The Sourdough Wars

“Come on.” And led me back to the car.
    “Let’s wait,” he said finally. “Maybe he left his car around here. As soon as the train noise dies down, it’ll be completely quiet again and we can be pretty sure any car we hear is his.”
    I could see it was a good idea, but I wasn’t about to say so. “Okay,” I said grudgingly. “But I don’t see why you won’t listen to any of my ideas. He wouldn’t have gotten away if you had.”
    He put a hand on the back of my neck. “I was afraid you’d get hurt.”
    “I’m a big girl.”
    He rubbed my shoulder fairly convincingly. “Look. If I’d gone back to head him off and he’d had any sense, he’d just have stopped and waited for you to run into him. Then he’d have had a hostage.”
    “He
didn’t
have any sense. Nobody does when someone’s chasing them.”
    “Babe, I was just—” He stopped and listened. Sure enough, someone had just started a car up. Rob’s was already warmed up and ready to go, so we had a slight advantage—if we could find the other one. We slipped into Seventh Street with our lights off, and followed the noise. Then we saw it—on King Street, its lights just coming on. It took off.
    We were right behind it, lights still off. After a zig here and a zag there, it turned onto Third, going south, and Rob had to hit his lights to follow. Third is the main thoroughfare in the neighborhood and there’d be traffic. So there was no choice but to turn the lights on. But when the burglar saw us do it, he must have caught on to who we were, because he floored his accelerator. We hadn’t quite completed the turn yet, so the burglar’s car zoomed ahead—a piece of awful luck, because we might have gotten his license number if we’d been a little closer.
    But Rob wasn’t giving up yet. He hit the gas, too. Third is a long, long street, and it will take you straight to Hunters Point, San Francisco’s meanest ghetto, if you let it. I wasn’t thrilled at that prospect, but it beat losing the burglar—I wanted to get him if we had to cover the city like Steve McQueen in
Bullitt
.
    We very nearly did. Third Street has traffic lights on it, and I guess the burglar decided he couldn’t take the chance of hitting a red one. He turned right soon, into the neighborhood at the bottom of Potrero Hill. This is much like the area around China Basin, all warehouses and railroad tracks. There were a million streets, and who knew where any of them led?
    The burglar, apparently. He whizzed in and out, around and about, like a rat in a maze he’s used to. We weren’t used to it, but we had a rat to follow and we were doing pretty well when we heard a siren.
    I looked behind us but couldn’t see a cop. Rob turned off his lights again and kept his eyes on the rat. Why he thought going dark was going to help I don’t know. The futility of the whole thing suddenly came home to me.
    “Rob,” I said.
    No answer.
    “Let’s give up.”
    Still no answer. Just a tighter set to the lips. I sat back. Oh well, it was only halfhearted on my part anyway. I still wanted to catch the burglar in the worst way, and my blood was still full of adrenaline. If he wanted to be macho, I’d go along with it. We were careening around on a corner on two wheels when I caught sight of a black-and-white—only a couple of blocks behind us.
    Rob apparently saw it about the same time. “Omigod,” he said, and gunned it again. We’d been going about sixty, a lot faster than was safe, and I hate to think how much worse it suddenly got. We needed to keep going straight for a while, because we certainly couldn’t turn any corners, but the trouble was, we couldn’t go straight. In that neighborhood, you can run into things if you don’t turn corners. So Rob did, somehow or other. My fingers hurt from clutching the door handle and my teeth hurt from clenching them.
    The couple of turns we had to take weren’t a bit smooth. In fact, we went up on the sidewalk both times and would have hit bus-stop signs, parking meters, buildings, or small children if there’d been any to hit.
    I figured Rob was pretty scared and I knew I was. It had finally come home to me that we were doing about ninety on city streets and a car full of cops was chasing us. I was a lawyer and had my professional standing to think of. Not to mention my mother. I started pleading: “Rob, honey, we can’t do this. My mom’ll kill me.”
    “Shut up.”
    “Don’t tell me to shut up. Let me out of