Protectors

by Kris Nelscott

  “Looks good,” she said, and meant it. She pulled her wallet out of her purse. “How much?”

  “Fifteen dollars should do it,” she said, “since you’re paying ahead, and you’re local.”

  Pammy smiled and handed her a twenty. The woman opened a drawer and gave her back a grimy five.

  “Do you have two keys?” Pammy asked. “Because I’d like one. My husband will give it to him, and that way you don’t have to worry about a late arrival.”

  “Good,” the woman said, “because the night guy hates having people show up after the eleven o’clock news.”

  “You have one to give him, though, if he shows up early, right?” Pammy asked.

  “Oh, yes, we’re covered both ways. That way you won’t have to worry,” the woman said, and smiled.

  Pammy smiled back. Mostly she was pleased that there would be a “night guy” who didn’t like to be disturbed. That would help.

  The woman handed her a key attached to a brown plastic oval marked 116. Pammy shoved it in her purse, grateful that her hands weren’t shaking.

  She didn’t ask for a receipt or anything else, because she didn’t want the woman to ask her name.

  But apparently, the woman was used to renting rooms to locals. Or maybe to women who didn’t want their names to get out. For all this woman knew, Pammy was reserving a room for her own purposes later.

  She thanked the woman, and let herself out of the door. The parking lot was deserted. The maid was gone, a crushed cigarette butt on the sidewalk the only indication she had been there.

  The wind still blew strong, amplified by the corridor created by the parking lot and the entry from the restaurant. Pammy didn’t even look at room 116. She’d probably get to know it better later.

  Instead, she walked toward the restaurant in case the woman was watching. Pammy didn’t want the woman to see that she had parked far away from the motel.

  Her stomach was tied up in knots, but she vowed to ignore that. Instead, she walked down the sidewalk, hoping that the next twenty-four hours would go by quickly, and she could return to her regular life as if nothing had changed at all.

  54

  Eagle

  At 7:15, Eagle left her apartment and walked to the Hotel Durant. It was only a few blocks from where she lived. It was also the only place where she knew she could get a cab at any time of day or night.

  She had already given the keys to her truck to Pammy, with the instruction that she and Val park away from the Golden Bear Motel. She didn’t want anyone seeing them arrive. But the truck had to be close enough that they could make a quick escape if they needed to.

  Eagle had a second set of keys tucked in her white purse, just in case something happened to the truck’s regular keys. Given the neighborhood’s proximity to the East Shore Highway and the nearby nightclubs, she had also instructed Pammy to make sure the truck was locked when they left it.

  Eagle had given locking the truck some thought because she wanted it to be easy to get into, but she also knew there were too many important things in the truck’s cab to leave unattended.

  She wished she could drive her truck. But people would notice her, especially considering her outfit. Women dressed like she was right now did not drive trucks.

  She spent most of the money Pammy had given her on a dress she hated. It wasn’t like anything Eagle would ever wear—before or after. In theory, it wouldn’t bother her to destroy it. In practice, it was the nicest thing she’d owned, maybe ever.

  Made of gold, pink, and ivory seersucker, the dress’s skirt belled outward from a tight bodice. The entire dress had thin vertical stripes, which were (sadly) flattering. The pink looked like a normal stripe from a distance, but in actuality was made up of little tiny hearts and flowers, which Eagle found damn near unforgivable.

  She wore gold slippers with it, “like Cinderella,” the in-store shoe salesman had said as he handled her feet, making her feel less like Cinderella and more like one of the wicked stepsisters. Eagle had forgotten to buy a matching purse, but she did pick up a matching gold headband that held her dark hair away from her face.

  Then she’d spent the last hour plucking and applying makeup, thankful that she didn’t usually live this way. She put a summer sweater over the whole ensemble and tucked her hands into proper white gloves. She had two cotton pairs in her purse, and some rubber gloves in the truck.

  The Hotel Durant was as upscale as Berkeley got, at least near campus. The hotel was over forty years old and was starting to show its age. The weird fresco around the front door should have been ivory but had a greenish tint from the pollution and the salt air.

  Eagle had come to this hotel before, mostly for the full-service bar, but the men she encountered there always thought she was there because she was lonely. Since she was there to drink, she found the attention annoying. Eventually, she stopped coming to the Hotel Durant at all and took to drinking at home, which, she knew, had not been the best solution.

  She slipped inside the door to find the valet desk. It was the first test of her uncomfortable outfit.

  The man behind the desk, wearing a blue suit and bellman’s cap, pasted a smile on his face and told her it would be no trouble at all to hail her a cab.

  He went outside, blew on a whistle, and within seconds, a cab she hadn’t even seen pulled up alongside the curb. She walked out of the hotel and down the sidewalk as the valet opened the cab door.

  “Where are you heading, ma’am?”

  She smiled and pretended she hadn’t heard the valet. She gave him a tip as she slid into the back seat. He shut the door and tapped on it.

  The cab driver, a middle-age man with too much Brylcreem in his hair, said, “Where to, Missus?”

  “The Golden Bear Restaurant on San Pablo,” she said. “Do you know where that is?”

  “I do, ma’am, although I must say, there are nicer restaurants in Berkeley.”

  “I know,” she said, pretending once again to be her stepmother. “But I am meeting a dear friend, and this is where she said we would have the most privacy.”

  “I understand, ma’am,” he said in a tone that made it sound like he didn’t believe she was meeting a female friend at all.

  He pulled away from the curb, heading east toward College Avenue. He was going to take Haste. She would have preferred going up Cedar, but she didn’t want to sound like a local.

  Instead, she clasped her hands together, resting her wrists on her damn purse, wondering what it was about this week that made her haul out that silly purse twice when she hadn’t used it at all in the past year.

  The cab driver didn’t engage her in conversation, and she was grateful. She had a hunch she would be lying a lot later in the evening, and she didn’t want to have to keep track of what she had told everyone.

  That purse was barely big enough for everything it needed to hold. She had put her various pairs of gloves in the purse, some medication, two capped syringes, and her wallet.

  She had also managed to put two Polaroids in there. She had taken them from that box she had discovered in the garbage behind her apartment the week before. On top of it all, she had placed her wristwatch.

  She had initially worn the watch, but it was too downscale for her outfit. The watch gave her away as someone without money.

  But it was the watch she needed now. She fumbled with the gold clasp on the purse, hating the gloves, but knowing they were part of her disguise. She pulled out the watch and glanced at its tiny face.

  It had already taken fifteen minutes to go from the Hotel Durant, and they still had half the distance to go. It was now quarter to eight. She had wanted to arrive early, like any tense parent would, and it looked like she would arrive closer to on time.

  She shoved the watch to the bottom of the purse, then glanced at one of the Polaroids. Eagle did not recognize the girl in the photo. If she had lived in Eagle’s building, Eagle had never seen her.

  In some ways, the girl looked like every
other white middle-class teenage girl. She had brown hair, blotchy skin, and a round face. There were unique characteristics, though—a dimple in her chin, a long neck that spoke of future glamour.

  Eagle hoped that Lavassier would ignore those things. Or better yet, that he would not have time to track down this particular girl.

  Eagle had consoled herself when she put the photographs into her purse that he would have the wrong name in the first place, and if this went right this evening, he wouldn’t be hunting teenagers again any time soon.

  But she knew she was taking a risk, and with these photographs, she was taking a risk with someone she didn’t know.

  With luck, she wouldn’t have to use the photographs at all.

  She sighed and looked out the window.

  The cab pulled into the parking lot beside the Golden Bear Restaurant. Eagle fumbled with her purse again to pay the cab driver, just the way that she figured a nervous middle-class woman from out of town would.

  She paid and tipped him, privately noting that she had paid him with the last of the money Pammy had given her.

  “You’ll need a cab home, won’t you, Missus?” he asked, putting a little too much emphasis on Missus, as if he were afraid that Eagle was forgetting herself.

  “I will,” Eagle lied. She wasn’t planning to take any cab home.

  The cab driver pulled a receipt off his clipboard. It had the cab company’s name, address, and phone number. On top, he had scrawled his name and a number.

  “You just ask for me, ma’am. I’ll make sure you get home no problem,” he said.

  “Thank you.” She made herself sound very grateful. Then she started to put the receipt in her purse, and stopped. She didn’t want any evidence that she had been the woman who had taken this cab. She clutched the receipt in one hand and the purse in the other.

  She slipped out of the cab. The parking lot was poorly lit. There were lights near the office door directly in front of her. Half of the lights above the motel’s doors were on, but the others looked burned out. The reddish-clay tiled roof hung over the sidewalk to the rooms, absorbing half the light.

  The only other lights in the parking lot came from San Pablo Avenue on one side, and from Cedar Street on the other. There wasn’t even a good light behind the restaurant.

  All of this relieved her immensely.

  She did not look at room 116 to see if its overhead light was on.

  The cab drove around the back of the restaurant so that it could take the other exit onto San Pablo.

  She wanted to walk the same path the cab had taken, around the back of the restaurant to see if there were any doors or windows back there, or any kind of fenced-in trash containers, but she didn’t. Because that would be strange, given the role she was playing.

  Besides, she was barely on time as it was.

  She walked up the slight incline to the sidewalk, then clutched her purse tightly against her side as she walked to the restaurant’s main door. The door was on the side of the building, away from the sidewalk—an odd choice, she thought.

  She did not look inside the restaurant as she passed its two big windows. She couldn’t hear anything through them, not music or laughter or even the clink of silverware, the way that you sometimes could through single sheets of glass.

  She reached the entry side of the restaurant, finally seeing why the cab hadn’t deposited her there. Half a dozen cars were parked in the parking spaces nearby, at least two of them sticking out so far that it had been nearly impossible to turn in from San Pablo. The cab driver apparently thought he could negotiate his way out easier than he had been able to find his way in.

  She was relieved that she hadn’t seen her truck or Pammy or Val. They weren’t supposed to be anywhere near the restaurant, and so far, they were sticking to the plan.

  She pulled open the glass door and entered the anteroom, with its gigantic cigarette machine and the smaller pay phone hanging beside it. She tossed the receipt in the sand-covered ashcan.

  Then she pushed open the plain brown door into the restaurant itself, immediately overwhelmed by the smells of roast beef, coffee, and baking bread. Her stomach growled. In all the running around she had done, she had forgotten to eat.

  The sounds she had missed outside were here now. A low hum of conversation. The rattle of ice and soda machines. The sizzle of food on a grill. The clink of silverware on china plates.

  There was a cash register directly in front of her, along with a tall table that vaguely resembled a podium. A large pile of thick menus rested on top. Waitresses, wearing brown with white aprons, scurried past.

  Eagle had never eaten here before, and the interior was larger than she expected. It went deep into the back of the building, with various combinations of large and small tables, and booths running along the walls. Only in the very back was there a counter, with some stools and enough space for a handful of patrons.

  But it was pretty clear that sitting back there was discouraged—at least at this time of day.

  She didn’t see any single men sitting alone, and certainly no one who looked like Lavassier. Despite her confident talk, she wasn’t certain she would recognize him in the golden lights of a fairly nice restaurant.

  A balding man wearing a wrinkled white shirt, a gravy-stained tie, and an ill-fitting suit coat over it, grabbed one of the menus. He was clearly the restaurant’s manager.

  “One tonight?” he asked and smiled tiredly at her.

  “N-No,” she said, making herself sound nervous. “I’m here to meet…” She couldn’t call Lavassier a friend. She couldn’t say this was business either. “…someone.”

  The man nodded and grabbed another menu. He started to lead her toward one of the windows, but she said, “Um, could we sit in the back?”

  The man gave her a knowing glance, then nodded again, pivoted, and headed toward a booth across the restaurant. He set both menus down on the brown Formica tabletop.

  “This okay?”

  It was midway between the counter for singles in the very back, and the front with all the windows. There were a few windows that ran along the Cedar Avenue side, but they were smaller and farther away. It would be hard to see her from in here and, with the growing darkness, it was impossible to see out of them from this spot.

  “Yes,” she said.

  “Coffee?” he asked, making it clear with that one word that they didn’t serve alcohol here.

  “Yes, please,” she said. “Cream and sugar.”

  “Sugar’s on the table,” he said, and vanished deeper into the restaurant.

  She slid into the booth, placing her purse on the leather seat close to the wall. She opened the menu, trying to think like her stepmother.

  Never take a table at a restaurant without ordering something. But Eagle knew better than to order an actual meal. Even though she was hungry, she didn’t want to be weighed down by what she had eaten.

  She looked at the desserts on the back, seeing an array of pies, and figured she would have one of those. Then she set the menu aside and shifted in her seat so that she could see the door.

  The manager came back carrying a coffeepot and a bowl filled with creamers. The packaged creamers disappointed her, not because she preferred real milk with her coffee, but because she was hoping for a little pitcher of milk like some restaurants served.

  The manager poured coffee into the thick cup in front of her, then swung the pot toward the other waiting cup.

  “Your friend going to want some?”

  “I don’t know,” Eagle said. “Maybe some water, though.”

  “Your waitress will bring that,” the manager said, and hurried away, the coffeepot held in front of him like a shield.

  Eagle didn’t see anyone who looked like Lavassier. Not yet. She opened her purse and shifted everything around, shoving her watch, wallet, and some of the gloves as close to the bottom as possible, and putting the photographs on top of the loosely closed small pill bottles she had brought with her
. They contained various kinds of drugs, from muscle relaxants to potent sedatives.

  She’d choose the best one after she met Lavassier.

  She would need observation skills and dexterity. The dexterity she wasn’t worried about. She’d administered a lot of different kinds of drugs to all kinds of patients, from those who had welcomed the drug to those who would fight anything she wanted to put in their bodies. She knew how to administer drugs quickly and she knew how to be sneaky about it.

  Eagle had told Val and Pammy that they would only need the motel room in case of emergency.

  Eagle had lied.

  She was going to take this bastard off the street, one way or another. With or without help.

  She wasn’t going to let him hurt anyone ever again.

  55

  Val

  The moment we pulled up to the San Pablo neighborhood in the growing twilight, I realized I had made a mistake. Somehow I had expected the area to be suburban—or at least, a little more upscale than it was.

  Instead, I found myself in a dying industrial neighborhood, with shops and music venues and more restaurants than I had expected. The clubs had weird names like the Freight and Salvage, the Lucky 13, and Tito’s.

  The neighborhood was in transition, and I wasn’t as out of place as I had expected to be. In fact, in some ways, Eagle and her lovely new dress were much more unusual than I was. Women dressed like she was were slumming.

  Pammy sat on the bench seat next to me, her feet outstretched over two black medical bags and some other things Eagle had crammed under the seat of her truck. Pammy had never driven a truck before, so it was up to me. Fortunately, I’d driven almost everything, even though reaching the pedals of this thing was a bit of a trick.

  Parking it would be even more fun.

  We drove past the Golden Bear, just so I could see it. The parking lot beside the restaurant was full. A clapboard sign in the middle of the motel’s lot said Parking for Motel Guests Only. I doubted Lavassier would park there anyway. I knew he didn’t want to call attention to himself.