Ecochondriacs [2]

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Launch

Despite her agitation, she did manage to fall asleep, albeit fitfully. And that lasted until about 5 am, when she sat bolt upright in bed, gasping for air. She was a woman who had an odd quirk in her thinking processes, shared only by a handful of others. During that strange gray time between waking and sleeping, she had the kind of mind that would solve problems for her, or remember things, or come up with great ideas. This characteristic had actually been her friend on many occasions. In fact, it was being her friend now, only it didn’t feel like it. This time it just scared her sideways and silly.

Just last week, Steven Lee had been talking to somebody a bit too loudly in the alcove where the vending machines were, and she couldn’t remember who he had been talking to. But she had been just around the corner at her desk, and he was talking about some software he had just installed that could tell you if a person had read the email you had sent them. Not only so, but you could tell if they had forwarded to anybody. They couldn’t yet tell who you had forwarded it to, but they could tell you how many. She wasn’t sure if it could tell if you transferred it to a thumb drive or anything like that. She wasn’t even sure if something like that was possible. The one thing she was sure of was that she needed to scramble out of bed, which was exactly what she did.

She threw on some clothes and went over to stare at her computer. She needed to decide what to do. As in, right now. Should she act like nothing had happened and just brazen it out? But what if her mouth filled up with cotton balls, and she started to talk to her boss like the guiltiest person on the planet? What about that? Should she copy the email thread onto a thumb drive? What would she do with it then? She didn’t want it. Who would she give it to? And could he tell with his software if she were to do that?

She just stood there wavering, like an aspen in a stiff breeze. Suddenly she sat down, not quite sure why, pulled a thumb drive out of drawer, and copied the whole thread over, and then threw the drive in her purse. “That’s not a plan,” she muttered to herself. It was the most courageous thing she had ever done in her life, but she was not aware of that in the moment. She was simply in a state.

And it is likely that she would be there still, rocking back and forth in her chair, had events not started taking on a life of their own. It was about 5:30 in the morning by this point, and she suddenly froze, startled by a scraping noise on her back patio, like a lawn chair being kicked, which is exactly what had happened. She stood up and grabbed her purse with the goods in it, darted back to her bedroom, and pulled a Glock out of the drawer by the head of her bed.

Her politics were of course left of center, and so she had often felt guilty about having a firearm, not to mention a tad inconsistent, but whenever that feeling came over her she just thought how bad the neighborhood was just three blocks over. She could live with the inconsistency, and there had been times when she thought she might not be alive without it.

She jumped back to the door of the bedroom, gun raised, just like she had seen in movies, and held her breath. In the dim morning light, she started to stare intently at the gun to make sure the safety was off. Then she remembered that Glocks don’t have safeties, like the kind man at the store had explained a couple of times. After that, she didn’t have to wait very long. The glass in her sliding glass door shattered, from top to bottom, and a man with a green ski mask stepped through it. Another man, in another ski mask, this one a dull red, stepped in right behind him. The second man was about six inches shorter.

“Well, miss,” the first one said, “we’ve just come for those emails. There’s a good girl.”

And then the second one spoke, and a spark of hope flickered to life down in Helen’s chest. These men didn’t sound too bright. “Yeah, miss,” the second one said. “We don’t bite. We won’t hurt you.” And he said this in a fashion that convinced her with absolute certainty that if she cooperated with them in any way, she would be dead before breakfast. That caused a pang because she had skipped dinner last night and was pretty hungry. But she silently hissed at herself not to be silly, and tried to focus on the intruders.

Her living room and bedroom and office were all still gray in that early morning way that unlit houses have, but she could see the two men both clearly outlined against the first light of dawn coming in from the patio. She was pretty sure they would not able to see her as clearly. So she thought about it for just a second or so, lowered her gun, and coolly shot the first man in the leg. The second man yelped and jumped behind the couch. Helen ran across her bedroom and out the door on the other side of the bedroom, a door that emptied into the hallway that ran out to the front door.

And out the front door she ran, with no thought or plan or strategy or prayer. Her Glock was in her right hand, and the purse in her left. She was wearing sneakers, and sweat pants, and an old T-shirt from the Climate Change picnic of the year before, and her brown hair was tied back in an early morning pony tail. The street in front of her house was deserted in both directions, with one solitary and very welcome exception.

Sitting still in the middle of the road was a black Tahoe, the one that belonged to her neighbor across the street, one Cody Vance. Cody Vance was a nice man, and not at all like the two thugs. The car was stationary because Cody had heard the gunshot, and was trying to sort out where it could have come from, it having sounded much closer than three blocks away. As soon as she saw the car, the only possible plan she could adopt came into her mind, and so she dashed for the passenger side door. She didn’t need to run as fast as she did because the second man was still behind the couch, starting to get up and ignoring the pleas of his friend, who was bleeding all over Helen’s carpet. That carpet would have to be replaced.

Helen pulled at the handle a couple of times, missed both times in her excitement, and then finally got the door open, and jumped in. “Go,” she said. “Please,” she added, remembering her manners.

Cody stepped on it, and pulled briskly away. “I suppose,” he said, as he accelerated, “that this is the kind of situation that will be explained after a few blocks?”

“Yes,” Helen said, somewhat breathlessly.

“And will the explanation include the fact that you have a gun in your hand?”

“Yes,” she said again.

But before anything more could be said, and before they got to the corner, Cody’s back window shattered as a bullet went through it. “Yikes!” he said, and Helen screamed a little stifled scream. The second man had finally run out the front door, managed to get off one shot, and then he jumped into the car that he and his friend had driven there. He promptly pealed out after the Tahoe, leaving the first man still on Helen’s carpet, soon to be discovered by some inquisitive policemen who were summoned by various neighbors on account of the two gunshots, and who found it curious that the front door of Helen’s townhouse was wide open. When they came inside, they were full of questions for Maurice, lying there as he was on the carpet, and unable, because of both time and pain, to come up with a good story for why he was there in that condition. But I am getting ahead.

Cody took a hard right, and stomped on the accelerator. “Whatever you do,” he said, “don’t put that gun away.”

He looked in the rear view mirror at just the moment when the second man—his name was Leon, since we are now needing to keep track of everybody—took the corner on two wheels. There was a long slow curve ahead, which Cody accelerated into, his mind trying accelerate at the same time. Helen kept turning around to look out the shattered back window, and in the midst of one swivel noticed that Cody’s eyes were glittering with excitement. He was enjoying this. He downshifted, and Helen rocked in the seat.

There was a short cut to work that Cody usually took, about a quarter of mile away, and he was trying to think about it clearly with his brain full of adrenaline. His question was whether or not that short cut would be visible from the road he was currently on. If the gunman kept on this road, like Cody wanted, what would he be able to see? He decided to take the gamble when the time came, took a hard right onto a frontage road, roared another thirty yards, and then another hard right onto his tricksy short cut route, hidden back in the trees. And as the Tahoe disappeared down that country lane, his eye was fixed on his rear view mirror, and he saw Leon’s green car flash by on the road he had just left. That car showed no signs of second thoughts, or of slowing down in any way. Leon was a not very bright man, and was intent on his mission in what was now entirely the wrong direction. Cody sped up again. They were safe for the moment.

He drove a mile or so, and then pulled into the parking lot of an abandoned cement factory. “Okay,” he said. “We are safe for the present. What is going on?”

Helen had been thinking frantically about what on earth she was going to say when this inevitable moment came, and she hadn’t come up with anything much.

“Um,” she said. “They were trying to kill me.”

“So I gathered,” he said. “Were there any reasons associated with this? Did you have dirt on Hillary or something?”

Helen sat up a little straighter in her seat. That was the kind of joke that used to offend her every single Thanksgiving. Her extended family haled from places like Oklahoma and Alabama, and there wasn’t an Arkancide joke in existence that hadn’t been told in her presence at least three times. A little starch started to creep into her demeanor, until she suddenly remembered that Steven Lee, the man who had apparently put out this hit on her, was actually a friend of Hillary’s. Or a big donor anyway. 

“Um,” she said again, “I am not quite sure.”

“Okay,” he said. “Any reasonable guesses?”

“I am really not sure I should say anything.”

“Okay,” he said again. “There is nothing for it then but for me to take you back to your place. The cops will no doubt be there by now. You will probably feel better talking to them about it anyway.”

“No!” She almost shouted. “I mean, please no,” she said more quietly. She knew how well-connected Steven Lee and his crowd were, on a global level, and she knew that steering or managing a local police department would be a morsel of baked goods for them, otherwise known to the general populace as a piece of cake.

“Now look,” Cody said. “I am more than happy to drive you away from a life-threatening situation for a mile or two. But any more than that and the price of your ticket is that you tell me your best guess for what’s going on. If I find your story credible, then I will take you somewhere safe, if we are able to figure out where that might be. If not, we go back to your place.”

“All right,” she said, submissively. “I don’t want to tell you the content of the emails, at least not right now, but some compromising emails were sent to me by accident. Compromising to the senders, I mean. I read them, also by accident, and then got a message from my boss telling me to delete them. But I had already read them, and he has a software program that tells him when somebody has opened and read the email he sent. I just remembered that this morning, just before those two goons showed up.”

“Two goons?” Cody said.

“I shot one before you rescued me.”

Cody turned in his seat and looked at her hard. “You shot one?”

“Well, in the leg.”

He sat quietly. “My name is Cody,” he eventually said.

“Yes, I know,” she said. “I met you at the neighborhood block party last summer. My name is Helen, in case you forgot.”

“I do remember meeting you,” he said. “But I am terrible with names. Many apologies.”

Another few moments went by, as did a few cars on the road by the old cement factory.

“So what do you do? CIA? Interpol? It must be exciting work that could result in your boss putting out a contract on you.”

“I teach a climatology course at Yale. And I do climatology research at the Smithsonian.”

“What was in that email? Why partly cloudy always means rain?”

She glared at him. “Climate, not weather.”

“Right,” he said. “I keep forgetting these important distinctions.”

“And what do you do?”

“I teach New Testament studies for Liberty University online. And I live up here in Annapolis because I have a research fellowship on the history of second century manuscripts of the gospels, mostly all in fragments.”

“Oh,” she said, hoping that no disapproval had come through in her voice. But it had.

She sat for a moment, shaking her head. Eventually, she just said it. “Well, I suppose I had better tell you . . . Not that I want to. But I do need to.”