I slunk down into the seat of the Beetle, but not so low that I couldn’t see what was happening across the street. Rick got out of the sedan, walked slowly around the Civic, confirming that it was in fact my car. He must have been cruising the neighborhood, hoping to find me, and when he spotted a car similar to mine, wanted to investigate. Chances are he wouldn’t have taken notice of the plate number the other times he’d seen the car at my home.

He peered through the windows, looking first in the back, then the front, and his eyes landed on the purse in the front seat. If he was anything like me, he couldn’t tell one purse from another—this skill shortage had led me to hide in this Volkswagen in the middle of the night—but this purse looked close enough to Stefanie’s that he figured he had the right car. He tried all four doors, found them all locked, and walked calmly back to his own vehicle, reaching for something from the back seat.

A baseball bat.

He swung it hard and took out the driver’s-door window. Shards of glass flew across the interior. Inside the Beetle, with the windows up, I could barely hear it. He pulled up the door lock, opened the door, and took the purse, which he tossed into his own car. But he’d looked through this purse once before and knew it hadn’t contained a ledger. Maybe, he thought, it was in my car somewhere.

So he began a search of it, not unlike mine moments earlier of the Beetle. He rooted through the trunk, looked under the seats, ripped up the back seat. Frustrated, he glared at the car, paced back and forth angrily, looking like Basil Fawlty getting ready to beat it to death with a tree branch. The bat, I suspected, would be more effective.

He took out the front window first. It took about ten swings of the bat to break out all the glass. Then the three remaining passenger windows, and finally, the back. But that wasn’t enough to satisfy him. He smashed off the mirrors, then swung the bat into the middle of the hood. The fenders were next, followed by the headlights, taillights, and trunk lid.

Jeez, I thought, why don’t you just set fire to it?

Rick went back to his car to hunt for something. He had a rag, possibly part of an old shirt. Then he opened the driver’s door on my car, pulled the lever next to the seat that popped the tiny door on the back fender that covers the gas cap, unscrewed it, and stuffed the rag partway down the tube.

Then, with a lighter, he set it ablaze.