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to such a ridiculous statement. “Okay,” John said, and without thinking added one of the meaningless departure-clichés he had used all his life. “Take care.” He turned.
    “John!” the woman cried. “Can I talk to you, please?” She was out of the car, on the far side.
    “Hey!” Richie’s tone was threatening. “Get back in here.”
    John did not like this. He told Richie, “If she wants to talk to me, she can. Also, it’s
her
car.”
    Richie lifted his hands from the wheel in a submissive gesture. “Okay, okay. What a touchy guy you are.”
    The woman met him halfway, at the back bumper. She spoke in a tone designed to be too low for Richie to overhear, but in a moment he had rendered that measure needless by putting the radio on at high volume and also closing his window, providing them with so much more privacy than was needed that it seemed derisory.
    “I want you to come along,” the woman said. “I don’t trust this guy. I know he helped me out just now, unasked, but there’s something wrong with him. Believe me.” Her eyes now looked sore within the heavy liner and blue-green shadow.
    “Just throw him out of your car,” John said. “I’ll back you up on that, if you want. But I’m not going anywhere else.”
    “He doesn’t care if his car was stolen.” The woman checked on Richie through the back window: he was tossing his skinny head about to the music. “You can figure that out: he stole it first himself.”
    John sighed. Hearing such an alarmist view, he was inclined to think the man even more harmless than he had earlier believed. John was by nature skeptical of exaggeration; he had always been that way. Things were rarely as bad or as good as assessed by the overexcitable.
    “Look,” he said, “do you want
me
to throw him out?”
    The car was still angled into and blocking one lane of the street, and the traffic had to swing around it. Some drivers sounded their horns in annoyance. Now Richie suddenly gunned the engine and accelerated away.
    “Hey,” the woman shouted, “he’s stealing
my
car!” She ran in pursuit, red hair flying.
    John actually felt relief. She could notify the police, and he would be well out of it. She undoubtedly had insurance against theft.
    But as it happened, Richie had belatedly done only what the cop had instructed him to do: pull into the nearest space at the curb, twenty yards up the street.
    Before either of them could involve him again, John limped to the office of the taxi service. Within, an enormously fat woman sat at a desk filled with gadgetry: PC, fax machine, telephone console with a selection of buttons, and a CB radio, all of which hardware looked to be well maintained. But the rest of the place was squalid: stained walls, filthy floor with conspicuously sticky patches, wastebasket overflowing with discarded fast-food containers and ex-soda cups.
    “Where to?” the fat woman asked, or rather grunted, disagreeably. John gave the address, and she squinted at him through little eyes that glinted from deep within her cheeks. “Let’s see your money.”
    He wondered how she suspected he carried none, and then remembered he had caught a glimpse of his own reflection in the plate-glass windows of the doughnut shop and for amoment thought it was someone else, unshaven and dressed in shabby clothes. A far cry from the workaday John Felton, in green blazer with the yellow breast-patch logo of the national real-estate association to which his employers belonged, and gray-and-white striped tie.
    He quickly explained all that might justifiably puzzle the taxi woman, and added, “I live at the address I gave: I can just run inside and get the fare.”
    The woman snorted porcinely. “Take a hike.” The phone rang, and she seized the handpiece in the pudgy fist at the end of a pneumatic forearm. “Twelve-oh-eight Fillmore. You got it.… Eight-ten minutes.” She pressed something on the radio and spoke into the little standing microphone. A