Chapter 25
The Jaguar’s smart key system allowed Jeff to keep the key in his pocket while simply pulling the door handle to open it. The car identified the nearby key, unlocking the doors and allowing entrance.
He jumped inside. Again, he didn’t need to waste time pulling the key out of his pocket and wrestling it into the ignition. He simply pushed the break and the start button simultaneously, but Laura wasn’t getting in. He leaned over and opened her door by hand.
The bum already stood beside Jeff’s closed door. Jeff fumbled for the lock button. The man pulled his hand out of his overcoat and dropped a black blob onto the front window.
Now he understood the reason Laura didn’t want to get in.
The darkness was dripping through the glass and expanding with a faint sizzling noise. He would be trapped in here.
He slid across the passenger seat and out the car, yelling, “Go, go!”
They ran across the parking lot to the sidewalk, the bum following, laughing like Santa might while handing presents out to little children.
“Let’s lose this nut!” he said as they ran down the sidewalk. They turned down a residential street. They hurdled over a low yellow fence into the ankle-high grass of someone’s front yard, Jeff resenting the spongy surface slowing their progress. While moving into the narrow passage on the side of the house, he pulled a rusty metal trashcan over to block the bum, then flew passed Laura, shouting, “Follow me.”
He scaled a five-foot wooden fence and helped pull her over, watching the heavy bum gracefully leap over the trashcan, somehow bellowing laugher in such an oxygen consuming chase.
After setting her down, they sped through this backyard, Jeff spotting the back door of the house open. He changed directions mid-step and headed through the door, locking it behind them, dodging laundry baskets, passing a gurgling washer and humming dryer, making a sharp right into a kitchen area, causing a stick of a women in her thirty’s to scream and throw a skillet of sizzling vegetables in their direction, Laura getting most of the greens on her forehead, navigating through the living room furniture with a boy and girl glued to a giant flat-screen television, exiting the front door, leaping off the porch into the front yard, crossing the street, up an apartment complex driveway, through the closing steel gate entrance, jumping and clinging onto the back of a U-Haul truck that moved too slow, hopping down and veering off the street up a path through a line a mailboxes and pine trees, dodging lawn-chairs around a blue-green pool.
His lungs ached and his legs felt leaden. Surely that large bum could not be keeping up. But he needed to be certain, so Jeff kept running down another walkway with two-story apartments on either side, balconies facing outwards.
They needed rest. Perhaps they were far enough ahead that they could hide.
He began to climb the bottom patio railing of one apartment and pulled Laura up as well. He held her foot and boosted her to the second story railing of the balcony, and she climbed over. He followed.
There, they squatted behind a barbeque grill in the five by seven foot enclosure, well hidden also by the paneled wood railing surrounding the balcony. But their panting wouldn’t surcease.
He peeked through a crack in the wood to the walkway below. No one used it at this late hour.
They lost the laughing lunatic.