Protectors

by Kris Nelscott

  “Are you saying no one cares about them in Chicago?” Pammy asked.

  “I’m saying Chicago has many more issues to care about, and so do the locals. The gangs, the violence, the drug trade—if a bunch of kids march about something in the third world, most of us wouldn’t have paid attention,” Val said.

  “Yet the Democratic National Convention, that whole debacle was in Chicago,” Pammy said.

  “With imported radicals,” Val said. “Most of the people arrested were from out of town.”

  Her words hung in the air. Pammy wasn’t quite sure what Val was getting at.

  Val must have seen the question on Pammy’s face. “If you’re going to target kids, activist kids, kids who might make some kind of difference, maybe, you don’t do it in Chicago. You do it here. Everyone knows San Francisco is hippie central.”

  “But this isn’t San Francisco,” Pammy said.

  “No, it’s not. But it’s close. And you said,” and with the emphasis on that you, Val turned toward Eagle, “that the center of the hippie movement had moved from the Haight to Berkeley. So if someone was up on all of that, they would have moved too.”

  Val had a point. But Pammy had missed so much of their conversation that she felt left out.

  So she waited for Eagle to respond. Eagle wasn’t saying anything, though. She was still comparing all the papers, with an expression on her face that probably mimicked Pammy’s half an hour ago.

  It almost felt like the solution was there in black-and-white, but she couldn’t see it.

  “What I’ve been trying to figure out,” Pammy said, “is who would target the activists? And why? The government?”

  “Now you sound like them. Paranoid as shit.” Eagle raised her head, her eyes narrow. She and Pammy had fought about this dozens of times before. Eagle hated it when someone criticized the government, even when the government deserved the criticism.

  “We were attacked down here,” Pammy said.

  “By little boys with their toys,” Eagle said. “Little military wannabes. The National Guard, who were happy they weren’t in Nam but liked to pretend that they’re soldiers too.”

  Pammy didn’t say anything to that. She couldn’t. Eagle hadn’t yet shared most of her experiences in Vietnam, but from what Pammy could tell, Eagle felt like she’d been assigned to a medical unit in hell.

  Eagle leaned in toward her, hands still on the papers. “There was nothing covert about what happened down here. Shit, Pammy, police from all over the Bay Area marched in a solidarity parade last winter. And they arrested a bunch of kids for no reason at all. That’s not covert behavior. They have the power—and the support of the Silent Majority—to do whatever they want to those kids.”

  “It’s like the Jim Crow South,” Val said so softly that Pammy wasn’t sure she had spoken for a moment.

  Eagle glanced at her, expression bemused.

  “Yeah,” Eagle said slowly. “It is just like the Jim Crow South. Or a town outside an Indian reservation.”

  Pammy started. She wasn’t sure she’d ever heard Eagle say something like that.

  “If you’re so inclined,” Eagle was saying, “you can do whatever you want to certain groups. You can persecute them and even if you’re caught, you won’t get in trouble.”

  Pammy was having trouble following some of this. She felt like there was a point to Eagle’s speech that both Eagle and Val understood, and Pammy didn’t know at all.

  “And that’s relevant how?” she asked.

  “If your list is accurate,” Eagle said, “then these kids don’t belong to those groups. These are entitled, spoiled kids whose parents have enough scratch to send them to school—”

  “Newsome said he didn’t have money,” Pammy said. “His daughter had a scholarship.”

  “But that’s not going to be obvious to someone who is targeting these kids,” Eagle said.

  “If someone is targeting these kids,” Val said. “If the missing kids are actually tied together.”

  “The street kids are as obvious as it gets,” Eagle said. “They’re easy pickins for a variety of reasons. A regular college student, even one involved in some damn movement, isn’t.”

  “Are you saying our man in the truck is doing this for the challenge?” Pammy asked.

  “I’m saying there’s something else at play here, something we don’t entirely understand.” Eagle tapped the papers again. “But we have a list. Do you have a contact in admissions, Pammy? Someone who can tell you if these kids are still enrolled?”

  She did. She knew a number of women who worked there.

  “I can ask them if I can figure out how I can easily claim I need that information,” Pammy said.

  Val leaned back on her heels, her new shoes squeaking just a bit. “You said you had a student class earlier. Can’t you be double-checking your enrollment?”

  “With boys too?” Pammy asked. She never allowed men to take classes here. She wanted the women to feel safe.

  “Just tell the admissions office that you’re branching out,” Eagle said.

  “Yeah,” Pammy said snidely. “A Gym of Her Own is now accepting men.”

  “Is that true?” A voice came from behind her. Pammy turned. Mattie was standing there, a large purse with a wet towel sticking out of it over one shoulder. “Are you taking men now?”

  “No,” Pammy said. “I was just making a very lame joke.”

  “Good,” Mattie said. “Because I like this place. It wouldn’t be the same with men.”

  Then she waggled her fingers at Pammy as a wave goodbye and headed out the front door.

  All three women watched her go. Pammy waited until she left before saying anything.

  “That’s why they won’t believe me in admissions,” Pammy said.

  “Oh, they’ll believe anything you tell them,” Eagle said. “You just present it as something new. They won’t think twice.”

  She was probably right. Most people didn’t care about what others were doing.

  “So,” Pammy said, “I figure out if the kids on this list are still enrolled, and then what? We’re not trained investigators.”

  “No, we’re not.” Val spoke this time. “But all the trained investigators with any kind of authority don’t care. I suppose we could hire a private detective. I could—”

  “Kids down here won’t talk to anyone official,” Pammy said. “I can barely talk to them. They’d run from a detective.”

  “So we have to figure this out on our own,” Val said, involving herself in this. Pammy didn’t mind, oddly. She liked having one more person on this team. If, indeed, she could call the three of them a team.

  “And that’s where I get stumped,” Eagle said. “Because if we find something, then what do we do?”

  “We have options,” Pammy said. “We can go to the authorities, or take action if it’s warranted and within our capabilities. But we’re not sure if this is just a rumor, right? Like that kids’ parking story about the guy with the hook? Everyone believes it, so it must be true, but it might just be a collection of weird coincidences.”

  “I know a man in Chicago who says there are no coincidences,” Val said.

  “Yeah, I’ve heard that,” Eagle said. “But at the same time, I’ve seen doctors misdiagnose because they thought they saw a pattern where there was none. They didn’t know the culture, so they didn’t know what was normal.”

  She was talking about Vietnam. Pammy didn’t ask any more about it. She didn’t want to be sidetracked.

  Instead, she said, “You’re saying Jill has a point?”

  “Even broken clocks are right twice a day,” Eagle said drily.

  Val moved around Eagle and looked at the papers. Then Val ran her fingers across the flyer.

  “You know,” she said, “we’re missing something obvious here.”

  She had a deceptively quiet way of speaking. Pammy had noticed that earlier. Val stated things, and to someone who was only paying a little bit of atte
ntion, it was easy to ignore what Val said. But that quiet way of speaking masked a formidable intelligence.

  Eagle seemed to know it as well. She softened her voice when she spoke to Val, as if Val’s very presence shaved off some of Eagle’s edges.

  “What are we missing?” Eagle asked.

  “Darla Newsome,” Val said. “We don’t know if she fits the pattern, or even if there is a pattern. All we know is that she’s missing and her parents are looking for her. We don’t know if she was active in anything. We don’t even know if she intended to stay in school.”

  “Too bad we can’t talk to the roommate,” Pammy said.

  “Why can’t we?” Eagle asked.

  Val let out a short bark of a laugh. And Pammy smiled too. Of all the people to ask that question, Eagle was a study in obliviousness.

  “We’re Establishment,” Pammy said. “That roommate isn’t going to tell us anything more than she’d tell the police.”

  “Too bad we can’t enlist your friend Strawberry,” Eagle said.

  “We could,” Pammy said.

  “I sure as hell wouldn’t trust her,” Eagle said. “Would you?”

  Pammy thought about it. She had trusted Strawberry with a lot of things.

  “I would,” Pammy said. “I’d believe she’d tell us what she learned from the roommate.”

  “But would she ask the right questions?” Eagle asked.

  Pammy wasn’t so certain about that. Strawberry might think some of their concerns were irrelevant and not ask, even if those concerns were important.

  “I could talk to the roommate,” Val said.

  Both Pammy and Eagle looked at her.

  Val shrugged. “I get mistaken for a college student all the time. It has to do with my size mostly. But most people don’t really look at my face.”

  “You mean most white people,” Pammy said.

  Val tilted her head a little. “You said it, not me.”

  Eagle examined Val as if seeing her with new eyes. So did Pammy. Dressed the way she was, and as thin as she was, Val could pass for a student.

  “You’d have to dump the Chicago PD shirt,” Eagle said.

  “Obviously,” Val said.

  “But otherwise, yeah, you’re right.” Eagle looked at Pammy. “The roommate would get us information to go with the information you’d get from admissions.”

  “What are you going to do?” Pammy asked, partly because she was feeling a little out of sorts.

  “I’m going to check the hospitals,” Eagle said, “and see if any of these kids were admitted recently.”

  “You can do that?” Val asked.

  “Yeah,” Eagle said. “If I present it right. Former patients, all that.”

  Pammy’s stomach was tied in knots. “What are you thinking?”

  “I’m not thinking anything yet,” Eagle said. “I’m hoping.”

  “What are you hoping, exactly?” Pammy asked.

  “I’m hoping that Val’s Chicago friend is wrong. I’m hoping that there are coincidences.” Eagle rapped a fist on the counter top.

  “If there are,” Val said, “then that still leaves us with your poor injured woman in the truck.”

  “And Darla Newsome, who is missing,” Pammy said.

  “And twenty kids who are just living their lives somewhere else,” Eagle said, “instead of becoming victims of some sick human being who gets off on harming people.”

  “Is that what you think is going on?” Pammy asked, her heart pounding.

  “What I think and what I know are two different things,” Eagle said.

  “I get that,” Pammy said. “I’m asking what you think.”

  “I’m thinking I don’t like any of this,” Eagle said. “I’m thinking we figure it out, not out of the goodness of our hearts, but because we have to protect our own.”

  “They’re not our own,” Pammy said.

  “We don’t know that either,” Eagle said. “How many people have never come back to this gym?”

  Pammy felt her cheeks heat. “I always thought they didn’t like class.”

  “And that’s probably true,” Eagle said. “But we don’t know, do we?”

  Val was watching them both. Then she inclined her head, as if she had decided to speak up.

  “I come from a place where you just take action,” she said. “We never expect the authorities to help. If you have a problem, you solve it.”

  “Do we have a problem?” Pammy asked, looking at Eagle.

  “I have a problem,” Eagle said with great force. “That damn woman will haunt me for the rest of my life if I don’t do something. You of all people should understand that, Pammy.”

  Pammy let out a small sigh. “Oh, I do,” she said in a near-whisper. “Believe me, I do.”

  19

  Val

  The gym’s silence didn’t bother me. It didn’t feel like a portent of bad things to come. Normally—or what passed for normal to me now—silence was as big an enemy to me as sound. Maybe more of one, because the last thing I wanted to do was relax my guard.

  And given what we were discussing—the possible disappearance of at least two dozen college students—I should have felt more tense, not less.

  But for the first time in a long time, I wasn’t twitching with nervousness. And I wasn’t talking to two women who treated me like something broken and fragile.

  They were treating me like an equal. Maybe they were a little wary—or at least, Pammy was. I would’ve been too, in her shoes. She didn’t know me. As far as she was concerned, I was that skittish woman she’d first talked to just yesterday outside the gym, not someone with such a large brain that my cousin Marvella called me the smartest, most educated person she had ever known.

  People passed outside the too-large plate-glass window, multicolored shapes that were mostly a blur of shadow and light. I had jumped a lot yesterday as people went by—fewer people than were going by right now. But I wasn’t jumping now.

  Maybe my attitude had changed.

  Maybe I just needed something to do.

  Or maybe, just maybe, I needed people to treat me like a competent human being again. Neither Eagle nor Pammy really knew my story, so they didn’t feel like they had to protect me from the world.

  In fact, they were reintroducing it to me, in all its hideous glory.

  Eagle was the one who was shifting her body slightly. She smelled faintly of sweat, something I hadn’t noticed before. The mention of that woman who had been kidnapped agitated her in a way that telling the story of the kidnapping didn’t. The story of the kidnapping had become just that for her—a story—but the thought of the woman herself upset Eagle deeper than I could have imagined.

  Pammy, on the other hand, seemed both calm and unsettled. That quiet way she spoke belied the passion behind the way she had answered Eagle. They both had ghosts in their pasts, ghosts of women, maybe, or ghosts of injured people they couldn’t help.

  I didn’t want to be one of them. I was here to get stronger. I couldn’t do that if everyone around me was handing me a crutch all the time.

  I had learned a lot about investigation from Truman. He always expounded on the right way to do it, and the wrong way.

  The wrong way, he used to say, was to wait for the information to come to the investigator. The right way was to take the same path that the average person would take to find out the information, and then expand from there.

  “Do you have a phone book somewhere?” I asked Pammy.

  She looked at me, eyebrows raised ever so slightly over her striking blue eyes.

  “Yeah, why?” she asked.

  “Because I’m going to see if Darla Newsome is listed.”

  Both she and Eagle looked at me like I had grown a third head.

  “You don’t think someone came after Newsome because she was in the phone book, do you?” Pammy asked.

  I shook my head. “I just want to talk to her roommate. It seemed like the easiest way.”

  Eag
le smiled warmly at me, and Pammy frowned at her. I had no idea what the dynamic was between the two of them, and I wasn’t going to ask.

  “The phone and the phone book are in my office,” Pammy said. “If you wait a minute—”

  “I’ll take her,” Eagle said, and started to walk away.

  “No,” Pammy said firmly. “I’ll do it. If someone comes in, let them get started without me.”

  “And what if they’re new?” Eagle asked. “I don’t want to deal with someone new.”

  “Have them wait,” Pammy said, as if it were the easiest thing in the world.

  I shrugged a little at Eagle, and let Pammy lead me to the back. The gym was bigger than I had ever thought when I stood outside. Once we went past the locker room—which was a good sized room by itself, when you considered the showers and the benches—we entered a slight hallway that was still wider that the one in my apartment.

  There were two doors at the end of the hallway. One, to the right, had a rectangular sign like you’d often see on office doors. It said Kitchen instead of someone’s name. Below the sign, someone had taped a piece of paper that read:

  Please do not enter without the permission of staff.

  I wondered exactly who “staff” was. I thought Pammy ran the business on her own.

  She didn’t even look at the door to the kitchen. She went directly to the other door and pulled a key out of her pocket, unlocking a deadbolt I hadn’t even noticed.

  I was a bit surprised. Apparently Eagle had a key to the office, or she wouldn’t have offered to bring me here.

  Pammy stepped in first, then scooped some papers off the desk, put them into a folder and set it on a dusty credenza. She took a metal cash box and placed it inside the top drawer of a nearby filing cabinet.

  The drawer had a tiny lock built in, and she locked that. As if it would do any good. I could pick that with a hairpin in a half second, a skill Truman had taught me when he was trying to figure out how hard it would be for “just anyone” to learn how to break into secured areas.

  Apparently, as the smartest and most educated person he knew, I was also, in his opinion, the least likely to be able to learn criminal behavior, something that offended me more than I wanted to admit.