A Case of You

by Rick Blechta

  “Shouldn’t have what, Ronald?” I asked.

  “I shouldn’t have been so hard on her. She might have stuck around.”

  “Leaving was not her choice.”

  “How was I to know she was an escapee from some funny farm in California?” He looked at his watch.

  “Hell. I got to get out of here. Sorry I can’t help with the equipment. We’ll talk, okay?”

  Ronald had his coat on and was out the door in less than minute. Dom and I watched him go.

  “There’s something Ronald’s hiding from us,” Dom said.

  “Yeah, and I have a bad feeling I know what it is.”

  I’d never told the pianist about Sunnyvale, or the fact that it was in California.

  Chapter 19

  Unable to sleep, Shannon got up in the middle of the night, dressed quickly and drove out to Sunnyvale. The long walk in through the trees and scrub was greatly simplified by the night-vision goggles. They were bulky and she knew she looked ridiculous, but they did the job. She arrived on top of her observation hill shortly before three a.m.

  Thick fog, luminous in the light of a nearly full moon, had flowed down to the valley floor, making most of the compound invisible. The peaks of the smaller buildings poked through like rocks in a slowly undulating grey sea, and the upper storeys of the larger buildings appeared to float majestically like ships.

  The fog also strangely magnified any sound in this otherwise silent world. A door slammed, a dog barked and someone coughed loudly, but because of the impenetrable blanket, the noises seemed to come from everywhere and nowhere.

  Shannon shivered and cursed softly as she lay on the damp ground. The previous day, she’d fastened the transmitter/recorder by means of cable ties to the middle of a thick bush on the edge of the hillside, giving it a clear opening to the compound below. Faced with cold hands, wet hardware and reaching up awkwardly through the branches, she was having a hard time popping off the protective cap that covered the headphone jack. Standing up to accomplish this more easily was not an option.

  Finally the cap gave up the fight, but not before Shannon had scratched her hands and split a nail to the quick.

  This had better be worth it, she thought as she fumbled with the headset.

  Jackie’s voice flooded into her ears, sounding cool, calm and collected. “Hi, Shannon. I’m sending this at ten fifteen at night. This place shuts down pretty early, since they don’t encourage us to fraternize. It can lead to ‘temptation’, as they put it.

  “I had to act out this aft in order to get some information, so they took away my radio, my bedding and my pillow. All I have left is one blanket. So all in all, it’s been a pretty dry evening.

  “I managed to sit with our quarry at dinner. It’s not something I can do on a regular basis, but I thought I could risk getting close once in public. You should see her eyes. If she isn’t spaced on something, I’m a horse’s ass. I’ve been sitting here trying to think of a reason they’d be so obvious about it. Any dough-head could spot it a mile off.

  “After dinner, I watched where Olivia and the other space cadets – that’s what the other inmates call them – were led off to, and it’s the building just to the north of the admin building. It’s probably hidden from where you are, but you might want to check it out.

  “If I’m going to get any decent info, I have to find a way to talk with her alone. That might mean getting into her building after dark. The staff members with the space cadets all have key cards on their belts, so if Roy stays on his roll equipment-wise, I should be able to get in there with one of the master key cards he gave me. Keep your fingers crossed.

  “That’s it. One thing I’ve got to say: when I get out of here, you owe me the biggest honkin’ steak dinner with all the trimmings. The food here is macrobiotic, lo-cal, organic junk, for the most part. Fresh fruit and vegetables I can live with, but I don’t want them all ground up together and looking like green slime in a glass.

  “Sorry for the bitching, but I hadn’t been counting on crap food. I’ll catch a couple of hours of sleep, then see if I can do a bit of a reconnoitre of the grounds. And yes, I’ll be very careful.

  “What’s up in the real world? Leave a short message so I know this gadget is working. Over and out.”

  Shannon pulled down the mike arm on her headset and pushed a button on the transmitter. It glowed red, showing it was on. “Jackie, got your report. Thanks.You’re doing a great job. If you get a chance – and be really careful about this – ask Olivia about someone named Jack Taggart. I’d bring it up very gently. She gets pretty emotional about him in that journal of hers, so I don’t know what her reaction might be, but I’m really curious to see what she says. Only do this if you won’t compromise your cover. Job one is to keep your head down. Over and out.”

  She’d barely stuffed the headset back into her pocket when she heard a twig crack nearby. In the stillness, it sounded like a rifle report.

  Taking stock of her surroundings, she slowly curled up her legs so the bush covered her completely. Then she waited. How loudly had she spoken? Sound carried amazingly. Crap! If she’d queered this business, she was going to be really upset with herself.

  Five minutes, ten minutes. A rock was digging into her side. She barely dared to breath.

  Then someone spoke. “See anything?”

  “No. I reckon it was another false alarm.”

  “Third one this week. If this keeps up, the boss is going to have us camping up here.”

  “That won’t do. What do we tell him?”

  “How about deer? Or a bear? Renaldo swears he saw one up here a few months back. The boss might swallow that.”

  “Okay. We’ll tell him we found bear tracks.”

  Shannon lay there an additional ten minutes just to be sure, then slowly backed out from under the bush.

  They must have motion detectors, since she’d been ultra careful about the cameras. Infrared would have shown her outline. It was lucky the ground was dry up here, and she was taking care to walk as much as she could on dry pine needles under the trees. Footprints would have clinched it.

  She soon found three detectors nearby, placed six metres up in the pines. Pretty cagey of someone. Make the cameras fairly obvious, then hit them with motion detectors while they weren’t expecting it.

  Now that she knew where they were located, she could take steps to avoid them, too. Only luck and the laziness of the staff had saved her.

  As she sped back to Portola with the sky brightening to morning, Shannon wasn’t sure which had been more unnerving: almost stumbling into trouble or possibly stumbling into a bear.

  ***

  Jackie woke just after three. The thin blanket did nothing to keep her warm, even with a sweatsuit on and two pairs of socks, but she’d really conked out for a while after transmitting her report to Shannon. Her left shoulder was sore from having slept on it for several hours. Ten minutes spent stretching all the kinks out made her feel as if she could move without actually creaking.

  Pushing the curtain aside, she looked out the window. Only half the lights from earlier were on, leaving generous swathes of darkness. She didn’t think it would be a good idea to actually go into Olivia’s room and possibly frighten her. This little stroll was best suited to seeing just what was possible and what needed to be worked out.

  Earlier in the evening, Jackie had stepped out the door of her building and found that the light over it was on a motion detector, so leaving that way was wouldn’t work. Her room’s one window was the slider type, and with a bit of fiddling, she managed to get the screen off. Leaning out far enough to see how much light was around her side of the building, she decided to risk a quick reconnoitre.

  After a few minutes of watching in all directions, she slipped the hood of her sweatshirt over her head and hopped onto the sill, then dropped to the ground and rolled back towards the building. A further two minutes brought no cries of alarm or running feet, so she crawled on her belly to the
end of the building, finding a space in the shadows there.

  So far so good. The dark colours of the clothes she’d been given certainly helped her clandestine journey, but she wished now she’d thought of adding silk gloves and balaclava to Roy’s care package. Light skin was surprisingly easy to see. The building Olivia was housed in was on the same side of the compound as Jackie’s, but being closer to the admin building, there was also more light. If there were going to be staff members out and about at night, they’d probably be found in that general area.

  Away from the buildings and pathways, there was no artificial light, and Jackie noticed with satisfaction that fog was beginning to roll down the hills on both sides of Sunnyvale. The site had probably been chosen as being nicely secluded because of the surrounding terrain, but it also lent itself to mists and fogs on nights such as this.

  She worked her way from one pool of darkness to another, and was less than halfway to her goal when the fog began obscuring everything. In a few minutes, it was so thick, she could walk where she wanted. Unless she went right under a light or actually bumped into someone, they’d never know she was there. Still, her ears strained to catch any hint of sound that might mean danger.

  One unexpected problem did arise, though: she was no longer certain which building was which and almost blundered into the side of what must have been a staff building, because she could hear people inside talking and laughing loudly, along with the unmistakable clink of beer bottles hitting together.

  So, she thought, when the mice are asleep, the cats play. Interesting...

  She reached what she was pretty certain was the building housing the space cadets. It was built lower to the ground than the building she was staying in, since it was on a flatter part of the site.

  Jackie was poking around, trying to see into the rooms when she heard the sound she’d been dreading: rapid footsteps coming toward her on the walkway from the admin building.

  She threw herself down in the wet grass facing the building, hoping the shadows would hide her.

  The footsteps went right to the door, where the motion detector switched the light on. Jackie could make out the burly man she’d seen in town the other day swiping his key card and entering the building.

  Deciding she’d tempted fate enough that night, Jackie got to her feet and was preparing to slip away when a voice spoke just to her right.

  “What are you doing out there?” The female voice was soft, but intense.

  Jackie froze, cursing her stupidity.

  “Don’t worry, I’m not going to tell anybody. Do you like the fog like I do?”

  By now she realized the sound was coming from the window near her right shoulder, not from outside the building. One of the space cadets was talking to her.

  “Yeah,” she whispered.

  “What are you doing out there?”

  “It’s a game I sometimes play, sort of like one of those video games, but in real life.”

  “Don’t you know you’ll get in a lot of trouble if they catch you out of your room?”

  “That’s all part of the game.”

  “Cool. I’d like to be out there with you, but we can’t get out of our windows any more.”

  Stringing her along, Jackie asked, “Why not?”

  “They’ve screwed them in place. I suppose I could break through, but I’d have no way to hide that, and they’d get pretty angry. I don’t want to have to sleep on the floor.”

  With that information, Jackie decided to take a chance. “What’s your name?”

  “Olivia.”

  Bingo!

  Realizing that whoever had come over from admin to this building could easily discover the two of them talking, Jackie decided to cut the conversation short.

  “I gotta go now.”

  “That’s too bad. I never have anybody to talk to when I sit here at night and look out.”

  “Oh, I might drop by another night when I’m playing my little games.”

  “I’d like that.”

  A sound at the front door and the light coming on made Jackie flit around the corner. All she needed was for Olivia to call out, and she’d be screwed. Fortunately, nothing happened, and she relaxed as the person walked off towards the admin building. She wasted no time getting back to her room, but her scrabbling entry through the window was anything but quick and graceful. Because of the slope behind her building, the sill was about five feet off the ground.

  Jackie lay on the floor, wet, tired but very exhilarated by her excursion. She knew she’d been lucky with the fog and the dark night and actually speaking to Olivia, but it’s said that luck is the residue of hard work...and taking chances.

  ***

  Dom and I had stayed up past four talking about the Olivia situation, first at the Sal, then, when Flo and Loraine gave us the boot, at the Mars Restaurant on College.

  As a result of more booze than I’d had in nearly three years and several coffee chasers, I wasn’t in top form when I woke up near noon. Unburdening myself had felt good, since I’d really had no one just to talk to since Sandra had left. Olivia would have looked at me as if I’d fallen out of a tree if I’d said some of the same things to her. We’d parted as the sky was beginning to lighten the east.

  Clapping me on the shoulder, Dom said, “This thing with our girlie is a lot more complicated than I thought. At first Ronald and I were sure she’d been spirited away by some manager who’d previously signed her. Man, you wouldn’t believe the scenarios we came up with!”

  “I’m glad you kept it from me. I probably would have popped you both in the nose. This has not been a good week for me.”

  “I think Ronald is now seeing the value of having Olivia working with us. If you want my opinion, he was jealous of the attention she was getting.”

  “Look, we’re all pretty good players, especially Ronald, but Olivia is just plain special. Of course she was going to get the lion’s share of the attention.”

  “You know that and I know that, but Ronald, well...he’s Ronald. He’s a hell of a player, Andy, not just good. With his skill and our backup, no telling how far we could have ridden on Olivia’s coattails. Now we’re faced with losing our steady gig.”

  “It’s no good talking about it. We’ll only get more depressed. I’m going home and hitting the sack. Kate is coming over this weekend, and I’ve still got fingerprint dust all over the house. I don’t want her to see that. Tomorrow’s going to be a busy day.”

  Lying in bed, I was working up the energy to head for the shower when someone started pounding on the downstairs door. Earlier in my musical life, I’d shared a house with the guys in my band, and when you have a bunch of musicians and parties till all hours, you learn pretty quickly how cops knock on doors.

  This was definitely a cop, and he clearly was not in a good mood. I threw on some clothes and hustled down, fully expecting to see dents on my front door from the law enforcement knuckles.

  “Andrew Curran?” one of two uniformed officers asked.

  “Yes.”

  “Please come with us.”

  “What’s this about?”

  “I can’t tell you that, sir. We’ve only been instructed to bring you downtown.”

  “Look, I just got out of bed. Can’t I have some breakfast and come down later?”

  His expression clearly showed he thought I was a complete moron. “I’m sorry, sir, but it doesn’t work like that.”

  “Can I at least get my goddamn socks and shoes on?”

  One of them actually followed me upstairs and waited outside my bedroom while I put on clean clothes. They even let me brush my teeth.

  Of course, the old busybody next door was out on her porch to see me escorted down the driveway to the cruiser. At least they hadn’t used handcuffs.

  ***

  Shannon got back to the motel, crashed for a few hours and rose as Portola came to life. First order of business was a nice hot shower.

  It sounded as if things were going well a
t Sunnyvale. She only hoped her inexperienced operative wouldn’t get overconfident. The memory of those livid knife scars Jackie had shown her had been the result of getting cocky. She hoped Jackie had learned something from that.

  Shannon’s goal at the moment was finding out exactly what had happened to this Taggart guy mentioned so many times in Olivia’s journal – mentions ranging from saint to devil. It had not been hard to read between the lines. The retired butler, James Davis, had admitted that everyone in the St. James family had been completely stunned that Olivia was so deeply involved with drugs when she’d overdosed. Both he and Darcy Jeffries had told Shannon that they couldn’t understand where she’d been getting the drugs.

  She was willing to put money down that Jack Taggart was the one responsible, although why no one else suspected him was beyond comprehension.

  Drying off, Shannon wiped the steamed-over mirror and studied her reflection. Part of her was still smarting over the way Maxine St. James had tried to play her for a fool. She’d been so smug about her little game as they’d eaten their civilized lunch, all the while thinking that she was about to put something over on the private investigator. Even though Shannon had the last laugh, she didn’t take kindly to being thought a fool.

  Wrapped in a towel, she went out into the room and flipped open her laptop. In short order, two emails told her that overnight searches by firms she’d utilized many times in the past to trace people had turned up nothing on Jack Taggart except his last known address in Brooklyn, something she already had.

  The world was still a big place, but it was shrinking daily due to the omnipresence of the Internet. Yes, Taggart could be anywhere, living under an assumed name, and it might take weeks or even months to run him to ground, but there were ways to find nearly anyone these days.

  But Shannon knew in her gut this wouldn’t prove to be the case with Taggart, because she was betting he was no longer in this world, and somehow she was going to tie that fact to Maxine St. James.