Run for Your Life (Michael Bennett 2)

He had it all, didn’t he? he thought.

The V12 engine of the luxury BMW sedan came to life with an elegant explosion when he turned the key.

Too bad “it all” wasn’t nearly enough.

While the engine warmed, the New Man took a Palm Treo 750 smart phone from his silk-lined inside jacket pocket. The little gadget could do everything: phone, e-mail, surf the Web. He clicked on Microsoft Tasks and opened the file he’d been working on.

It was a mission statement, a brief written summary of his goals, philosophy, and ambitions. He’d actually gotten the idea from the movie Jerry Maguire, of all places. In it, Tom Cruise’s character sends out a mission statement that gets everyone all riled up.

That was precisely what the New Man was going to do today.

Except this was no movie.

He still liked Cruise, even though Cruise had made a fool of himself on Oprah with his couch-jumping antics. Maybe it was the slight resemblance they shared, but the New Man considered him a kind of a role model, almost a psychic brother. Cruise was a perfectionist, a peerless professional, a winner—just like himself.

Rereading the document for the hundredth time, he knew it was complete. The only problem that remained was how to sign it. There was no way he could use his real name, and the “New Man” wasn’t distinguished enough. He could feel the true name hovering at the edge of his mind, but he couldn’t quite reel it in. Well, it would come, he thought, closing the Treo down and tucking it back into his jacket. The important things always did.

He jauntily tapped the garage door opener on the Beemer’s visor, and backed out smoothly toward the daylight flooding in through the rising door.

Then his passing glance caught the rearview mirror again—just in time to see the immense grille of a Lincoln Navigator, parked in the driveway directly in his path.

He slammed on the brakes barely in time to keep from ramming the Navigator and turning the shiny, showy grille into a twisted chunk of metal.

He exhaled a seething breath through his gritted teeth and wrenched the gearshift into park. Goddamn Erica! She had to leave her monster SUV right there, didn’t she? Exactly in the one spot where he couldn’t get around it. Now he’d have to go back inside the house, find the keys, move it, then start all over again in the Beemer. Like he wasn’t in a distinct rush here. Like he didn’t have important things to do. Erica wouldn’t understand that—she’d never had anything important to do.

And now, she never would.

That thought made him feel a little better, but when he strode back to the Navigator three minutes later, his annoyance erupted all over again. This was cutting into his comfortable extra margin of time.

He twisted the key in the ignition so hard it bent, floored the accelerator, and threw the tranny into reverse. The SUV’s seventeen-inch tires screamed as it rocketed backward, streaking rubber down the length of the herringbone-patterned limestone driveway. Instead of curving along with it, he kept going straight, onto the immaculate lawn. The spinning tires tore deep gouges and threw up tufts of shining green grass.

Leaving the Navigator’s engine running, he parked the BMW, much more carefully, on the deserted suburban street. He was feeling a little calmer now. He was almost done with this crap, almost back where he’d started, and still ahead of schedule.

Then, as he was getting into the Navigator to return it to where it had been, a cold jet of water from a sprinkler pop-up lashed across the back of his designer suit from his shoulders to his waist.

His blue eyes practically smoked with fury, and he almost started pounding on the steering wheel with the heels of his hands. But a memory cut in, from an anger management therapy session he’d been ordered to take part in several years before. The therapist had concentrated on techniques to ratchet down his destructive rage: count backward from ten, breathe deeply, clench his fists, and pretend he was squeezing oranges.

Squeeze your oranges, he could almost hear her soothing voice saying to him. Then flick, flick, flick off the juice.

He gave it a try. Squeeze and flick. Squeeze and flick.

The sprinkler jet shot across the Navigator again, pissing into his face through the open window.

“I’ll show you anger management, you idiot bitch!” he snarled, and stomped on the accelerator.

Spraying grass and chunks of limestone, the SUV hurtled straight through the garage and into the back wall at thirty-five miles per hour. The crash was like a bomb going off in a phone booth, with studs splintering and clouds of drywall dust billowing through the air.

He managed to switch off the ignition around the deployed air bag, then squeezed himself out of the seat. Things were nice and quiet now, except for the hiss of the cracked radiator and the soft spattering of the lawn pop-ups.

“That’ll teach her,” he said.

Then he stopped dead.

Teach her. Teacher.

That was it—the perfect name he’d been looking for!

“Erica, you finally did one useful thing,” he said softly.