Protectors

by Kris Nelscott

  Pammy couldn’t contact Strawberry’s parents even if she wanted to.

  “It might be a crisis,” Stella was saying, “but not a sinister one. The crisis might be how many kids think dealing with their causes is more important than getting an education that will help them through life.”

  “I have a hunch these next few days will give Strawberry a hell of an education,” Pammy said softly.

  “But not one she’s going to want,” Stella said. She grabbed another bag of garbage and carried both out the back door.

  Pammy checked the fridge to see if anyone had left open containers. No one had, but one half-full baby bottle sat inside.

  She stared at it for a moment, feeling sad. These rules she set for herself, not knowing what was going to happen to the women she had helped, they took a toll. She sometimes felt like she had a chip of ice in her heart, a chip that would never entirely melt.

  The door banged and she whirled, heart pounding. Stella came back inside, hands extended, a small grimace on her face. She went directly to the sink and started to wash up.

  “You know what?” Stella said, her back to Pammy. “I made light of those disappearances and I shouldn’t have.”

  Pammy closed the fridge. “I don’t think you made light.”

  Stella shrugged, still scrubbing her hands. “Yeah, maybe. But I didn’t respond with anything approaching compassion.”

  Pammy opened her mouth, then closed it. This was an insight into Stella that Pammy hadn’t expected.

  Stella grabbed a paper towel and used it to dry her hands instead of the clean towel that Pammy had put out. Then Stella turned around and faced her.

  “I heard you when you said that the police won’t help down here,” Stella said, “and I know that Eagle had trouble with them.”

  Pammy bit her lower lip. She wasn’t sure where Stella was going with this.

  “However,” Stella said, “I can help with that in the right instance.”

  Pammy nodded. Stella had helped in January, when an arsonist had targeted the gym. Stella was the one who had gotten the police to take the call seriously.

  “I’m not sure what the right instance would be,” Pammy said.

  “Me, either,” Stella said. “But I do know, if we come up with the right cover story, I’d be able to...um…get the police to actually look at some suspects we come up with. We might be able to figure out a way to report the disappearances.”

  “It sounds like too much, Stella,” Pammy said. “If we use you too often, then the police aren’t going to listen any longer.”

  “Maybe not to me,” Stella said, “but they have to pay attention to Roy’s wife. So, the next time you need police help on something, let me run interference.”

  Pammy let out a small sigh. She had no idea how that would work.

  “You do a lot for me, Pammy,” Stella said. “I know you saved the life of at least one of my friends, and you may have just saved two more lives tonight.”

  “I didn’t do anything,” Pammy said.

  “I would never have told Strawberry about this,” Stella said. “And then what? I get Norma a hotel room, or something, and she goes back to that asshole, and he beats her to death? Or she goes back and he kills her by inches, harms that baby, and Norma can’t come to me anymore because he knows she came before? You’ve done a lot, Pammy. Just the fact that you’re here means a lot.”

  The exhaustion that had been dogging Pammy for the last few hours came back. “This place isn’t some kind of rescue, Stella.”

  “I know,” Stella said. “And I appreciate everything you’ve done. So, let me pay back where I can.”

  Her words hung between them. Pammy didn’t want to say yes. That meant there would be more incidents in the future.

  And that ignored the two things she, Eagle, and Val were already investigating.

  Cases. Pammy’s father would have called them cases.

  But if Pammy did, that meant she was not only running a gym, she was running some kind of amateur detective agency, as well as some kind of rescue operation for women in trouble.

  She felt pulled apart enough as it was.

  “Please, Pammy,” Stella said.

  Pammy sighed. “All right. But I hope we never have to use that clout of yours.”

  “Me too,” Stella said. “Believe me. Me too.”

  32

  Val

  By three in the morning, I was flagging. Besides, my night court story was wearing thin. Most collars that came in this late waited for shift change and the official start of a day court.

  I had given up on coffee long ago. I was too jittery. I had placed the percolator on a cool burner, and had put my coffee cup in my pristine sink. The air coming in the window was darn near cold, something I still wasn’t used to, not given the oppressiveness of Illinois summer nights. My hands were chilled, but the rest of me was bathed in a light sheen of sweat.

  Not because of the temperature, but because I was onto something.

  What exactly, I didn’t know.

  Three more jurisdictions had reports of screamers in an F-350. They were all in June, and they were all near Walnut Creek, so it might have been the same screamer.

  Two rural police departments had sent me to the same county sheriff’s office because they both had found skeletons wrapped in blankets on side roads. The surprise was that both skeletons were male. They were bound and gagged—or had been before most of their skin sloughed off—and they were clearly dumped.

  Whoever this doer was, he was smart enough to leave the bodies in places that didn’t have a large detective force. And the doer seemed to know that local jurisdictions often didn’t talk to each other.

  I had finished the last call with someone in Vallejo, who had nothing on a truck driver with a fetish for blankets, rope, and gags. But the officer there told me about their Fourth of July shooter all over again, and reminded me to watch out for him.

  Maybe that was how some information got passed between police organizations in the Bay Area. A little tit for tat—I’ll watch out for your strange killer if you watch out for mine.

  I didn’t ask though. I didn’t want it to seem like I had no idea how to play the game, even though I was beginning to think I really didn’t.

  I was shaking with exhaustion and overstimulation. I sank into a kitchen chair and realized at that moment that I would end up with the phone bill from hell. At least I was calling after 11:00. That would cut down on some of the expense.

  But I had paid no attention to how long some of these calls ran, and some of them ran for at least fifteen and twenty minutes.

  I also had no idea what to do with this information I had discovered in my late-night calls except present it to Pammy and Eagle. I didn’t even know what I would have done if Truman were still alive and all of this was going on around Chicago. So many jurisdictions, so many questions—

  I supposed that Chicago detectives would notify the other precincts. Here was where my knowledge of procedure broke down. I wasn’t certain if I had enough information to issue something formal to other community police departments. I had no idea if an All-Points Bulletin could cover this or if the departments just sent each other flyers or if there was some more formal way of handling all of this.

  Or if it really was that tit-for-tat thing.

  I rubbed a hand over my face and decided to make one final call. This time, I would change my story a little and try Oakland, threatening to drive over if they had the right information.

  I grabbed my trusty legal pad and went back to the counter, taking the receiver off the wall. One last call—or maybe two. I wanted to see if they would give me the body in the blanket on the border with Berkeley. I wasn’t going to offer it up.

  It took me three calls to get someone who was willing to cooperate. The officers answering the phones sounded surly in Oakland, and one of them made it sound like he wasn’t going to help anyone from the SFPD for any reason ever.

  Finally I got
transferred to someone handling North Oakland, although I wasn’t sure what that meant. Did it mean that North Oakland had its own precinct or did it mean that they only had one officer handling an entire region of a good-sized city? No one said, and of course, I couldn’t ask without sounding like a new raw recruit—or someone who hadn’t lived long in the Bay Area.

  To my surprise, the person who took my call in North Oakland was female. She didn’t identify herself, so I had no idea if she was a cop or some late-night dispatch.

  I suspected cop just from the way she answered the phone.

  “Yeah?” Her tone distinctly said This better be worth my time, jerk. I smiled at it.

  I introduced myself as Carol Ann Houk again, and outlined my story. I tried not to make it sound practiced.

  I ended with, “I’m the lucky person who gets to drive over and look at your file, if you have something open and unsolved that fits his description.”

  She made a pe-shaw sound with her lips. “Ain’t it always the way.”

  She sounded as tired as I felt. But she didn’t use that opening to tell me anything about her.

  “Give me the details,” she said. “I’ll have them ready for you when you get here.”

  “I’ll be honest,” I lied. “I got shift change in three hours. If I can avoid a drive, I will. Would you mind looking in my date range first, so I know whether or not I’m wasting my time?”

  “Rather waste mine, huh?” Her tone held no amusement at all.

  “It’s a favor to both of us if he actually has the information,” I said.

  “Yeah, I suppose,” she said, and put me on hold without telling me. The only way I knew was that the phone sounded dead.

  I couldn’t resist, though. I asked if she was still there. She wasn’t. I hoped she hadn’t cut me off.

  I paced the kitchen, going as far as the cord on my phone would let me. I couldn’t reach the sink or I would have poured out the coffee. A light went on in the apartment across the backyard. Someone else was finally awake on this block. I tugged on my bathrobe. I really should have gotten dressed before doing all of this.

  She returned with another click. Their phone system was clearly better than any other I’d encountered all night.

  “Lots of dead girls in the last month,” she said. “You didn’t say. Was this one Negro?”

  She was right: I hadn’t said. I hadn’t had to say before. Everyone else had assumed a white victim. But I remembered my one glimpse of Oakland, at the bus terminal, and realized that its complexion was a lot darker than much of the Bay Area.

  I had also heard that the Black Panthers had their national headquarters in Oakland, whatever that meant. In Chicago, I had stayed as far away from the group as possible, thinking they had little to do with me.

  “No,” I said. “She’s white.”

  “Well,” said the woman on the other end of the phone. “That makes this a lot easier. I should’ve asked before I pulled open-unsolved.”

  “Sorry,” I said. “I just assumed…”

  “Yeah, you can’t assume nothing around here. Ninety percent of the calls we get deal with trouble in the ghet-to.” She had made it two words, and she had said it derisively. Obviously my assumptions about her skin color had been correct.

  I could hear paper rustling through the phone.

  “Sometimes I think we should just torch the entire place,” she said conversationally. “Save us a lot of time and money.”

  My breath caught. Had she just said that?

  I moved my jaw. I wanted to reply somehow, but I had no idea how.

  “Okay, here’s what we got,” she said, as if she hadn’t said anything out of line. “Two known prostitutes, no real names, just nicknames. Beat to death by the same john, we think. Interest you?”

  I took a deep breath, not really wanting to continue this conversation at all. But if I wanted information, I needed to.

  “How long were they known prostitutes?” I asked.

  “Arrest records going back to 1967,” the woman said.

  “My mutt made it sound like she was a Berkeley college student,” I said, using some of the same slang I’d heard from Truman.

  “Then why the hell aren’t you on the phone with them?” the woman asked.

  “I was,” I said. “They got nothing.”

  “Well, they should have something,” she said, “because the only other thing that fits is a body dump between 62nd and Dover. We handed it over to the Berkeley PD.”

  They didn’t think so. Or they were using the jurisdictional issues as an excuse not to solve it.

  “Body dump?” I asked.

  “Female, bound, gagged, wrapped in a blanket. July 10. Pushed off a truck. Witness called us. We heard the address, called Berkeley. You want the names of the officers they assigned?”

  “I do,” I said, only because that was what someone from another police department would ask for.

  She gave me the same names I’d received before.

  “Other than that,” she said, “our open-unsolveds with women in your age range are known victims, not Jane Does. That all I can do for you?”

  “One last thing,” I said. “You mentioned a body dump off a truck.”

  “Yeah, I said it’s Berkeley’s problem—”

  “I know,” I said. “But I’ve been given another job. A shit job. Homeless claim that some man in a truck has been picking them off one by one.”

  “Shooting them?” she asked in that same flat voice she had used when she mentioned burning down an entire section of her city. Boy, was she charming.

  “No,” I said, trying not to let my voice reflect my contempt for her. So much for some kind of sisterhood. She wasn’t anyone I ever wanted to spend time with—if she could even see past my skin, which I was certain she couldn’t. “This guy seems to take them away, never bringing them back.”

  “How come the SFPD has you chasing hallucinations?” she asked. Apparently she had an even lower opinion of the homeless than Carter from Berkeley.

  “Because there’ve been enough credible witnesses to corroborate,” I said. “We’re not too thrilled that some guy in a truck is using our area as some kind of hunting ground.”

  “That’s a big assumption,” she said. “For all you know, he’s picking them up as free labor for his farm.”

  She made that sound logical. She made it sound like something she would have approved of.

  “And then what does he do with them?” I asked.

  “If you’re lucky, he feeds them and sends them to a church or something, pulls them out of your district. Ignore that one, Houk. It’s not going to get you promoted.”

  My fault that I had presented all of this as possible promotion fodder.

  “I was just wondering—”

  “I don’t talk to the homeless,” she said. “Bad enough I gotta deal with the Negros. You got what you want, right?”

  And then, without waiting for my answer, she hung up.

  Which was probably a good thing. Because my answer wouldn’t have been reasonable (and possibly white) Carol Ann Houk of the San Francisco PD’s answer. My answer would’ve been pure Valentina Wilson when she had nothing to lose.

  I hung up the phone slowly, shook out my hands, and paced the kitchen.

  No wonder Eagle had been pissed off at the Berkeley police. They had felt that the abduction she saw wasn’t worth their time. And from her description, they had seemed a lot more caring than this woman from North Oakland.

  If I had had any doubts about our investigation of Darla’s disappearance and Eagle’s truck driver, those doubts would have evaporated after this conversation.

  I knew that cops saw a lot of crap. I knew that they got a lot of crap too. But that North Oakland cop and I had been discussing human beings, human lives, and she hadn’t cared.

  For a half second, I thought of reporting her for her comment about the black population of Oakland.

  But who would I report her to? Oakland pol
ice investigated their own. And if she felt comfortable enough to say that to me, a stranger, then I couldn’t imagine what the Oakland police officers were saying to each other.

  I shivered, glad I hadn’t moved there or even stayed there for one night.

  My exhaustion had vanished in the face of my anger. But I knew it would return as soon as the adrenaline left my system.

  So I decided to use that adrenaline while I had it.

  I needed to make sense of my notes for Eagle and Pammy.

  I grabbed the legal pad and sat down at the kitchen table. And then I started to write.

  33

  Eagle

  Eagle managed to get five hours of sleep, which had to be some kind of record after the night that she had had. Her dreams weren’t quite nightmares, but they were filled with images of children playing in bomb craters, tossing infants back and forth as if they were sandbags, and battered Vietnamese women wearing hats, not quite a Nón Lá, but similar—woven and made of dead ferns that had decayed to black.

  Everything smelled of rotted vegetation and standing water. Eagle stood in a rice paddy and watched the children playing catch with the infants, feeling a growing sense of dread.

  But the dread wasn’t bad enough to wake her up. It was the kind of dread she had felt every day that last year of her service, the kind that had become an inevitable part of life.

  She had awakened at six. She had forgotten to pull down her blinds, and the sky was turning pink over the apartments to the east. The street was quiet, and for a moment, she basked in the silence.

  The silence and the fact that she was here. In the States. Away from the madness she had experienced in Nam.

  The madness here, in Berzerkeley, was a different kind of madness. An everyday madness, sadly. She wagered there wasn’t a place in the world where some women did not end up looking like Norma had. Human beings battered each other. Mostly men battered women, but Eagle had even seen women batter their men.