Union Jacked

by Diane Vallere

  Except maybe the shooter.

  Reality check. Maybe there was another reason Loncar put me on the list?

  No! I couldn’t just sit around and do nothing. Not now. Not after everything.

  The elevator doors opened and closed without me. Eventually, I climbed on and rode to the fourth floor, got off and wandered around the hallway in a daze. I didn’t know where I was going or what I expected to find. I just knew I wasn’t ready to go back downstairs and face the thin blue line.

  What if it was one of them?

  The thought hit me like a water balloon on a hot day. The shiver that I hadn’t been able to shake since the shooting was replaced by an uncomfortable heat that prickled my armpits and climbed my neck and face. I felt sick. I clawed at the toggles on my Paddington coat and ran to the closest ladies’ room. I shed my coat and pushed up my sleeves to run my arms under cold water. I was burning up. When I glanced at my reflection, my face was beet red.

  I was in a hospital. I was floors away from medical professionals who could give me a once-over and reassure me that I was okay. But I knew I wasn’t okay. My temperature was fluctuating between hot and cold. My stomach had been in a constant state of nausea, and I hadn’t eaten pizza for days.

  I knew what was happening was different than anything I’d experienced before in my life, and it didn’t have to do with Loncar or the shooter or the strike or the angry police officers downstairs. It had to do with that thing I was afraid to think about.

  With shaking hands, I pulled my phone out of my handbag and called Nick. Before he’d left, we agreed that the time change would make it difficult to connect while he was gone. Privately, I knew the more he was able to focus on researching factories and sourcing materials, the sooner he’d know if this new venture was viable and the sooner he could come home. There was a twelve-hour time difference between Ribbon and China, and the risk in calling him now was interrupting a business meeting.

  “Hey Kidd,” he answered. His voice was smooth and jovial, and he spoke as if we’d been in the middle of a conversation. “I was just thinking about you. The factory had these sneakers with a Union Jack on the side, and I pulled a pair from production for you. This marriage is the gift that keeps on giving.”

  It was too much. Nick calling me “Kidd” like he’d done since we met in New York. The mention of the British theme of my secret-not-secret party for Loncar. The seven thousand miles between Ribbon and China, the events of the past twenty-four hours, and the nausea that I hadn’t been able to shake even after eight cups of tea. I blurted out the thing I’d tried to ignore by focusing on everything else.

  “Nick, I think I’m pregnant.” And then the nausea won, and I threw up in the sink.

  I’ve never felt so alone in my life. The floor of the bathroom where I tossed my cookies was, coincidentally, on the floor for obstetricians. Nick stayed on the phone while I got myself (somewhat) under control, out of the bathroom, and into the closest doctor’s office. Overstuffed red chairs draped loosely with plastic lined the perimeter of the room. The walls showed exposed nails and hooks but no pictures. Three shades of near-identical pink had been swiped onto the wall in broad brush strokes and paint chips had been attached below to identify them as mauve, dusty rose, and puce. Three abandoned paint trays, three paint cans, and three rollers sat on the floor. Tilted against one of the plastic-covered chairs was a flat-screen TV playing a rerun of Frasier.

  “Hello?” I called out.

  A toilet flushed, and a woman appeared. She had wild, frizzy hair peeking out from under a plastic shower cap printed with cats. “Which one do you like?” she asked. She pointed to the swatches of color on the wall. “I like the puce, but puce? What will patients think when I tell them my walls are puce? No, I need something calming. Mauve. Have you ever noticed all of the muted pink colors have a U? Maybe it’s a conspiracy.” She picked up the middle roller and loaded it, rolled a W of paint onto the wall and stood back. “No, mauve just isn’t as alive as puce. I’m right. Aren’t I right?” She cocked her head to the other side. “Don’t answer that. I know I’m right.” She set the roller down. “Maybe blue would be better?”

  For the first time since entering the office, the woman seemed to detach from her dilemma and notice me. I dropped my handbag and coat onto the floor and stood in the center of her lobby, unsure what I should say or do or say. Or do.

  “Wow, you’re not having a very good day, are you?” she said. She scooped my stuff from the floor and tossed it onto a plastic-covered sofa. “Sit. Relax. I’ll get you something to drink. Coffee? Tea? Soda? Water? I’ve got it all. Juice? Wine? You probably want wine.”

  There was something familiar about her voice, but I was too freaked out to place where I’d heard it. She guided me to one of the plastic-covered chairs, and I sat. The tarp crinkled under me in a way that would make a room of fifth-grade boys laugh. “No wine,” I said.

  “Okay. I’ll be right back.” The woman disappeared for a moment and returned with a Dixie cup of water.

  A faint, tinny voice repeated my name over and over until I remembered Nick was still on the phone. I held it out, and the woman took it. “Hello? This is Dr. Emma. Were you speaking to the young lady who burst into my office?” She winked at me. “I see. Yes, that does make sense. Of course. Here you go.”

  She handed me the phone. “Take your time. I’m going to return a few emails from the back office. Actually, maybe I should return some phone calls too. No. Emails are faster.” She put her fingernail between her teeth and looked over her shoulder. “Or billing. Yes. I’ll work on billing.” She disappeared into the hallway, and I raised the phone to my head.

  “Nick?”

  “I’m here, Kidd. Are you okay?” I made an O with my mouth and inhaled sharply, and then exhaled in several short puffs. “Are you hyperventilating?”

  “It’s Lamaze. I watched a video on YouTube.”

  “How far along do you think you are?”

  “I’m ten days late.”

  There was a pause. “Ten days. That’s—not very late. Have you taken a pregnancy test?”

  “I don’t need to take a test, Nick. We’re newlyweds. And we’ve acted like newlyweds. And I cleaned the whole house and I haven’t eaten pizza and I’ve felt ill for a week and I just threw up. I’m pretty sure that means I’m pregnant.”

  “Or it means you ate too much junk food and the house needed to be cleaned and there’s a bug going around.” He paused. “I thought it would be a good idea for me to give you some space to adjust to me moving in, but I’m all finished up here. I was going to surprise you. I can be home in a day. Okay?”

  I closed my eyes, and his voice wrapped me in a cocoon of comfort. I felt a hint of the bliss I’d felt on our honeymoon when we were in Paris away from the problems of our lives. The memory of making out with him under the Eiffel Tower flashed into my brain, and a rush of heat traveled lower. My heartbeat picked up, and I became aware of what had gotten me into this predicament in the first place. “Come home, Nick,” I said.

  “The trip’s sixteen hours long so you won’t see me until tomorrow, but I’ll be there as fast as I can. I’m going to need you to be calm about this. Can you do that?”

  I took another sharp breath in and exhaled in three puffs. “Yes,” I said. “I’ll see if Emma will let me stay here a little longer.”

  “Is Emma a new friend? I don’t think you’ve mentioned her before.”

  “She’s a doctor. Is that a sign? That the first person I encountered after telling you was a doctor?”

  “Where are you?”

  “The Ribbon hospital.”

  “Samantha, why are you at the hospital? Maybe you should put Emma back on the phone.”

  Nick only called me Samantha when he was worried or trying to make a point. Or during those private bedroom (and sometimes living room and shower and once in the garage) moments when we—well, you get the picture. (What if it was the time in the garage?)

  “
I can’t. She’s busy with her billing. Nick—”

  “Listen to me, Kidd,” he continued. “I’ll be there as soon as I can. This is us. You and me. I love you more than I ever thought possible.”

  A warm glow lit within me, and I held my breath and counted to ten while appreciating the bond I had with Nick. He knew me better than anybody, and he accepted me. He loved me. He wouldn’t make me do this alone. He was coming home. He would be back in Ribbon tomorrow. I forgot about everything else except him and me and the baby we were going to have.

  “I love you too,” I said. “And I don’t want you to cut your trip short because of me. Millions of women have already done this. I can do it too.”

  “Let me talk to your doctor again.”

  I held the phone against my sweater and called out to Emma.

  “Is everything okay?” she asked. She held a stuffed rabbit in one hand and a fidget ring in the other.

  “My husband would like to talk to you.” I held out the phone. She handed me the stuffed rabbit and took my phone.

  “Yes?” she said to Nick. “Of course. Yes. No. Absolutely. No, that’s not likely. I’ll tell her. Yes. Safe travels.” She pressed a button on my phone and handed it back. “Your husband cares very much about you,” she said.

  “It took us a long time to get to where we’re at, but I wouldn’t trade it for anything,” I said.

  “I picked up on that,” she said. “In fact, he did ask me to give you some advice. He wanted me to tell you to use the party you’re planning to keep you busy. I agree, if you’re working on a project, the best thing you can do is continue. Don’t focus on what you’re afraid is going to happen. Focus on what you can control.”

  Like a malfunctioning slide projector, images of Detective Loncar flashed into my brain. The expression on his face when he heard about the party. His demand that I keep him in the loop about everything. The shooting in front of Tradava. His body, down. The rush of medical staff in his room. The flat line on his monitor.

  “I think if Nick knew the details, he’d say focusing on the party wasn’t a good idea.”

  “Nonsense. Your husband’s advice is right. Now go home and spend the rest of your evening working on your project.” Her eyes cut away from mine to the swipes of color on the wall. “Maybe yellow?” she added to herself.

  I stopped on Loncar’s floor before leaving the hospital. The frantic energy that I’d witnessed in the detective’s room earlier had given way to calm, but the door was closed, and a Do Not Disturb sign hung from the knob.

  I went to the nurses’ station to check on his condition and held out my wrist to show my visitor band. “I was here earlier to visit Detective Loncar. I was here when—when—” I turned and looked behind me, and then turned back. I didn’t know what had happened or whether he’d pulled through.

  The nurse checked notes on a clipboard and looked up at me. “Are you a relative?”

  “No.” The woman set the clipboard down, and her expression tightened. “But I am one of three people on the approved visitor’s list,” I added. She verified my identity through a phone call. When she satisfied herself, she leaned close. “Your friend had a cardiac event. It was after his daughter left.”

  “Ginger was here?”

  She nodded. She picked something up from her desk and dangled it in front of me. “She left a trail of leather fringes in her wake.”

  I took the black leather fringe and turned it over in my hands. There was one person on site who wore leather fringes, and it wasn’t Ginger Loncar.

  It was Bridget, the hostile female cop from the lobby of the hospital.

  7

  Carl’s Unicorn

  Who was Bridget? And why had she been on Loncar’s floor pretending to be his daughter? Something didn’t make sense, and I was going to flip every rock in my way until I had answers.

  The impulse to lie low and live a quiet, safe life vanished. Despite my rocky employment history since moving back to Ribbon, there was one thing I’d consistently done well.

  I called Eddie from the car. “Yeah, mate,” he answered in his Nigel voice.

  I didn’t bother with formalities. “I just left the hospital,” I said. “Detective Loncar went into a coma. I had a meltdown, and now I’m headed home.”

  Eddie was quiet for a moment, and I wondered which part of what I’d said had caused his silence. “Dude, you want company?” he asked, his voice back to normal. “Because I got a call about a vigil at Tradava, and as bad as I feel about what happened today, I wouldn’t mind an excuse not to go.”

  “Meet me at my place in twenty minutes.”

  I could have driven home. I should have driven home.

  I didn’t drive home. I drove to Tradava.

  It was dark and my day should have been winding down, but my brain was swirling with information, like dust particles floating around me in seemingly random patterns. Pieces of intel that may or may not have had anything to do with the shooting were just out of my reach.

  And Eddie had said someone had organized a vigil, and I wanted to know who that someone was.

  I pulled into the lot and discovered the idea wasn’t unique to me. A news van was parked beyond the customer entrance, and a cluster of people stood near it. Some were holding candles. Yellow crime-scene tape marked off where the picketers had stood earlier and expanded far enough into the lot to render a third of Tradava’s customer parking off-limits. In addition to the news people and the candlelight vigil participants, I counted three guards in black security uniforms.

  From a distance, it should have been easy to spot Carl Collins from the Ribbon Eagle/Times in his trademark hat, ill-fitting seersucker suit, and Stan Smiths, but it was closing in on ten p.m., and the streetlamps that peppered the lot were far enough away from the group that I couldn’t see him.

  Why had I come here? Because it was ground zero. It was where the shooting had taken place. Loncar had said he knew the shooter. He said he was the target. But if he wasn’t, then innocent people were still at risk.

  I drove closer. Faces of the participants turned to watch me. I parked in one of the available spaces and got out. A tall, lanky man with a receding hairline and ruddy cheeks pulled away from the group and approached. “News or vigil?” he asked.

  “Neither.” I pointed to the store. “I work here.”

  “Store’s closed. Probably going to be closed for some time. Might not ever reopen.”

  “Is that your opinion or has some official source given you a quote?”

  He smiled a half smile and scratched the side of his face. Light from the nearby streetlamp made silver follicles of his beard sparkle. Instead of answering, he held out his hand. “Frank Mazurkiewicz. Ribbon Eagle/Times.”

  “Samantha Kidd,” I said.

  He pointed at me, his index finger and thumb sticking out like a gun. “You’re Carl’s unicorn,” he said. “He’s been chasing you around Ribbon for years now.”

  “I expected to find him here tonight. Did the paper expand the crime beat?”

  “Carl’s on a cruise somewhere in Bermuda.”

  “And you’re the backup crime reporter?”

  “Sports.” He shrugged. “I was working late on a story about local swimmers, and the editor needed someone to cover the shooting. I came here to check things out and found a vigil.”

  My relationship with the local newspaper was solidly tied to Carl Collins, and his absence from this investigation made it seem even wonkier. But there was an easygoing friendliness to Frank. He seemed to accept the assignment as part of his job, but not feel propelled to leverage it for bigger and better things.

  “How long have you been here?” I asked.

  “About an hour. I thought we’d get a background picture for the story, but people started showing up. I’m more interested in the human interest angle. You’ve got a family-owned business that’s been here for seventy-five years, bought out by an investment company with a history of buying up retailers and brea
thing new life into them. You’ve got a unionized workforce on a picket line. And you’ve got a shooter who took what might have been a local story and blew it up into national news.” He looked at his watch. “Seven o’clock on the west coast. Yep, by now every news station in the country has reported on what happened here today. Depending on how I write this thing, we can look like a hotbed of criminal activity or a community that pulls together in the face of crisis.”

  “You’re going with community.”

  “Seems better for Ribbon,” he said.

  I pointed at the small crowd. “Do you know who organized this? If it were someone from Tradava, I’d think I would have been notified.”

  “You want to talk to the young lady in the earmuffs. Her name is Taryn.” He pulled out his phone and scrolled through his notes app. “Taryn Monahan.”

  Monahan? That couldn’t be a coincidence.

  I thanked Frank and approached the vigil. As I got closer, I picked out the woman in the earmuffs and recognized her as the middle-aged cheerleader from this morning. She greeted each newcomer and handed them a thin white candle with a round disc affixed to the middle. She held her lit candle out, and they lit theirs from hers. With the expanded crowd, the glow provided what the streetlamps did not.

  “You’re Taryn?” I asked.

  “Yes,” she said. She pulled out a candle for me. I waved her off. “I’m not here for the vigil.”

  She stood there with a candle in each hand, one lit, one not. “You don’t want a candle?” she asked.

  “No. I’m not staying.”

  “Why not? Don’t you care about what happened here today? Don’t you care that someone used violence to shut down our rally?”

  “You think the shooter had something to do with the union strike?”

  “Of course, he did. It was probably arranged by management.” She said “management” like she was saying “two-month-old lettuce that’s been left to rot in the refrigerator.” (Not that I’d know.) “My brother was shot.”