Protectors

by Kris Nelscott

  Thanks to her training and the things she had seen in Pleiku, she knew what certain drugs did in large quantities. She could make him overdose, if need be. Or she could guarantee that Lavassier would live, but never hurt anyone again.

  She wasn’t sure she wanted to be judge, jury, and executioner, though, even though she wouldn’t execute him, even in the worst case scenario. She would guarantee that he couldn’t walk again. Or couldn’t use his hands.

  Or couldn’t think. She woke up on Tuesday night to find herself debating what would be better—leaving him a quadriplegic or just a mindless thing.

  She had already ruled out a fatal overdose. She didn’t want there to be any chance that she or her friends would go to jail for harming this man.

  But she believed that she could hurt him permanently. All it would take would be one or two minutes alone with him, after Val and Pammy had exited the room. One shot between his toes, one tab under his tongue, and Lavassier would be damaged for good.

  She decided to have the materials on hand but not make a decision as to what to do until she’d assessed the entire situation.

  That need for flexibility left her with a lot of errands to run. She needed to get a large medical kit, and she needed to upgrade her medical supplies. She stashed a second bag in her truck, just in case.

  She also cleaned her apartment again, this time removing all of the illegal drugs, from the marijuana she bought on Telegraph to the tabs of LSD she had acquired the past year to the back-up kit she’d brought back from Nam. A number of the soldiers she’d worked with had back-up kits, although they all called it something else—the security blanket, the exit strategy, the escape route.

  She didn’t need hers anymore. She wasn’t going to end her life, no matter what kind of nightmares she had. She had proven that to herself over and over again. The kit was redundant, and here, in this apartment, it was also dangerous.

  She never said anything to Pammy or Val, but part of her knew that she was preparing for the worst-case scenario. Worst case: Eagle couldn’t return to the apartment. Someone else would have to clean it out.

  Somewhere in the middle of all that planning and prep, she moved her pistol to the truck as well, making sure it stayed locked. She put the weapon in a small metal cash box, made sure the thing was locked with a tiny key, and had a combination lock on the front.

  Someone had to be really determined to break into that. And they had to know something valuable was in it. Her truck was such a ratty vehicle that it looked like it could hold nothing valuable.

  Still, she wrapped the cash box in a shirt and put it inside a woven pouch that someone had given her a long time ago. Then she stashed it on the floor—not under the seat. Anyone looking to steal something would look under the seat and consider whatever was in plain sight to be worthless.

  She also monitored what Pammy and Val were doing.

  Pammy was in charge of getting Finders Inc.’s phone number. There were only a handful of answering services in the Bay Area, and only a few of those had options that allowed someone to call in from any neighboring community.

  Pammy had guessed that Lavassier would use one of those services and have multiple phone numbers for various areas in the Bay. She toyed with talking to Stella and asking Stella to contact the MacGivers, but Eagle had talked Pammy out of that.

  Eagle didn’t want anyone else to know that they were going to contact Lavassier. And that meant Stella—even though Pammy thought Stella trustworthy.

  Eagle was beginning to think that Stella was trustworthy as well, but Eagle also knew that the fewer people involved in this the better. They were planning to do something not entirely legal—hell, completely illegal—and she didn’t want word to get out that they were involved.

  Val had little to do to prepare. Part of that was by design: Eagle wanted full control over this operation. Part of it, though, was that there wasn’t much Val could do.

  She didn’t know the area. She didn’t have a vehicle. And she had no physical skills although, as she kept saying, she was working on them.

  She was, in many ways, the brains of the group. She put pieces together. So Eagle kept her informed about some of the important things. Eagle also had her check, by phone, on the names that Pammy had gotten from the admissions office.

  First, Val called the students who were still in town, the ones who were still enrolled. Two of them spoke to her, seemed stunned that people thought they were missing, and laughed about it. All they had done, they told her, was drop out of the political activities they had been involved in.

  Apparently, they had said (in different ways) that they were disillusioned by the presidential election the fall before, and they didn’t see the point of activism any longer. One of them had cited all the assassinations, and that he had decided to keep his head down and pretend like nothing was going on in his world.

  Val reported that she had refrained from wishing him good luck with that.

  She couldn’t reach the third student and wanted to visit the address, but Eagle discouraged her.

  They were moving from information-gathering to action, and once they hit action, there was no turning back.

  Besides, if they got caught riffling Lavassier’s truck—truly the most dangerous part of the operation, in Eagle’s opinion—then she didn’t want anyone to tie them back to the information they’d gathered earlier in the week.

  Thursday morning, Eagle had just finished with the reorganization of her apartment when she got a phone call from Pammy.

  “I got his number,” Pammy said, “and I don’t want to contact him alone.”

  “Call Val,” Eagle said. “I’ll be right there.”

  “She’s here for class. Remember, he’ll have to call us back.”

  “I know,” Eagle said.

  “If we use the gym’s number, I’ll have to answer until we hear from him. We can’t have someone say the name of the gym,” Pammy said.

  Eagle thought of letting Val and Pammy come to her apartment. But that meant someone would have to babysit the phone until he called back.

  She glanced at the clock on the stove. It was 11:00. If he was between clients, he would probably check his messages during the noon break. She would.

  “I think the gym number is fine,” Eagle said. “One of the three of us can man it until he calls.”

  If he called. Her stomach twisted. She wanted him to call. She had no back-up plan if he didn’t.

  But they could delay their plan if they had to. They could wait until they heard from him.

  Eagle grabbed her regular purse, checked for her wallet and keys, then let herself out of the apartment.

  She hated that this part of the plan was in his control.

  But she was excited that they were going to get underway.

  She hadn’t lost her resolve. She wanted to catch this man. She had wanted to catch him since she saw him slam that woman’s head into his F-350.

  “Game on, you son of a bitch,” she whispered, and hurried down the stairs.

  47

  Pammy

  Pammy hung up the phone and pressed her hands over her mouth. This was her last chance to back out before they contacted Lavassier, before they took the step that crossed a line from which they could never return.

  Her office was quiet, and it looked no different than it had two days before when they had come up with a plan that would get Lavassier out of Berkeley. It might even make him stop permanently.

  Or it might destroy them all.

  Thin sunlight trailed in from the only window, despite the fact that she had pulled the curtains. She had kept the overhead light off, almost as if she were hiding. On the yellow legal pad before her, she had doodled the numbers of the various answering services. Below them, she had written all five phone numbers for Finders, Inc. and had drawn a box around them.

  Her heart was pounding, and she felt slightly sick. She could probably back out. Hand the phone numbers over to Val and Eagle, and jus
t back away from all of this.

  Then Pammy folded her hands together and tapped her thumbs against her lips. She had a feeling of impending doom. She had had it ever since she had started calling the answering services. She had it now.

  And she knew why: she was choosing to cross a line.

  In the past, she had crossed lines because someone had pushed her. Stella had brought injured friends here as a refuge. Pammy hadn’t brought those injured women here, and she hadn’t helped them. She had just given advice and found someone else to help them escape.

  She had never before initiated action against someone.

  She had never decided to actively stop someone.

  She had never crossed that line between concerned citizen, acting in a tough situation of someone else’s making, and becoming a vigilante.

  Eagle’s plan took them precariously close to vigilante. It maybe even crossed the line, depending on what happened after they searched Lavassier’s truck.

  She kept hearing her father, complaining about neighborhood protection groups deciding to stop crime on their own.

  They always make it worse, her father had said. They think they know what they’re doing, and they don’t.

  Pammy hated having his voice in her head. He had lived in a different time and in a different place. It wasn’t a simpler time, but it was one that seemed simpler.

  Or maybe, as Eagle had said, Pammy was looking at her father’s wisdom on law and law enforcement from the perspective of a child who had a policeman father, not from the perspective of an adult woman who knew that there were areas where the law did not work.

  Pammy pushed her chair back. She had called Eagle the moment she had the phone numbers. That had been Pammy’s subconscious, making it impossible to change her mind.

  Or rather, Pammy could change her mind. But, now, because Pammy had called her, because Pammy had told her the numbers existed, Eagle would take those numbers and continue with the plan. Val would help her.

  Val really wanted to do this, for reasons Pammy could only guess at, reasons Pammy didn’t really understand.

  Both Val and Eagle needed Pammy. Neither Eagle nor Val were strong enough to fight Lavassier on their own. If he discovered Val inside his truck, looking for something, he would break her in half. She had no idea how to defend herself.

  If Eagle pulled a gun on him, he would wrest it from her with a twist of the wrist.

  And then he would beat them both nearly to death, like he had done with Kelly MacGivers. Pammy didn’t need to hear the hospital report to know what he had done to Kelly MacGivers, what he had done to the others.

  Just Eagle’s description of how he had treated that last girl had convinced Pammy this man had to be stopped. It didn’t take much to go from using the side of a truck to beat a girl into submission to hitting her so hard that he crushed her cranium and “accidentally” killed her.

  This Lavassier was used to dealing with criminals. He hadn’t moderated his behavior to deal with unathletic and possibly drug-addled college students.

  Pammy could train wives and family members of violent men. She could teach people how to defend themselves.

  But Pammy couldn’t reach the students Lavassier would target in the future. She couldn’t train them to fight back. They had no idea they were at risk, and if they were involved in the “Movement” as Strawberry called it, they weren’t likely to go to a gym just off Telegraph. Strawberry was the exception, not the rule.

  The police already knew about this man. They couldn’t stop him. Any more than the police department that Pammy’s father had worked for in Philadelphia had been able to stop all the killings ordered by organized crime.

  There were holes and failures in the way that law enforcement worked, in any area. Pammy’s father had never discussed those with his daughter.

  She had no idea if he had taken extra-legal action to shut down some bad people. No one would confess something like that to a child.

  But there was evidence that he was concerned about those lawless areas. He had trained her to defend herself, after all.

  Sometimes, baby girl, he had said, there’s no one around to protect you. So at those times, you have to know how to protect yourself.

  That advice, which he had repeated after every time her mother had interrupted them, every time her mother had argued that the things he had taught Pammy weren’t “ladylike,” had been Pammy’s guiding principle. She had repeated those words to some of her classes, had murmured them to frightened women afraid to clench a fist.

  Her father had been right.

  Pammy had been right.

  But neither of them had gone far enough.

  Men like Lavassier found loopholes in the law. They exploited those loopholes for personal gain.

  Lavassier was getting rich off of desperate families and wayward teenagers.

  The police wouldn’t be able to stop him. Hell, some cops might even agree with what he was doing.

  Pammy was a realist: She knew she would get no help from the police. She also knew that there were some cops, like this Brunsan who had investigated Lavassier, who were disturbed by the things Lavassier had done.

  The best she could hope for was that they would look the other way.

  Pammy put a piece of paper over those phone numbers. Her hand hovered for a moment.

  Pammy had to get Val. Pammy also needed Jill to start the class, just in case this took longer than Pammy expected.

  If Eagle got here before Pammy brought Val back, Eagle might make the phone call herself.

  And Pammy didn’t want that.

  She grabbed the legal pad and put it in the top drawer. It would take Eagle a moment to find it, if she went searching, and a moment was all Pammy needed.

  The knots in her stomach were untying. And weirdly, she felt better about this.

  That memory of her father felt like a blessing.

  His blessing.

  He had trusted her to do what was right.

  And now she was.

  48

  Val

  The gym was filling up early. Students from the class talked to each other now as if we were old friends. I smiled at Joan, who had found a t-shirt that fit, but I didn’t go talk to her.

  I didn’t feel like talking to anyone.

  During class the day before, I realized just how far I needed to go. I was the dead weight in the plan to find Lavassier. I could barely do a sit-up. I had no idea how I could fight a man three times my size.

  I shuddered. I knew this was causing some flashbacks. Armand Vitel had not been a lot bigger than me, but he had been wiry and strong. After the night he raped me, I tried not to think about some of my injuries. But I couldn’t stop staring at the bruises his fingers left on my arm, bruises that went so deep that they didn’t disappear for weeks.

  I had no idea how to shake someone like that off. And, like Vitel, Lavassier made a career of dealing with and beating up criminals. He knew how to hurt someone and do it effectively.

  My mouth was dry. I looked at the mat, at the jump rope that Joan had so kindly pulled for me, and felt the aches all over my entire body.

  Mentally, I knew what I wanted: I wanted to be able to be as fluid as Pammy. I wanted to be able to surprise someone larger than me by flinging him on his back. Using my weight and my strength as a surprise, not being afraid of them.

  But I wasn’t anywhere near that. I had just started this journey.

  I was going to have to be very careful on Friday night. I didn’t want to be the one weakness in this entire plan.

  I needed to talk to the others about that, when we talked again.

  Pammy strode out of the office area. She looked pale, and there were shadows under her eyes. She was reluctant to take on Lavassier, and part of me didn’t blame her. We were doing something that she advocated avoiding in the self-defense class I listened in on the day before.

  Your job is to suss out any situation you’re in, she said to the assembled studen
ts, some of whom were from the university, and if it looks bad, leave. That’s the best defense you have. Walking away from any possible bad situation.

  She also knew that wasn’t always possible and she led them into those scenarios too.

  But she had looked at me as she had said the thing about walking away, and it felt like she was speaking directly to me. I clearly didn’t belong with her and Eagle on this, even though the original plan had been my idea.

  I should walk away.

  But I didn’t want to.

  They needed a third person, and I could tell just from a few days that Jill wasn’t that person. I hadn’t met everyone in the gym yet, but none of the women I had met could be that third person.

  That person had to be me.

  Pammy stopped at the counter. Jill stood behind it, shuffling some papers. Pammy was explaining something to her.

  “Did you watch the splashdown?” Joan had come up beside me. She was tugging on the t-shirt, as if she still wasn’t used to wearing it.

  The Apollo 11 crew had splashed into the ocean about an hour ago. I had watched it at home before I walked here.

  “I did,” I said. “I was glad they made it.”

  Joan smiled. “Me too.”

  “Hey!” Marilyn joined us. Her hair wasn’t sprayed into submission today. Maybe she felt calmer about the class as well. “Did you hear about the Bay Bridge thing?”

  “I’m new here,” I said. “I didn’t know there was a Bay Bridge.”

  My cheeks warmed as I said that. I felt even more insecure than I had a moment ago. Marilyn’s comment made me realize just how new everything in Berkeley was to me.

  “Oh.” Marilyn’s lips thinned. “I was hoping someone here knew something about it. This morning’s paper says they voted to charge tolls on the Bay Bridge, and that’s how I get here.”

  I looked closely at her for the first time. “You drive here from San Francisco?”

  She nodded. “There’s nothing like this anywhere else that I know of. How do you get here?”