No Regrets

had her role down pat. No matter how frightened she was, she managed to smile and even laugh at John’s jokes so that he would think she was calm and had no intention of bailing on them. But this didn’t give her a chance to signal anyone with her eyes, and she had no way to write a note to leave behind.
    They hurried back to the Thunderbird, and drove on the surface street until they came to the Albertson’s store. Once again, the clerk shook her head. Kari’s check-cashing card was for the Fairfield-area stores, and there was no manager on duty to OK handing out over three hundred dollars. Kari nodded and kept her face calm, but she wondered how she could be having so much bad luck. Inside, she felt like screaming.
    “So,” John said when they were back in the Thunder-bird, “what’s your next plan for getting our money?”
    Kari thought fast. “I have some friends who live in North Highlands—not far from here. They keep money in a safe in their house. They might cash my check.”
    “Let’s go,” John said. “Maybe we should drive by their house and see if they’re home.”
    There was a car in the driveway, but John said he wanted to be cautious. “We’ll go to a pay phone,” he said. “You call them up, and tell them you have car trouble and you need some cash to pay for the repair job.”
    Kari did as she was told, but she felt completely hopeless as her friends’ phone rang a dozen or more times and no one answered. It seemed as if the whole world was turning its back on her.
    Only yesterday, Kari Lindholm had been happy and secure. She and Ben had their problems, of course—all couples did. Both of them were bitterly disappointed that she hadn’t become pregnant yet. They wanted a baby so much. They didn’t have a lot of money—but neither did anyone else in their social circle. That wasn’t a top priority on their list of where happiness lay.
    Mike and John were swigging down the beer she had paid for at the Safeway store, and getting more unstable with every bottle. They hadn’t made a lot of sense whenthey were sober, and now Kari wondered if their inhibitions would disappear and all her efforts to reason with them wouldn’t count for anything.
    She should have been home by now. Surely, her husband would have called Sancho Panza to see why she was late. She prayed that someone was looking for her. And then she felt a new kind of panic. What if they did encounter the deputies or the highway patrol? Would there be a car chase—bullets fired into the car she was in? She knew John and Mike wouldn’t hesitate to push her out of a moving car if they had to save themselves.
    It seemed as if whatever was going to happen, she might not see the end of this day.
    The “getaway” was proving to be one of the most inefficient escapes in California’s criminal history. With all their turns, returns, missed freeways, and stops, in four hours they had logged less than fifty miles toward Reno. Mike had now decided to head to Auburn, northeast of Sacramento on U.S. 80. Both men were growing more insistent that Kari get them their three hundred dollars—or else.
    Kari knew there was one last person she could ask for money. Her mother. She told her captors that she would ask her mother to wire three hundred dollars to the Western Union Office in Auburn.
    “We can just pick it up there,” she promised. “Within fifteen minutes of when she sends it.”
    Kari knew her mother would be able to hear tension in her voice, but she couldn’t think of any way to tell her what was really happening. She would have to think of some code phrase that might work. John and his knifewould be right there next to her, and he was likely to listen in to the conversation.
    They pulled in beside an outside pay telephone booth in the North Highlands area of Sacramento. John walked Kari into the booth, holding his sleeved arm against her back. She felt the unyielding surface of the long knife blade there as it pressed against her. If she made a mistake, she could be dead within a few minutes, her life’s blood gushing from her lungs or heart.
    She tried to keep her voice steady as her mother answered her phone. She wondered what Kari was doing— knowing that at this time of morning, shortly after nine, she was usually sleeping after working all night.
    “I’m on the road, Mom,” Kari said. “And my car broke down. Could you wire me three hundred dollars?”
    “Well... yes, I think so. What’s wrong with your