How To Steal a Car Read Online Free PDF Page A

said.
    “Okay.”
    “I can’t believe you talked me into this.”
    “Me neither.”
    There is no real difference between scared and excited. Think roller coaster. Think first kiss. Think stealing a car.
    I don’t know what triggered it, but after we stood there saying nothing for about two minutes, I felt my body start to move. A couple of seconds later I was unlocking the car door. I jumped in and stared at a completely unfamiliar set of controls. It took me almost a minute to figure out where the key went. Finally I shoved it in and turned it and felt the engine rumble. Will was banging on the passenger window. I fumbled with the buttons until his door clicked open. He jumped in and we took off.
    “Shit, shit, shit,” he said. I looked over and he was grinning all across his face.
    I knew exactly what he was feeling.
    The Pit was a sinkhole in a vacant tract of land just on the other side of the freeway. A few months later it would get turned into a landscaped pond in the middle of a new commercial development, but back then it was a deep hole about a hundred feet across and filled with water. Local legend had it that the hole was five hundred feet deep and there were old cars and dinosaur bones and whatever down at the bottom. It used to be a popular swimming hole, but after years of crazy parties, the number of broken beer bottles reached critical mass and then somebody threw a dead raccoon in there and it floated there for days. Even after it sank, this dead-animal smell sort of hovered over the pond, and after that nobody swam there.
    There were a bunch of trees and bushes around most of the pond, but there was one place you could drive right up to the edge. I pulled the Hummer up as close as I dared and stopped. The headlights skimmed the top of the pond; I could see various unidentified things floating there. They looked to me like dead bodies even though I knew they were just plastic bottles and bags and branches and stuff. I turned the lights off and we got out. The muddy, slippery bank below us sloped steeply down to the water ten feet below. A rotten, fishy odor hung in the still air.
    “Now what?” I asked.
    “Now we test the underwater performance of the Hummer H2,” Will said. His voice came out high-pitched.
    “I am not driving into the water,” I said.
    “Put it in neutral. We’ll push it in.”
    I don’t know how much a Hummer weighs, but there was no way. It was like trying to move a tank.
    “Pull it forward,” Will said. “Just a little. So the front wheels are over the edge.”
    It took him a few minutes to talk me into getting back in the car and trying it. I kept one foot on the brake and sort of jerked the Hummer forward a few inches at a time.
    “A little farther,” Will said. He was standing outside, looking at the front wheels.
    The nose of the Hummer was pointing slightly down. I eased up on the brake for just a second and felt the SUV move another couple inches.
    “Just a little more,” Will said.
    Again, I eased up on the brake and felt the front tires go all the way over the edge. I jammed my foot down hard on the brake, but this time the vehicle kept on going, sliding over the lip of the bank, moving slowly but unstoppably down toward the water. I froze with my foot on the brake and my hands locked on the steering wheel. I think I was screaming.
    “Stop!” Will shouted. Like I wasn’t trying.
    The Hummer slewed sideways on the muddy bank and began to tilt to the right. I know I was screaming at thatpoint. There was an awful splashy crunch as it tipped onto its side. I fell across the seats and whacked my head against the passenger window as the Hummer slid nose first, on its side, into the water. I flailed around in the dark, trying to figure out which way was up. For some reason my brain wouldn’t accept that the driver’s side of the SUV was now above me. I could hear Will shouting, but it sounded like he was a mile away, and then water started pouring in through