards is how.”

“Coming up. I’ll turn right-”

“Thanks for the tip.”

“-and then go a couple of blocks, then make a left into Westwind Circle. You know what to do.”

“I knew what to do when I was twelve.”

“Here goes,” I said, turning.

Louie said, “Whee.”

The people who built the Valley’s housing tracts were infatuated with circles, streets that end in a nice, decorative, round dead-end with the houses facing each other across it. The thinking was that a circle meant no through traffic, so kids could play safely, people could keep an eye on each other’s houses, and there was less likelihood of drive-bys by members of minority groups. Now, of course, the minority groups live there, driving by to get into their garages.

The nice thing about Westwind Circle, from the perspective of this particular exercise, was that it didn’t look like a circle. It dog-legged right before the circle became visible, although I was beginning to think the people behind me would have dutifully followed me into a ten-foot long cul-de-sac with DEAD END blinking in red neon on the corner. It was almost enough to make me feel guilty about tricking them. Still, something worth starting, as my mother always said, was worth finishing. And anyway, it was taking my mind off of Thistle Downing.

I turned right, did a nice slow putt-putt until the dogleg, and then accelerated around it. I was sitting there at the curb, facing out, by the time the Chevy entered the circle, hurrying to keep up. It slowed as the driver undoubtedly surveyed the situation, and then it stopped. The car sat there, idling, with its brights still on, and then the tail-lights lit up as the driver put the car into reverse. But suddenly Louie’s black Firebird was pulled across the road, blocking the way.

They had nowhere to go.

I got out of the van.

The Chevy backed up a few feet and stopped. Then the front tires turned toward my right, almost ninety degrees, and the car jumped forward with an ululating squeal that probably came from a loose fan belt. The car turned sharply, crossed the circle, jumped the curb, and hopped the sidewalk onto someone’s nicely maintained lawn. Then it cut back toward the opening of the circle, so it was facing out. Suddenly, it stopped as though it had hit a glass wall. The engine revved, and the car went forward about two inches and stopped again, before going back a couple of inches and then forward again. I couldn’t see any mud or sand, but it looked very much as though the rear wheels were stuck in something.

I started walking, and the driver stopped gunning the engine. All of a sudden I wished I were carrying a gun. I stopped, thinking about it. I had no idea who was behind that wheel, and while whoever it was had no serious tailing skills, that was no guarantee that he or she wouldn’t be very good at shooting someone. Different people have different talents.

Oh, well. I held both hands up, palms out, about hip-high. At least I could reduce the odds they’d shoot in what they thought was self-defense. The car rocked forward and back one more time, and subsided. Still stuck, apparently.

It seemed to take three or four minutes for me to cross the circle, although it couldn’t have been more than thirty seconds. I moved to my right to get the headlights out of my eyes, and kept coming. When I was about eight feet away, two faces turned toward me, and I stopped cold.

Girls. The driver was, to be generous, fourteen. The passenger, whom I had thought was sitting way down in the seat, had in fact been sitting bolt upright. She was eight if she was a day. As I stood there, recalculating everything about the encounter, the driver slowly nodded: once, twice, and then a third time.

On the third nod, two left hands came up in perfect unison with the middle finger extended in the universal blow-off salute, and the car’s rear wheels spun, throwing someone’s nice lawn and dirt in an arc ten feet long. The