For a moment Mark said nothing as the light turned green. We drove slowly through the intersection. From the passenger seat I couldn’t make out the expression on his face.
“Okay,” he finally said. “I’m not surprised.” The next intersection was a four-way stop. He braked and turned to me, smiling. “You are certainly amazing.” He shook his head like there was something he couldn’t believe. “Get me a phone number, and I’ll see what I can do.”
I did have Christine's number in my phone, from when we had done the "let's get together sometime" thing at the class reunion nine months before. If I were her, I would not be using that phone anymore, but it was worth trying. The computer voice on the other end confirmed my suspicions.
But I had a Plan B. I called a mutual acquaintance, another old classmate. She ran a car rental place in Omaha, and was therefore the kind of person that Christine might have used—and "use" is the right word—recently.
I told her that I had gotten a voicemail from Christine giving me her new number, but the message was garbled. I told her I had been brought in by the FBI, who let slip information I thought Christine needed to know. I managed to sound both casual and concerned, and when I got off the phone with Christine's new number, Mark was impressed.
"What can I say? I'm good on the phone," I said.
"At least." He smiled to himself without taking his eyes off the road.
The bank was less successful.
There was a young man sitting at a desk when we walked in. He was polite and sympathetic when I told him the story. Without identification, however, he wouldn't give me any information about my account. It was frozen or it was gone, and he wouldn't even tell me which.
The old Tina definitely would have cried. She probably would have turned to the nearest man and would need him to hold her—and more. But that was the Old Me. And while I could feel the tears coming up, the New Me fought them back.
The New Me stopped thinking about what I had lost. She wasn't caught in a swamp of worry and fear about what she should try. She remembered Yoda and focused on what needed to be done next.
Christine Hamilton taken everything I owned: my money, my identity, even my ability to enjoy my dream city. She owed me, big time. Fortunately, she had twenty million dollars at her disposal, and I fully intended to make her pay.
11
Mark had gone to a teller to do some business of his own, so he had not heard the discussion, but the look on my face told him that things had not gone well. He didn't ask for specifics. That was good, because even focusing on Christine and twenty million dollars might not have been enough to keep me from crying if I had to explain what had happened.
We drove back to Sweet Magnolia in silence. I was thinking how to revise my plan, because I didn’t even have gas money anymore. Mark put his hand on my knee, but in a comforting way, not a suggestive one. I put my hand on top of his and squeezed. Maybe he was the latest "Janet" in my life. Even the New Me wasn't going to turn down help.
When we got to my room I realized that it was after checkout time. Great, I thought, they're going to charge me for the night. Then I realized I might not be able to check out anyway since my credit card was frozen.
For a minute I considered simply packing up and leaving, but that was not fair to the guesthouse. It wasn't their fault that I had no money. Lacking a better plan, I decided to try the completely honest approach.
The same young woman who had checked me in, and who had let the marshals into my room, was sitting at the desk. As I walked in she set down her phone. She looked serious.
"I need to check out and my purse has been stolen."
"We charge every night in advance," she said. "That's policy, since we've had trouble before with other guests."
"Did you charge for tonight?"
"Yeah, we did." She looked a little sheepish. "After the, um, thing this morning, the owner told me to run the card in case you didn't come back."
"So you ran it for tonight?"
"Uh huh." She stared at her hands on the desk. Then I considered what that meant—as of this morning, the card had been working.
"My card went through okay this morning?"
"Yeah," she said, as if asking, "why wouldn't it?"
"Look, I’m in a bit of a mess. My purse was stolen. I don't have any cash and I can't get any without ID, which I don't have since it was in my purse. And you just told me you charged my credit card in advance. I won’t be staying tonight. Is there any way that you could help me out? Maybe refund me what you charged tonight?”"
The young woman shifted in her chair and tilted her head. She stared at me for a moment, thinking it over. "Okay," she said. "Since we ran it early and since you're in a bind and all, why don't I just give it to you in cash?"
I gushed my gratitude to her as she counted out one hundred fifty dollars in tens and twenties, and told her I would be out of the room in fifteen minutes.
"You won't believe the great luck I had," I said to Mark, who was sitting in the overstuffed chair, his laptop open on the desk and his tablet on his lap.
"Me, too," he said. "I wasn't completely sure I could do it, but I was able to get through a couple of firewalls and start tracking Christine's new cell."
He showed me on the tablet how it worked, and it was simple. Her phone was a red dot on the map, and my location was a blue one. The red dot was moving toward Chalmette, southeast of the city. Mark said there were a bunch of discount stores there. Maybe she had to stop to pick up some items before her trip to… where?
"Give me your phone," he said.
"Why?" I asked as I handed it over.
"I want to disable the GPS. Don't make calls on it unless you absolutely have to, and keep the GPS off so you can't be tracked."
"What about the GPS on the tablet?"
"Nobody would associate you with that tablet; it's mine." He fiddled with my phone and handed it back.
I looked at him and smiled. "You're pretty smart."
"And you're pretty brave to be doing this." His voice dropped half an octave and his thick eyebrows moved toward each other. He turned back to his laptop. I think he didn't want me to see his face.
"I don't think I have a choice." I threw my clothes into the duffel bag and pulled out the small backpack that I had brought for sightseeing. Now I turned it into a purse. A purse without a wallet, that is. The Old Me would have panicked when she could not find her car keys. The New Me was calm enough to remember that they were at the parking garage. The New Me also realized that it was going to cost fifty bucks to get my car out, one third of my total funds.
Mark closed up his laptop as I zipped up my bag and looked around the room one last time.
"This was quite a room," he said. He put his arm around me and kissed the top of my head. I let him, and nuzzled closer for just a moment.
"It was," I said. "It was an amazing night, and now it feels like it was ten years ago."
We stood there for a few more seconds. I'll admit, that was nice.
Finally, he spoke. "I want to make you a loan so that you have some cash."
Of course, my initial instinct, being the polite girl who didn't want to cause anyone problems, was to say no. Luckily, the New Me knew I needed the money. It was surely going to cost me a lot more than a hundred dollars to catch up with Christine, who by now was heading out of town toward I-10. So instead I repeated "I'll pay you back" and "thank you" about seventy-five times. Inside I wondered how much he was going to give me.
He smiled and pulled out a thick bank envelope. "It's a thousand dollars," he said. "I hope it's enough."
That nearly overwhelmed me. I had expected maybe a couple hundred bucks. But a grand? That was hard to believe. I looked inside the envelope, which made him laugh.
"It's all there," he said.
"No, not that," I stammered. "It's just that it's so much."
"I want to help you," he said. "You won’t let me come with you, so this is a way I can help."
/> I hugged him tight around his neck, then put fifty bucks in my pocket for the garage. I zipped the rest of the money into an inside pouch in the backpack.
"There's something else," he said, and from his back waistband pulled out a small gun. It was a snub nose .38. The gun was a good size for me. I knew a little about weapons, and had gone to the shooting range a few times with my first husband. Mark showed me that it was fully loaded.
"I didn't have any more ammunition at home," he apologized. "Anyway, I hope you don't have to use this."
On that point we agreed, although I felt better having the gun. I put it in the backpack. We embraced and his neck smelled good, but I couldn’t let myself linger in his arms. I thanked him again as I pulled away.
He handed me the tablet and we both saw that the red dot was headed east on I-10.
"I better get going," I said, and he nodded, more reluctant than I was. He drove me in silence the couple of blocks to the garage and kissed my forehead.
"Be safe," he said. He paused as if to say more, but didn't.
"I will. Thank you." I paused, too, not knowing what more to say. So I got out of his car and dug into my pocket for fifty bucks as he drove away.
12
Christine's red dot was heading northeast, well into the Bayou Savage National Wildlife Refuge as I pulled onto I-10, about fifteen miles in front of me.
It was after five and the traffic was starting to get heavy. Mostly I was focused on the red dot and the cars in front of me, but as I changed lanes quickly to get around a slow semi, I noticed that a white Camry made the same move. There were two men in the car. They pulled up next to me and the guy in the passenger seat was looking at me. Not in a "hey baby" sort of way. More in a "that's our mark" sort of way. I had to remind myself to breathe.
With all of the details of getting out of town to worry about, I had put away the thought that someone might be following me. Maybe they still thought I was Christine, or maybe they thought I was in with her, or maybe they just thought they could follow me to get to her.
I recalled what the FBI had said, that there were potentially two groups after Christine—and therefore, me. The drug cartel was one, since she had their money or at least knew where it was. Depending on whether she was still working for her boss, the mobster middleman, or had double-crossed him, he could be after her, too. The guys in the Camry looked Hispanic, so I thought they were more likely to be South Americans, but the mob might have been an equal opportunity employer, for all I knew.
I sped up and they dropped behind me, and then I zipped around the semi so the truck was between us. My breathing returned to normal when I couldn't see them anymore, and I again focused on the road ahead. Christine's red dot wasn't moving very quickly, and I was catching up. I took another normal breath.
Then the semi dropped behind as it slowed on an incline, and the white Camry reappeared. Passenger Guy was still staring. What do I know, but he looked more like a no-necked drug dealer from Miami Vice than a mobster to me.
I didn't think that the Vue would be able to outrun a Camry, or nearly any other car I could think of, and we were approaching the Lake Pontchartrain bridge. I looked at the tablet. Once I got on the bridge there would be no exits for six miles. I was trying to decide what to do when the traffic in front of me slowed to a crawl. I pulled the .38 from the backpack and set it on the passenger seat. There was a construction sign, and we all dutifully lined up in the left lane, with the lanes to the right occupied only by orange cones. The roadbed to the right of the shoulder was dug up, littered with rebar and other construction materials. The Camry was a couple of cars behind me.
Occasionally I lifted my foot off the brake, which was as fast as I could go through the bottleneck. I wasn't sure how to check traffic on the tablet without messing something up, so I didn't know how far the congestion would last. Gauging by Christine's continued snail's pace, she was still in the jam as well.
I kept looking in the rear view mirror even though I couldn't see the Camry behind the other cars. My foot had returned to the brake when I saw Passenger Guy's door swing open. They were thirty feet away and I was not going to wait to see what he would do. I swerved to the right, crushing an orange cone and knocking a couple more down as I maneuvered to drive half on the closed lane and half on the right shoulder. By now I could see him getting back into the Camry. I sped up just as I heard a car backfire, and knew that nobody's car was backfiring.
The white car was right behind me. My foot pushed the accelerator to the floor but in about two seconds they would easily be able to ram me.
I grabbed the .38 with one hand and pushed the automatic window button down with the other. Looking back, I pointed the gun out the window and fired twice at the Camry. I plowed into a few more orange cones, but was able to recover without going off the road.
The Camry gunned toward me but didn't make it far. My first husband, for all of his many faults, including a wandering eye and a love of the Council Bluffs riverboat casinos, was an excellent shooting instructor. I had hit the windshield. The driver had swerved and his right front tire went off the road into a pile of rebar. He seemed to be stuck there.
Passenger Guy's door opened and I floored it as another shot whizzed past the Vue. In the rear view mirror I saw him get out and start running toward me. My right foot felt like it would push through the floor.
Luckily, the road itself was not yet under construction and I was able to drive in the closed lane for about three miles—far enough that I stopped worrying that Passenger Guy would catch up with me on foot. Then I saw a break in the traffic where a semi was lagging behind and I slipped back into the lane. Even more luckily, although I got a few nasty stares, I didn't see any cops.
My dash through the cones had gotten me a lot closer to Christine, which was good because her red dot was moving more quickly as she got through the construction. I was not sure how far I was behind her. Maybe fifteen minutes? Maybe less. The bridge finally ended and I paid a lot closer attention to the tablet, since there were exits every few miles.
At one point I couldn't hold it any longer, so I got gas, peed, and grabbed five of the cheapest granola bars they had in the vending machine at the rest area. I ate two when I was back on the road and put the rest in the backpack for later. Nothing to drink, because I would just have to stop again.
As I drove, I thought about how I had ended up in this mess, how if I'd only been able to put up with Joe I would still be safe in Omaha. For months I'd been trying to figure out about why my marriage had become intolerable, but it wasn't until now, zooming through the Gulf Coast, that the pieces began to fall into place.
I remembered the last reorganization at work, which put me in an area with some new people. One of them was a guy who flirted with me a lot. Nothing ever happened, but I really liked the attention. I had gotten used to feeling old and unattractive, and here was somebody who didn't see me that way. I started taking more time with my makeup in the morning, and bought some clothes that were more flattering than what I had been wearing.
At first I had tried to do the right thing, to turn my sexual energy toward my husband. It did not work. He wasn't interested, and it was a weird gender reversal. I felt like I was one of those guys in American Pie, trying to get laid by girls who were playing mind games. I told him that I wanted more romance in our marriage. He ignored me for a while, then he started insulting me, and then he told me to leave.
These were all serious thoughts, and sad ones, really. But I had too much adrenalin and too little food to cry, so I laughed at the craziness of it all. Laughed, and kept looking at the tablet and patting Mark's .38 as I barreled by Pensacola.
After several hours, the red dot stopped near Tallahassee. I thought that Christine must be driving a vehicle with a gas tank close to mine in size, because the Vue's needle was well into the red zone. I had gained on her a little, and was glad to have a chance to get gas without losing ground. Paying with cash took longer than swiping a c
redit card and running, but I needed more granola bars anyway, and I could not keep going without coffee. I thanked my lucky stars for Mark's money.
Back on I-10 I couldn’t tell whether I was gaining further on Christine or just hoped I was. It was after midnight and I was exhausted. I tried not to think about that, and tried to look on the bright side.
I thought about that Mel Brooks movie, Young Frankenstein. Igor is trying to look on the bright side and says, "Could be worse, could be raining." And then it starts to rain.
Just as I smiled at the memory of the movie, it started to rain. Hard.
As day had turned into night, the interstate traffic had changed from vacationers in minivans and sunbirds in sedans to semis. That had been okay when the road was dry, but in a downpour it was awful.
My stomach tensed up again: I needed to keep up with Christine and couldn't afford to get stuck behind a truck, which I did.
It was throwing thousands of gallons of water at me, but worse, out of the corner of my eye I could see the distance between the red and blue dots growing.
I decided that New Tina was no longer going to get stuck behind semis. New Tina was going to summon up all her courage, hope she did not hydroplane next to the truck, and go for it.
I could barely see the yellow line on the left side of the road, but I made it out as best I could. My wipers were already at their fastest speed, and as I started passing the truck I couldn't see a thing. I was petrified. I believed in God, although I was not a traditionally religious person, but I had not prayed in a while. That changed then and there as I began asking for God's help out loud and with a lot of conviction.
When I was halfway past the semi, I started to see again and I thanked God, several times. I gunned it to get past the truck, said a few more thank you's, and thought about what I had done.
Passing Semis in the Rain: A Tina Johnson Adventure Page 5