Protectors

by Kris Nelscott

  Pammy closed her eyes, and nodded again. “All right.”

  “Good thinking,” Val said to Eagle. “I wouldn’t have considered that.”

  “We need to consider a lot of things,” Eagle said. “He’s smarter than I want him to be.”

  “Why is that an issue?” Val asked. “I always thought he was smart.”

  “I thought we’d have surprise on our side,” Eagle said. “We might not.”

  “He won’t see us coming,” Val said.

  “No, he probably won’t,” Eagle said. “But he’ll recover pretty damn fast. We have to be ready for that.”

  “God,” Pammy said softly.

  Eagle glared at her. “There’s still time to back out.”

  Pammy swallowed. “You need me. You both do. I’m not backing out.”

  “Then be prepared,” Eagle said. “Because it’ll take all three of us. And we might not win.”

  “I don’t think anyone wins here,” Val said softly.

  “Getting this son of a bitch off the street is a win,” Eagle snapped. “And if you two don’t agree, I’ll do it myself.”

  She was surprised at her own vehemence. She hadn’t realized how much she hated this man until right now. Amazing how that hatred could flare with one meeting, one slam of someone else’s head against the side of a truck.

  “We’re in this together,” Val said.

  “And we’ll get this man off the street,” Pammy said. Her voice was stronger than it had been earlier. “No matter what it takes.”

  52

  Val

  I leaned against the wall near the locker room, arms crossed. Jill was running an advanced exercise class—she called it Exercise 3—and everyone in it looked just like everyone in my class.

  Except they could do the exercises.

  They were jumping rope like old pros, doing sit-ups without groaning, and touching their noses to the mat when they did their push-ups without bending their knees or their back.

  Someday, I might end up like them, but not right now.

  God, I was so out of my league, and I knew it.

  I had showered and changed into the clothes I had brought for the afternoon, but they wouldn’t do for the evening. Before I went to the Golden Bear Motel, I would need to change into all black and get the gloves I had bought. I had planned to dye one of my baseball caps black, but I wouldn’t be able to now, and since I had moved here in the summer, I had left all my stocking caps in Chicago.

  Hell, I had left almost everything in Chicago.

  I let out a small breath and tried to shake off the nerves.

  Eagle had left first. She had been galvanized by the talk with Lavassier. Yeah, he made her nervous, but in a good way. It felt like she had a weight slowly lifting off her shoulders.

  It wasn’t that easy for me or for Pammy. I would have admitted that to Pammy if she hadn’t given me a look that warned me off. I got the sense she didn’t want to think about what we were about to do.

  Then I learned, that she had realized she too had errands to finish before we initiated our plan, errands she had planned to finish tomorrow or later tonight. But the timeline got switched and we were doing our best to be prepared for whatever hit us.

  “Take the phones,” Pammy said to me. “Try not to answer, but if you have to, then pretend to be Mrs. Knight’s sister-in-law or something. And don’t do it in front of Jill.”

  Pammy couldn’t tell Jill what we were doing and she couldn’t send Jill home. There were back-to-back classes all afternoon, and Jill was one of the few people who could teach them.

  I had suggested to Pammy that I could supervise, if she gave me a list of what everyone should do, and she laughed. It was the first time I had heard her laugh in the last few days.

  “It doesn’t quite work like that,” she had said to me. Then she had told Jill she would be back, and I would handle the phones, and she hurried out of the building.

  Jill hadn’t had time to ask me what Pammy was doing, but Jill kept looking at me over the heads of the exercising women. They were sweating, their shirts blotchy and wet, and they seemed to be enjoying themselves.

  But Jill wasn’t.

  I knew I looked out of place, leaning up against the wall, but I didn’t want to be in the office. If Lavassier called back, I didn’t want to answer the phone too fast, but I didn’t want Jill to get it either. If she was standing right next to the phone near the counter, then she would pick it up—hell, I would pick it up—and that might ruin everything.

  A group of white college-age girls entered, carrying books. Two of the girls were wearing flowing tie-dye skirts, three were wearing shorts, and all of them wore t-shirts. One of the girls glared at me as she led the way into the locker room.

  I recognized that intimidating stare. I’d grown up with it. But I was a different woman now. Now, I stared back.

  They all passed me in a wave of incense. I walked over to the counter to look at the schedule.

  The next class was an innocuously titled class called “strength-building.” I had no idea what that was, but those girls clearly did.

  A few other women were straggling in. Jill clapped her hands together, ending her class, and thanking everyone.

  The gym was filled with women, entering, leaving, heading to the locker room, and studiously ignoring me.

  All except for Jill. I had hoped she would stay in class rhythm, but of course she wasn’t going to. She headed straight toward me.

  I let out a small breath. She intimidated me. What did that say about this evening, if a tall, athletic white woman intimidated me? How would I do with a strong, muscular and violent white man?

  Jill stopped in front of me. I could go into the locker room to avoid her or slip past down the hallway to the office, but if I tried to get around her, she would probably grab my arms.

  Jill said, “I know you said whatever is going on is private, but today is just weird. I’m helping out. Can you tell me what’s going on?”

  We’re going to take the law into our own hands and try to get a man put away for life. If we’re lucky, we’ll help the cops. If we’re not lucky, we’ll fail. And the ground in between, well, Eagle wants to make sure he never hurts someone again, and Pammy wants to make sure Eagle doesn’t go to jail, and I’m not exactly sure how I fit in.

  “Um,” I said to cover what I was thinking, “it really is private.”

  “How about the Reader’s Digest Condensed Version?” Jill asked.

  I closed my eyes and sighed, trying to think without the pressure. She was right. She was helping. She was annoying and she was difficult and she was doing all of this for Pammy for free. And Jill was used to being in the know, and she might just act out if she wasn’t.

  I opened my eyes, and I was surprised to find tears in them. One of the women here for the next class came out of the locker room, and the door banged closed behind her.

  I jumped.

  Jill frowned, and some of the charge left her body. “I’m sorry,” she said. “I didn’t realize—”

  “No, it’s okay,” I said as quietly as I could. No one was close. The conversations going on near the mats actually gave ours some cover.

  Jill’s stance had softened. She didn’t seem as angry.

  “I…um…was raped in Chicago.” My voice was nearly a whisper. The part of me that always observed the world, the one in the back of my brain that commented on everything, noted how ironic it was that one of the first people I told about this would be a woman I didn’t like much, a woman I wasn’t sure saw me as her equal.

  Jill’s mouth opened in a small “oh.”

  “I nearly died,” I said. “When I got better, I came here. And now, there’s this man—”

  Jill held up a hand, stopping me. “Eagle and Pammy are helping you with this man, right?”

  I nodded. Thank God she was intelligent. I had hoped the implication would be enough, but I had expected to take it farther, whatever that meant.

  Jill
already leapt to the correct conclusion.

  “They’re good women,” Jill said. “They do for others in ways I never could. Even Eagle.”

  Then she gave me a half-smile. “You can tell from my tone I wasn’t sure about Eagle at the start. She’s pretty angry.”

  “Yeah,” I said, and decided to go for broke. “You weren’t sure about me either.”

  Jill blushed. The blush was almost instantaneous, and it ran from her neck up to her forehead, coloring her skin a deep red.

  “I’m beginning to realize I have issues I didn’t think I had,” she said. “If you had asked me—”

  I mentally finished for her, I would have said I have Negro friends, of course I do. They’re good people.

  “I would have said that I like everyone,” she finished, not quite going the way I thought. “But there’s some training in my past that I didn’t even realize was there. Some things my parents used to say about Indians and the Irish and, you know—”

  “Blacks,” I said.

  “Yeah,” she said. “I’m sorry.”

  I’d never had anyone say that to me before. They always lied or covered up how they felt or pretended it didn’t exist. But Jill was blunt. It was one of the things I had noticed about her, and found a bit intimidating.

  I guess it cut in all directions.

  “Me, too,” I said, because I didn’t want to give her a pass.

  She lightly touched my arm. “Pammy’s a good woman. She’ll do the right thing, whatever that is. And Eagle too.”

  “Thank you,” I said.

  “And I know Pammy left you here to guard me, to make sure I didn’t answer the phone. I’m going to promise you here and now that I won’t. I’ll teach classes until Pammy gets back and I won’t ask any more questions. And I won’t tell anyone what you told me. You’re right. That’s yours to tell, which is why I asked you personally, and I won’t let anyone else know either.”

  “Thank you,” I said, not expecting her kindness.

  “We all have crosses to bear, and sometimes they’re not obvious right away. I understand that.” Then she glanced at her watch, and sighed. “Those college girls are always running late. Excuse me.”

  She pushed open the locker room door. A waft of steam mixed with perfume and sweat emerged.

  She raised her voice. “Five minutes. I start at the top of the hour, no matter who’s on the mats or not.”

  Then she smiled at me—a real smile—and headed back toward the mats.

  I leaned my head against the wall, and sighed. I was relieved that she hadn’t pressed me about what was going on. But I also felt a little calmer.

  The locker room door banged open and the college girls came out, hair pulled back into ponytails or held in place with a headband around the forehead, shorts instead of skirts, and in two cases, bikini tops. They were laughing and talking and ready to go to work.

  And none of them—not even the first girl—gave me a second glance.

  But Jill did. She nodded at me, then talked softly to the women lining up for the next class.

  And, I realized, the phone hadn’t rung at all since Lavassier called back. I hoped it wouldn’t ring until Jill was gone.

  If only we could be that lucky.

  53

  Pammy

  Pammy parked her grimy white Pontiac just off 10th near Cedar. The neighborhood was surprisingly residential, this close to the East Shore Highway, but the houses were small—bungalows, mostly. A lot of them were clustered near Franklin Primary School, a few blocks away.

  She hadn’t been to West Berkeley in a while, which was surprising, considering it was only two miles or so from her gym.

  Sometimes two miles stretched across an entire world.

  She got out of the car. The wind caught her hair and whipped it into her face. It was a surprisingly blustery day for July, and she hoped the wind would die down after dusk. Wind sometimes interfered with sound, and she wanted both herself and Val to listen carefully tonight.

  Pammy turned into the wind, adjusted her short-sleeved shirt, and slung her purse over her shoulder. Before she had left the gym, she had changed into one of the outfits she had brought that morning in case she needed something more appropriate to the real world. She was now wearing a white blouse over black pants and sandals.

  Her black purse matched. She went from a somewhat odd female gym owner to middle-aged housewife with just a change of costume.

  She ducked her head and walked up the street to San Pablo Boulevard. The motel’s white sides gleamed across the sidewalk.

  She had never been to the Golden Bear Motel, although she had put friends up there when the Flamingo Inn didn’t have room. Most of her friends from out of town couldn’t afford the Claremont, which was where she would have preferred to put them and where, in her mind, the fictional Dorothy Knight was staying with her nameless husband.

  The Golden Bear had an adobe exterior with brown shutters on every window, shutters decorated with tiny bears. The bear motif went across everything affiliated with the motel, including the restaurant.

  She passed the restaurant first, on the way to the motel’s office. The restaurant was in its own little building near the front of the Golden Bear complex’s parking lot.

  The motel itself was U-shaped. The part of the motel just behind the restaurant was two stories tall. The rest of the motel was on a single level.

  As she passed the restaurant, she peered at it, looking for its hours sign. It wasn’t in the two large windows across the front. So she looked in the tiny vestibule that housed the official entrance, the cigarette machine, and the pay phone.

  There, the hours were printed in black on a white sign. Weekdays until 10:00 p.m. She had had a feeling that it wouldn’t be open too late. She would have to tell Eagle about that. Although Eagle probably wasn’t going to talk with Lavassier for two hours—or even one hour—they also didn’t want to be the last ones in the restaurant. That would make them memorable.

  The motel’s office was across the parking lot from her, in a rounded area at the end of the single-story building. The parking lot was mostly empty. A Firebird in bad need of a new paint job was parked behind the restaurant, and a brand new LeMans was parked at the very center of the two-story building.

  A woman, wearing a blue maid’s uniform, sat on a bench outside the office, a purse over her shoulder and a cigarette in her mouth. She was clearly waiting for someone to pick her up.

  Pammy nodded at her as she ducked into the office. It smelled of stale cigarettes and pine freshener.

  The interior was perfectly square, which was odd, considering the rounded exterior wall. A brown couch sat beneath a map of California, with affiliated motels marked by pushpins. Ashtrays sat on both end tables. A bookshelf filled with some area guidebooks and pamphlets graced one wall. On top of it were several statues of bears, but only one of them was golden. A large stuffed bear wearing a UC Berkeley t-shirt rested on one corner of the counter. A hand-lettered sign leaned against its leg, telling people to hit the bell for service.

  She had to look for the bell. It had fallen between the bear’s arm and its shirt. She hit the tiny metal button on the top, and it made a surprisingly loud “ping.”

  Then Pammy held her breath. This was one of the moments she was worried about. She knew a lot of people from her activities in town, and it wouldn’t surprise her to find out that she had made the acquaintance of someone who worked at the Golden Bear.

  A woman came out of the back. Her bright red hair was piled in an elaborate beehive. Her face was naturally pale and covered with freckles. She was older than Pammy and looked worn out.

  “Help you?” the woman asked as if helping someone was the last thing she ever wanted to do in her entire life.

  “I need a room for a friend of my husband’s.” Pammy matched the woman’s tone. Pammy wanted the woman to think that this favor was a reluctant one. “He’s driving in late, and he wants to make sure he has a place to sleep tonig
ht.”

  “We don’t normally book up on Thursdays in July,” the woman said. “He’ll be okay.”

  “Still,” Pammy said, “if I don’t have a key, my husband will be upset.”

  “All right.” The woman hauled out a leather bound book and flipped it open. “How long’s he staying?”

  “I have no idea,” Pammy said flatly. “We’ll cover one night, and he can figure out what he’s doing after that.”

  The woman smiled a little, as if Pammy’s exasperation reflected something in her own mood.

  “He has this truck that he just loves,” Pammy said. “So if there’s somewhere you can put him where he can see the truck from the window, and where no one else’ll be around him, that’s probably for the best.”

  “He loud?” the woman asked.

  “I have no idea,” Pammy said. “But he’s not staying at my house.”

  The woman chuckled. “He’s really your husband’s friend, isn’t he?”

  Pammy made a face and nodded. “I’m spending as little time with him as possible.”

  “What’s this charmer’s name?” the woman asked.

  “Justin Lavassier,” Pammy said. “Let me spell the last name.”

  She did, and the woman wrote it down carefully in her little book. Then she reached behind her and opened a cabinet built into the wall that Pammy hadn’t even seen. Keys hung from hooks. The woman grabbed one.

  “We’ll put him in 116.” She tapped the hand-drawn map of the complex pasted on the counter. “People don’t usually like that part of the hotel. It’s a bit of a walk to the restaurant and the office. On slow nights, we tend to put most people in the two-story building.”

  Pammy looked at the map. 116 was at the bottom of the U, not near anything except other rooms. On the back side were houses, probably, or maybe someone’s yard. Not even close to the nearby streets. The closest units wouldn’t have anyone in them, and the ones that might actually get residents were on the San Pablo Avenue side of the motel, which meant there would be traffic noise.