"Let me show you how this works," Danger Girl laughed, as we descended the stairs in the airport parking garage. I call her Danger Girl because
0. I keep putting her in danger, sometimes mortal;
1. She soloed in a Cessna before she turned seventeen;
2. She has certain other dangerous habits that, this being a different kind of publication than it was in days past, cannot be discussed in the full and frank fashion with which it was once my delight to oppress our more delicate readers.
She'd told me that we were renting a Camry. I was happy about this. I like renting Camrys. But as we walked towards a line of cars that clearly included Camrys, Danger Girl took a sharp right turn towards a black Challenger in what I was pretty sure was the rental return lane. "I can take any car I want," she informed me, "so I'm going to take this one." I loaded our luggage into the wide, flat, Seventies-style trunk as she fired up the Pentastar and adjusted the seat. "Off we go!" she laughed, and we drove up two levels of a circular ramp and out into the warm California night.
As we entered the freeway, something occurred to me.
"Hey… aren't you supposed to, like, tell somebody you're taking this car?"
Danger Girl's response was measured. "I… suppose… that maybe we should have passed some kind of security gate. But I do this all the time. I just take whatever car I want and then my company pays for it."
"Have you ever just driven a car out without talking to anyone?" There was a long pause.
"Maybe, possibly, not."
"Should I call the rental agency?"
"If you want." I called the rental agency. There were three options in the automated system. None of them corresponded to reporting a self-stolen car. So I pressed the third option.
"Blah-blah Car Rental, this is LaQueesha speaking." I'm not making that up; it was her name.
"Yes, ah, I picked up a rental car from the airport and nobody asked me for any ID or had me sign anything."
"Can I get the identifying number on the car?" I read it to her.
"Sir, I'm showing that car as being in our inventory."
"Well, that's because I drove it out and nobody stopped me."
"Well, I am showing that we still have it."
"Well, I," I responded in somewhat irritated fashion, "am showing that it is driving down the 405."
"What do you want me to do about that, sir?"
"Could you, I don't know, maybe put it in your computer that it wasn't stolen? That we're bringing it back?"
"I'll have to connect you to the rental office to do that."
"Then connect me." And the phone promptly bleeped to inform me that the other party had hung up.
"I wouldn't worry about it," Danger Girl said, "it's a black Challenger, they won't be looking for it."
"Baby," I whined in response, "cops like pulling over black Challengers so much they don't even care which one it is!"
"I don't know what you're moaning about. I'm the one driving, not you."
"I'm an accomplice! Plus, this is California! They'll arrest me for stare-raping you into doing it or something!"
"This thing's pretty fast," Danger Girl noted, as the speedometer swung past '70' on the four-lane surface street. "But I can't see out of it at all."
"Then why are you going so fast?"
"In case they're looking for us." I dialed the rental car company again. And got Omar. Who also hung up on me.
"Well, I want to have a drink," Danger Girl exclaimed, "so I think we should give it to these valet people."
* * *In the morning, we fetched the Challenger back from the valet. There were no cops waiting to bust us. Having spent half of my life in imminent expectation that either the police or the film crew from "Cheaters" would appear around the next corner, I didn't truly relax until we were away from the hotel and back on the freeway, where Danger Girl accelerated to a steady eighty-in-a-fifty-five.
"You cannot," I explained, as if to a child, "operate a stolen car with this degree of recklessness."
"Hey!" she exclaimed. "It's another Challenger just like us!" And in truth I'd seen four black rental V6 Challys that day already.
This one was being driven by a Hispanic fellow with a face tattoo. I instructed DG to stick close to him as we traveled to the parking garage where my car was stored, figuring that the LAPD, given the choice between pulling over a blonde girl in a North Face jacket or a Mexican with a face tattoo, would choose the latter, even if the license plate on the APB matched the former.
We retrieved my car without difficulty and Danger Girl had an idea. "Hey. There's an airport here, too," she said, with the same kind of wonder a child might display while playing SimCity. "Let's leave the car at the rental office." We pulled up in convoy and she drove in without me. Two young black women awaited her.
"Girls," DG chirped, "this car is from another airport. They just let me take it. I'm giving it back."
"You just took it!" responded the lot attendants, in tuneful unison. I could read their minds from a distance. This is what these blonde bitches get up to! They steal cars! And don't nobody stop them!
"I just took it!" DG responded. "Would you like it back?"
"Well," one of the attendants responded, scanning it half-heartedly, "It don't be showing up in the system."
"So," DG prompted, "it's like this never happened! Do I have to pay you anything?"
"I guess not," the taller of the two replied.
"Well then. Goodbye!"
"Goodbye!" the lot girls said, again in tuneful unison. DG hopped into the passenger seat of my car. Behind her, I could hear one attendant say to the other,
"She just took the car."
"Surely," I opined, as the three-cylinder engine roared to life behind me and we pulled away, "there will be consequences for this." And yet there were not.
THE END.
The post The Night That Danger Girl Stole A Black Challenger From The Airport appeared first on The Truth About Cars.
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