- CHAPTER 3: School Life- © 2.15.2007

Shawn grabbed his backpack and two small objects from his dresser drawer.   A metal coat hanger was lying on his chair, and he folded it inside his solar-powered backpack.  Shawn took a deep breath, gave himself a wink, and walked out of his room and into the bright California sunlight.

The girls, nervously giggling, were waiting for him outside the West Campus gym parking lot.  The BMW Mary drove around on rare occasion looked like it just came out of a sauna, drenching with sweat from every pore.  They had left the car running for two hours with the air conditioner on full blast.  Leaving the air conditioner running for that long created a completely soaked interior trapping moisture along the windows.  There were even some poignant commands and ingenious observations other students made on the windows saying “Wash me!” and “I’m wet.” 

Shawn didn't catch the weather report that morning but he saw sparrows above flying eastward in a clear migration.  Other black birds were circling the campus and briefly perching themselves only along power lines running north and south.  Shawn knew from the two behaviors that rain was only hours away.  He remembered this is exactly what happened the last three times these events converged.

“Hi girls.  Looks like your car got water-ballooned from the inside.”

Sarah smiled and jumped up and down cheering at Shawn’s arrival.  Mary was in a rage of self- frustration.

“The leather is going to be ruined!  What if somebody broke in while we were playing tennis?  I can’t believe we didn’t notice the engine was on!  This…what…what am I going to do?” sputtered Mary while pulling her hair from every angle.

Shawn winked at Sarah, who hugged Mary to calm her down.  Shawn had seen worse situations than this.  He opened up his backpack to pull out a small blood pressure pump, along with a long plastic tube that fit into the air pump.   After attaching a thin air pouch made of Gore-tex rubber to one end of the air tube, he then connected the other end of the tube to the air pump.  After checking to make sure the connections were tight, Shawn pulled out the coat hanger and twisted it into a slightly bent rod, resembling a large letter V.   When Mary saw the last tool Shawn twisted into shape, she began to wonder if he would damage her window or chip her glow-in-the-dark paint while trying to open the door.  Maybe she should have just called AAA. 

Before she could voice her concern, Shawn let out a sigh of relief.  “Okay.  This should take less than six seconds... and there shouldn't be any damage to your car.”

As Shawn said these words, even Sarah was perplexed.  She had known Shawn for almost a year, and was always amazed by the little tricks and skills he seemed to have for any curve ball that would come his way.   But how could anyone open this car without chipping some paint or bending the window out of shape? Sarah wondered.

Without missing a beat, Shawn scanned the perimeter to see if anyone was watching.  He sighed as if he were a magician about to give away a major secret to the world.  It was 4:20 P.M., and classes were either in progress or done for the weekend. 

Seeing no one he could recognize other than three graduate students resting against the courtside bleachers, Shawn slipped the small wallet-sized air bag into the top corner slot of the car door.  Grinning at Sarah and bowing slightly at her mystified friend Mary, Shawn began to squeeze the air pump on the other side of the tube. 

Once, twice, three times he squeezed the pump, and following the laws of air pressurized within a confined space, the small Gore-tex bag that was sticking into the driver’s side door corner began to inflate like a balloon.  This in turn caused the door to stick out slightly from the top right corner.  With a final squeeze of the pump, a significant opening was created by this fist-sized air balloon, and it was large enough for Shawn to slide his coat hanger inside the car.  The angled shape of the coat hanger made it easy for Shawn to reach the automatic door opener located on the left door panel.

In less than four seconds, Shawn had opened this impeccable feat of German engineering without leaving a single mark.  Mary was astonished and screaming with joy and appreciation.  In her happiness at saving herself the headache of calling a towing company or a locksmith, which could have cost a hundred dollars, Mary offered to buy both of them dinner at the world-famous sushi joint called Miso Fishy on Sunset Boulevard that evening. 

Sarah realized something bigger about this rescue, and she knew that Shawn would wonder at some point whether she realized this fact or not.  Sarah was amazed by what she had just seen, but she realized immediately, and beyond Mary’s vista of thought, that this bit of knowledge was useful for breaking into any car on the face of this planet at any time -- without much difficulty.   Anybody with this knowledge could open any car, anywhere, without a crew or too much equipment.  A little knowledge could be a good thing, or a dangerous thing, depending on the situation and the application, Sarah remembered learning from life.   Then she began to wonder how easy it would be to hotwire a car once the doors were unlocked.

She would find out sooner than she ever wanted to.

Continued...