by Varian Wolf
“My boyfriend locked me out of the house,” I said, feigning mild distress. “We had an argument this morning, and it’s his idea of a joke not to let me in.”
“Well that doesn’t sound like fun,” he answered, aping sincerity. More likely he just wanted a nearly-naked girl in his car. Hey, use what you’ve got.
“Can you give me a ride?”
“Sure, hop in.”
I did, and he drove.
“What’s your name?”
“Sheri. What’s yours?”
“Melvin.”
Just what I needed, another M.
“Where do you want to go, Sheri?”
“Tulane. I can stay with a friend there until he comes to his senses.”
“He must have lost his senses, putting a little thing like you out on the street. Your boyfriend in school too?”
“No. He works. I met him at a club.”
“Which one?”
“The Minute.”
I’d seen it in the French Quarter.
“I’ll have to try it. I guess I’ve been going to the wrong clubs. I’ve never run into anyone as pretty as you.”
He wants to fuck. Perfect.
“Maybe I’ll take you there sometime. It would teach my boyfriend a lesson. Show him he’s got some competition.”
“That sounds like fun. You a girl who likes to have fun?”
Creepy man, just drive me to Tulane.
“Sometimes, if it’s with the right man.”
“How old is your boyfriend?”
“Forty-five,” young enough to intimidate, old enough to make him think he has a shot.
“You like mature men.”
“As long as they can keep up with me.”
Fuck, I hate flirting. Fucking hate it. How could Miguel stand it?
“You know, eight percent of men never lose the level of testosterone they had in their youth.”
“Ooh, what does that mean?”
“Testosterone is the male hormone that influences hair growth, muscle mass, metabolism, and libido. It’s essential…”
Great, a doctor pervert.
My phone began to ring. I looked at the number. Yoki. I turned the volume down and answered it.
Yoki’s panicked un-whisper immediately started in my ear. I was glad I had turned the volume down.
“Omigod, Annie! Now there are two of them. One of them had a gun under his coat. I saw it! They don’t look like students. I’m fairly certain they’re watching my door, or one of my neighbor’s! Are you coming soon? Annie?”
“Is that your boyfriend?”
“Oh, sugar,” I said. “Don’t talk like that. Stay calm.”
“I’m trying, but they’re scary-looking people, Annie. They look like some of my dad’s coworkers, and those secret service chaps are not the kind of people you want showing up at your door!”
“No, baby. I’m going to Tulane. I’m going to stay with a friend. She needs me more than any unemployed ladies’ man.”
“Annie, what are you talking about? Unemployed ladies’ man?”
I felt a thick hand on my thigh.
“Tell him you’re going to be busy for a few days,” said the man with his fat hand on my thigh, “Tell him he should have taken better care of you.”
He pulled the car over and put it in park.
“Annie! Are you coming? Annie?”
“I’m with a nice man, sweetie. He drives a Lexus. He says his name’s Mel-“
That was when he tried t take the phone out of my hand. It had taken him long enough to realize what I was doing. He wasn’t used to this kind of thing. I was.
And remember, I said “tried”.
With my left hand, I struck a glancing blow off his cheekbone and nose. It was enough to make him bleed and protest.
“You hit me! You bitch!”
How quickly the B-word comes out at times like these.
He tried again for the phone, then tried for my face.
I drew the .40 and pistol-whipped him good. I put the gun to his temple.
He cried out in anguish.
“Oh god, oh god. How could you…How could you…”
“I’ll have to call you back,” I said to Yoki, and hit the end key, muttering to myself, “Should have done it my way to begin with…”
“Oh god. Oh god…”
“Drive, puddin’ head,” I said. “That’s all I want you to do.”
He blithered, but he did as he was told.
“I have…I have a family. I have…”
“What? You’re scared of me now? You think I would have hit you if you hadn’t groped my leg? What is wrong with you people? All you people? I asked for a ride. I’m in a bathrobe, locked out of a house, and you can’t just give me a ride. Can’t a guy just give a girl a ride in this world?”
“Hey, you flirted with me. How was I supposed to know–”
“Know what? That you’re some special case? That you’re harmless with all the weirdoes and crazies out there? That you don’t mean anything when you grab my leg and try to take my phone?”
“I –I was afraid you’d get me in trouble. My wife–”
“You shoulda thought of that. Shoulda thought of that before…” Wait a second. It wasn’t my job to teach this guy some lesson, some social skills. “Just drive the fucking car.”
He did. We got close to Yoki’s building. I didn’t want him to take me all the way there. He’d watch where’d I’d go and tell the police when he called them. Unless I killed him. That would buy me some time, but even I realized how stupid that would be.
Only because I had no idea how nuts everything was about to get.
“Stop here.”
He did. He was shaking, sweating. Journeyman.
“Got a phone on you?”
“You’re not going to call my wife?”
“Not if you drive outta here quiet and don’t talk about this to anybody. You make it public. I cry rape. Who you think the cops are gonna believe?”
He fished a Bluetooth out of his pocket and handed it to me.
I took the butt of my pistol to the hands-free device on the dash. He didn’t try to grab me. In fact, he cowered, covering his head.
“Park somewhere. Break your window. Tell the cops somebody broke into your car. You tell them about me, and I squeal about how you molested me, and if that happens, trust me, the cops will be the least of your problems, because my boyfriend will honest-to-god rip your throat out. Got it?”
“Y-yes.”
I got out and ran.
Some students saw me running across the campus, but there was no avoiding it. I was in their hive. A group of guys whistled at me. A girl in a bathrobe, running in broad daylight. Slightly conspicuous.
I got sandspurs in the soles of my feet. If you’ve ever gotten sandspurs in your feet, you need no explanation as to what a nuisance they are, but if you have never had the privilege, imagine little balls covered with needle-sharp spikes that bury themselves in your flesh. They’re some evil invention of our twisted Mother Earth, and they grow in the grass in the south. During the fall they are numerous, and there’s no avoiding them. I had to stop to pull the little savages out. I hopped over to some verge beside Yoki’s building and tried to make myself a little less conspicuous while I got the little monsters stuck in my fingers instead of my feet. I took the opportunity to call Yoki.
She answered before the first ring. She must have been staring at the phone.
“I don’t see them anymore, Annie. I don’t know where they went.”
“Yoki, how do I get into your building?”
“You need a keycard…You don’t have one. Oh no…”
“Stay calm. I’ll get in somehow. Call me if they show up again, all right?”
“Right.”
I hung up. I watched people passing in and out of the front door. There would be side doors, less obtrusive places to enter, but there would not be as many people going in and out. A group of girls was headed in r
ight now.
I trotted over.
“Oh, thank goodness! I went out to get a tan and forgot my card in my shorts. Thank goodness.”
The nice girls looked at me a little strangely, but the weirdness of my present predicament was so far into the ultra-weird spectrum it wasn’t visible to the naked eye. They let me plow in behind them without a second thought about it.
Inside. Stairs or elevator? Elevator was quicker. Stairs offered more room for maneuvering. Where would these shady characters be? Knowing who they were and why they were there would help me figure that out. But there are some behaviors that are nearly endemic to an activity. Lurking, for instance, which was what these guys were doing, is usually characterized by repeated motions, cycles. If these guys weren’t after Yoki, they wouldn’t be back, which would be great. I wouldn’t be forced to do anything else rash. But if they were after Yoki, as she seemed so certain they were, they would lurk back her way before long, and she could tell me about it.
I called her.
“Annie, Annie…”
“Shut up. Do you have a fisheye thing?”
“What?”
“A fisheye lens, on your door, so you can look out.”
Jesus Christ was barking wildly.
“Oh, a peephole. No. I have to peek out. Do you want me to open…”
Damn.
“No, Yo. Don’t open anything. Stay where you are. I’ll be up soon.”
“Wait…I think I hear footsteps…”
A loud sound drowned out Yoki’s words. Then she squealed. There was the sound of an enraged Messiah unleashing his wrath, and the yell of the man who was on the receiving end of it.
“Fuck!”
I looked around. People were staring at me, the cussing girl in a man’s bathrobe in the lobby. The elevator was on its way up without me. I hit the stairs. I took them two and three at a time to Yoki’s floor. Then I slowed, tried to get my breathing down so I could hear. How handy would be not to have to breathe right now, like Miguel?
I peered around the corner. There was no one in the hall, but I could see that Yoki’s door was standing open. I rounded the corner, gun in hand, stepped to Yoki’s side of the hall and edged along the wall toward the door. There was no sound coming from inside.
Just as I reached the door, a girl stepped out into the hall. I put a finger to my lips, a plea for quiet. She screamed like they do in the horror movies and ran back inside her room. Damn it.
I turned the corner into Yoki’s doorway. The door was broken in. Yoki, Jesus Christ, and whatever bad people had been here were gone.
So where did they go? They hadn’t come down the front stairs, and they couldn’t be in the elevator that had been headed up. They probably weren’t hiding in here. They had come to get her, waited, and when they discovered that she knew they were there and wasn’t coming out, lost patience and broke down her door. They’d be abducting her right now.
There had to be another stairwell. I ran down the hall in search of it.
Bingo. Through a door at the end of the hall, I found the back stairs. At first I didn’t hear anything. Then, I heard a muffled squeal, the kind someone makes whose mouth is being squeezed tight.
I started down the stairs, my bare feet affording the benefit of quiet in the echo-y stairwell. I soft-footed it down the stairs as fast as I could go, catching a glimpse of the pair halfway down. They didn’t see me. There was a big guy and a smaller guy. The big guy seemed to be struggling with something. That would be Yoki.
Just then, someone somewhere triggered the fire alarm. The noise of it filled the stairwell. The authorities would be coming. You might think that’d be a good thing, but I wouldn’t. I’m Annie. Remember who you’re dealing with here.
They were moving fast – really fast for people toting a thrashing Brit with ballet muscles. If I didn’t pick up my pace, they were going to outrun me.
And damn me if they didn’t. They exited through the door at the bottom of the stair just as I reached the second-story landing.
I cracked the door, saw their backs to me, had time to register that there was something really wrong about the way they were moving –how fast they were moving, before telling them to freeze. Something told me that doing that would be a really bad idea.
Maybe shooting them was a really bad idea too, I thought, but it was exactly what I decided to do.
Fearful of hitting Yoki, I aimed for the legs of the man carrying her. I fired four times, and something must have hit him, because he stumbled and lost his grip on Yoki, and she went tumbling. He didn’t fall, though, which was really strange.
They both turned toward me. The big guy didn’t seem to have been harmed by the bullets after all. This was bad.
Just then, Jesus Christ, who had been squeezed tight in his master’s arms until her fall, flew like a peregrine falcon for the hand of the big man. The furry fury had been unleashed.
“Gaa!” the man yelled, and flailed his arm like a whip –more like a whip than a man should be able to, and Jesus Christ went flying into the wall of the building like a hairy projectile. He struck with a yelp.
“Get the fuck away from my friend!” I warned.
The two men were not impressed. They had heinous expressions on their faces, the kind people get when they’ve just taken a bite of that odious green bean casserole slop that everybody cooks for potlucks but nobody eats, or like Al Gore had when he found out that he’d won the popular vote but couldn’t move into the White House, or like you get when you’re about to kill someone who really, really pisses you off. I hadn’t seen them eat any green bean casserole, and Election Day wasn’t for another two weeks, so I deduced that they were about to kill me, and they were about to walk into the wind to do it.
Then, we all heard the police sirens, and the two men, murderous expressions and all, ran for it.
They were fast. Really, really fast. They reminded me of someone, someone who’s eyes had flashed in the light.
I grabbed Yoki’s hand and pulled her to her feet. Jesus Christ leaped into her arms, apparently little worse for the wear from his encounter with the wall.
“Come on,” I said to her. “Let’s go.”
I glanced over my shoulder. There was a patrol car stopped in the street. Two cops were climbing out of it.
I pulled Yoki around the corner of the building, and we ran.
Suddenly, there was something like an air raid siren sounding, not to mention more sandspurs in my feet. Yoki’s cell began simultaneously shrieking the song “Yell fire!” with its insistence that revolution was on its way, loud enough to make the speaker crackle in pain.
“That’s the campus emergency alert. There will be help coming.”
She was in shock, not thinking clearly, I thought, or she would realize how bad all of this was going to be if we got caught –if I got caught. Speaking of, I was going to ditch my gun in that planter up there…
“Drop your weapon! Drop it now!”
“Drop your weapon! Put your hands on your head!
“Put the gun down! Put it on the ground!”
Oh…I’ll spare you the expletives.
I dropped the weapon. Two campus security police had nearly run headlong into us. A few seconds later, the cops from behind arrived.
They took me to the ground with expediency. They put a knee in my back and pressure on just about every other part. They especially ground my face into the Good Mister Goodwin flyer that greeted me when I hit the ground.
They had Yoki too, but she looked so harmless and scared they didn’t throw her down. That was good, because I might have gotten really pissed and made things worse for myself.
“Yoki!” I called to her. “Don’t go home! When they release you, don’t go home or to your friends’ places. Don’t go anywhere those men might find you. They’re gonna be looking for you, Yoki. Do you understand? Be looking over your shoulder. Don’t go home!”
I hoped she heard me. I repeated myself a few more times, but c
ops blocked my view, and I couldn’t see if she’d understood.
Out of the corner of my eye, I saw the SWAT guys swarming over the lawn in their ninja black and body armor, assault rifles in hand.
I felt the handcuffs going on, pinching tight as always. I didn’t try to struggle this time. I instead remarked to myself how nice it was to be tackled by cops on the soft earth of a New Orleans lawn instead of feeling the bite of unyielding pavement on my bones. I also considered my great luck at not having been tackled in a patch of sandspurs, even if my face was smashed into a stray Good Mister Goodwin flyer.
Over the radio talk and the sirens and the cops yelling harsh words in my ears, I could still hear Yoki’s phone yelling fire – warning of danger, too late.
12
Walking against the Wind
I’d like to say that getting processed got me all nostalgic. I’d like to say that yet another opportunity to view our nation’s finest in action was inspiring. I’d like to say that the familiar four drab walls, video camera in the corner of the ceiling, and one-way mirror in my face in the cold, echo-y room in which I found myself got me feeling all homey. I’d like to say that, but I’d be lying. I was too busy thinking about the sandspur thorns broken off in my feet, and how I’d gotten myself in here in the first place. The fact that I’d done just that –gotten myself in here. I didn’t have to go running to the aid of someone I’d only met a couple of weeks before, someone who had nothing to do with me or my world and with whom I had nothing in common, except that we were both strange characters who had shared some strange experiences in the eccentric city of New Orleans, such as finding the corpse of my boyfriend’s latest victim. Yoki had been in danger, and I had done that thing I usually only did for myself: whatever it takes. I had gone to help her, and maybe I had saved her life, and in those last moments before the acuteness of the danger had lapsed, I had called her…my friend.
My friend. My first human friend, who, as soon as she was released, was going to be in terrible danger.