looked out the window to the street where the truck had been. I still didn’t regret taking it, but I didn’t feel very secure about it either.
Actually, I think I was feeling regret; I just wasn’t ready to admit it, even to myself. I said, “The truck was aiming right, so I would have run left.”
She said, “Which is good. It’s where you came back from, if anyone happened to be looking. So if you ran that way, then up the next block …”
We looked left down Juniper for a moment, then turned toward each other and said in unison, “Fred Jackson’s garage!”
CHAPTER
TWO
Sergeant Rainey looked as if he were the principal of a grade school and I was the tenth consecutive kid to be marched into his office. Or I felt like a naughty boy being marched into the principal’s office, and Rainey seemed weary of me at first glance. He gave me a frozen-faced, I’m-watching-your-pupils-dilate-so-don’t-lie-to-me look, and all I could think about was the lie I planned to tell. Tapping his pencil against a notepad on his desk, he invited me to sit.
“Let’s see, here. You’re a wine steward in a sandwich shop?”
I nodded.
“And your wife is a schoolteacher. You live in a house on Juniper and park your Toyota Camry out front. Why don’t you tell me what happened tonight.”
I gave him the truth until I reached the part about getting close to the truck. Then I said I heard one of the guys make a move toward me, so I ran down the block, took a right at 37th, and kept going until I holed up in Fred Jackson’s garage, about two blocks away. I told him I hid in the corner behind the boat—Fred’s aluminum drift boat—and I took a piece of firewood from the stack along the back wall, and if I heard anyone coming I planned to beat on the boat and yell for help. I found it surprisingly easy to invent the details. But then it occurred to me that I had made a mistake because of how closely this version paralleled what had really happened—me beating on the truck with the length of pipe.
Rainey said something I didn’t catch.
“I’m sorry?”
“That was your plan?”
“Actually, I was in a hurry.” I laughed, and it surprised me. I had a lot of nervous energy. It’s amazing how worked up you can get over lying on record to the cops, even when it’s not your only thrill of the night. This was different from driving away in the truck because it was face-to-face. And I couldn’t react to the adrenaline rush by beating on something and roaring like a prehistoric galoot. A pressure was building in me—made worse by the sense that I was a suspect in the disappearance of the truck—and I had to just sit there and maintain the restrained demeanor of modern man.
I said, “I didn’t have what you might call a plan.”
“Did you see any of the thieves?”
“Only shapes.”
“How many?”
“At least two.”
“No, I asked how many shapes you saw, not how many you think might have been there.” This was when I realized I still didn’t have my story straight. He said, “It’s my job to figure out what happened. All I want from you is your side of it. So again, how many car thieves did you see?”
“Two.”
“And the one that came after you?”
“That was later. Not a lot later, I mean, but I didn’t see anyone right then. I was looking at the truck.”
“Still, in your story, one of them came after you.”
“Actually, it might’ve been a noise, like a scuff. It happened right after something broke in the car. There was a snap, then this other noise, and I ran.”
“But in fact, you didn’t see anything.”
“I think I panicked. In fact, my wife—”
Oops. Why bring her into it?
“What about your wife?”
“Oh. Well, I was telling her what happened because I was gone so long, and it made sense to her that I ran. I wanted to see the license plate of the truck, but when I got close, I got scared. I mean, they were right there, and it was so quiet.” He watched me. I said, “Actually, I might have made the noise that spooked me. My wife doesn’t think I’m very brave.”
It’s interesting how often you can use the word actually when you’re making it all up, when nothing you’re describing is actual.
“Were you carrying anything?”
“What do you mean?” I was worried that he had a witness, one of our neighbors perhaps, who had seen the whole thing—including me carrying the pipe into the truck. Was he just riding out my version to see how far I would go? Well, I thought, I’m in this far. Also, I still felt I was one of the good guys, an ordinary citizen trying to protect what was his.
He said, “Did you have a weapon?”
“We don’t keep guns in the house. When I was hiding, I found a piece of firewood, but that was more of a—you know, something to pound on the boat with.”
“In Fred Jackson’s garage.”
“Yup. I mean, yes.” I cautioned myself, Don’t get too comfortable. Then I realized I was making mistakes because I was too tense, not because I was too comfortable. The middle part was missing, the kind of relaxed you get when you’re in a serious situation but innocent, and telling the truth. I was close to what Marla calls the church giggles, where the tension alone can make you explode with snickers at notions that normally wouldn’t spark a chuckle. If I got any less comfortable, who knew what pumpkin-seed remarks might be pinched out of me?
“What’s funny?”
“Nothing. I didn’t know what it would be like, is all.”
“What what would be like?”
“This.”
“Did you hear the dog go off ? The one they call Barky?”
I felt certain that a loud dog could be heard from two blocks away, but when you put me in the back of Fred’s garage, I wasn’t so sure.
“Barely,” I said. “It sounded like a million miles away.”
“Is that the dog’s real name?”
“It’s what we all call him. He’s got a hair trigger, and then you can’t shut him up. His real name is Jeeves.”
“Jeeves.”
“I know. They missed by a mile with that one.”
“Yeah, but with dogs you can’t be sure.”
“They could have named him Stupid. You figure that out right away.”
He scribbled on his pad, then sat back, took a deep breath, and sighed.
“Okay, Mr. Sandusky. Mr. Jim Sandusky.” He was consulting his notes, holding the pad at arm’s length. “I think we’re about done here, but I want to say something off the record.” He set the pad on the table and looked at me. I waited for him to move the pad to a drawer or turn off a tape recorder, some indication that “off the record” was anything other than a mental construct.
Eventually I said, “Okay.”
He said, “I’ll be honest here. There might be repercussions if you took the truck. But if you were to tell us where to find it, you would get your life back in pretty short order.”
I recalled my last look at the windowless, battered wreck.
He watched me with a slight smile for a moment,