It had never happened to me, so I assumed it never would. There was no reason not to plan a trip to Death Valley for that Sunday, no reason not to make sandwiches for the trip, no reason to worry about anything at all. The problem was someone else had other plans, as I discovered on Sunday morning when my car was not where I'd left it the night before.
Of course, I knew instantly what had happened—my car had been stolen. But: stolen? I couldn't quite believe it. Dazed, the first thing I did was look for my apartment's property manager, but only a surly assistant was working, a woman who looked at me with no mercy and said merely, "There's nothing we can do about it, you know."
"What you're saying is you don't care," I spat at her. If security was not a concern, I'd make it one. I went home and wrote out six signs saying, "A resident's car was stolen from this parking lot Saturday night" and posted them everywhere. When I saw my downstairs neighbor at his car, I made sure to tell him. Another neighbor overheard us and came out on her balcony; her parking space was next to mine. They were sufficiently alarmed.
A theft like this is a little drama—what's going to happen, how long will it last? For me, the drama lasted only about 48 hours, ending with a 4 a.m. phone call from a Henderson police dispatcher. She said my car had been recovered on Stephanie Street, near Marie Callender's, and I had to get there right away or it would be towed.
It felt a bit like being in a movie, telling the cab driver I had to get to Henderson fast because the police were waiting for me. I remember him doing a double take. But he obliged, whizzing down 215 through the night to the lonely parking lot where an officer was, thankfully, still waiting. There was my car, windows down, singing her warning song—ding, ding, ding—from the jammed ignition. She had been driven hard, used and dumped. There was garbage everywhere inside the car. The plastic bags I'd meant to recycle were strewn knee deep. Beneath them lay fast food wrappers, an empty bottle, a bowl and ramen noodles all over the back seat. I found a nail clipper with a twisted file on the floor. There was an ashtray from another car, a cord for a cell phone. And clothing—a whole set of cheap clothes stuffed into my Whole Foods shopping bag—UNLV shirt, black pants, ugly sweater, undershorts, socks neatly balled up, and a pair of sneakers.
"Maybe he was in a hurry," the cop said.
With the help of a tow-truck driver, we got the car started. I was so happy riding home at daybreak. Some of the unknowns were known. But the person who stole my car, who was he? An invader from another part of town or a neighbor? Strangely, I felt sorry for him. I thought about how bankrupt his life must be, about the parts of his personality that had to be missing in order for him to do this.
He'd gone shopping inside my car, going through every single item, taking some things, leaving others. Of course he wanted the new fleece blanket and matching pillow, but not the wiper fluid. He wanted the tools and the maps and the first aid kit, but not the safety triangles. He even wanted the half-used bottle of hand lotion, although not the sunscreen. There were five library books in the car—he stole three of them, cookbooks, no less. A guy who left ramen noodles and a Burger King bag with a receipt for $1.58 attached aspires to be a cook?
Later in the week, I gathered up all his crap and took it to the Metro substation. Surely the fuzz would want this evidence.
When I had reported the crime, Metro informed me that vehicle theft is a felony, so if I spotted my car in town before the police did, I was to call them immediately. If I tried to reclaim it on my own, I could be stopped and removed from the car, possibly arrested. It sounded serious. So I couldn't help but notice the guy in the substation waiting area sneering as I presented my evidence to the police officer. None of it proved anything, I was told, and they weren't going to fingerprint a property crime.
But Metro is not completely indifferent to auto theft. There is a program called Watch Your Car that Metro and Henderson police have been part of since 2003. Funded by the U.S. Department of Justice, the program is designed to deter theft and to speed apprehension of stolen vehicles.
People who do not normally use their vehicles between 1 and 5 a.m. voluntarily register with police and receive two light-reflective decals, one for the front windshield, one for the rear window, that identify their vehicle to cops. The rear-window sticker is just a logo—at first it looks like a pair of watchful eyes beneath the brim of a hat. Looking closer, you see that the hat is a car and the eyes are wheels. (There is also a third decal available that alerts police at border crossings and ports of entry.) If spotted by police anywhere in the U.S. between 1 and 5 a.m., or near any land border at any time of day, the vehicle may be stopped to verify ownership.
The decals are supposed to be tamper-resistant, as it would take some time to scrape them off your windows and, in car theft, time is of the essence. The front window sticker states that it is a federal offense to remove them without the owner's permission. The funny thing, though, is that the sticky stuff seems to be on the wrong side of the decals, meaning you either have to put them on the outside of your car, or use some kind of glue to put them on the inside. I used rubber cement and hoped they're reflective enough to be seen through tinted windows.
I haven't noticed many of these stickers around town, but once your car's been stolen, you'll try anything.
Metro's website says the top 10 stolen cars (as of July 2003) are: Honda Civic and CRX; Honda Accord; Toyota Camry; Saturn SL; Acura Integra; Nissan Sentra; Toyota Corolla; Ford Mustang; Saturn SC; and Dodge Caravan. The local recovery rate is 75-85 percent, most within three days.
But don't be misled: no one's car is safe. Since my car was stolen in November, at least three others have been taken from my gated apartment complex alone.
But this experience showed me something about Las Vegas I'd never have seen otherwise, something that meant as much to me as anything I lost. I learned that there was someone nearby with a heart big enough to cancel out all the assholes I encountered during this journey, and then some.
She was my downstairs neighbor. Previously, we had passed on the stairs once or twice and never spoken. But as soon as she heard about what happened, she'd come to my door offering sympathy and succor.
"I'm so sorry to hear about your car," she began. She told me her sister's car had been stolen, twice, in California; she knew what an ordeal it was. "Do you need to be driven anywhere today?" she asked. "If you need anything, or if you just want to rant about the injustice of it all, you let me know."
An angel in Sin City. Imagine that.