LITMIR.BIZ

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sweater. I picked up the fitted gray turtleneck that I had tried on three tops earlier. “But what if he wants to kiss my neck?” Mr. Katz licked his fur suggestively. “I didn’t say I’d let him kiss my neck, but it would be closed minded of me to completely eliminate the possibility.” I looked in the mirror again. This was just going to have to do. My hair couldn’t take another shirt change.

      There was a knock at the door. Mr. Katz lifted his head in alarm.

      What kind of jerk shows up a half hour early for a first date? I didn’t even have my makeup on yet. I should have trusted my first impression of him. I had a date with the last living caveman.

      The knock came again.

      “All right, I’m coming.” I gave Mr. Katz a “why me?” look and headed for the entryway. “Which one of my idiot neighbors let you into the building anyway?” I asked before throwing open the door.

      “Oops.” It was one of my idiot neighbors.

      “Sophie, I didn’t know you had such a high opinion of us.” Theresa Conley wasn’t going to let that one slide. But then again, letting things slide wasn’t really her forte.

      “I honestly didn’t mean it, Theresa. You just caught me at a bad time. You see, I was just talking to my cat and… You know what? Never mind. Fresh beginning. Hello, Theresa, what can I do for you?”

      Theresa sucked in her cheeks in a manner that made me think of the fish I had had for dinner the night before. “I came because I’m trying to be a good neighbor. Not that you make that an easy task. Nonetheless, I feel it’s my duty to inform you that while looking for parking I saw your car, and it seems someone has broken into it.”

      “Oh, God damn it!” This was the second time someone had broken into my car. “Did they break the window?”

      Theresa smiled. “Driver’s side.”

      “Damn it!”

      “Well, I just thought I should tell you. And say hi to your cat for me.” Theresa left in a considerably better mood than she had arrived in.

      I slammed the door and turned to see Mr. Katz looking at me questioningly. “I don’t have time for this. I have a date in—” I checked my watch “—twenty minutes.”

      Mr. Katz swished his tail and headed back to the bedroom to see if he could do more damage to my sweater collection.

      “Argh!” I grabbed my keys from the small table in the entryway. Something was missing. When I came home I always put the face to my CD player on the table next to the keys. Except when I forgot it in the car. If I tried a little harder, could I be a bigger idiot? Defeated, I went out to inspect the damage.

      I had parked a little more than three blocks uphill from my apartment, somewhere around five o’clock the day before. I really needed to get an alarm system—although what were the chances I would hear it when I was parked ten miles away? Thanks to an inordinate number of SUVs blocking my line of sight, I wasn’t able to spot my car until I was less than ten yards from it.

      I stopped breathing for a second. It was unlike Theresa to understate things, but even from a slight distance it was clear that my Acura hadn’t just been broken into, it had been vandalized. The hood and the trunk had been popped and remained open. When I got closer, I could see that the driver’s side window had indeed been broken, but the biggest damage was to the interior. Not only had they dumped everything out of the glove compartment, but they had also slashed up the interior of both the front and back seats and pulled the stuffing out in several places. There were slashes all over the floor, as well. Hesitant, I looked in the trunk and found that they had also slashed the carpeting in there, along with the spare tire. My hands started trembling and I gripped the top of the trunk to steady them. Who would do this? I pressed my lips together and went to the front of the car to see what else had been destroyed or taken. I forced myself to peek under the hood. The engine was intact.

      Why was that? If the object was to cause as much damage as possible, shouldn’t they at least have cut a few wires or something? I peered through the broken glass to get a second look at the mess inside. My CD player was still there. Last I had checked, the main reason people broke into cars was to steal their stereos. My stereo wasn’t state-of-the-art but I was pretty sure it was theft-worthy.

      “I thought I was supposed to meet you at your place.”

      I jumped at the sound of Anatoly’s voice. He was standing in the doorway of an apartment complex parallel to my car. His eyes traveled behind me to the Acura. “Looks like somebody made an enemy. You know the owner?”

      “What are you doing here, Anatoly?”

      “What do you mean, ‘what am I doing here?’ I live here.”

      “In that building right there?”

      “The one I just walked out of. Your powers of deduction are staggering.”

      “And you didn’t hear anything when some lunatic was ripping apart my car?”

      “Your car?” Anatoly’s eyebrows shot up. He walked closer for a better look. “I don’t understand, are you a drug dealer or something?”

      “Excuse me? Someone messes with my car and you want to know if I’m a drug dealer?”

      “Look at the car, Sophie. Whoever did this was looking for something, and when they didn’t find it in the glove compartment or the trunk they assumed it was valuable enough for you to hide it inside the seats.”

      “Well, if they were looking for drugs they got the wrong car.”

      Anatoly was examining the trunk now. “Well, they were looking for something.”

      “Oh, for God’s sake! I wouldn’t even know how to hide something in the upholstery of my car without ruining it. Let alone in my spare tire. What the hell could I possibly possess that I would even want to hide that well?”

      “Could be a number of things. Do you have some compromising photos of the mayor and the latest Playboy bunny that you were planning on blackmailing him with? Although I think Willie Brown proved that San Franciscans aren’t concerned with such things.”

      “Give me a break. I’m not blackmailing anyone. This is real life, not one of my books….” I looked at the car again. In what seemed like slow motion, I opened the passenger side door and touched one of the fresh cuts in the seat.

      “What’s wrong?” He stepped behind me and put a supportive hand on my arm.

      “Nothing. Look, I don’t mean to blow you off, but I think I should go report this.”

      “I’ll go with you.”

      “It’s really not necessary. I’ve had my car broken into before. You just go to the police station, file a report, and when the SFPD has a slow day they’ll look into it. That will be right around the time the sun collides with the earth.”

      Anatoly just stared at me.

      “I’m trying to be funny.”

      “I can see that.”

      “Well then, laugh and go away.”

      Anatoly didn’t move. “Are you going to drive the car to the police station?”

      “Now you’re the one trying to be funny. I can’t possibly drive this thing.”

      “Why not? The engine seems to be intact,” he pointed out while checking under the hood. “And the only tire they slashed was the spare.”

      “The police station is only a few blocks away, I’ll walk. It’s not like they have to look at the car. All I have to do—”

      “This isn’t a normal break-in Sophie. The police should see the damage in order to know what they’re dealing with.”

      I wrinkled my nose in disgust. The last thing I wanted to do was sit in the seat that only

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