Strip (30 page)

“I guess we paid for last night’s dinner.”

She put her arms around him and squeezed, rocking him from side to side. “I can’t believe you. You’re so dumb and so smart at the same time. You always surprise me.”

“Then at some point you’ll expect to be surprised, and so you won’t be. Still want this safe?”

“I don’t know. Should I?”

“There are pros and cons.”

“What are the pros?”

“You and I don’t have to haul the damned thing somewhere in a stolen SUV and dump it.”

“What are the cons?”

“If you leave it in your house, somebody can always look at the serial number and trace it to the strip club. Or you sell the house and some future owner forgets the combination, so he writes to the company and asks for it.”

“Not good,” she said. “Let’s get rid of it. I don’t want to do it myself, though. We just stole, like, eighty grand. Can’t we just find some neighborhood kids we can pay to drive the SUV away and ditch it?”

“I’d like to, but even if they didn’t get caught doing it, they’d talk about it later, and eventually the cops would be asking us about it.”

“I hadn’t thought about it that way—that whoever dumps it could get caught. Maybe it will be a sort of adventure.”

“An adventure?”

“Yes,” she said. “You know I love that. It’s the best.” Her eyes were glowing.

Sometimes he felt as though he had managed to grab the mane of a running horse, but holding on took all his physical strength and presence of mind. And it could only end one way that he knew of.

He was trying to learn to think faster than he usually did, because she could never be stopped, only diverted onto another path that she’d gallop down at the same frenzied pace. “We’ll do this. Let’s take the Sequoia and leave the safe inside when we dump it. Do you have any Windex and paper towels?”

“Sure. I have some out here in the garage.” She went to a cupboard on the side wall that held supplies. “What do you want cleaned?”

“The safe and the parts of the SUV we might have touched—door handles, windows, dashboard.”

“I’d better do it,” she said, and began to spray the door handles and wipe them off.

“What—men aren’t good at cleaning things?”

“Not men. You.” She sprayed the Windex in his direction, but he dodged it. She wiped every interior surface, then all of the door handles, and stood on the running board and wiped great swaths of the doors and roof. Then Jeff pulled the SUV out of the garage, hosed it off, wiped it with a chamois while Carrie went inside to get ready.

Carrie came out wearing a crisp summer dress and flat shoes that looked like ballet slippers. “I’ll drive the big one,” she said.

“Are you sure?”

“Yes, I’m sure.”

He knew that she had made the determination that driving the stolen vehicle with the safe in it was more exciting than driving the getaway car, so he knew that there was no way to talk her out of it. And ordering her not to would make her start searching for greater risks. “Then wear a pair of gloves.” He reached into the trunk of his Trans Am and handed her a pair of clear surgical gloves.

He watched her put them on. “We just want to get rid of it. That means park it someplace where the neighbors will put up with it for a day and then call the cops. Don’t pick a place where there will be cameras. No shopping malls, airports, public buildings, parking structures. It should be along a curb in a residential neighborhood. We keep it absolutely simple. Okay?”

“Okay,” she said. Her big, clear eyes were unblinking and the smile on her lips seemed almost innocent in its sincerity. “I know a good place. Just follow me.” She put on the gloves, climbed in, and shut the door, and began to back the big vehicle down the driveway.

As Jeff stepped to his car, he began to think of other things he should have said before she left. She was driving a car stolen in an armed robbery. It would not be wise to drive it very far. She shouldn’t speed or otherwise draw attention to herself.

When she finished her descent down the driveway, Jeff began his. He heard her step hard on the accelerator to start down the hill toward Ventura Boulevard. She reached Ventura Boulevard at around forty-five miles an hour, and bounced across the intersection. Jeff reached the intersection and found the traffic signal was red, so he had to make a right turn onto Ventura, a left into the parking lot for the big Ralph’s Grocery Store on the corner, and come out the exit onto Vineland Avenue.

He could just see the Sequoia disappearing around the right turn far ahead at Riverside Drive. He accelerated and came within sight of her as she went up the freeway entrance ramp. He followed, heading east toward Glendale and Pasadena. As they drove, Jeff began to feel calmer. It wasn’t wise to drive a stolen vehicle far on a major freeway, but there were no police cars in sight at the moment, and as long as she wasn’t unlucky, she would probably be able to do this. They could be home by 9:00.

Carrie left the freeway at Colorado Boulevard and drove toward the quiet neighborhoods surrounding the Cal Tech campus. Jeff approved. There were always lots of unfamiliar faces around a university, most of them young. All she had to do was pick the right street, park the Sequoia, and leave. She made an abrupt left turn without having time to signal, and went down one of the streets fast.

Jeff looked in his rearview mirror, saw a police car, and understood. She must have seen the car, and seen one of the two cops doing something that she interpreted as showing interest in the big Toyota Sequoia. Jeff heard the sudden
blip-blip
of the police siren, and saw the red and blue lights come on. He quickly pulled into the left lane, trying to look like a dumb, confused driver who was blocking the left turn while he tried to get out of the way. The siren behind him
blip-blip
ped again, and then a cop switched the microphone to public address, and his amplified voice said, “Pull ahead to the right. Pull ahead and to the right.” Jeff deliberately made a terrible mess of it, signaling for a lane change to the right, and looking over his right shoulder at the nonexistent traffic to his right, but not moving at all.

The police car’s engine roared, and the car swung to Jeff’s left, making a long diagonal in the oncoming lane before it made its left turn. All Jeff could think of was to follow. He drove after them, trying to hang back so the cops didn’t realize what he was doing. There had to be some way to manage this, to rescue her before they caught her.

By now they would be on their radio describing the Sequoia, maybe reading the license number. They would be giving her location and direction, and in a couple of minutes she would start seeing cops who were ahead waiting for her, blocking the road or putting down spike strips to puncture her tires.

Ahead of him, he could see her turn south. What was that street? Fair Oaks? As she sailed through the intersection, cars stopped and rocked forward against their brakes, and the ones behind veered into odd angles to keep from butting the ones in front. She picked up the first of the police reinforcements at Fair Oaks.

Jeff was already making a kind of peace with his doom. He would be in prison for the next twenty years. There was no way Carrie could elude the two police cars. At the next street another patrol car slid into the intersection and blocked her lane. Carrie slowed down, so the police officer would be in no doubt about which choice she was making, but then at the last moment she turned left and shot off behind him.

The two cars chasing her did the same, while the car in the intersection remained immobile. When Carrie and her two pursuers had passed, the third police car turned and joined the chase.

Jeff pulled out his cell phone and dialed her number.

“What?” she snapped.

“We need to end this fast. In a minute there will be choppers and a dozen cop cars.”

“Agreed. How?”

“Do you know a place along here where there’s an alley?”

“Sure. There’s an alley behind Raymond.”

“Drive in the alley, ditch the car, run through the back door of a restaurant and out the front, and get in my car.”

“Once more around the block.”

“I’ll be on Raymond waiting.”

Jeff drove north again, turned up Raymond, spotted a parking place that a car was just vacating, and pulled into it. He heard the sirens now as Carrie approached, a chorus of syncopated
blip-blips.
Louder and louder. When the sirens went silent, he pulled out.

Sooner than he had anticipated, Carrie dashed out the front of a Chinese restaurant. He stopped, she threw herself inside, crouching on the floor, and he drove off. He turned at the first corner, went to Del Mar and stayed on it, then swung onto the freeway entrance. He accelerated hard all the way to the split where the 210 and the 134 diverged. He chose the 210 west through La Canada toward San Fernando because its curve put him out of sight the soonest.

The seconds passed, and Jeff traded each one for another stretch of pavement, another small increment of speed. He kept glancing in his mirrors, searching for blinking emergency lights, but he saw none. He kept going as fast as he dared. Every time he passed a slower vehicle, he thought of it as a barrier he had placed between them and the police.

She was still kneeling on the floor with her elbows on the passenger seat. “If I get any more excited I’m going to faint or something.”

“We haven’t made it yet.”

“Can I get up now?”

“Just give it another minute or two. How did you get from the car to the restaurant without getting chased down?”

“I wanted to get into the alley with as much time to spare as I could get. I knew right where I wanted to go, because I had passed it just a few minutes earlier. So as I was coming to it, I sped up, and so the cops behind me did too. At the last second I hung a right turn because I figured if I tried a left I’d probably roll over in that big-ass SUV. The first two cop cars went past because they were afraid if they stopped quick, the ones behind would run into them. Then I guess they backed up to get to the alley, but I didn’t have a chance to see how that worked out, because I was down the alley looking at the backs of buildings. I saw the restaurant, with its door open to the kitchen, so I pulled in front of it, reversed, swung the SUV in a half-circle until the rear end hit the building across the alley, and left it crossways. That left the SUV blocking the alley, with my door facing away from the cops. I took the keys, jumped out, ran into the kitchen, through the dining room, and out, and there you were.”

“I’m getting off the freeway.” He coasted down the off-ramp onto a surface street and kept going. “You can get up now.”

Carrie turned and sat in the passenger seat and buckled her seat belt. “Wow. That was the absolute best. Losing the cops in a car chase. I don’t think there’s much in the line of bad behavior that tops this.”

He looked at her uneasily. “You know it was a fluke, right? We were lucky. If we tried it a hundred times, ninety-nine of them they’d either catch us or kill us.”

She smiled. “I’m not going to do it even one more time. They don’t get a do-over on the car chase. But I sure as hell did it this time. I beat them.”

“You kicked their big blue asses for them.”

“Yeah” She laughed. “I said I wanted an adventure, but I was just thinking of a little adventure, like dropping off that SUV and then having sex in a place where there was some small chance of getting caught.”

“Oh?” he said.

“That’s why I changed into this dress. See?” She lifted the skirt. “There’s nothing under it but me.”

“Oh my God.”

“You know, like in a restaurant we both go to the restrooms at the same time, only it’s the same one? Or we go into the changing room in a department store?”

“I get the picture. I just don’t know what to say.”

“Wow. A big, beautiful, dumb boyfriend who knows how to crack a safe and outrun the police. What’s next?”

J
OE CARVER PARKED
a block away from Sonia Rivers’s apartment building in North Hollywood. He had learned after he had caught the attention of Manco Kapak what a good idea it was to leave his car somewhere about the distance he could run at a dead sprint, but not close enough to be visible from his destination.

He walked to the apartment building, studying the area for places that might become dangerous later on—apartments that had no curtains or blinds, buildings with flat roofs that had ladders built into the wall, an empty lot with thick brush at the back. He arrived at the building and rang the bell for Apartment 6.

After a few seconds there was a female voice on the intercom speaker that he recognized as Sonia’s. She sounded a bit startled and irritated. “Yes? Who is it?”

“Hi, Sonia. I hope you remember me. I’m Joe Carver. We met at a club about three weeks ago.”

“I remember you. It’s eight in the morning. I’m getting ready for work.”

He tried to sound grave and yet respectful. “I’m sorry. I was afraid it might be an inconvenient time for you, but I really have to talk to you.”

“It hasn’t been three weeks. It’s actually been almost four weeks. Is this the first time you ever thought of getting in touch? Eight
A.M.
on a workday? Don’t you own a telephone?”

He had noticed that she hadn’t refused to see him. She just wanted to make him listen to her indictment in its entirety before she let him in. He didn’t let that knowledge make him complacent. “I’m sorry I couldn’t call.”

“Couldn’t call, or didn’t?”

“Couldn’t. The reason I couldn’t was that something you said to a third party has put me in danger, and I’ve been hiding for three weeks.”

“Look, Joe. I remember you clearly. At the time, I thought you were funny, and you had a certain charm. And I know there are girls who find weird approaches and wacky pickup lines cute and irresistible. They’ll swoon and hang your picture in their lockers at their high school. But I’m not one.”

“I know this sounds like that, but it isn’t. I’m not out here feeling clever and funny. I’m feeling scared, which is why I was wondering if you’d let me in while we talk.”

There was a loud buzz and the door lock clicked, so he turned, opened the door, and stepped inside. He went to Apartment 6 and the door opened inward. Sonia had one hand on the doorknob and the other furiously brushing her long, dark hair. She stepped back to let him enter, but didn’t stop brushing. “Now, please tell me that you really have something to say.”