I moved a few feet away. “Where can I find Michelle?”
He rose to his hands and knees and shook his head.
He struggled to his feet, stepped toward me, and swung with his right hand.
This time I caught the swing on my left forearm and hit him in the solar plexus, not too hard. I didn’t want to send him in the hospital; I just wanted to stop him.
He fell to the wooden floor and curled up into a ball.
The door at the rear opened. “James, what’s going on out there?” Michelle Hickham stepped into the hall. “Hello, Chuck. I saw your text earlier. I thought that might be you.”
Chapter 5
Michelle had changed since I had last seen her. Her hair was a little longer and she wore it in a single braid. She wore a peace symbol necklace identical to Beardface’s. Her green tee-shirt announced, “The earth does not belong to us; we belong to the earth” in gold letters. When I read the slogan, I noticed she was obviously not wearing a bra. I was careful not to leer. Reading a tee-shirt is not leering. At least her shorts were fashionable. As were her sandals. And her feet were clean. “What are you doing here, Chuck?”
“Your father asked me to find you. He’s worried.”
“Tell Daddy that I’m fine.” Her eyes were very bright, very wide.
Is she high too? I pointed at Beardface. “Is Mr. Congeniality here James Litdorf?”
“Yes. Have you two met?” She glanced down at Litdorf, who was having trouble getting to his knees.
“Briefly. He just attacked me.”
“How did you know who he was?”
“I’m a private investigator. It’s my job to know things. Michelle, your parents are worried about you. Would you please call your dad or your mom? You can use my phone if you like.”
Litdorf struggled to his feet and stepped between Michelle and me. I let him.
His eyes blazing, he stuck his arm out in front of Michelle. “She’ll do no such thing, asshole. You can’t tell her what to do.”
“But you can?” I said. “That doesn’t seem fair.”
“You can’t force Michelle to go with you, asshole,” Litdorf said.
Michelle frowned and took a half step back toward the door. She looked ill at ease. Unconsciously, she grasped her braid in her left hand and twirled it, let it go, twirled it again.
I moved to one side where I could see her without looking around Litdorf. “Michelle, would you please call your parents?”
She crossed her arms and turned to one side, not looking at me. “Daddy’ll just insist that I come home. He doesn’t understand me.” She struck a pose. “He doesn’t understand what motivates me now that I’ve grown up and can see beyond middle-class mentality.”
Litdorf stepped between us again. “Michelle has a higher purpose than short-sighted, middle-class reactionaries like her parents could ever understand. She cares about the future of the entire planet.” He spoke like he was carrying a picket sign in front of an oil refinery. “She’s a true friend of Mother Earth.”
I grabbed Litdorf’s beard. “I’m talking to Michelle, not to you, asshole. If you step between us again, I will throw you to the other end of the hall. And if you interfere after that, I will toss you down the stairs.” I jerked down on his beard and forced him back to his knees. “Now sit down like a good little boy.”
I turned to Michelle. “Can we go downstairs and talk where we won’t be interrupted?” I glanced at Litdorf.
She turned to him. “Go back inside, James. I’ll be back in a few minutes.”
James looked up at me with hatred in his eyes. He didn’t move.
Michelle led the way downstairs into the parlor. She turned on the light and stood in the center of the room, hands on her hips. “Now what?”
After seeing the filthy, dilapidated furniture, I was glad she hadn’t invited me to sit down. “You said your father doesn’t understand what motivates you. What doesn’t he understand?”
She looked at the ceiling as if she could see Litdorf sitting on the floor in the upstairs hall. “What James said. I am motivated by caring for the future of the entire planet.” She said it like she was quoting scripture. “We—all of us—we’re tomorrow’s heroes. I see the bigger picture now.”
Cute. She was almost a robot. I let it pass. “You’re here of your own free will?”
She looked a little uncertain, but nodded. She twirled her braid again.
“Will you at least call your parents?” I tried to hand her my phone.
She crossed her arms again and looked away. “Daddy will just lecture me with middle-class bullshit. He talks at me, not to me. I’m involved with an important project this week—important to the whole planet. Tell Mom and Dad that I’ll be home at the end of the week. They can lecture me then.”
I handed her my business card, one without the logo of a knight on a white horse. Maybe my card needed a logo of Don Quixote tilting at a windmill. I felt about as effective. “If you need someone to talk to…someone who won’t lecture you…”
She took the card and stuck it in her pants pocket.
“Call me if you need anything. Day or night. Okay? I don’t do lectures.”
She put a hand on my arm. “I’m all right, Chuck. I really am. And I know what I’m doing.”
Yeah, right, I thought.
Chapter 6
When my phone rang at four-thirty in the morning, my stomach did a little flip. Nothing good happens after midnight. It was Michelle.
“Hello, Michelle.”
“I need to talk to you.”
“Okay. I’m listening.”
“Not over the phone. People can listen on the phone.” She sounded breathless. “We need to talk in person. I didn’t know who else to call.”
“Okay. Are you still at Litdorf’s house? Do you want me to come get you?”
“I’m not there anymore.”
“Where are you?”
“I can’t tell you over the phone. Someone could be listening.” Her voice broke. “I’m in trouble and I’m scared. I don’t know what to do.”
“What kind of trouble? Where are you now?”
“Not over the phone. We have to meet.”
“I don’t read minds, Michelle. Tell you what—do you remember our conversation during the Super Bowl halftime about pie? We were comparing places to find good pie.”
“Yeah. I remember.”
“Do you remember my favorite place?”
“No.”
“It’s open twenty-four hours a day. Don’t say the name. Just tell me if you remember.”
She paused. “Yeah, yeah, I think so. Yeah, I remember.”
“Do you have a way to look up the address? Yes or no.”
“Yes.”
“Just answer yes or no: Do you have transportation?”
“Yes.”
“I could meet you there in an hour.”
“It’ll take me longer. Two hours.”
“Two hours. I’ll be there.”
“Chuck, one more thing.”
“Yeah?”
“Don’t tell Mom and Dad you’ve heard from me. I don’t want them involved, especially Daddy. I can’t be seen, so I won’t go inside the place. I’ll meet you in the parking lot. Don’t let anyone follow you. This must be an absolute secret. Are you okay with that? Can I trust you?”
“No, I’m not okay with that, Michelle, but I’ll do as you say. This will be our secret.”
###
I was at the Day and Night Diner in a half hour. Plenty of time to have breakfast, then wait in the parking lot for Michelle. The place had a handful of customers at five in the morning. I sat at the counter.
Veraleesa Kotanay was on the night shift until seven. “Hey, Chuck. This a pie run or breakfast?” She set a steaming cup of coffee on the counter for me. Veraleesa had been at the diner since God’s dog was a puppy. I had met her when I worked the neighborhood on a previous case. The Day and Night had the world’s best pie.
“Good morning, Veraleesa. Too early for pie. I’ll have breakfast.”
“The usual?” She was already writing it up. After she turned the order in, she stopped across the counter from me. “You’re kinda early. Don’t usually see you until after sunrise.”
“Early to bed, early to rise. That’s me.” We chit-chatted until my order was ready, then she went to serve other customers.
I finished breakfast and waited in the van for Michelle. She was late. I wondered whether she had remembered the name wrong. If so, she could always call me again. Then I saw her car.
She parked her Civic between streetlights a half block away.
She walked to the van, glanced in the passenger window. I motioned her to get in.
“Okay, Michelle, what happened?”
She grabbed her braid with one hand and twirled it around her hand. “I’m sort of involved in an accidental death.”
“Start at the beginning. Tell me everything.”
“You know that railroad bridge next to I-95 that crosses the Seeti River?”
“The automatic one?”
“Yeah, that one.”
“What about it?”
“It’s been blown up.” Her voice broke. “Boom! The train fell in the river. The conductor, or engineer, or whatever you call him—he’s dead. I think he drowned.” She burst into tears.
I patted her shoulder and waited for her to calm down. I handed her a tissue. “How are you involved?”
“We were going to snag a protest banner across the locomotive when it came past. We wanted to plaster the train with our message. The banner read No more coal-fired plants.” She swept her hand through the air as if she were spreading the banner. “That train brings coal to the Port City Power generating plant in the middle of the night. They sneak it in when no one can see it.” Her eyes shined with excitement. “That train helps the power company poison our air. We were trying to stop it. We have to stop it. It’s killing the planet.”
Oh geez. This was no time to debate energy policy. “So what is your involvement?”
“We…we got to the railroad bridge in a rowboat. It’s the only way to get to the tracks down there.” She sniffed. “We tied up the rowboat under the bridge where no one could see it and climbed up the riverbank with bamboo poles so we could hold up the banner from either side.” She wiped her nose with the back of her hand like a little girl, forgetting the tissue. “The poles were fifteen feet long. The banner was twenty feet wide. We were going to hold it up like football goal posts and let the train run through it.”
“I follow you so far. What about the explosion?”
“The train came rolling down the track on the other side of the river. We raised the banner in plenty of time. Then…” She put her face in her hands. “Steven said, ‘Watch this.’ And he held up a cell phone and tapped the screen.” She grabbed her braid and twirled it—three times. “The rowboat exploded and blew up the bridge. The first few cars of the train fell into the river.” She sobbed again.
“Did you know that Steven intended to blow up the bridge?”
“No, no, no. You’ve got to believe me.” She grabbed my arm. “We were just going to hang the banner. That’s all. No one was supposed to get hurt.”
“The explosives were in the rowboat?”
She nodded. “We didn’t know it at the time. They were covered by the banner and a piece of canvas. When we took the banner out of the boat, I saw the canvas. I asked Steven what it was for, and he said it was nothing. The explosives must have been under the canvas.” She sobbed once. “What do I do now?”
Great. I didn’t say what I was thinking. I didn’t tell her that she was involved in a felony murder. That it was a federal crime to interfere with a train. That she had committed a terrorist act that carried a death sentence at the federal level. I didn’t say that she was a naïve knucklehead whose dubious friends had thrown her into a cesspool and she was way over her head. I didn’t say any of that. I’d promised—no lectures.
Instead, I bit my tongue. “Let me see what I can do.”
“Will you help me?”
“You may be beyond help, Michelle. But I’ll try.”
Quarterback Trap (A Carlos McCrary novel Book 3) Page 25