No problem losing pursuit in such a warren. The boxes we live in! he thinks. The boxes! Okay, he’s out on Prospect, they’ll never find him. Police cars are cruising, heading down toward Tustin and the scene of his attacks. Busy night, hey Officer? Jim feels an urge to run out into the street and shout “I did it! I did it!” He actually finds his feet on the track when fear jumps him and he hauls ass back into the dark between streetlights, shivering uncontrollably. Are those people on foot, back there? That’s not normal, he has to run again. Can’t go back for his car, no public transport, can’t reach anywhere on foot. He laughs hard, tries hitchhiking. Turn right down Hewes. He gives up hitchhiking, no one ever picks up hitchhikers, and besides where is he going? He jogs down Hewes to 17th, gasping. Over into Tustin, onto Newport, then Redhill. A couple of times he stops to pick up good stones, and then throws them through the windows of real estate offices that he passes. He almost tries a bank but remembers all the alarms. By now he must have tripped off a score of lesser alarms, are the computers tracking his course this very moment, predicting the moves that he is helplessly jerking through?

People passing in cars stare at him: pedestrians are suspicious. He needs a car. Cut off from his car he is immobilized, helpless. Where can he go? Can he really be here, doing this? Is he really in this situation? He seizes an abandoned hubcap, frisbees it into the window of a Jack-in-the-Box. A beautiful flight, although the window only cracks. But it’s like hitting a beehive; employees and customers pour out and in a second are after him. He takes off running into the applex behind him, threads his way silently through it. He stumbles over a bicycle, picks it up with every intention of stealing it and pedaling off, gives up and drops it when he sees the Mickey Mouse face, staring at him from between the handlebars.

Back on Redhill, farther south, he sees a bus. Incredible! He jumps on it, pays, and off they go. Only one other passenger, an old woman.