Matt & Mariko - A Serialized Novel - 5.1

CHAPTER 7

     But then Matt heard crashes and some shouting. The skate punks had thrown their boards through the window and jumped down to chase him. They were rolling through the alley toward him just as he was losing his breath.

     He raced across the street, forcing a red Jaguar to screech its brakes to avoid running him over. He didn't know if he could make it over the block wall in front of him, but he did, pulling himself up and rolling over on his hip. When he landed, he found himself in a back yard with a kidney-shaped swimming pool and a swath of green lawn.

     A bodybuilder in pink bikini briefs was stretched out in his chaise lounge, eyes apparently closed behind his sunglasses, an iPod's tiny headphones in his ears.

    The Jaguar hadn't started up again yet, so the skateboarders jumped onto its hood then off the other side in pursuit. Leaving their boards behind, they scaled the block wall behind Matt and hit the bodybuilder's lawn just as Matt had crossed the yard and was leaping over the opposite wall into the next yard.

     "Hey dude," one of the skaters yelled to the bodybuilder, but he didn't seem to hear or see them.

     Matt landed on the lawn of the next yard, where a woman bodybuilder in a pink bikini was sunning herself on the chaise lounge in front of her kidney-shaped pool, iPod headphones in her ears, eyes shaded by sunglasses and apparently closed, because she didn't make a move as Matt ran across her yard, followed by the skateboarders.

     But in the next yard, a man inside the house saw Matt as soon as he had leaped over the wall. The man yelled "Hey" from behind the patio door.

     "Sorry," Matt shouted back. "Passin' through." He headed for the wall on the other side of the yard, but the man had grabbed a handgun and started shooting, knocking off small gray chunks from the cinderblock. Matt made it up and over nevertheless, landing on a sidewalk and running across the street.

     "Hey," the man shouted again while the skateboarders flew toward the wall he was shooting.

     "Passin' through," one of them shouted back. The man kept shooting, but missed them, too.

     One of the skateboarders pulled a gun from the waistband of his cut-offs and fired back from atop the wall. He knocked a chunk of stucco off the man's house.

     "Cool!" the skateboarder said. The man ducked back inside for a moment, then popped his head out the glass door to return fire as the skateboarders cleared his wall.

     When the skateboarders landed on the other side, they saw Matt running into a house. The man behind them was still shooting, and chips of cinderblock were sailing onto the street Matt had crossed. When the skateboarders landed, they saw Matt run into the open door of a white two-story house with a neatly manicured lawn.

     Matt shut and locked the door behind him, gasping for breath. He heard what sounded like a conversation in the living room, but it was only the TV. Jerry Springer was interviewing a teen-age white girl who had run away from home and was turning tricks for a black pimp.

     Matt paced as quietly as he could through the living room to the kitchen, then into the garage, where he checked the black Mercedes to see if the keys were inside. No luck. He went back into the kitchen and checked the counter. There they were. He picked them up. Just then, the doorbell rang, then rang and rang again. That would be the surf punks, Matt thought to himself. He had the keys in his hand when a woman in a white bathrobe, her black hair still wet from the shower, turned the corner on her way to answer the door.

    She screamed as the doorbell kept ringing.

    "Oh, sorry, ma'am," he said. "The door was open, you must not have heard me. I'm from Wilton Mercedes. They sent me to pick up the car for, ah, an emergency recall."

     "I didn't buy my car at Wilton," she said. The doorbell kept ringing. "I better get that."

     "I'll just take the car then," Matt said.

     "No, you wait. Why is my car going to Wilton?"

     "They're handling the repair, ah, regionally," Matt said, keys still in his hand.

     "Why didn't anyone call me?"

     "Oh they called. They probably got your husband."

     "I'm divorced. He has no authority to make any decisions about my car."

     "Well, maybe it was your boyfriend, then."

     "My boyfriend! That bastard! Now he's trying to get his hands on the Mercedes, too?"

     "No, no ma'am," Matt said while she ran off to open the door.

     He rushed into the garage as the skateboarders pushed past the woman into her house.

     ''Where'd he go?'' a skateboarder demanded.

     "Who?" the woman asked.

     Matt gunned the engine of the big black car and checked for the garage door opener on the sun visor but couldn't find it.

     So just as the skateboarders ran through the garage door and pulled out their guns, he gunned the engine in reverse and crashed the car backward through the garage door with an explosion of metal, and the Mercedes’ tires were instantly squealing on the driveway and out into the street. He turned the car around, its roof scratched and trunk crumpled, and sped off as the skateboarders took token shots toward him.

     The woman in the white bathrobe followed them out onto the driveway, standing between them amid the wreckage of the garage door and its metal bars and bolts.

     The two skatepunks look at the woman as they put their guns back into the waistbands of their shorts.

     "Why'd ya let him take your car?" one of them asked her. Then they walked away, leaving her there to deal with the aftermath of their afternoon.