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I was to learn much later how very curious a scene this must have been for anyone there who noticed: as I paced back and forth staring at the fax and trying to decide what to do, the DMV investigators were following in my footsteps, keeping close behind me. Every time I turned in the opposite direction, they would swing right back into position behind me, as if we were all part of some clown act at the circus.

At last I stepped outside the back entrance, and walked over to the pay phone. As I picked up the receiver and started dialing, I noticed four suits walking out in my direction.

Huh, I thought. I hadn’t paid for the fax yet, and now there was going to be trouble over the couple of bucks I owed. All four were looking directly at me.

I said, “What do you want?” staring down the woman, who was closest to me.

“DMV investigators—we want to talk to you!”

Dropping the pay phone handset, I called out, “You know what? I don’t want to talk to you!” while tossing the fax into the air, calculating that one or more of them would go for it.

I was already running through the parking lot. My heart was racing, my adrenaline pumping. I focused all my energy on outrunning my pursuers.

Those many hours I’d spent in the gym, day after day, month after month, paid off. The hundred pounds I had shed made all the difference. I ran north through the parking lot, dashed over a narrow wooden footbridge leading into a residential area dotted with palm trees, and kept running as hard as I could, never looking back. I was expecting to hear a helicopter at any minute. I needed to change my appearance, and quick, so if an air unit was dispatched to search for me, I could slow to a walk and blend in with the normal street traffic.

When I was far enough ahead to be out of my pursuers’ sight, without slowing I began to shed clothes. Still a gym rat, I was wearing shorts and a gym shirt under my street clothing. I got off my outer shirt and threw it over a hedge as I ran. I ducked down an alley, stepped out of my trousers and dumped them in the bushes in someone’s yard, then started running again.

I kept up the pace for forty-five minutes, until I was sure the DMV agents had given up. Sick to my stomach and feeling as if I might vomit from the exertion, I ducked into a neighborhood bar to rest and catch my breath.

I was happy about my narrow escape but distressed all the same. I found a pay phone in the back of the bar and dialed my own cell phone, still in Gram’s car. I called over and over and over. No answer.

And again. And still no answer. Shit! Why wasn’t she picking up? I was afraid she might’ve gone into Kinko’s looking for me, maybe even asked the clerks or other customers if they’d seen me. Damn! I had to get hold of her.

Time for a Plan B. I called the supermarket and told the person who answered that my elderly grandmother was parked in the handicapped spot right outside the market. “I was supposed to meet her,” I explained, “but I’m stuck in traffic. Could someone please go out and bring her to the phone? I’m worried about her health.”

I paced back and forth, waiting and waiting. Finally the man I’d spoken to got back on the phone and said he hadn’t been able to find her. Oh, fuck! Had she ventured inside Kinko’s? I was going out of my mind wondering what could be happening.

At last I managed to track down my cousin Trudy and tell her what was going on. After yelling at me, she drove to the parking lot and searched up and down the rows until she found Gram’s car—not in front of the supermarket but outside Kinko’s. My sixty-six-year-old gray-haired grandmother was still sitting in the driver’s seat waiting for me.

The two of them joined me at a nearby Dupar’s restaurant, which I had made my way to on foot, feeling sick over Gram’s having had to sit in her car for what by now was about three hours. When they walked in the door, I was hugely relieved to see that she was okay.

“I kept calling you—why didn’t you answer the phone?” I asked.

“I heard it ringing, but I don’t know how to use a cell phone,” she answered.

Incredible!