Free Returning Injury by Becky Due

thinking about when she chased a burglar.

    She and Jack were staying in a hotel in Rochester, Minnesota, where they went every year for their Mayo Clinic physicals. And every year they had the same room, a poolside suite with a door going out to the pool and another door that went out into the hall. Jack liked to sit out in the courtyard by the pool every morning to read his paper and drink coffee.
    They were both early risers, so one morning, still in their pajamas, they decided to go for a quick walk around the hotel. Around five-thirty, when they got back to their room, they were shocked by a man going through their things. Jack tried to grab him by the arm, but he got away and took off running. The defeated look on Jack’s face and not knowing what the thief had already stuffed into his backpack made Rebecca angry, so she kicked off her flip flops and yelled, “Call the police!” as she took off after him. Running as fast asshe could, she chased him out of the pool area and into a hallway. Then, not sure if her body wanted to go faster than her feet or vice versa, she fell hard and jammed her shoulder. She was thankful she had fallen on the carpet and not on the cement by the pool. She jumped up and continued after him.
    He ran into a fire escape stairwell; she was only one or two floors from him. She heard a door close and she started trying to open all the doors as she went down. The first floor door was the only one that opened, but she saw nobody. She asked a few people if they had seen a guy wearing black and carrying a red backpack running in this area. Nobody had. So she headed back upstairs to the second floor using a different set of stairs. She looked around and at the fire escape door, there it was, a bent hanger lying on the floor. He had propped a door open for his escape. Pissed that she hadn’t caught him, Rebecca headed to the front desk where she saw Jack and two police officers.
    The cops treated her like she was too little, too weak or maybe just too much of a woman, and she shouldn’t have chased the guy; it made her uncomfortable. She was just trying to protect herself, her husband and their property. And maybe she’d take a bad guy off the streets for a while. The only place the hotel had a camera was on the first floor, so they had video of Rebecca, in her pajamas, running out of the fire escape but no pictures of the crook. The police said they would continue checking the area.
    The bellhop and front-desk workers at the hotel were amused. They teased her, but not in a mean way. “What would you have done if you caught him?”
    “I would’ve beat the living shit out of him.”
    They laughed. Jack stood by, proud of his Rebecca. They asked Jack, “Why did you let her go after him.”
    “I can’t stop her from doing anything she wants to do. I just said go get him, honey, I’ll call the police.”
    Everybody laughed.
    And it made it easier to laugh, too, because Jack told Rebecca that he didn’t think the thief got anything, maybe a little cash. He asked her how much money she had had in her coin purse.
    “I think thirty or forty dollars. Did he get my necklace?”
    “Nope. We were lucky he got your thirty or forty bucks and that’s it.”
    Rebecca was relieved. She had put her ten-thousand-dollar diamond solitaire necklace inside her coin purse. Her computer was right where the thief was standing, along with Jack’s wallet and money clip with cash. They were thankful that they caught him when they did. If she had known that he only took a few bucks, she wasn’t sure she would have gone after him, but in that moment nobody could have stopped her.
    The next day Jack and Rebecca went for breakfast at the hotel cafe. Jack proudly told their server about Rebecca chasing the burglar. The server loved what Jack was telling her and she turned and beamed at Rebecca. Jack continued bragging. “We never saw the hotel security guards until pretty, feminine little Rebecca chases down the