Protectors

by Kris Nelscott

  “It’s not stupid,” said the guy from the next table. “The war is wrong.”

  “And you’re fucking out of line,” Eagle snapped. “This is a private conversation.”

  The guy looked at his wife or girlfriend or whatever she was. She looked a little pale. She stood up and so did he, grabbing his copy of the Berkeley Barb as he did so.

  He brushed Eagle as he went by.

  “You really don’t belong here,” he said. “You both give off bad vibes.”

  Val looked shocked at his anger. But Eagle wasn’t. She started to stand. Val grabbed her hand.

  “That’s what he wants,” she said quietly.

  “He didn’t like that I mentioned calling the cops,” Eagle said.

  “Maybe.” Val shrugged. “Or maybe something else bothered him.”

  She moved her hand in front of her face, indicating her dark skin. Eagle looked around. It was an unusually white crowd in Caffe Med today.

  “Tell me more about your hippie-dippy ding-a-ling,” Val said.

  She seemed amazingly unconcerned by the rudeness. Eagle liked her spirit, and then tried to tamp down that feeling too.

  “She made you mad,” Val said, with great understatement.

  The anger surged back. “She professes to claim she cares about things, and she doesn’t care at all.”

  Eagle nodded toward that couple. They were now outside, talking to some of the hippies who had gathered at the window near the coffee counter.

  “They don’t care either,” Eagle said. “It’s as if nobody cares. All of these forgotten and missing people. It sounds like some asshole is preying on them, and no one is willing to do anything.”

  “What could we do?” Val asked.

  Eagle looked at her. Something in Val’s tone was different. It wasn’t like Pammy or the hippie-dippy ding-a-ling when they had asked the same question. Val sounded like she was asking a more fundamental question.

  “What do you mean?” Eagle asked.

  “If we figured out who this man is,” Val said, “and that’s a big if, what could we do? If he is indeed preying on young people.”

  Eagle’s mind stuttered. She hadn’t quite thought that far. She leaned back in her chair.

  “I guess I thought I’d report him to the cops once I had his name,” she said slowly, “but that’s not reasonable, is it? They won’t do anything.”

  “And if we report him to the cops, and they decide to investigate, even a little, we’ve tipped him off,” Val said. “Because if he is preying on people down here, he’s smart, and he can play off the cops’ prejudices.”

  “If we tip him off, what will he do?” Eagle asked. “He knows I saw him.”

  “And he knows you couldn’t do anything,” Val said. “But if he’s afraid of getting caught, or realizes that he’s been noticed, then he’ll just move to a new location and prey on others. We’ll never find the missing woman, and we’ll never know what’s really happening.”

  Eagle took a deep breath. She had been so focused on finding the injured woman that she hadn’t thought any of this through. And then she had gotten so angry this morning when she learned there might be others that she got even more upset.

  “I suppose we should find out if we’re making this up first,” Eagle said. “Maybe he’s a harmless guy with a truck.”

  Val shrugged again. “I think we should have several plans. If he’s harmless, we do nothing. If he’s the wrong guy, we find the right one. But that’s where it starts getting dicey.”

  “In what way?” Eagle asked.

  “If he is taking people,” Val said, “what’s he doing with them? If he’s taking women…”

  She shuddered, and that bright-eyed look suddenly left her face. Eagle knew what she was thinking—she was thinking about the man who had hurt her.

  “But,” Eagle said, trying to distract Val, “if he’s taking kids of both genders, ah, hell, that’s where I get confused. What could he be doing with them?”

  “Or maybe he’s not involved at all, and there are simple explanations, like kids dropping out or something.” Val pushed her plate away and sighed. “Truman would tell me not to get involved, there are too many ifs, and I’m making things up.”

  Eagle had figured out that Truman was the dead husband. Apparently, he was still quite alive and well in Val’s mind.

  “You didn’t make up two things,” Eagle said. “First, I saw a man with an F-350 hurt a woman and throw her into the bed of his truck. Second, there are rumors going through the student community to steer clear of a man with an F-350. So I say, we find the F-350 and go from there.”

  “Without a plan?” Val sounded a bit lost at the very idea of working without a plan.

  “Yep,” Eagle said. “Without a plan. We need to know what we’re up against first.”

  Val’s eyes were wide.

  “That is a plan, you know,” Eagle said. “It’s just step one.”

  Val didn’t move. Eagle wondered if this very idea was causing more flashbacks for her.

  “You don’t have to help, you know,” Eagle said. “Just having a sounding board was—”

  “No,” Val said. “I do have to help. I do. It’s important.”

  “It’s not your fight,” Eagle said.

  “It’s not yours either, and yet you’re going to do it,” Val said.

  “I saw her. I can’t get her screams out of my head.” Eagle didn’t add that those screams combined with other screams, screams that would probably never leave her.

  “I understand,” Val said softly. “I’m dealing with some screams of my own.”

  Eagle’s gaze met hers. “You can back out at any time.”

  “You too,” Val said.

  “I don’t back out,” Eagle said.

  Two spots of color turned Val’s cheeks a dusky rose. “I’m done backing out,” she said softly. “Giving in did me no good. Running away...” She shook her head as if dismissing the thought.

  “Think of it as running toward,” Eagle said.

  Val nodded once, her chin jutted forward with determination.

  “So,” she said, “what do we do next?”

  “I guess we go back to Pammy’s and find out how to talk to that ding-a-ling,” Eagle said, and then she grinned. “Maybe you can keep me from strangling her.”

  “Or maybe I’ll help you,” Val said, and laughed.

  Eagle joined her. The second belly laugh of the day. The second belly laugh of the week, maybe even the month.

  She shouldn’t have been laughing. They were talking about serious business. But Val made her feel lighter.

  And after years of darkness, the light—no matter how brief—felt really good.

  17

  Val

  Eagle and I left Caffe Med, skirting the dogs outside as well as the growing crowd of hippies, all talking about some upcoming action. The odor of cigarettes mixed with the faint stench of marijuana. It wasn’t hard to see the pot smoker. He had taken his hand-rolled roach and half-hidden it behind his back. A woman grabbed it from him, and he turned, pretending to be angry. They mock-fought over it, making his attempt at hiding the roach even more ridiculous than it had originally been.

  Harmless play. I knew that, and yet I was having trouble with the movements.

  In the distance, the music—if that was what you wanted to call it—had almost stopped. The bongo player provided a beat for the fighters, who were twirling and laughing as the man tried to get the roach, and the woman was keeping it from him.

  Eagle touched my arm and urged me forward. She had a compassionate look on her face.

  She’d had that look since we stood up from our table. Sitting for an hour had made the muscles of my upper thighs seize up. I had gotten out of the chair like an elderly woman, and Eagle had reached for me, apparently afraid I was going to fall over.

  “Exercise,” I had mumbled.

  But from that moment forward, I felt a little off. After my speech, Eagle seemed fired
up. She was ready to return to the gym, ready to talk to the hippie-dippy ding-a-ling, whose name was—apparently—Strawberry which, in my opinion, wasn’t much better than hippie-dippy ding-a-ling.

  The idea of facing my fears was a good one. I’d been trying to do that since I left Chicago. The reality of it, especially taking on someone who had attacked a woman, made me feel reckless.

  I could hear Truman in my head, telling me that I was too small, too fragile, too female to deal with things like an attacker on the loose. He would’ve said, Let me handle it, honey, and in the early days of our relationship—even in the latter days of our relationship—I would have.

  Truman had tried to handle him and it had gone horribly wrong. I had tried to ignore him and it hadn’t worked either. He had died because of someone else, not us.

  Who was I to take on a man who had beaten a woman and thrown her in the back of a truck? I couldn’t even do three push-ups.

  And my sore muscles made me feel just exactly like I had felt after the surgeries. Worthless, destroyed, powerless.

  I gave Eagle a sideways smile. She nodded to the street. Several more bicycles were going by than had earlier, slowing down some cars. Kids no older than twelve were bunched near a bookstore, one of them holding a copy of what appeared to be Mad Magazine, and the others looking on.

  I could make my apologies to Eagle, head down Telegraph, and meander my way home.

  But then I wouldn’t face anything. I would go back to being the little coward I had been, the girl who ran away.

  My heart was pounding. I threaded my way through the growing afternoon crowd, and made it to the other side of Telegraph.

  Eagle was waiting for me. She leaned into me, and said softly, “That’s the kind of police protection we get,” and nodded at a car parked half a block away.

  It was a Berkeley police department squad car, some basic sedan thing, and if it were anything like Chicago PD squads, the engine had been removed and replaced with something that had a lot more horsepower than any other sedan on the road.

  Some of the young kids hung out near the car, and one girl was leaning on it, a comic book in her hands. She looked engrossed in it.

  There was one police officer inside the car. He was young, and he had longish brown hair—too long for regulation. I understood what Eagle meant now; he was supposed to “blend in.” Even if he hadn’t been wearing a beige uniform, he clearly wouldn’t have fit in. Maybe it was his posture: superficially relaxed, but with one hand on the steering wheel. Or maybe it was the fact that he was ignoring the young kids that stood near the car, one of whom, I could tell from half a block away, was holding a joint.

  I glanced at Eagle, who was frowning at the car.

  “If I went and asked him to help find that girl,” Eagle said softly, “he’d tell me the same thing everyone else says. People disappear. I hate that sentence. I hate it. People disappear, but they shouldn’t.”

  Unless they wanted to. I suspected a lot of people around here had disappeared from somewhere, and thought they wanted to.

  I had.

  But I wasn’t happy here, any more than the rest of them seemed to be. Or maybe I was just imposing my own opinion on everyone else on the streets. I had mostly avoided Telegraph since I’d come here, walking streets that were quieter, except when I went to the bookstores. It was too chaotic here, and too drugged-out.

  I could understand how the police felt that these kids were bringing on their own problems. All those years as a cop’s wife showed.

  And yet…

  I knew what it was like to be part of a community that had no value. Most people in Chicago believed the South Side was all gangs and violence, and didn’t know about the vibrant community of people who were the best citizens possible. My friends, my family…

  The people I had left behind.

  I swallowed hard and pivoted, heading down the street to Pammy’s gym. Eagle had to scurry to keep up with me.

  “You see something?” she asked as she reached my side.

  I shook my head. “I just realized…half those people live on the street, don’t they?”

  “I don’t know for sure, but it seems that way,” Eagle said.

  “Including the little kids,” I said.

  She shrugged. “What of it?”

  The question was cold, and that offended me.

  I turned, stopped, and glanced over my shoulder. She stopped too, frowning at me.

  “This is where people come when they’re running,” I said.

  “Like you,” she said.

  I shook my head. “Not like me, so much. More like, if they’re having trouble at home or can’t handle life. They come here, don’t they?”

  “It used to be San Francisco from what I understand,” Eagle said. “I wasn’t in the States at the time.”

  Her voice was dry, her expression guarded. I waited, a trick I’d learned from Truman. If you didn’t speak, then the other person had to fill the silence.

  Eagle did. She shrugged.

  “They’d end up in the Haight,” she said. “It’s a wasteland now. Drugs everywhere, a free clinic that can’t keep up, kids that are mush-brained and lost. I went there once, thinking I’d volunteer…”

  She shook her head, glanced over her shoulder too. People threaded around us, like we were a rock in a river. No one really seemed to care what we did.

  “I kept thinking those kids brought it all on themselves. I mean, what do you expect when you shoot up?” Her voice was so soft I almost didn’t hear her. “But that wasn’t it, really.”

  She shook her head again, then looked down. The head-shaking wasn’t a no gesture. It was more like she couldn’t get a thought out of her head.

  “It was…I’d seen so many guys shoot up over there.”

  I assumed she meant Vietnam. I didn’t ask her to clarify. It sounded like she was on some kind of roll.

  “I actually understand why people seek oblivion,” she said even softer. “I didn’t want to be around junkies anymore. It was too close.”

  I didn’t hear those last words as much as I read her lips.

  She raised her head then, her brown eyes defiant.

  “You know what I’ve been thinking these last few days?” she asked.

  It was my turn to shake my head.

  “I’ve been thinking that if you got off on harming people, this was the place to do it. You don’t harm them on the street, because the kids on the street would stop you—mostly. They take care of each other as best they can. But if you take them out of the neighborhood, nobody knows how to find them. Nobody even knows their real names half the time. If you’re one sick fuck, you can find a smorgasbord of delights down here.”

  I shivered. She was right. And those underage kids…they disturbed me even more than the clearly drugged-out adults.

  “What Pammy’s doing is great,” Eagle said softly, “but it’s a drop in the bucket for what’s needed. And honestly, the crowd she caters to isn’t the crowd on the street. It’s housewives and professors and students. Not those defenseless addicts back there.”

  I frowned.

  “Fuck.” Eagle took a deep breath, then glanced at the gym. She looked at me in surprise. “Fuck.”

  I looked around. The crowd on Telegraph remained the same. The kid leaning against the squad car, bicyclists going back and forth. The bongo player had started up again, which was worth a curse, but not one as heartfelt as the one Eagle had just issued.

  I couldn’t see what had upset her.

  She was looking at the gym.

  “Something’s not adding up,” she said.

  And then she walked ahead of me. I looked back at Telegraph one last time. She was right: it was a smorgasbord. And it was more than that. It was a hubbub of petty crime.

  The fact that the cops just patrolled or sat and did nothing bothered me in a weird way. But it was different than Chicago. In Chicago, the cops were active. They didn’t just sit and watch. They rousted drug
dealers or pursued the gangs—when they were in the neighborhood. Mostly, they weren’t in the neighborhood at all.

  And like the cops here, they often didn’t respond to real crime.

  I let out a small sigh. I almost felt like a traitor for having that thought. The fact that the Chicago PD didn’t respond to much of what happened on the South Side had been a bone of contention between me and Truman.

  One of many bones, out of a lot of contention.

  I had no idea what Eagle felt wasn’t adding up. I couldn’t see it. Something had bothered her, though. Something to do with the smorgasbord, the cop, and the petty crime.

  I hurried after her, heading for the gym.

  I had made my choice. I was going to get involved—maybe for the first time in my entire life.

  18

  Pammy

  The gym had achieved a midafternoon quiet. No classes were scheduled for the rest of the day, although Pammy kept the door open for anyone who wanted to exercise. The rest of the afternoon would probably remain quiet. The only other official item on her schedule for this day was a Tai Chi class at 7:00. Jill was supposed to teach it, but if she didn’t show up, Pammy could handle it.

  Pammy leaned on the counter, one elbow near the flyer, her right hand splayed on the papers from the self-defense class. Behind her, the sound of running water was oddly soothing. One of her regulars, Mattie, was using the shower in the locker room after a rather intense jump rope session.

  The names on the list the class had compiled bothered her. Pammy hadn’t expected twenty names. Most of them had checkmarks alongside, and all but two listed the name of some organization the person had belonged to or some protest rally attended.

  And Strawberry had been right about genders. The majority of the names on the list—fourteen—were female, but the six male names had at least a dozen check marks beside them. So they weren’t on the list by mistake. Everyone, at least everyone in the class, had known that those boys had disappeared.