“RIGHT HERE. WE’RE LEANING on it,” Oggie said. He began to walk around the car. It was the one we’d been hiding beside the whole time. How I could’ve missed it, I’ll never know.
“Oggie, get down. Somebody will see you!” Raven said.
I tried to grab him, but he stepped away. He started peering in the windows, checking out the turquoise fins and the big, glitzy taillights. He disappeared around to the street side.
“Look at this radio,” we heard him saying. “I always wanted to see inside one of these.”
Two cops came around the side of 5446. They walked fast down the driveway, talking.
“We’ve got to get out of here!” Raven said in my ear.
“How?” I whispered back. “They’ll see us if we try to run.”
“If we stay here, they’ll see us anyway.” The cops were checking their watches and talking into a radio. All they had to do to see us was to look around.
A loud click sounded behind us. The car door we were crouched against shot open. We jumped a mile.
“Get in!” whispered a voice.
“Oggie! How did you get in there?”
“It was unlocked. Come on.”
We scrambled inside. Raven closed the car door quietly and we got down under the dashboard in the front seat. Oggie was little enough that he didn’t need to duck. He was sitting in the driver’s seat with his hands on the steering wheel, looking awed out of his mind. He turned the wheel a few times, then leaned way over to check out the brake and the accelerator. When he came back up, he had something in his hand.
“Look what I found.” He held up some keys. “Somebody must have dropped them.”
“They’re Cat Man’s car keys,” Raven hissed. “Put them back where they were! We don’t want to touch anything in here. Cat Man goes crazy if you touch his car.”
A crackle of gunshots broke out suddenly from behind the house. I peeked out the car window just in time to see Ralphie running at top speed down the driveway. He dropped down behind a bush.
There were more gunshots, and along came Ringo, then Cat Man. They ran across and hid behind a broken-down shed in the next yard down. Ten seconds later, a cop came around the side of the house looking for them with his gun out.
Raven inched up from the floor to watch beside me. We had a good view of everything.
“What’s happening?” Oggie asked.
“Never mind,” Raven said. “It’s not for you to know.”
While the cop looked down the street one way, we saw Ralphie get up and run the other way to the shed. Then all three, Cat Man, Ralphie, and Ringo, ran to the next yard and hid again. They were working their way down the street, getting closer to us.
“They’re coming for the car!” Raven whispered suddenly. “They’re going to try and make a getaway in the car.”
“Oh, no! What should we do?”
“Get out of here fast!” Raven said.
I heard Oggie suck in his breath.
“Oggie, open your door and get out. We’re all leaving through your door so they won’t see us,” Raven said. It was the first time I ever heard her sound really upset.
“Move!” Raven said. “RIGHT NOW!”
The next thing we knew, the car’s motor was turning on. We looked around and saw that Oggie had Cat Man’s keys in the ignition.
“What are you doing!” Raven screeched. “We have to get out of here!” She tried to reach across and stop him, but Oggie socked her hard in the arm.
“We ARE getting out of here,” he said. “Leave me alone!”
“You can’t drive!” Raven said.
“Yes, I can!” Oggie yelled. “Keep away or I’ll blow this horn!”
Raven fell back, and we watched in kind of a paralyzed state of terror while he disengaged the parking brake. Next, he put on the left-hand blinker. He took the shift out of park and put it into drive. He looked over his shoulder to see if anyone was coming and turned the wheel to the left. Then he stretched his leg way down under the dash, hit the accelerator with his foot, and came back up for a view out the windshield.
“Stay down!” he ordered. “We’re headed for some cops.”
We started off with a big lurch and began rolling down the street. In the nick of time, too, because three seconds later a loud yell came from behind us.
“Hey, you! Come back with that car!”
Raven and I looked back. There were Cat Man, Ralphie, and Ringo jumping up and down in the empty parking place, howling like three furious old coyotes. Immediately, about five cops were on them. The last we saw, they were throwing down their weapons and raising their hands high. No one noticed us. We cruised away, free and clear.
“Oggie, you’re a genius!” Raven cried. “Cat Man’s busted!”
Oggie didn’t answer. His teeth were chattering a little. I could see it was the yeeks trying to break through. He wasn’t letting them, though. He was fighting them back, concentrating every inch of himself on doing the job. He wasn’t tall enough to see out the Bonneville’s windshield AND reach the accelerator at the same time. So it was first one, then the other, one and the other, which gave our ride down the street a kind of hop and slide motion.
After a minute, he began to get the idea, though. His rhythm picked up, and we were sailing along at a good clip, probably five miles per hour at least. We went down one block and another, then one more.
“Okay,” Raven said. “That’s probably enough.”
“No, it isn’t,” Oggie said between his teeth. He was in the groove and didn’t want to stop. A car came up behind us and honked a few times. Oggie was driving more or less in the middle of the road, but soon he caught on that he was supposed to be on the right-hand side and moved over. The car flashed past.
After that, we came to a yield sign and a couple of red lights. They didn’t faze him, either. He knew his signals.
“How about it?” Raven pleaded. “We could pull in here.”
“No!” Oggie bellowed. To show her how well he was holding up, he put on some speed. He loosened up and began making nerve-racking comments, too.
“Don’t worry, I’ve been practicing at night when you can’t see very well, either,” he told us. And: “Keep down. Here come more cop cars!” Also: “There’s a Lincoln Continental headed straight for us!” And: “I could take this thing on the expressway if I had to.”
Raven and I were holding our breaths and closing our eyes whenever we came to an intersection. Every so often Oggie would look across at us for one split second and say, “I’m a good driver, aren’t I? Don’t you think I’m good?”
It was during one of these split seconds that we finally crashed. Not into anything big, just a bunch of tin garbage cans sitting on the curb. Garden Street was about to merge into the traffic circle at Route 1, and Oggie had been trying to come in for a landing to scope out the problem.
“That’s it!” Raven yelled. “I’m out of here!”
She wrenched open the door and leaped for her life. I followed. We ran around, threw open Oggie’s door, and pried his hands off the wheel before he could decide to go anywhere else.
“Let go!” we yelled. “We’re taking you home!”
He didn’t want to go at all. In his own mind, he’d just gotten started. All the time we were dragging him away, he was looking back wildly over his shoulder at Cat Man’s Pontiac Bonneville.
“I can drive it,” he kept yelling. “I did it by myself.”
“You did it all right,” I finally snapped at him. “You smashed up Cat Man’s car.”
“That doesn’t count,” Oggie yelled. “Parking doesn’t count.”