couldn’t wrap her mind around the number.
“Five hundred … thousand?”
Oz nodded. “Had to borrow to pay off an old debt. Swapped an old debt for a new one.”
“Jesus H. Christ.” Eleanor sighed. Someone had loaned her dad five hundred thousand dollars? Wonder what he’d spent it on. She’d gotten nothing for Christmas from him.
Oz patted her knee and started to shuffle away again.
“Hey, Oz?”
“Yeah, toots?”
“Do Kev and Jake hate me for some reason?” Even now Kev and Jake eyed her from their various posts. Both of them were in their mid-twenties, her dad’s two best guys.
Oz burst into peals of big-bellied laughter.
“Hate you, toots? Hell, no.”
“Then what’s their problem?”
“They don’t wanna piss off your papa by getting caught staring at his baby. You’re getting too pretty for your own good. Stop that, now. And get rid of those pigtails. That only makes it worse.” He slapped the side of her leg in a fatherly sort of way and headed back to work. Eleanor couldn’t believe these guys she’d known since she was a tiny seven-year-old, and they were zit-faced teenagers, now couldn’t even talk to her because she had boobs. She yanked her ponytail holders out of her hair.
Eleanor glanced around the garage while she waited. Bad night. Everybody working like demons. She’d never seen the garage looking so dismal or so frenzied. A great furnace boiled with flames in one corner casting heat but no light. The whole place smelled of smoke and sulfur. She couldn’t wait to get the hell out of here.
Finally her father pulled in the back entrance and got out of the Camry.
“One down,” Eleanor said as he glanced first at the car and then at her. “Four to go.”
A convertible driven by her dad’s friend Tony pulled up outside the back entrance to the garage. Eleanor threw herself inside.
“Where to?” Tony asked as he peeled out and onto the street.
“Find me some rich bitches. They keep their cars cleaner.”
“Gramercy Park it is then, ma’am.”
On 23rd Street, she nabbed a Mercedes. Too easy. They hadn’t even locked the fucking thing.
Canal Street netted them one BMW, silver. It handled like a dream. Such a pretty car it broke Eleanor’s heart to scratch the window with the coat hanger. She didn’t want to think about the thousand different parts it would be chopped up into by tomorrow morning.
On Union Street she spotted a high-end Acura, bright red, parked outside a restaurant. The owner had probably tipped the hostess to keep an eye on it. The hostess was probably off getting stoned in the kitchen.
“Four down, one to go,” she said to her dad as she tossed him the Acura’s spare keys. The genius owner had left the set in the visor. She didn’t even have to wire this one.
“Be careful,” he called out as she headed back to the street.
She flipped him off on her way out the door.
One more car and it would be done. One more and she could go home to bed. With all the adrenaline surging through her body, she knew she’d crash hard the second she got home and wouldn’t wake up until noon.
As Tony drove her into SoHo, Eleanor kept her eye out for a nice American car. American manufacturers were arrogant, and that made them shit at security. No Ford or Dodge had ever put up much of a fight.
“Nice …” Tony purred as he spotted a car in tiny ten-space paid-parking lot.
She saw what he saw the second after he saw it. A Shelby Mustang. Looked like a 1966 to her, not that she’d bet her life on that. She knew make and model on sight, but she wasn’t enough of a nerd to bother with all the years. She’d leave that to her dad.
“It’s mine,” she said. Tony wolf whistled his agreement.
“Go for it. See you back at the shop.”
Eleanor hopped out of the car and sidled over to the lot. She saw a few people milling around but no one seemed to notice her. She probably looked like some drunk preppy waiting for her friends to come out of a bar.
Let them think that. Let them think anything they wanted as long as they didn’t notice her standing with her back to the driver’s side window, a bent coat hanger behind her back. She dug under the latch and lifted up, popping the lock with ease.
Ten seconds later she and her new friend Shelby were already on the street.
Done. She’d jacked five high-dollar cars in one night. One night? She’d done it in four hours. A sense of relief flooded her. In no time she’d be back in her bed at home dreaming of Søren. Good thing she’d finished her job early. The skies had opened up and rain exploded from the clouds. The temperature, unusually warm the past week, turned frigid in minutes. The rain fractured the city lights and set everything in her rearview mirror alight with a blue glow.
Blue?
“Fuck.” In a panic Eleanor glanced behind her. A police car, blue lights ablaze, nestled in behind her. It hadn’t turned on its sirens and the silence of the car menaced her far more than sound.
She knew she had about two seconds to decide what to do. She could gun it and run. The second she lost the cop car she could dump the Mustang and disappear. But this wasn’t the highway or the interstate. This was Manhattan after midnight. Narrow streets. Pedestrians. Her foot hovered over the pedals. Accelerator on her right, brake on her left. Eleanor looked around for an escape route. She saw no alleys. No easy exits. And up on her right loomed a church, its ancient spire casting a cross-shaped shadow onto the shining streets.
Eleanor hit the brakes and prayed for a miracle.
Eleanor
FOR TWO HOURS THE COPS KEPT HER IN THE BACK of the squad car while they asked her questions and talked on their shoulder-mounted walkie-talkies. She did her best to stick to her story. I’m sorry. I wanted to drive it around the block. You know—joyriding. But for some reason the cops didn’t quite buy it. Apparently joyriders usually borrowed cars they had the keys to, not cars that had to have their locks popped and their ignitions hot-wired.
The two cops—one white, one black, both young—seemed way too excited about having pulled her over. Mobsters and murderers and rapists were running all over town and Officer Ferrell and Officer Hampton couldn’t stop patting themselves on the back for bringing down a fifteen-year-old car thief.
“We called your mom,” Officer Hampton said, giving her a wink.
“Oh, no, not my mom.”
“She’ll meet us at the station,” Officer Ferrell said.
“Station? We have to go to the station?”
“Sure we do.” Officer Hampton waved his hand, motioning at her to stand up. She stepped out of the back of the squad car and into the driving rain. “That’s where we take everybody we arrest.”
“Arrest?”
Ferrell and Hampton laughed as they pulled her arms gently behind her back and placed handcuffs on her wrists. The cold metal bit into her skin. She’d never worn handcuffs before. The heft of them surprised her. She’d never dreamed they’d feel so heavy and cold.
The white cop, Ferrell, placed a hand on the back of her head as he maneuvered her into the back of the squad car.
“You, little girl,” began Officer Hampton,