by Stephen John
No response.
I knew I had to get loose before he tossed me out the door, so I grabbed his ear with my free hand and twisted hard—perhaps a tad too hard.
“Yeeeeee-owwwww!”
Mountain Man let out a blood-curdling scream, turning loose of me and falling to one knee, holding his ear. I’m uncertain I’ve ever heard as many expletives come out of one person’s mouth in a five-second period.
I landed on my feet. I took off, disappearing into the center of the crowd. I knew the big guy would recover quickly and be hot on my trail. When he found me, he would likely not be in a good mood. I remembered there was a trash can twenty feet to my right, near the restroom. I headed toward it, shedding my glasses, peeling off my sweat-shirt and losing the wool hat as I approached. I heard a cat-calls as I stripped down to my tank top and tight jeans and shook my hair out.
Several people noticed my metamorphosis, including Roger, the fifty-year old man who had tried to hit me up for a joint. He was standing near the trash can as I dumped my Goodwill attire.
“Whoa,” he said, looking at me, blinking. “Caterpillar to butterfly. I think I’ve been drinking way too much. I know women get prettier the more you drink, but... DAMN!”
He looked at his bottle of Rebel Yell, “I’ve had enough. You take it.”
He handed me his bottle of whiskey. I took it and tossed it in the trash, on top of my Goodwill clothing.
“Roger, can you hang with me for a few minutes?” I asked.
“Sure,” he said. “Why not? You got an angry boyfriend after you or something?”
“Nope,” I responded. “Security.”
“Big guy?” he asked, raising his hand high.
“Yeah.”
He scoffed and shook his head in disgust, “That’s Clyde. I can’t stand the guy. He’s always like, ‘No you can’t bring your whiskey in here; no, you can’t smoke a joint in here; no, you can’t pee in the hall.’ What a buzz-kill.”
I looked at the stage and sighed, realizing I had completely wasted my time. Paul Pride was not coming. He would have been here long before now. Clyde was trying to find me to toss me out on my ear, and instead of Paul Pride, the only person I had found was a fifty-year old sweet vagabond who thinks peeing in a public hallway should constitutional right. And I was putting up with all this for a man who didn’t want me here or want my help. The night was a bust.
My heart was racing. I don’t know why, but at that moment I was furious with myself to be in this situation. It might have been the lack of leads or lack of cooperation from Carter. Maybe it was my inability to move our relationship forward any quicker. Maybe it was losing out on the best chance I had to find Paul Pride. Maybe it was the beer. Maybe it was a combination of all the above.
It was probably the beer. I took a deep breath. Yep, I was hammered.
I looked at the stage again and sighed in exasperation.
“Roger, do you think you can get me to the front of that stage?” I asked.
“Sure,” he said.
I slapped him on the chest, a little harder than I should have, “Let’s go, Roger.”
“Why?”
“Because I wanna sing, Roger,” I bellowed. I slapped him on the chest again, this time even harder. He nearly lost his balance with the blow. “I wanna dance. I want to be up front.”
He shrugged, “Okay. We should probably move now though. Clyde is on the prowl.”
He pointed. I saw Mountain Man making his way through the crowd, looking for me.
“Quick,” Roger said. “Hop up and down to the music. Throw your hands in the air and start fist-pumping. Shake your hair in your face. Watch. Like this.”
Roger demonstrated what he meant. It didn’t look like dancing. In his defense, he was drunk, too. HIs dancing looked more like an Emergency Room Doctor had yelled, “Clear!” and zapped him with the defibrillator paddles.
As Clyde glanced in my direction, I looked away from him and at the stage and followed my new friend’s advice, jumping up and down, pumping my fists, shaking my hair in front of my face, to the song playing, “TNT.”
The ruse worked as Mountain Man did not appear to give a second look my way. He turned to his left and walked in the opposite direction.
I patted Roger on the chest, “Okay. Let’s go.”
With Mountain Man at a safe distance, Roger grabbed my hand, and we made our way to the stage through the sea of humanity, all of them standing, jumping and screaming, shoulder to shoulder, elbow to elbow. It took the length of the song, “Fire Your Guns,” for Roger and I to make our way to the stage.
Roger had done his job. I was now standing right by the edge of the stage. Lady Angus was standing three feet away. She was swirling her long dreadlocks around and around as she played. Sweat was spraying off her hair—much of it sprinkled on me.
Seriously? I mean, she was great and all, but you know—ewww.
The next twenty minutes was a blast. I had not had this much fun in a while. Roger was singing along. He knew every word to every song.
The band ripped into “Dirty Deeds Done Dirt Cheap.” I hooted at the top of my lungs and caught Roger smiling out of the corner of my eye. He may have been an older man with a questionable personality and zero sense of fashion and a sloppy drunk to boot, but to his credit, he was sweet, poorly dressed sloppy drunk. He stood beside me and just smiled. It was the smile you’d get from a big brother and not a lecher. He was just there to share a moment and have fun. He was my only Seattle friend and at that moment, I was happy to have him.
At least Roger wanted me around. At that moment, I forgot about Carter and about Paul Pride. I was only focused on singing along, clapping and dancing.
When the song ended, Lady Angus approached the mic, “Thank you Seattle! We have one more song for you tonight. Does anyone out there know, ‘You Shook Me All Night Long?’”
The crowd roared with approval. She counted down and shredded the beginning of the song. The crowd went crazy.
The lead singer, Lady Brian Johnson, a husky woman with black hair, an ample spare tire around her middle and a million tattoos, approached the front of the stage as the drums and bass guitar kicked in. She sang, “She was a fast machine, she kept her motor clean, she was the best damn woman that I’ve ever seen.”
Lady Angus made eye contact with me. I hooted, “Woo-hoo!”
She smiled and laughed. I had both hands in the air, clapping and singing along with the music.
Lady-Bri continued to sing, “She had sightless eyes, telling me no lies, knocking me out with those American thighs...”
The band had whipped the crowd into a complete frenzy.
During the musical interlude the second guitarist, Lady Malcolm Young, a dark-haired beauty, walked forward and began a guitar solo. Lady Angus handed her guitar to a stagehand and walked over to where I stood. She held her hand out to me. At first, I backed away. She laughed and smiled more broadly.
“C’mon!” she screamed.
What the hell, I thought. I took her hand, “Roger, give me a boost,” I yelled, barely audible against the music.
Roger put his two hands on my waist and gave me a boost on stage. The crowd screamed in approval.
Lady Angus looked at me and started a sultry dance move. I did my best to replicate it. Then I would bust a move and she’d replicate what I did. We traded off head-bobbing, undulating and shoulder-shimmying. We shook our shoulders, then turned and shook our booties at the audience.
If only Celia Arceneaux could see me now, I thought. I was shaking every body part able to jiggle and was doing so unabashedly. She always accused me of being a slut. This would have validated it for her. But she wasn’t here. Lady Bri ended the song with a resounding...
“Alllll night long!”
The crowd went crazy. Lady Bri and Lady Angus gave me high fives and admonished the crowd, “Let’s give it up for this young lady here.”
When the song was over, my adrenaline rush immediately dwindl
ed. I managed a smile and a tiny bow and called for my unlikely hero, Roger. He held his arms out as I jumped. He caught me.
“That was aaaawesome!” he reported.
The band took their bows, waved and left the stage, waiting in the back for the audience to demand an encore. The cheers were deafening.
It was then; I saw him.
It was Paul Pride.
He was there. His hair was shorter than it was in the picture I’d seen, and he now had facial hair, but unmistakably, it was him. I don’t know how I had missed him earlier.
Unless he arrived late...
Or I missed him in the sea of humanity...
Or was it the beers?
I walked toward him. He saw me coming. I felt his eyes move up and down my body. Paul Pride’s eyes let me know what he was thinking. He was grinning from ear to ear as I drew near.
“That was great,” he said. “You wanna go out back and smoke a joint?”
“You’re Paul Pride, right?” I said.
It was as though I had flipped a light switch. The smile disappeared from his face instantly. He didn’t respond. What he did, was react instantaneously, and it caught me off guard. He slipped his hands under my armpits and effortlessly picked me up, tossing me backwards into the crowd.
Damn, he was strong!
I landed sideways across the backs of two humongus biker types and fell to the floor. Paul took off, heading to the exit.
“Hey, that wasn’t very nice,” Roger screamed after him. “This girl is homeless... maybe... I think.”
Paul was immensely strong and agile and had broken through the crowd and was at the exit before I recovered. I took off after him. Unfortunately for me, I wasn’t anywhere near Paul’s size. While Roger was effortlessly knocking people left and right as he plowed through the crowd I had much more difficulty pushing my way through the audience.
By the time I made it to the exit, he had put almost a hundred yards of distance between him and me.
Damn, he moved fast.
Just as prepared to give chase the band struck up their encore song, “For Those About to Rock, We Salute You.”
“I love that song,” I said aloud, and ran after Paul Pride. He had run down a steep hill and was now running at a lower level alongside a road filled with parked cars.
Rather than following him down the hill to the lower level I remained at the higher level, running parallel to him.
I saw Paul Pride look back twice, but I was tracking him by running along the top level, far enough back that he couldn’t see me. He kept looking back, but from my position I could tell, he did not know where I was or if I followed. He thought he’d lost me, which is exactly what I wanted.
I saw him unlocking a car door. He stopped long enough to survey the scene once again. He did not see me. I was certain. I knew I would not have time to catch him before he pulled away. I kept up the chase, however, and got close enough to make out the description of the car. I also made a mental note of the license plate number.
Paul Pride peeled away feeling certain he’d gotten away cleanly and dodged a bullet.
Not so, Mr. Paul Pride.
I stopped. In some of Carter’s emails, he and Ariel were exchanging information about Paul’s car. Pride drove a 1999 Dodge Ram, which had been reported stolen and later found abandoned. The car he took off in was not a Dodge Ram.
It was a late model white Toyota Prius.
I smiled.
A Toyota Prius.
It was a car a girlfriend might drive?
Perhaps a girlfriend who was hiding him out?
I pointed in the direction Paul had driven off.
“I got you,” I said aloud. “I got you, Paul Pride.”
At two-thirty in the morning when I arrived back at my hotel, I opened my laptop and signed on. I wrote and emailed HotdudeinNE. That was the private email address my CIA partner, Ben Harrison, gave me to reach him outside the visibility of our employer, the CIA. I marked the subject line “URGENT.”
Harrison was a terrific partner, and I trusted him unequivocally. He knows I’ve been handling cases local to Sinful against strict orders and even knows Ida Belle and Gertie have been working alongside me. He doesn’t condone it; he doesn’t like it, but he tolerates it.
More recently he let me know he’s been falling for a girl he’d met and was considering leaving the CIA to be with her. That made me think about my life and the decisions I was making regarding my career.
In the email I asked Harrison to pull strings and to look up the registration of the Toyota I saw Paul Pride drive away in, and to send me the owner’s name and address and any other information on her he could dig up.
I looked at my phone. I had several missed calls from both Gertie and Ida Belle and also two from Carter, who undoubtedly wanted to know if I arrived safely back in Sinful by now.
I wondered if I should call Harrison directly? Should I call Carter, or Ida Belle and Gertie? Paul Pride did not realize I saw him driving away and would therefore not make any rash moves before morning.
It would wait until morning.
Chapter 10
At six a.m. I checked my email. Harrison was in Washington D.C. so it was nine o’clock there. He had already responded to my email. Tons of information poured in as email attachments. I took a picture of his responses with my phone.
I called Carter. He answered on the second ring. His sounded as if he’d been up for a while.
“Carter,” I said. “How is the search going for Paul Pride?”
“Well...” he stammered, “I’m not where I thought I’d be but I’m working on some things, and...”
“Let’s talk plain, shall we?” I interrupted. “You have nothing, Carter. I know it, and you know it, and now you know I know it. You are still looking for Paul Pride and you have no real leads.”
“That is not the case, Fortune,” he objected. “I have been...”
I made a loud, annoying buzzer noise, not as annoying as the one Simon Cowell uses on America’s Got Talent, but damn annoying, “Wrong answer. Carter, I know.”
“What do you know?” he asked. His tone reflected both concern and annoyance.
“Look, I can help,” I replied. “I didn’t go back to Sinful. I’m still here in Seattle.”
“Fortune, I thought we agreed—”
“To quote a famous man I know well, I didn’t agree to anything. You agreed for both of us and I don’t know what I was thinking.”
“That was different,” he said.
“Look, Carter, I’m not arguing about this. Meet me at seven-thirty at the Biscuit Bitch.”
“The Biscuit what?”
“You heard me. Bring your rental car. See you then, Carter.”
“Fortune...”
I hung up and called Ida Belle.
“How did it go last night?” she asked. “We didn’t hear from you. It worried us.”
“I have much to tell you,” I said.
“That’s good,” Ida Belle replied. “We sat in the parking lot of Dick’s Burgers until nine o’clock. We never saw Paul.”
“I know you didn’t,” I replied. “Are you guys dressed?”
“Yes.”
“Meet me at the Starbucks downstairs in fifteen minutes. I’ll bring you up to speed.”
Chapter 11
I met with Ida Belle and Gertie and brought them up to speed on what I had discovered, and was now waiting on Carter to show up at the wonderful but unfortunately named, Biscuit Bitch. I sat in the far rear corner of the dining room, a safe distance from all ears.
Carter popped through the door, saw where I was sitting and made a beeline for my table. He looked more than just a little irritated as he approached. He pulled his sunglasses up to the top of his head, revealing the eyes of a man who looked like he hadn’t slept well.
The waitress saw Carter come in and quickly arrived at our table and poured two cups of coffee.
“Do you two know what you want?” she asked.
“Just coffee for me,” I said. Carter nodded.
The waitress rolled her eyes, perhaps mentally calculating the tip for two cups of coffee.
“Fortune, why are you still here?” he said, forcefully.
“Good morning to you too,” I said in a tone laced in sarcasm. “It’s so good to see you.”
“This is not funny, Fortune,” he said.
“You’re right, it isn’t funny,” I re-joined. “You’re in over your head, Carter, and you need help. And now, you’re gonna let me help, too.”
Carter sat back, surprised, “You know something, don’t you? What do you know?”
“I know it all, Carter. I know Paul Pride is a drug smuggler for a man named Manny Montoya. I know he’s hiding out with $200,000 worth of Montoya’s cocaine. I know you took his sister to a safe house. I know you are desperate to find Paul Pride before Montoya does, and I know the DEA is looking for him, too. And I know you have no clue where he is and you’re worried to death about it.”
Carter’s mouth was fully agape.
“How in the hell...?”
“Never mind, Carter,” I said. “How I found out is not important. What is important—is Sally G.”
“Who is Sally G?” Carter asked.
“Oh, you don’t know?” I replied, elevating the sarcasm a notch. “Why Carter, I thought you didn’t need help.”
Carter slumped back in his chair, more than a little irritated but interested in what I was saying.
“Again,” he said. His voice made it clear he did not appreciate the cynicism. “Who is Sally G?”
“It’s Paul Pride’s girlfriend,” I said.
Carter’s body froze in place as though my words had turned him into stone.
“You know who Paul Pride’s girlfriend is?” he said, in disbelief.
“Oh, I know more than just who she is,” I said.
He leaned forward, “Like what?”
“I know her name; I know her age; I know what car she drives; and I know her current address.”
I leaned forward, “And I strongly suspect he is staying with her. I even have her picture.”
“And how did you come by all this information?” he asked.