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-blipped 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?”
24
JOE 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.