How To Steal a Car Read online

  “I was sure you were going to back out,” Deke said with a grin.

  I sat down across from him. There were two Phrap-o-chinos sitting on the small table. His was half empty.

  “But you bought me a Phrap anyways.”

  “Just in case.”

  “What if I hadn’t shown up?”

  “I’d have drunk it myself.”

  That wasn’t exactly what I’d meant.

  “How long have you been here?” I asked.

  “Just a couple minutes.”

  I took a sip of my drink. It was warm, but not hot. I got up and went over to the station with the stir sticks and sugar and stuff, added three packets of sugar, stirred it in, and went back to the table.

  He watched me take another sip, then said, “So…you really up for this?”

  I’d always thought that stealing cars was something you did at night, but according to Deke, the best time is in the middle of the day, and the best place is in a big busy parking lot, like at a mall where nobody pays any attention to just another teenager.

  “Best part is you just have to drive it about a mile to the Park & Ride and leave it there.”

  I didn’t get it. “What’s the point?” I asked.

  “To make sure it doesn’t have a transmitter on it,” he said.

  “What’s that?”

  “You know—those signal things they put in some cars so if they get stolen the cops can locate them. We drop the car at the Park & Ride, and if no cops show up, my guy has one of his guys pick it up the next morning.”

  “So all I have to do is drive the car a mile and I get a thousand dollars?”

  “Minus for the key. Minus my cut for setting it up.”

  “Leaving what?”

  “Two-fifty?”

  I laughed. “How about five hundred?”

  “It’s only like two minutes of work!” he said.

  “Yeah, and I risk getting caught and going to jail.”

  “Look, I have to deal with the guy, then locate a car like what he wants, then get the VIN number so I can order a key, and pay the key guy—five hundred bucks just for the key! Then I got to follow the guy whose car it is to work or whatever so we know the best time and place to grab the car, and then deal with you, and—”

  “Okay, okay,” I said. “I’ll do it for two-fifty.”

  “And you won’t go to jail, because you’ve got a clean record and you’re only sixteen.”

  I corrected him. “Fifteen.”

  His eyes widened. “You don’t have a license?”

  I started laughing at the expression on his face, then he was laughing too because if I got pulled over, not having a license would be the least of my problems.

  You hear a lot about car thieves hot-wiring cars, but it is much easier to use a key. That way you don’t have to damage the car. Also, many new cars are equipped with antitheft devices that make hot-wiring impossible, or they might have transmitters so the police can track them down by following a signal. To get around that, the thief must park the car in a safe place for a day or two to let it “cool down.”

  I should say something about my mental state during all this: Happy and Relaxed.

  I think it was the rules. There was no fuzziness about what Deke and I were doing. It was immoral, illegal, risky, and entertaining. I was not distracted by thoughts of Jen or Will or Jim Vail or Elwin Carl Dandridge or even, in a way, Deke Moffet. Because Deke was not really Deke the Boy—he was more like Deke the Auto Thief. He was not who he was—he was what he did. Like we each had a job to do, and until the job was over we were defined by what we did. What we had to do. I think this is why guys like football, and why they join the army, because as long as you are playing the game or following orders you do not have to figure out who you really are.

  Deke had a little blue pickup truck that he actually owned. It was a mess, with a bunch of McDonald’s wrappers and cups on the floor, and it reeked of cigarettes.

  “You smoke?” I asked.

  “Marsh does.”

  “Oh.” I had been wondering about Marshall Cassidy. “Before, you were boosting cars with Marshall. How come now you’re doing it with me?”

  “Marsh is sort of…unreliable. If it wasn’t for him we’d never have gotten caught. It was really stupid. Both of us in the car—I mean, what was the point? We should have just taken turns. Why risk both of us getting cracked? Plus he was driving fifty in a thirty zone and got us pulled over. I should’ve known better than to let him drive. He’d been smokin’ bathtub.”

  “What’s that?”

  “It’s this cheap meth.”

  Meth. That made perfect sense. Marshall Cassidy was one of those guys just born to be a meth freak.

  “But you guys are still friends?”

  “Marsh and me, we been tight since we were like five.”

  Just like me and Jen.

  Deke turned off I-394 onto Ridgedale Drive, then into the parking lot on the Macy’s side of Ridgedale Center. He drove up and down the rows of cars, then stopped.

  “There it is,” he said, pointing. “The silver Benz.”

  He showed me a thing that looked like a small cell phone.

  “This car has what you call a keyless option. You just put this thing—I guess it’s a keyless key—you put it in your pocket, and when you walk up to the car it automatically unlocks the doors. You get in, put your foot on the brake, press the start button on the dash, and take off. Nice and slow—nobody’s gonna be chasing you.”

  I took the key.

  “Now you go shopping,” he said.

  “You mean car shopping?” I said, thinking he was making a dumb joke.

  “No. Go into Macy’s and look at some stuff, then walk out the other entrance so it looks like you’re coming out of the mall and going to your car. That way nobody connects you with me.”

  “Thanks a lot.”

  “You know what I mean.”

  “Fine.” I put on my sunglasses, got out of the truck, headed into Macy’s, and walked through the men’s department, then into the mall and out the mall entrance past the bench where Jen and I had been sitting the day I’d seen the guy drop his car keys. I reached into my purse and felt around. The Nissan keys were still there, way down in the bottom. I could feel the Mercedes key in my jeans pocket, almost like it was hot. I stood there on the curb for what seemed like a long time, then something inside me clicked, and I stepped off the curb and headed diagonally across the parking lot toward it, my heart pounding harder and faster with every step.

  I was opening the Mercedes door when I heard someone say, “Hey!”

  I froze.

  “Cordelia?”

  I turned toward the voice. A guy—tall, a few years older than me with dark hair and close-set features—smiling. He had on a pair of those jeans that underpaid Asians spend hours beating the crap out of just to make them look old, even though you can tell right away they’re fake.

  I said, “Ummm…” And then it hit me who he was. Only I couldn’t remember his name.

  “Tyler,” he said. “From the Minnehaha Club pool? You’re Cordelia, right?”

  I remembered I had told him my name was Cordelia.

  “You guys never showed up,” I said. “At the Starbucks?”

  “Oh! Uh, we didn’t think you’d show up.” He ran his eyes over the car the same way he’d looked at me in my bathing suit.

  “Nice ride,” he said.

  “It’s my boyfriend’s.”

  “Cool. So, what’s going on?”

  “Nothing?” I said. Looking past him I could see Deke in his truck, gesticulating. “Listen, I gotta get going,” I said.

  He looked disappointed. “Okay. Well. It was good to see you.”

  “Good to see you,” I said. I got into the car and closed the door.

  The inside of a Mercedes-Benz is so quiet it feels at first as if your ears have stopped working. I found the start button on the dash next to the steering wheel and pressed it. The d
ashboard display lit up, but the car didn’t start. Tyler was still standing a few feet away, watching me and smiling. I pressed the button again. Nothing. Tyler was still watching me, and I had a sudden panic attack. What if this is his car? But he looked too calm for that. I remembered then that Deke had said something about the brake, so I put my foot on the brake pedal and pressed the start button again.

  The engine started with a deep hum, and the car began beeping loudly. The panicky feeling got worse for a second, until I figured out what it was. I fastened the seat belt and the beeping stopped.

  I put the car in gear. As soon as it started moving, my panic went away. I felt like I was in a dream. I drove out of the parking lot, around the entire mall, then re-entered the lot by Macy’s. Tyler was nowhere in sight. I parked the car in the exact same spot and walked away from it. I was almost back to the sidewalk in front of Macy’s when Deke pulled up in his pickup.

  “What the hell?” he said.

  I got in beside him.

  “I’m sorry,” I said.

  Deke said, “Look, you said he doesn’t even know your real name.”

  “He could find out.”

  “Why would he?”

  “I’m irresistible?”

  “Seriously, he’s not even going to remember he talked to you. I know guys like that. You’re just another girl to him.”

  “He was really interested in the car. And he remembered my name.”

  “Your fake name. Besides, what are the chances he ever finds out that the car he saw you get into was stolen? Cars get boosted every day. You ever see anything about it in the news? Hell no. Unless somebody gets jacked with a baby in the backseat or something. It’s what they call a victimless crime—except for the insurance company, and nobody cares about them. Besides, even if he did remember and found out who you are and all, nobody would believe him. Girls don’t steal cars, they—”

  “Shut up,” I said. Or maybe shouted. I opened the door and got out and slammed it.

  Deke rolled the window down and kept talking, getting mad now. “I paid five hundred bucks for that key!”

  “So do it yourself!”

  “I will if I have to. Gimme the key.” He leaned across the seat and stuck his hand out the open window. I took the key out of my pocket and looked at it. My heart was going crazy again and I felt like I couldn’t get enough air. I backed away from him, then ran over to the Mercedes, got in, and slammed the door.

  Silence.

  I pressed the start button.

  Nobody in the history of driving ever drove better than I drove that eight-tenths of a mile from the Macy’s parking lot to the Park & Ride. Each second stretched out to a minute as I used every ounce of concentration to bring utter flawlessness to my performance. I imagined my dad, my mom, Deke Moffet, Will, the faceless man who would one day give me my driver’s test, and God all watching my every move. I did not disappoint them. I was perfect.

  Afterward when he picked me up just down the street from the Park & Ride, Deke said, “You did good.”

  “Thanks.” I had this buzzy, hollow feeling inside, like I had done something really important. Not necessarily something good, but something real.

  “Let’s go over to the Pit and smoke a bowl,” he said. “Celebrate.”

  “No thanks.” The last thing I wanted was to sit next to a stinky pond and fry my brain cells. I wanted to hang on to that buzzy feeling, but not the kind of buzz Deke was talking about.

  “You don’t smoke?”

  “I think I just want to go home,” I said.

  That night we had a quiet dinner, just me and my mom eating crunchy BLTs and tomato soup. Neither of us had much to say. I wondered what was going on in her head, but mostly I was thinking about what was going on in my head. My drive from the parking lot to the Park & Ride kept playing in my head like a loop, over and over.

  Later I went to my room and tried to read some more Moby-Dick, but the words started looking like little black squiggles, and then I must have fallen asleep, because when I woke up I was still dressed and my alarm clock read 5:13 a.m.

  I got up and, without even changing my clothes, I walked all the way to the Park & Ride, which took almost an hour. The Mercedes was still parked where I’d left it. I turned around.

  When I got home, my mom was making french toast.

  “You got up early,” she said.

  Jen called just as I was about to call Deke, who told me never to call him before ten, so I talked to her for a while. She was on a rant about Will, who had gone to the pool with her, and instead of hanging out with her, had started talking to these guys.

  “Remember the blond guy? What’s his name? Damien?”

  “Or Andre.”

  “Yeah. They know each other. I guess he works at Ducky’s sometimes and they’re both into, I don’t know, some sort of gaming thing. So I…”

  I just wanted to call Deke, and I was trying to figure out if there was a way you could text somebody in the middle of a call to somebody else, and Jen just kept chattering until finally I told her my mom was calling me. When I hung up, I had this moment of confusion over why Jen and I were such good friends.

  Deke wasn’t home, but I got him on his cell.

  “It’s still there,” he told me. “I just drove past it. They should have picked it up by now. Let me call you back.”

  A few minutes later my cell rang.

  “Neal said the cops were watching it all night,” Deke said.

  “Who’s Neal?”

  “The guy who isn’t going to be paying us any money on account of the car’s got a transmitter on it.”

  “Oh.” The fragment of buzz I still had left whooshed out of me. “Now what?”

  “Now I’m out five hundred bucks, and Neal’s pissed. We have to find another Benz.”

  I didn’t say anything. I was thinking about the car sitting in the Park & Ride with some undercover cop watching it through big official-looking binoculars, just waiting to pounce. Would they take my fingerprints from the steering wheel? Would Tyler the pool guy hear about it and report me? Did anybody else see me?

  “You up for it?” he asked.

  “I don’t know,” I said. I really didn’t.

  Jen was still upset about the Will thing when I got back to her later that afternoon. She wanted me to come over, so I said okay and talked my mom into dropping me off at Jen’s on her way to a church meeting. When Jen opened the door, I knew in one second she was drunk.

  “My parents are up at Izatys for the weekend,” she said. “I think they go there so they can do it.”

  “They can’t do it here?”

  “My presence inhibits them.”

  “They told you that?”

  “You know how weird they are about sex.”

  “Oh.” Sometimes I forget about what happened to Jen when she was eleven.

  What happened to Jen when she was eleven: Her sixteen-year-old cousin was staying with them because he’d been kicked out of school in Des Moines for smoking dope, and his mom, Jen’s mom’s sister, didn’t know what to do with him. So he stayed a month at Jen’s and she really liked him at first, until he started visiting her room at night. She let it go on for a couple of weeks before telling her mom. So technically Jen is not a virgin, but officially she still is one because, when you’re only eleven, it shouldn’t count.

  Jen and I were already best friends back then, but she never said a word to me about her cousin and what he did until three years later when her therapist told her she should talk about it. And right after she told me all about it she said she never wanted to talk about it again, so we never did. But sometimes we would talk about other things and what we said wouldn’t make any sense except for us both knowing what happened with her cousin. Like she would tell me how if she was watching TV with her parents and a sex scene came on, they would start talking really loud about ice cream or something. Anything about sex made them act weird, according to Jen, but that was fine with her. She once to
ld me that when she was a little kid she would hear them doing it in their bedroom and she would think they were hurting each other. After the thing with her cousin, they stopped doing it where she could hear them, or if they did they were really quiet.

  Most of the time Jen was perfectly normal. I didn’t think about her as a girl who had been molested. It was so long ago. But I know that things that happen when you’re a little kid can mess you up pretty good inside. I guess it can mess up your parents too.

  “I am so pissed at Will,” Jen said, pouring herself another glass of red wine. “You want some?” The bottle was almost empty.

  “No thanks,” I said. I remembered all too clearly my recent hangover.

  She tipped the rest of the wine into her glass and took a big sip. She was sitting on the beige sofa. I couldn’t believe she hadn’t spilled on it yet, the way she was holding the glass all crooked and everything.

  “I think you’re right,” she said. “Will is gay.”

  “I never said he was gay.”

  “You said he might be.”

  “I don’t remember what I said, but I don’t think I said he’s gay.”

  “Why not?”

  I wasn’t sure why not—maybe Will was gay—but Jen was bugging me with all her drunken whining. It is definitely no fun to be not-drunk with someone who is way-drunk.

  Jen said, “So this guy Andre or Damien or whatever works weekends at the car wash, and he and Will are both into some stupid video game and they’re talking some weird video game language, and I’m like, Hello? I think they’re both gay.”

  I wanted to say, So what if they are? I stole another car. But I didn’t.

  “…and I wanted to play mini golf, but Will kept saying ‘Just a minute,’ and finally I went up to the sundeck and when I came down later, they were gone. He was supposed to be my guest.”

  I wanted to say, Do you have any idea how trivial and boring this is? Do you realize that I stole another car? But I didn’t.

  “I think we should break up with him,” Jen said. She grabbed my wrist and got right in my face and said, “You have to swear you’ll break up with him too.”