No Footprints Read Online Free PDF

deal with police. She swings onto the bike and heads over the grass into the bushes. Be careful. You
don’t know who’s in there! She laughs out loud. She should be dead—how can she worry about guys smoking hash in the bushes?
    The vehicle slows, stops, starts up again. The fog sucks it in.
    It’s enough to break her sense of freedom. She’s alive, yes, but nothing’s changed. She made her deal; she still has to pay.
    But not yet. She gets back on the bike and rides into the fog.

6
    What is life? When I sat zazen in my room before going to bed I wasn’t pondering the question, but it was in the back of my mind. I went to sleep with it on my mind. But I found myself in my dream, falling, falling, waiting to hit the water, crashing into it so hard it startled me awake momentarily. Each time I jolted awake, I checked my phone. As if its ring wouldn’t have woken me! It was too early for Mike’s call, but that didn’t deter me the next time I woke. Never have I been so grateful for the alarm at five in the morning. I was sweating and freezing and very glad for the 6:00 am call. Late as it was, I had only ten minutes for zazen—like peering into a familiar room you can’t take a seat in—but I was thankful for that focus on reality.
    When I got to the set at the high point of Dolores Street—another location I had scouted—I stopped at the lunch wagon to pick up coffee and eye my phone again, as if to conjure up his message.
    With its wide grassy center divider of glorious tall, fat palm trees and its lovingly restored Victorians and Edwardians, Dolores Street is all San Francisco. The original white stucco mission church there, built in 1776, still stands open to the public, with its tiny graveyard peopled by the Miwok, Spanish, and Irish dead of long ago. Three blocks east, Mission Street is still the heart of the city’s traditional Hispanic neighborhood. I’d suggested it to Jed Elliot, the second unit director, talked
up its crowded sidewalks, dotted by taquerias and women in bright flowered print skirts grilling tacos to sell from their carts—ones we could mock up and send flying in the car gag. I’d carried on about the old bars with signs above the door: Open at 6:00 am, and ones in the window: Ladies Welcome.
    I’d weighed the local color against the amount of traffic and the hassle of getting the city to block it off, and also dangers like light posts I might hit and end up hiking the company’s insurance. And then there were the unavoidable bursts of noise from customers at those stands, laundromats and early opening-time bars. With delivery trucks sure to try sneaking through the roadblocks, the potential for interruptions was impressive. But in the interval between my eyeballing the site, then contacting the city and starting the search for each of the property owners likely to be involved, our main backer’d gone belly-up.
    Still, I’d called the city liaison to stall, figuring to keep the faith with a project I tried not to believe was headed nowhere. When suddenly, a new group of backers leapt up—not as reliable as the first guy, but with a connection to a big money couple in the city—and the word again was Go. But we had to be gone by Thursday, i.e., three short days from now.
    Oh, and our block of Mission had been nabbed for a church fair.
    Then I’d spotted the peak of the hill at Dolores and 21st. I’d pictured myself driving up, hitting the turn so fast it’d look as if I was about to roll the car—not just over but all the way down to 24th Street.
    Who could not be hooked?
    Here, blocking off the incoming streets wasn’t a problem. But waking the neighbors sure was. We’d had to drive the trucks in before dark and park them overnight, blocking the wheels for some of them on the steep streets. Plus, we’d hired a couple of off-duty cops, not only for fear of our trucks being