No Regrets

what I just did,” he said, “but I’m a sicko person, and I haven’t had a woman in a long time.”
    Kari would never remember just when they had finally gotten on the freeway headed toward Reno. Her captors had a plan of sorts. Their main concern was to get as far from Fairfield and Sancho Panza as they could before 7 A.M. when the day shift showed up for work. They would find Shelly tied up on the floor of the office, and would surely call the police and report her kidnapping. They planned to ditch Kari’s car before then, and obtain a rental car. They had expected to find enough money in the two women’s purses to pay for the rental car, but they still needed three hundred dollars—whatever that was for.
    John now pawed through the two purses, looking for cash and credit cards. But Shelly had only fifteen dollars in hers, and Kari had nothing but change.
    “I have my paycheck,” Kari offered. “It’s for $306.50. I can probably cash it at an Albertson’s store because I have a check guarantee card with them.”
    “We’re not going back to Fairfield,” John argued.
    “No—no,” Kari soothed. “There are some Albertson’s stores in Sacramento. I think they’ll honor my guarantee card.”
    Although she had convinced John and Mike that they needed her alive in order to get cash, she was very careful not to say much to either of them. “They were very jumpy,nervous, and seemed like they could blow it at any moment.”
    As they hurtled east on the freeway, John told Kari that the two of them had been planning to assault her and Shelly as they sat in the living room of Sancho Panza. “At first, we were going to kill both of you, steal your purses, and take one of your cars,” he said, as easily as if he were talking about the weather.
    It chilled her blood to think that the two men had been sitting near them for hours, calmly planning their murders when, all the while, she and Shelly had been completely unaware of the danger.
    “For some reason,” Kari remembers, “they didn’t kill us. It might have been because we had to call the sheriff for the resident and the deputies arrived so quickly. Maybe they figured it would be too risky to hang around there.”
    John kept telling Kari that they were “totally desperate men. We don’t have a goddammed thing going for us. We don’t give a fuck what happens.”
    And then, with what seemed to be flawed reasoning, John explained that it would be better for them when they were captured to be facing murder charges as well as kidnapping, auto theft, and any other charges. He said that would get them fewer years in the penitentiary. Kari didn’t dare ask them how it could possibly work out that way. Murder charges certainly didn’t add any stars to felons’ crowns.
    But she didn’t argue with them. Any criticism on her part would, she knew, be like waving a red flag in front of a bull.
    The two men spoke of how they had never had a chance in their miserable lives. “Nobody never gave us no breaks,” Mike whined.
    Kari realized now that John must have been treated at Sancho Panza, because he knew the names of several counselors who worked there. While he and Mike bemoaned their unhappy past, Kari also detected anger, hostility, and fear.
    “This hostility was precariously maintained and controlled,” she says. “They needed constant reassurance that we weren’t being followed by the California Highway Patrol or the Solano County sheriff’s deputies. I kept telling them that Shelly wouldn’t call the police, and that she was tied up, anyway, so she
couldn’t
call anyone. Mike, John, and I agreed that I should call Sancho Panza right at 7:00 A.M. so I could catch Gracie before
she
called anyone.”
    Even though Kari was cooperating with her kidnappers and subtly giving them the sense that the three of them were in this dilemma together and they seemed to trust her, she still believed that they intended to kill her.
    “I just didn’t know when...”
    If she had any chance of escape, Kari knew that she had to get to a place where there were other people around. She didn’t want anyone else to get hurt, but she hoped she could let someone know where she was. She thought about how she might alert a clerk or manager at an Albertson’s store. But if John caught her signaling, she had no doubt he would dispose of her as soon as possible.
    Now, as they entered the outskirts of Sacramento, they exited the freeway at the Jefferson off-ramp. Kari