After a little walk...

Stealing a car is easy. All it takes is a gun or some brute ****, maybe a power drill. Stealing a car you plan on returning takes a bit of finesse. By the time you get to Fond Duluth Casino’s parking ramp you might as well have walked to Beth’s place and picked up her RAV4, but where the fuck’s the fun in that?

Once you get into the ramp itself, it’s a matter of looking for two things. An older car, say from the late 90s, and a parking voucher in the window. The VIP ramp would be easier, but the cars there tend to be more noticeable and the cameras are a little more vigilant, so you stick to the general access ramp, where the lighting is bad, the cameras are sparse and easily noticeable, and the cars tend to fall squarely into the category that used to be called ‘hoopties’. This means they’re far less likely to draw the attention of the police.

You find what you’re looking for on the third floor of the ramp in a west corner. A ‘97 Honda Accord. Compact, in relatively good shape, and fortunately Unlocked. The voucher is about two hours old, and odds are pretty good that the owner will be in a statistics and probability class for another good couple hours (which is to say playing penny slots). You only intend to be using it for a little under thirty minutes.

It’s the work of mere minutes to get the engine started and pop the steering lock, and after paying the $4 parking fee, you and Beth are on your way to your place. Well, one of your places, but this one is where you keep your car. The eight minute drive to Lincoln Park is an easy one in midday traffic, though the car’s heater doesn’t kick in until you’re well past Mesaba Avenue.

Lincoln Park used to be a business district, but it’s fallen on hard times and until recently the only businesses that could keep afloat were a number of bars. In the last few years there’s been a drive to revitalize and clean up the neighborhood; new restaurants and other store fronts popping up almost overnight, creating a strange dichotomy of aged and decrepit with shiny and new. Your place is an apartment over top of an old restaurant called Lee’s that serves what can loosely be called pizza.

You pull up behind the building and fish out your keychain, opening the garage you rent and revealing a relatively well maintained ‘00 Toyota Camry. You then follow Beth back to the parking ramp, pull into the short term parking (‘Under an Hour, Free!), and replace the car where you borrowed it from, undoing your amateur electrician work, and restoring the vehicle to the condition you encountered it in with the aid of some electrical tape.

You and Beth then return to your pad in the Park. As you drive she snuggles up to you over the gear shift and you silently mourn the passing of the bench seat and column shifter.