Raven stood on the sidewalk across from the Greyhound bus station, where I had just pulled up. The top was down on the Mustang convertible so that I could talk to her without rolling down the passenger window. I was not in a great mood. Inching through downtown traffic in Vancouver will do that to a person, even when the sun is shining. It didn’t help my mood that my hands were scabbing from blisters that had broken while I was working the heavy bag in the gym the evening before.
“This cloak-and-dagger stuff is getting old,” I told her. Her instructions had been to head toward Chinatown for our 11:00 AM meeting. She had then called my cell five minutes before eleven to give me the final destination, so I wouldn’t know ahead of time where she would be waiting. Obviously, she still suspected I would try to set up some kind of trap. Given my own plans, she had no idea how right she was not to trust me.
“Get used to it,” she said. Then walked around to my side of the car and opened the door. “I’m driving.”
Behind us, a woman in a Toyota Prius honked.
Raven flipped her the bird.
The woman honked again.
“Excuse me,” Raven said. “I’ll have this handled by the time you get in the passenger seat.”
I didn’t like someone telling me what to do. But it would feel good not to have to grip the steering wheel. And it would suit my purpose for Raven to believe she was in control. Besides, she was a car thief. I could trust her ability to drive.
I stepped out of the Mustang while Raven strolled to the Prius to have a chat with the woman behind us. To my right were the bus terminal and the railway station. Plenty of pedestrians. And plenty of homeless people. Beautiful weather for an aimless morning.
As I walked around the hood of the Mustang, I saw Raven leaning into the driver’s window of the Prius. The Mustang was jet black. The Prius, appropriately, a dull green.
Raven returned to the Mustang and slid into the driver’s seat.
“Nice chat?” I said. As far as I could tell, no punches had been thrown.
“I pointed out that her smug self-righteousness at driving a Prius was misplaced. That studies have shown a gas-guzzling Tahoe SUV has a smaller carbon footprint than her I’m-better-than-the-rest-of-the-world status symbol. People don’t put together what it takes to have all those batteries for a Prius. I say ride a bike or take the bus.”
“Oh,” I said. “That’s nice.”
Raven patted the steering wheel. “Slumming it, are we?”
The convertible was less than two weeks old. But the last car she’d seen me in was a Lamborghini.
“Borrowed it,” I said. “From a girl at school.”
I saw a slight tensing of her jaw muscles. I knew she didn’t like Bishops Prep and the pretentiousness there. It upset her that a daddy would give his teenage daughter a brand-new Mustang. It was an attitude I understood. And shared.
“Just took a flash of your pearly whites, did it?” Raven asked. “A flex or two of your biceps and she tossed you the keys?”
“Shallow gender stereotyping doesn’t suit you,” I said. “By suggesting I am just a pretty face and that she cares only for my body, you belittle her and me.”
“Exactly,” Raven said. And gunned the Mustang, swerving hard. The rear tires squealed and slid across the asphalt, and a split second later we were facing the opposite direction, accelerating hard.
Two seconds later, she stomped on the brake for the red light at the intersection.
“You know,” I said, aware of people staring at us, “the entire point of my borrowing someone else’s car was to be inconspicuous. Perhaps you don’t understand the definition of that word.”
I spoke slowly, breaking it down to syllables. “In. Con. Spic. U. Ous.”
“And perhaps you don’t understand how dangerous I am when I’m in a bad mood,” Raven said. “This whole break-in thing is Mickey Mouse. It’s not like we’re hitting some skid-row house with bars across the windows. A place like this, on the coastline, it’s going to run in the millions. We’re talking sophisticated security. Video, silent alarm, maybe even rent-a-cop patrols. I have no idea of the layout or what we’re up against. And I’m supposed to trust that you’ve got all the angles covered? A trust-fund kid who trades down from a Lamborghini to a Mustang and whose most difficult decisions in life are whether to ring the maid for tea or coffee with breakfast?”
I should have been offended by her insults. But I took her anger as a good sign. It meant she was distracted. I needed her distracted. If she stayed distracted, she wouldn’t see the scam I was pulling on her.
“Got the breakfast decision covered,” I said. “Usually Earl Grey tea. And freshly squeezed orange juice.”
The light turned green. She floored the Mustang and expertly fought the skid, then zipped in and out of the traffic.
I hid my smile. Yup. An angry person was easier to fool than one who was thinking.