Annie of the Undead (32 page)

“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 cops 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.

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.

“So, ‘Angry’ Annie Eastwood,” said the cop who
was going to be my polite debriefer on this fine afternoon. He had
brought a friend with him. It looked like it was going to be a
whole party.

He plopped a file down on the table between us.
I noted that it wasn’t as fat as the file they had on me in
Detroit.

The cop leafed through the freshly printed stack
of flattering reports.

“Twenty-three arrests in Michigan, one in Ohio,
five misdemeanor convictions, three felony convictions, two years
in federal prison, in current violation of parole by failing to
appear for your parole officer, leaving the county, possessing and
discharging a firearm –unregistered, I might add, and with three
outstanding warrants…for breaking and entering, vandalism, and,”
his voice crescendoed for the climax, “murder of one Mitchell
Robinson, aka “Short John” in Detroit, Michigan. You’re a regular
little Detroit terror. So tell me, Miss Eastwood, what are you
doing so far from home?”

I looked at him squarely.

“Waiting for my lawyer.”

“Uh huh,” he looked over his shoulder at his
partner, “I’m Detective Schmidt. This is Detective Lopez. You’re
familiar with the system, Annie? Well, if you are, you know that
helping us now will help you when it comes to a plea deal.”

I thought about asking them to take off my cuffs
and let me pick the thorns out of my feet so they could feel like
they were doing me a favor, but then they’d feel like they were
doing me a favor.

“We don’t have to tell you how bad this is,”
said the other man, “Breaking into an apartment, discharging a
firearm on a college campus, kidnapping one of the students…”

I smiled. I didn’t even flinch. Kidnapping. I
should have thought of it sooner. It was icing on the cake. If
they’d talked to Yoki, they’d know it wasn’t true, but they still
would have to try to use it against me as a tool of interrogation.
It was too perfect.

“Don’t get cocky yet,” said Schmidt. “You have
charges to face in Michigan if we don’t get you first, and I don’t
have to tell you that murder one can get you life in a maximum
security penitentiary up there. There were witnesses to that
shooting. They say you pulled the trigger on an unarmed man who was
begging you for help.”

Apparently they hadn’t noticed who pointed the
gun at who first. People in Detroit never were very good
witnesses.

“Annie,” said Schmidt, sitting down, folding his
hands on the table, and getting all cozy. “This really isn’t going
to go well for you. I’m sure you’ve heard of Virginia Tech. If the
prosecutor pushes the idea that you had similar intentions, you’ll
be doing more time than the two years you did for that armed
robbery conviction. They’re looking for scapegoats on that kind of
case. You need to convince them that that’s not what this was.”

Bored, I looked around the room.

“Tell us what really happened, Annie.”

“Who were the two men outside the building?”
asked Lopez, “The ones who bolted. What did they have to do with
this?”

“So you did talk to Yoki.”

Lopez stepped forward. He was supposed to be the
menacing one. He slapped a picture on the table and slid it over to
me. It was a girl a few years younger than myself, but with more
sun damage. White girl. She had long brown hair and big white
teeth. She looked vaguely familiar, but I couldn’t place where I’d
seen her.

“Tell us what you know about Trisha Danes.”

Oh. That’s who it was. Fried chicken girl. The
one whose nose I’d broken.

I looked at Lopez.

“I knew blonde wasn’t her natural color.”

They’d talked to dozens of people who were at
that party already. They knew what had happened. That was so minor.
Why were they bringing it up now?

“She disappeared last night. She never made it
home. Her roommate called us after she heard about your,” he
pointed aggressively at me, “fight with her at the party at
Bartholomew Rathstein’s house.”

Schmidt’s turn. “You were seen leaving the party
right after she did.

Lopez again, meaner. “You followed her out,
didn’t you. You followed her outside to retaliate for her making
you look bad in front of all those college-educated kids, didn’t
you? You were trying to fit in, and she saw you for what you really
were, so you punched her in the nose, and you followed her outside
to finish the job.”

Whoa. Now we were getting into
definitely-need-a-lawyer territory. This is where the dumb people
talk and the smart people get dumb real fast.

“It’s looking a lot like lawyer time to me,” I
said.

“A lawyer isn’t going to help you when the
prosecutor’s office gets a hold of all this evidence.”

“Did you use the .40 to kill Trisha Danes?”

“Did your friend Yoki help you hide the
body?”

“Where did you hide it?”

“Did you follow her home or kidnap her
there?”

“Where is the black SLR Coupe you were seen
driving that night? The McLaren.”