Sunshine or Lead

by Adam Van Susteren

  She noticed that Aaron’s tracking signal stopped moving and she wasn’t sure if he was at an intersection or if he had parked. As she approached the location of the signal, she noticed it was in a giant mall. She drove past a Bloomingdale’s and around to the back of Fashion Valley Mall. While the tracker was not accurate to the foot, it was accurate to within one hundred feet or so and she could tell that Aaron’s car was far away from the stores. As she cleared the second parking structure, she could see a trolley stop to her left.

  She fumed at her bad luck. The emotions escaped with a “Fuck! Fuck! Fuck!” She eased her vice grip off of the steering wheel and held her composure. If she could spot him, she could follow him. She parked and got out of her car to look around.

  She noticed the sounds of an approaching train and sprinted like an Olympic hurdler up the stairs to the second platform. Even with the intentional weight gain of the past month, she was in exceptional physical condition. As she ascended the last step, she saw the trolley starting to pull away.

  Aaron had his back to the departing trolley hoping that his damn ticket would print out in time to catch that train. It didn’t. He finally got it printed out and saw people that had gotten off the trolley clearing the platform. An interesting mix of kids and adults dressed in regular clothes and costumes started joining him on the platform. He saw a Wonder Woman and Superman holding hands, several zombies, Laura Croft, storm troopers, Wolverine, but no vampires. Strange, he saw dozens last year.

  With no smart phone to play on, Aaron spent more time looking at his surroundings. He noticed his side of the platform, with the train that would go west to Old Town and then south to the Convention Center, was starting to fill in with people again. He stepped a few feet away from the ticket machine and noticed a tall woman with short black hair that appeared to be a little out of breath getting a ticket at a machine a few feet away. She seemed familiar and he kept taking glances at her, without trying to stare, to see if he could place her.

  His eyes would wander to the costumed Comic-Con conventioneers, but they would always settle back on the chubby woman in the baggy blue jeans, dark flannel shirt, and black purse. It was a pleasant, but hot, summer day in San Diego. Seventy eight degrees in the shade, but under the summer sun it felt like it was in the nineties. He wondered if maybe she was supposed to be some Goth comic book character that he couldn’t place. She really was familiar. Pretty for being so chubby.

  He stole a few more glances but couldn’t place her. He let it go from his mind and became focused on what to discuss with Enloe about Xiaowan as he stepped onto the next trolley car.

  Enloe’s office is in the big red San Diego Federal Building on Broadway Street, right across the street from the California Superior Court that Aaron frequented for his own clients.

  Aaron saw seats open on the trolley but decided to stand near the exit and save the seats for the women wearing uncomfortable shoes for work or their costumes. As the Green Line trolley approached downtown, he had to decide if he wanted to take a free transfer from the Santa Fe Depot station. Both the Blue and Orange Lines would run him due east and closer to the federal courthouse on Front Street. The Green Line continues south. It would be a choice between a transfer or a few blocks’ walk.

  If he had to carry exhibits, he would have chosen the transfer because the walk was uphill. Aaron was wearing shorts so the walk from the bay, five blocks up Broadway to Front Street, was his choice. Normally this was one of the most popular downtown exits, but Aaron was one of the only people to exit as the rest were headed to Comic-Con. He walked up Broadway enjoying the fresh air, sun, and especially the shade when a building cast a shadow offering up protection from the heat.

  Aaron was stopped at a light on the west side of State Street. For no particular reason, he turned around and saw that the woman that stuck out at the trolley stop was just a half block behind him. She had her flannel off and was wearing just a black tank top; she appeared much fitter than he would have guessed.

  He had a paranoid feeling that she was following him. When the light signaled him to walk, he crossed the street trying to match the same pace and nonchalant gait he previously held.

  Aaron made the choice to go into the state courthouse where he knew the layout and the deputies that ran the security screening. He crossed to the east side of State Street and pressed the crosswalk button, waiting for the signal before crossing over to the north side where the Superior Court Hall of Justice is located.

  He pulled out his dumb phone, flipped it open, and pretended he was typing a text message as he waited for the light to change and give him the walk sign. When it did, he put his phone away and noticed the woman was crossing Broadway to the north, just as he was. She was maybe fifty feet away. If she got stuck at the light, he would have another ten seconds on her.

  He opened the door to the courthouse and, to his relief and delight, he recognized the three deputies running security: Rachel Cameros, Dennis Quinn, and Damian Valencia. He had known them all over the years through their various department assignments and time spent at weapons screening. Dennis was behind the x-ray machine looking for weapons in the briefcases, backpacks, and whatever other containers were sent through the machine. Rachael and Damian were set up behind the metal detector to walk people through and make sure no one made it past them with any weapons. It was like an airport security screening, except the deputies were friendly and respectful. Removing danger was their focus, not the size of a bottle.

  Damian called out, “Hi Aaron. How’s it going today? You’re not going into a department dressed like that are you?”

  Aaron responded with urgency in his voice, “Damian. Guys. I’m not kidding, I’m being followed by a woman with black hair, blue jeans, flannel shirt, black purse. Please let her clear security and then detain her. I can’t place who she is, maybe just an aggressive reporter, but something strikes me as really off.”

  They all snapped to attention. Rachel said, “We’ll make sure she doesn’t have any weapons and then let you ask why she’s following you. But without cause, we can’t arrest her. You know that.”

  “That works. Pretend you don’t know me,” Aaron said as he put his cell phone, keys, and belt in a tray on the conveyor belt. He went through the metal detector without setting it off. He wanted to turn around and look at the courthouse doors, but didn’t. Had he, he would have seen the woman attempting to peer through the reflective glare on the door to survey the courthouse lobby.

  Aaron took his time putting his belt back on, then walked past an elevator bank and stepped onto an escalator that would bring him to the second floor, home of the civil business office that was closed on Friday afternoons due to budget cuts. On the escalator, he looked around and saw the woman place her purse on the conveyer belt to get through security.

  She walked through without setting the metal detector off. Dennis asked, “Hold up, ma’am. What’s the needle in your purse for?”

  She responded calmly, “An EpiPen. I’m deathly allergic to bees so I carry one with me everywhere I go in the summertime.”

  “We have to check everything that might be a weapon. I’m going to open your purse and take a look at it.”

  “Okay. Sure,” she said confidently.

  Aaron rode the escalator back down and asked, “Excuse me miss, do I know you?”

  She turned to Aaron and her eyes burned with a hatred that he could feel. She blinked the anger away and calmly flashed a smile. Aaron almost missed that tell. “Nancy Bryant, reporter for the Wall Street Journal. I was trying to gather some background information from afar before requesting an interview.” She reached out her hand and shook his with a firm shake.

  It was her strong hands that made the memory click for him. Sometimes a song or smell will help jog a memory, in this case it was the firm grip of her strong hand. He remembered those hands well; they gave him a back massage in a hot tub in Washington D.C. a month ago. Back then she had long blond hair and her face wasn’t
puffy. She was trying to find out what information he learned from the former Chairman of the Federal Reserve, Stan Goldwidth, but Aaron outsmarted her.

  When shaking her hand, Aaron asked, “Why didn’t you say so earlier?” He grasped her hand so she couldn’t pull it away. “Damian, Rachel, would you mind placing Nannette under arrest for conspiracy to commit murder, robbery, and every other crime she committed in Washington D.C. and around the world?”

  She jerked her hand back but Aaron held onto it. “What are you talking about? My ID is in my purse.”

  Damian pulled out his handcuffs. “Ma’am, for your and our safety, I am going to put these cuffs on you while we sort this out.”

  Rachel and Damian took her left hand and held it behind her back. Aaron released her right hand and Damian took it and clasped a pair of handcuffs on her.

  Nannette felt deflated but tried to remain confident. “This is outrageous. Aaron is clearly confusing me with that woman named Nannette he is talking about.”

  Dennis searched through her purse from behind the conveyor belt return feed. “Her passport says her name is Nancy Bryant.”

  Aaron asked, “Passport?”

  “Yeah, no license or other identification. No credit card or even a grocery club card,” Dennis said as he set the passport back in her purse and focused on the syringe. “I’ve seen EpiPens come through security before and this doesn’t look like any I’ve ever seen.”

  “Dennis, what city does her passport say she’s from?”

  Dennis set the EpiPen back down and re-opened the passport. “New York City.”

  With a little surge of confidence, she said, “Like I told you, I am from the Wall Street Journal based out of New York City. If you must know, I don’t own a car so I don’t have a driver’s license. That’s why I carry a passport. And because I travel so much, I go out to eat and don’t grocery shop.”

  Rachel and Damian weren’t sure what they should be doing now. If Aaron was wrong and they detained a reporter for too long, she could write all about it and even sue them for false imprisonment.

  Aaron asked, “What hotel are you staying at?”

  Nannette rented a house that she was going to use to torture Aaron and Tina in. She had to make the snap decision to tell the truth about the house or say a local hotel. “A hotel just off of the trolley station, Town & Country, in Mission Valley,” she said confidently and added, “Everything in the Gaslamp was booked because of Comic-Con.”

  Rachel said, “Ma’am, it’ll just be a minute as I call the hotel to confirm that you are a guest and that Mr. Baker is wrong.” She walked a few paces away and played with her smart phone to find the hotel website and phone number.

  Aaron asked, “Dennis, do you have a fancy cell phone you can use to take a picture of the EpiPen? And then can you send it to Tina for me? She’s an ER doc so she should be able to let us know if this looks like an EpiPen or something else.”

  “Sure, what’s her number?” Dennis asked.

  Aaron approached Dennis, leaving Damian alone watching Nannette. She knew that the EpiPen wouldn’t check out and neither would her hotel claim. ‘Shit!’ she yelled to herself before looking sweetly into Damian’s eyes. “I’m getting a little lightheaded from all this. Do you mind if I sit down against that wall?”

  Knowing that the handcuffs were secure, and being a nice man, he agreed. Nannette sat against the wall while Rachael was talking to a hotel operator asking for a manager and Dennis and Aaron looked at the picture Dennis had taken of the syringe. She saw a man in a suit approaching the security line. Damian put his hand up. “Just a minute, sir. We have to sort a situation out. Put your metal in a tray and take off your jacket. We’ll send you through in a second.”

  With Damian’s eyes on the man, Nannette might have a few seconds to use her Secret Service training on how to get out of handcuffs. From her countless days swimming, Nannette’s arms and shoulders were incredibly limber making her the best in her class at the first part of the escape. With a fluid and graceful motion, she rolled onto her side, tucked her knees to her chest, and pulled her arms from behind her back, over her feet, and in front of her.

  Nannette looked at Damian who held his left hand up at the man trying to enter the courthouse. Damian’s right hand was near his firearm; years of training meant he would be able to draw almost instantly and a struggle for his gun had lower odds of success than making a break for it. She snatched her dark flannel shirt from the ground and sprang to her feet. Before anyone could react, she darted through the exit that separated those that cleared security screening from those that didn’t. She was five feet of the twenty to the front door before Damian yelled, “Shit! Dennis, lock it down!” and started giving chase.

  Aaron looked up and started running after her too. Rachel followed out the door and called 9-1-1 to get San Diego Police involved. Dennis radioed for deputies at the courthouse to come assist at the security screening area. He had to stay at his post until backup arrived to make sure dangerous people didn’t enter the courthouse.

  Nannette had the benefit of sitting at the trolley stop in Mission Valley for several minutes looking over the train’s routes on a map. She knew that the ocean was west and that a mile or so away to the southeast would be the Convention Center where all the people dressed in costume were headed. Comic-Con brings in over a hundred thousand conventioneers, the perfect place for a damsel in distress to get lost in a crowd.

  Nannette made it through the front doors and went left, east, at a sprint. Her flannel shirt was precariously draped over her handcuffs but she was able to balance it and run at full speed.

  With only a few seconds’ head-start, she was afraid Damian or Aaron might catch her. She looked south at Broadway’s traffic and noted a little island that separated the street into two sets of three lanes. She glanced at oncoming traffic and slowed to a jog heading east. After two cars passed, she darted south to blaring horns and slowing cars in the lane closest to the divider. She ran eastward along the island, looking over her shoulder to traffic on the other side.

  The few seconds that Aaron and Damian were behind cost them dearly because after traffic slowed for Nannette’s crossing, it picked back up and was a tight cluster of cars flowing through at thirty-five miles per hour. They continued east and pulled parallel to her but she was three lanes of traffic ahead of them.

  Attempting to control his adrenaline rush, Damian radioed, “Suspect headed east on Broadway and looking to go south on Front.” Damian said to Aaron, “Go down First, I’ll follow on Front.”

  Aaron nodded and ran east looking for a break in the traffic to cross Broadway. Rachel heard Damian’s message over the radio. “Dennis, get a direct number to the marshals at the federal court!”

  Dennis pulled out a binder and called out a number to her.

  Damian made it to the island separating Broadway when the light finally turned green and the little man flashed a walk sign. He was a full ten seconds behind Nannette who was running south down Front Street.

  Aaron was almost at First when he saw a break in the traffic and darted across. Nannette was approaching E Street where Front Street passes directly under the Federal Building bridge-way tunnel. Aaron and Damian were each about half a block behind with the twenty story AT&T building separating them.

  U.S. marshals inside the Federal Building and dozens of people on the street thought it odd to see a woman in dark blue jeans and a black tank top sprinting down the street carrying a black flannel in front of her. By the time they noticed she was being chased by a Sheriff’s deputy, she was too far past to catch.

  At the moment Nannette ran by the marshals’ security screening, the phone rang. It was Rachel calling to tell them that a Sheriff’s deputy was in pursuit of a dangerous woman. One of the younger marshals, excited to break away from the tedium that was security screening, ran outside and joined the chase right in line with Damian. The others stayed at their post.

  Police sirens start wailing as SDP
D had picked up the call and cruisers headed from all over the city to the west side of Horton Plaza Mall.

  Nannette looked over her shoulder and saw no traffic in the tunnel on Front Street so she crossed at a diagonal. Damian and the marshal followed at a diagonal as well but they were not gaining any ground on her.

  Once clear of the building’s underpass, she cut diagonally across a little grass field. She slowed and whipped her head from side to side to look for pursuers and determine where to go. She kept her pace at a hard jog and looked for a place to get lost.

  When she was nearly across the field, she looked to her left and coming, like a freight train, was Aaron Baker.

  Aaron thought the timing was perfect and changed his bearing to the right to intercept her on the grass. In a micro-second, Nannette thought of a drag strip racing car that deploys a parachute to help it stop and she did the last thing Aaron Baker expected, a baseball slide on the edge of the grass. He avoided getting tripped and thundered past her by a good ten feet, touching the curb before he was able to turn around and look at her.

  She sprang back to her feet and darted across First Avenue, slapping her cuffed fists on the hood of a car that nearly hit her. A car passed by her in the east lane as she crossed First and was running south. Aaron saw Damian and a man in a navy sport coat running across the grass to his position. First Avenue was filled with cars again so Aaron ran due south with only three lanes of one-way traffic separating him from what he considered was the final loose end from his Washington D.C. adventure.

  Damian and the marshal were across First after stopping traffic to cross. They were a half block behind. She turned and made a left on G Street. Damian’s traffic-stop backed all the way up to where Aaron was so he was able to easily cross without losing more time. He was only ten yards behind her. A first down never looked so far away.