wasn’t braking. Wasn’t slowing. She was going to hit them.
“Get back! Get your kids on the sidewalk!”
A siren shrieked. I stumbled, leapt, landed hard ten feet down on the cement.
The car shot by, siren suddenly keening. The family huddled at the edge of the macadam; the woman flat out on the cement.
I ran into the road, after the car. Karen turned left onto a side street—out of the park, into North Beach—and when I reached the street she was gone. There was only one way she could have turned, but at the next corner there were more options and more at the next after that. She was out of sight, but in the distance, the siren screamed. The siren was still on!
No problem. I stopped, gasping for breath. John would have called in the theft. By now every patrol car in North Beach would be closing in. The woman had been an idiot to steal the car, and a lucky idiot not to have killed anyone, but now, pinpointing herself with the siren, she was just a run-of-the-mill dolt.
I stood, catching my breath, listening for new sirens, for sirens converging. Instead, silence. I tried to gauge where the sound last came from. No luck. I dug out my phone and called Gary. Gary’s machine. “Gar, get ready for a call from Karen. Whatever trouble she had an hour ago, it’s nothing to what she’s in now. She stole John’s car, his unmarked police car! Hey, what the hell’s going on? Call me!”
I hurried up the path. I needed to get to my brother before backup arrived. Before a uniform scooped him up and spit him out at the scene of Karen’s arrest, wherever that would be. How was I going to explain this to John? I slowed my pace. I couldn’t explain it to myself! I liked Karen. Liked that despite whatever was going on with her, she was interested in Mike. And me. Don’t beat yourself up! She’d paused to say that on her way to steal the car!
I was impressed by her immediate, certain response to the hundred-foot pole koan. You are atop a hundred-foot pole. How do you proceed? Letting go, I knew from reading rather than experience, meant not releasing your grasp and falling in terror, but rather stepping out of the past, out of who you are, into the next moment, whatever that moment brings. It was about walking though a door to the unknown. But was it stepping out of your life as a soon-to-be-divorced woman to drive away in a stolen police car?
What could possibly have spurred her to do such a crazy thing? Chance? The keys, obviously, had been in the ignition. That was going to make John look great. “Just-so John,” as he was called behind his back in the department, was now going to be just a laughingstock. Cops don’t leave the keys in the car. Civilians in San Francisco don’t leave their keys, not unless they’re hot to be pedestrians. The one small saving grace for him would be the muzzling of his biggest fun-poker—Gary would be silent, indeed.
Gary with his hush-hush client, John suddenly gone irresponsible, and . . . Karen . . . What the hell was going on here? I needed time to think. But time was the one thing I didn’t have.
A couple speaking German ambled down the steps. I veered around them and headed up. I wanted to beat the reinforcements John would have called, but not by too much.
What could have made Karen pull a crazy stunt like stealing a police car? I asked again, as if it was the koan. I was walking slowly now.
How do you proceed off a hundred-foot pole?
You step forward.
But something triggers that decision. According to John, chance is a bigger cause of crime than the law-abiding would like to believe. But he sure wasn’t going to make that argument in this case. Not and have the fault be all his own.
I rounded the top of the stairs onto the observation circle. No patrol cars. Good.
“John!”
His eyes were jammed to a telescope pointing far right and down into the bushes. “See anything?”
“What do you think? No! She . . . took . . . my . . . car!” He was almost yelling. Behind him people moved away fast. “What the hell got into her?”
“I don’t know, John!”
“You brought her here!”
“It was a fluke.”
“Fluke? Yeah, right!” He turned and strode back from the parapet, got a car-length away, charged back, planted himself inches from my face. “You brought her. How come?”
“I didn’t bring her. I’d just met her. She wanted to go for a run; I only had an hour. We were in Washington Square. This was just the logical place—”
“Washington Square, a minute from Gary’s office. Gary! He’s behind this,” he shouted at me, light dawning, “isn’t he?”
“Stealing a police car? Are you nuts? I’ve kept away from our family all of my adult life. I hardly know either one of you. But that’s just crazy.”
He was pulling in breath through clenched teeth, eyeing me like I was a suspect. “It’s Gary, isn’t it? What did he tell you?”
He told me to rabbits. Why had Gary insisted I not tell him? Gary was my buddy, but he was what I loved in guys—a brat. Could John possibly be right?
His face was growing purple. I’d never seen him this out of control. He dug his fingers into my arm. “Don’t you clam up to protect him.”
“Let go of me!”
His grip loosened. I jumped back.
“Not Gary, huh? You saying she set us all up? What do you know about her? You tell me! Why did Gary say to bring her here?”
Ah. “Gary didn’t. He only told her I’d take her running. He didn’t say where.”
“So you chose Coit Tower?”
“No, she wanted a high spot with a view and trees . . . oh.”
“Exactly. What did she say to you?”
“She’s getting a divorce. But she didn’t go into that. She just about got killed shoving a girl out of the way of a car. Driver was furious.”
“Really?” For an instant he seemed taken aback.
“Yeah, just as suddenly as she decided to take your car. People do lose it in divorces, you know.”
“What else?”
“A Zen koan; she talked about that, and about Mike.”
John barked out a laugh. “Your two favorite subjects!”
“Hey, I don’t—”
“What else did she say?”
“Nothing! No, wait. There was one last thing, but it’s not going to help you. She was trying to be kind. She said, don’t beat yourself up—meaning me—about Mike.”
He nodded, his lips tensed into a slight sneer I knew all too well. “So you liked her, right?”
“What’s
