"That was the best sex I have ever had," I said. "And I don't ever lie about sex." And I don't.
"You were pretty amazing, yourself." He grinned. He was standing now, his shirt pulled over that powerful chest.
I wasn't sure what the etiquette was, because despite how great I felt—or maybe because of it—I was not sure I wanted to see him again. Part of me thought that being with him a second time might be disappointing, because how could it be better than last night? The biggest concern I had was that if I saw him again I might start to get attached, and the last thing I wanted was strings.
He seemed to know what I was thinking. "Let me give you my number, baby. I'd love to see you again while you're in town. But if that doesn't work out, I'll just thank you right now for a night I'll never ever forget."
I don’t remember what I said. He wrote his number on the notepad from the nightstand, kissed me as I lay in the bed, and quietly closed the door behind him.
I stayed in bed for a while, smelling him in the sheets. There was a delicious soreness between my legs. I replayed scenes from the night like I was remembering a movie and then once again drifted off to sleep.
7
There was a loud, dull pounding, and for a minute I thought it might have been some sort of colossal hangover. Then my eyes opened up and I realized it was at the door, which made me feel better because that kind of hangover is just plain miserable.
The pounding stopped and the door opened. A guy in a black t-shirt with white lettering stepped in. Then I felt a lot better, because I realized I was dreaming, one of those vivid "last hour before you wake up" sort of dreams. I closed my eyes and rolled over.
"Christine Hamilton?" said a sharp voice.
That did not sound like a dream. And the hand shaking my shoulder certainly did not feel like a dream. I blinked myself awake to see a guy and a woman, each in a black t-shirt under a black bulletproof vest, standing over me. The vests said "U.S. Marshal." The guesthouse desk clerk was wide-eyed, peeking into the room from the courtyard.
"Who? Christine? What do you want?"
"Christine Hamilton, we have a material witness warrant to detain you."
Okay, I was awake now.
"I'm not Christine Hamilton." I realized I was naked and pulled the sheets around me as I tried to sit up and still maintain a little dignity.
"That's all," said the woman to the desk clerk, who took off.
"You're U.S. Marshals? Why are you here?" I was awake but not quite firing on all cylinders yet.
"Yes we are. We're here to serve a material witness warrant on Christine Hamilton, also known as Tina Johnson," said the man.
"I'm not Christine Hamilton."
"Okay, Tina Johnson?" He said it with a mocking voice although neither of them broke a deadpan expression.
"Yes, I'm Tina Johnson."
"Well, we're bringing you in."
This did not make any sense at all. I thought about the night in high school the cops came by to pick up my brother after some kid he barely knew said he'd helped hold up a liquor store. My brother hadn't done it, of course, but when they pulled him off the couch and arrested him he'd had a dime bag in his pocket. Mother had to hire a lawyer to keep him from being convicted of a felony and that was the money she had planned to help pay for my first year of college. Once I started working full time to save up, I never had time. Then I met my first husband and, well, life just got in the way. I always regretted never trying college, and I've hated cops ever since. I wasn't feeling much more fondly about the Marshal Service.
"For what?" I held the sheets around my neck.
"Material witness," the man repeated, only now it was more of a snarl. "We'll stand outside while you get dressed." He walked out and closed the door behind him.
"What did I witness? Show me your ID," I demanded. The woman flipped out her badge. She said nothing. "What do you think I witnessed?"
"Look, our job is to take you to the FBI. You can talk with them. Right now, get dressed."
"Am I coming back?" I asked her. This was only partly a smart aleck question.
She shrugged, like she didn't know and didn't care.
My mouth tasted awful, so I insisted on brushing my teeth. Her not caring worked in my favor, because she seemed to be in no hurry. I washed my face and put my hair up, too, as long as I was at it.
As I got my phone, my purse, and my room key, I also grabbed the piece of notepaper where Mark had written his phone number and stuffed it into my pocket. It wouldn't hurt to have a friend in New Orleans right now.
"Why are you bringing me in?"
She said nothing.
As much as I hated cops, or the marshals, or whoever, I knew better than to lose my temper with them. And obviously they were not going to answer, so I just shut up. They put me in the back of a black SUV and we drove for about twenty minutes. It was a long, silent, twenty minutes. Then we drove through a secured gate and to a four-story brick building. A sign said "Federal Bureau of Investigation."
I am not sure how I had expected to spend my first morning in New Orleans, but this was certainly not it.
The marshals handed me over to two FBI agents in dark suits and left. It took the agents a couple of hours to confirm that I was, in fact, the real Tina Johnson and, more importantly, that I was not a material witness to anything.
But I learned something really interesting: Christine had completely set me up. Right before she left Omaha, she told the FBI that sometimes she used the name Tina Johnson. My name. So when they were looking for her, they looked for Tina Johnson as well as Christine Hamilton. Now, why a person on the run would use an alias they told the FBI about is a good question, and the FBI did not have an answer other than the obvious: they had been played.
And I learned one more thing: the cops and the FBI and the Marshal Service were not the only people looking for Christine.
Christine knew where the money was. Whether this money technically belonged to the Kansas City mob or a Peruvian drug cartel was a matter of some dispute. But apparently none of them knew where it was, and she did.
Finally I asked the ten thousand dollar question: "How much money?"
The FBI agents had apparently forgotten I was there since they were busy making phone calls and typing on their computers. They both looked at me a little startled, like they weren't sure they should answer. The one looked at the other, who shrugged, and the first one answered.
"About twenty million bucks." Okay, I guess it had been the twenty million dollar question.
I whistled in appreciation.
"Yeah," said the second one. "Real money."
"So she took off to get the money?"
"I guess," said the second agent. "She was crazy to run. Now she's got some really dangerous people after her."
"Were you going to put her in witness protection?"
They didn't answer, turning back to their computers. But I was not done asking questions.
"Did she give my name to the mob?"
"We don't know," the first one said while he typed.
"How did you figure out where I was?"
"Your credit card," he said, finally turning to look at me.
"Out of all the Tina Johnsons in the world?"
"Modern technology," said the second one.
"Would the mobsters or the cartel be able to find me the same way?" The thought made my empty stomach tighten.
The second one looked at me, a little sympathetically for a change.
"Maybe."
"What does 'maybe' mean?" I asked sharply. This was starting to sink in, and my first response to fear has always been anger.
"It's possible. We always operate on the assumption that they have hackers who can access the same databases that we do. If these guys can steal customer databases from Fortune 500 companies, they can certainly trace your credit card."
I swallowed hard. "So what do I do?" I could hear a voice that sounded like Joe telling me how stupid I had been to co
me to New Orleans, how I would just end up in trouble. And Mother, in the same voice she had used to tell me that the college money was gone, telling me how there was nothing anyone could do.
Then a part of my brain I didn't even know existed woke up after nearly fifty years and decided to fight those voices. No. I am not stupid and I am definitely not going to accept that there is nothing anyone can do, I thought. As I said that to myself I got a quick mental image of Mother smiling, just a little, as if she'd been waiting for my brain to wake up all along.
The second agent said something, but I didn't hear it. The first agent nodded at him.
"Miss Johnson, you should know that we have not made any other arrests in the case," said the second agent.
I looked at him while I thought that over.
"Hamilton was our only witness. We indicted her to gain her cooperation, but she had not given us anything on which to base an arrest prior to her disappearance."
"Where are these people?" My voice rose but didn't crack.
"I think you're better off finishing your vacation somewhere else," the first agent said.
"That doesn't make any sense if you don't know where they are."
"But it may be that they know where you are," the second one reminded me.
"So what are you going to do to protect me?" They looked at each other and I knew the answer.
"Miss Johnson, we don't have the resources to do that."
Of course not. I was on my own. The sooner I could get back to Sweet Magnolia and away from the police and the marshals and the FBI, the better.
The second agent drove me back to the guesthouse. He said nothing. That was fine. I spent the drive thinking about how much cash I'd need to avoid using my credit card for a while. Once the FBI—or the bad guys, for that matter—found Christine, I wouldn't have to worry. It was still early enough to get to the bank. I would just pack up, check out, and maybe head over to the Gulf Coast in Mississippi or Alabama for a while. I'd heard they had nice beaches.
As he dropped me off, my head was full of thoughts of the Gulf of Mexico.
At least, until I stepped into the courtyard.
8
Although I noticed a woman sitting in the courtyard, smoking, her back turned to the street, I didn’t pay her much attention. I crossed the patio to my room and as I held the keycard up to the door I smelled the remains of a cigarette. I turned around and jumped: she was not more than three feet from me.
"Christine."
"Hello, Tina." She said it the way the bad guys say it in the movies—cold and quiet. My stomach returned to churning, and I did not know what to say.
"Aren't you going to invite me in?" This was a threat, not a question, and the keycard had already unlocked the door, so she slipped past me and pushed inside. I followed her but stood in the doorway. I hoped somebody in the courtyard might be a witness, maybe even a deterrent, to her trying to pull something. Of course, there was no one in the courtyard.
"What are you doing here?" It took a minute to put together the question.
"I've got some people after me and I need to get away.” She said it as if she were telling me that she had beignets for breakfast.
"Why do the feds think I'm you?"
Her mouth smiled but her eyes were ice. "I needed to get away, and it would be easier if they started following you." She spoke the way we did to customers after you had to repeat something obvious.
"How did you know I was here?"
Her smile got wider, like the Grinch Who Stole Christmas when he was planning to steal the presents. "Facebook."
That was another thing Joe had always told me I did wrong, spending time on social media. My stomach was doing flip-flops.
"The feds know I'm not you," I said. I didn't want her to think that she had me pinned down. But when she kept smiling, I knew there was a problem.
"Exactly. That's why I'm here. They're not going to be following Tina Johnson anymore. So I need to become Tina Johnson."
I squinted a minute as I thought this through. She laughed.
"You never were very smart," she said. "You know that test in seventh grade? All you got was a B minus. It's pretty pathetic that I have to be Tina Johnson for this to work, but hey, sometimes a girl has to settle." She laughed again.
Enough was enough. The Tina who had argued with those old voices returned. This time she could talk out loud.
"Get the hell out of my life," I said to her. My voice shook a little. I stepped away from the doorway so she could leave. "Get out."
"Duh, let me think. No." She moved toward the door, but only to block my exit. Then she walked toward me, backing me into the room.
"Give me your purse," she ordered.
The purse was on my shoulder. I held the strap tightly against my body. My hands were still sweaty but my voice had stopped quivering. "Get the hell out."
"Give me your purse."
There was a noise outside the still open door. A housekeeper was moving from one room to the next, across the courtyard.
"Stop, thief!" I yelled.
Christine looked startled for a minute until we both saw that the woman was wearing ear buds and could not hear me. I ran to the door and yelled again, trying to push Christine into the courtyard. She grabbed my purse, pushed me back on the bed, and took off. She slammed the gate shut.
I bounced up and went after her, only three steps behind. But she had shut the gate so hard that it had jammed. It took me a moment to unstick the metal handle, and when I looked up and down the street, she was gone.
9
I wanted to swing into action, to know exactly what to do and to become Angelina Jolie. But I couldn't, not at first. Instead, I stood in the empty courtyard. My fists were clenched at my sides and I kept reminding myself to breathe. I went back to my room and sat on the edge of the bed.
Joe's voice returned, and Mother's, and that's when my eyes filled up. A big tear rolled down my cheek and I couldn't even move to wipe it away.
"Big talk, right, Tina?" I asked myself out loud. "You say you're done being a loser, but exactly what are you going to do about Christine and the mess you're in?"
A big part of me wanted to curl up on that bed and wait until somebody could make it all go away, even knowing that there was no such somebody out there. A second tear reached the corner of my mouth.
Then I realized that "somebody" was me. The words of Yoda crowded out Joe: "Do or do not. There is no try."
That was a lightning bolt. All my life I had been trying, usually without much success. I needed to stop trying and start doing.
And once I focused on what I could do rather than what I should try to do, I began to feel better. I mean, as "better" as a person can feel when she's been set up to be a patsy for a bunch of drug dealers and the mob and the FBI.
I grabbed the paper pad from the bedside table.
"Goal: find Christine and get purse, etc.," I wrote on the pad. I thought a minute, then I put a "#1" in front of that, because I decided I didn't want to settle anymore.
"Goal #2: get the money."
10
Once I set my mind to it, the plan came together pretty quickly.
I had struggled about whether to call Mark. I didn’t want to depend on someone else, and didn’t know how he would feel about being dragged into this mess. But I needed a way to figure out just where Christine had gone, and having a friend who was an IT guy seemed like a resource I could not ignore.
He picked up on the second ring.
“How are you?” He sounded both happy and surprised.
"I'm sorry to do this, but I'm in a mess and need your help," I began.
"What's wrong? Are you okay?"
I gave him the short version, and before I finished I could hear him getting into his car.
"I'm on my way."
Even though I was committed to being the strong, competent one now, it felt great to have a friend who would help, no questions asked. It felt equally great that I had a
plan to execute, and I didn't need to wait around for him before I could get started.
First thing was to call the bank, to cancel the credit card that Christine had stolen. The automated system told me the card was no longer active, so I pushed buttons until I got a human. It occurred to me that not so long ago, I might have been the person on the other end of the line.
She told me the card had been frozen. She would not say why. I demanded a supervisor. He was not any more helpful, so finally I told him that the card had been stolen, wrote down the confirmation number when they cancelled it, and hung up.
This made my plan to get cash even more urgent. Luckily, my debit card was still in the back pocket of my jeans from the night before. There was a cash machine down the block. Mark was pulling up front and I waved at him as I ran down the sidewalk to the ATM. I popped in the card and waited to type in my PIN.
"Card retained by bank," read the display. What? This couldn’t be happening.
My stomach started churning so much that for a minute I was worried I would throw up. Not only did I have no cash, but the machine had just eaten the only tangible proof that I had a bank account. Christine had my ID and my checkbook. I pulled out my phone and tried to sign on to the bank's mobile app. Of course: no access.
It was three fifteen, and I had no choice but to try the bank in person. I ran back to Sweet Magnolia, where Mark was waiting for me at the gate.
“Can you track someone’s cell phone?” I asked as he drove me to the bank.
“Probably,” he said. “There are just a couple of tricks to it. I’m pretty sure I could.”
Finally a break.
“Would it be on a GPS map so I could follow her?”
“Tina, are you planning to chase her?”
“What else can I do? I’m not going to sit here and hope that the cops or the FBI or whoever get their shit together and find her. These are the same idiots who lost her in Omaha and who found me instead.” I shook my head. “No, I’m not waiting for them.”
“Then let me come with you.”
“No,” I said, more quickly than I had intended. We were at a stop light, and I reached out my hand and put it on his arm. “You are so nice to offer. I appreciate it, I really do. And I appreciate your helping me out right now, and if you can set up the tracking that would be great. But I don’t want you coming with me. This is my problem, and I will solve it.”
Passing Semis in the Rain: A Tina Johnson Adventure Page 4