A dozen days ago, I posted that there was a modification I would be making to The Jumpstart Discoveries and that I would start the narration of the story from the beginning, starting on July 10th (I believe). Since that day is here, the narration starts again – from the beginning just as previously stated.

This story is part caper, part romance. The modifications I’ve made address the motive of the lead female character. That motive will be explored in the next chapter.

As in the narration of The Secret of Possum Hollow, this narration is being used as a tool by the author and may result in edits and elements which will appear in the published version of the story. “Possum Hollow” is still in progress – back spine and back cover design are being developed now… anticipated release in mid to late September.

Anyhoo, it’s back to work. Stories don’t write themselves…

 

An Unexpected Visitor

 

Christopher Michaels was bothered by the insistent buzzing of the helicopter which seemed intent on interrupting his train of thought. He was at his efficiency apartment, a dull, lifeless place where single men usually stay just after college until getting someplace better. He had been home from work for less than half an hour when the buzzing started. He had put the gallon of milk he’d just bought at the Rodeo Mart away in his refrigerator when the noise crept into his consciousness. Instead of just ignoring the noise, Christopher decided to go out on what passed for his balcony to see if he could determine what the hubbub was about.

“Police helicopter,” he snorted. The machine sent down a powerful beam of light, sweeping the ground beneath it. After watching the helicopter crisscross the general area for half an hour or so, Christopher decided that he had had enough excitement for the night.

He wondered if the circling helicopter had anything to do with the couple he saw in the white Impala pulling into the parking space directly in front of his at the Rodeo Mart when he was pulling out of the parking lot. The girl might have looked familiar… but then again, he’d seen hundreds of girls, women, really, come in, have a prescription filled at his pharmacy counter, and then leave. In another minute or two, another familiar face would step up to the counter wanting the same thing. A conversation would occasionally be nice. A personal conversation, not one about drug interactions, harmful side effects or why the doctor ordered such an expensive prescription.

Back to the girl in the car.

He’d seen her face from the pharmacy counter. He was sure of it. He can’t remember talking with her, but he was sure he knew the face.

It would matter little to him, now. Like the rest of them, she was with someone else. They were always with someone else.  Unattainable, at least to Christopher Michaels.

He had other concerns. Student loans. A better place to live. A circling helicopter which would hopefully go circling somewhere else.

Still, he was curious about the helicopter.

The people on the morning news would give a hint about what was going on with the helicopter. He stepped back inside, turned off most of the lights except for his bedside lamp and a small lamp by his front window. He took off what he wore, sat up in bed and relaxed. He thumbed through the day’s mail. A couple of bills and a letter addressed to him from his father. He read it again then set it aside.

The image of the couple in the Impala parked bumper to bumper to his car at the Rodeo Mart briefly came to mind again. He shook off the image and the offer in the letter to eventually drift off into a deep slumber.

Some non-descript dream transitioned into someone knocking on Christopher’s door in the middle of the night. It wasn’t a demanding knock. It was more of an insistent knock, proffered by someone who, while wanting an answer, wanted it to be quiet enough not to attract attention from the neighbors.

Christopher slipped into a pair of white cotton briefs. He supposed that perhaps he should exercise caution by looking outside to see who might be knocking. Whoever it was attempting to intrude on his sleep may not have had his best interests in mind.

A woman slipped in the moment he disengaged the latch. She pushed Christopher out of the way, shut the door and then dead-bolted it behind her.

“Oh, thank you, thank you, thank you,” the woman gushed.

She was about his age, give or take a year or two, dressed in blue jeans and a “Western” shirt in a muted blue plaid, unbuttoned to reveal enough cleavage to hold his attention. She wore very little make-up, perhaps a touch of lipstick but not much else. Her general appearance struck him as slightly disheveled, as he would expect someone to be at this early hour of the morning.

“Are you in trouble? Are you all right?” Christopher asked.

“I don’t want them to see me. Look out the window. Do you see anyone?”

She sounded panicked, out of breath.

He took a quick peek past his curtains and out the window to see an empty courtyard. There was nobody out there.

“Don’t look!” the woman said, apparently changing her mind. “They may see us!”

Perhaps the young woman who had forced her way into his apartment was part of an elaborate dream. One of two things would happen next, he thought. Either she would hit him on the back of his head, knocking him unconscious so she could rob him blind, or she would slip her hands into his briefs as a prelude to an elaborate wet dream. Since there was nothing for the woman to steal, except for maybe a television and a pair of twenty-dollar bills, the prospect of a wet dream seemed to be the more likely scenario.

“I don’t see anything,” he told her.

She let out a sigh of relief. “Thanks. I thought maybe they had finally tracked me down.”

“Who’s they? Who was after you?” Christopher asked, turning toward his unexpected visitor.

“I’m not quite sure.  I was with my date.  We were driving out Bellaire when he decided to stop at a carry-out. I chose to wait for him in the car. When I saw men in ski masks going inside a few minutes later, I decided to get the hell out of Dodge. One of them could have seen me.”

“You drove off in the car and abandoned your boyfriend?”

“He wasn’t my boyfriend.  He was just some… some guy I used to work with. The last I saw him; he was talking to the cops.”

“But you just told me that you ran away,” Christopher pointed out.

“Well, I did… but I went back. I parked the car back at the restaurant and took the bus back out. I saw him out the window when we passed by.”

“So, you saw him from the bus?”

“Yes,” the woman confirmed, “I saw him in the parking lot of the Rodeo Mart on Bellaire when I rode by on the bus.”

“The date went badly, I take it.”  Christopher sat down at the table in his living/dining area. The notion that his encounter was merely a dream was dissolving into reality and a partial erection.

“Yeah, a bad date,” she answered, sitting down in the chair opposite his.  “I’ve been out of it for damn near three hours trying to think what to do next.  My date said he was planning to take me further out to this place where we could go line dancing. I got the impression that all he wanted to do was to get drunk and screw.  You have anything to drink?”

“Maybe a beer,” he offered. “More likely you’ll find cold filtered water and a fresh jug of milk I picked up at the Rodeo Mart a little earlier.”

He studied her backside when she got up from the table. She went to his refrigerator and extracted a bottle of beer he didn’t realize he still had. He studied her face when she came back to the table. She could have been the same woman he had seen when he left the Rodeo Mart. He was still a bit fuzzy with the details on that encounter.

“I found this,” she said, twisting open the bottle of Lone Star and taking a long swig. “I’ll pay you back later.”

“If you’re thirsty, the beer won’t do you much good,” Christopher scolded his guest.

“I know that,” she informed him. “But it couldn’t hurt, either.”

She took another long pull at the bottle.

“I know you,” the woman stated. “You work at the pharmacy over next to the mall. You deal drugs!” Her face lit up in a wide smile. He could tell that she was attempting to make light of the situation. She took another pull off the longneck.

“I deal in legal drugs,” he clarified.  “I fill prescriptions at a Pharmacy Rite.”

“Beer’s a legal drug,” she countered.

“You’re right, beer’s a legal drug, but it’s the alcohol that’s in beer that’s more properly the drug. If you’re thirsty, the alcohol will make you even thirstier.”

“Oh, well. Live and learn,” she said before emptying the bottle. “So, what should it be next? Water or milk?”

“Water would be the better choice. It’s on the bottom shelf in the clear pitcher.”

The woman got up, went to the refrigerator, extracted the water pitcher then set it down on the empty counter next to the sink.

“You have any glasses?”

“Look in the cupboard on the far left.  I don’t have glasses. I only have plastic cups.”

She pulled down a cup, poured herself some water then brought it over to the table.

“You work at the Pharmacy Rite over by Sharpstown,” she stated.

Christopher wasn’t sure whether he should confirm what she had just told him. There was something familiar about the woman, but he couldn’t quite place her, other than possibly being the girl he saw in the white Impala in the Rodeo Mart parking lot. He wondered if a friend had set him up.

“You said that you’d been running for nearly three hours because of a robbery at the Rodeo Mart’” he stated. He wanted to determine if he could trust her. “Were you running from the helicopters in the area around ten, ten-thirty or so?”

“Uh, huh,” she nodded. “They were probably looking for the guys in the masks or they might have been looking for me. I’m not sure. I found a place to hide in the laundromat next to the club down the street. I fell asleep and when I woke up, it was three hours later.”

“Did you think of calling the cops yourself?” Christopher asked.

“I don’t have my phone with me,” she said. “From the number of cops I saw when I passed by on the bus and the fact that there was a helicopter involved, I’m guessing that there was a shooting. Charlie might have tried to blame me for whatever happened. After all, I took his car and fled the scene.”

“Charlie. Was he your date?”

“Yes. Charlie.”

“He could have just as well presumed that you guessed what was happening and got away so you could pick him up later,” Christopher pointed out.

“That’s not how Charlie thinks. I know the son of a bitch. He’d either blame me to make himself out as a victim, or he would claim I was a hostage. It would not have occurred to him that I would take the car and have him walk or ride a bus to get back to his hotel.”

Christopher thought about what she said for a moment.

“That fellow sounds to me like the perfect jackass,” he told her. “I take it that he was full of himself.”

“He told me in so many words that he was going into the Rodeo Mart to buy beer and rubbers.”

“And he expected you to wait in the car until he got back?”

“Eeeyah,” she smiled. “He’s pretty damn dumb.”

“And this was at the Rodeo Mart just down the street,” Christopher concluded.

“Yeah, that one.”

“And this happened at around ten – ten-thirty?” he surmised again, just to keep a timeline in his head.

“About then, uh huh.”

“Damn.  I must have just missed it.  I was there right before ten.  Damn!”

Christopher got up to recover a cup he had left on the kitchen counter so that he could have a drink himself.

“You were there?” she asked.

“I pulled out of the parking lot maybe five till ten.”

“You were driving an old guy’s car, weren’t you? Was it your green four-door that pulled out of the parking space while we were coming in?”

“That would be me.” She had to be the woman he’d seen when he left the parking lot of the Rodeo Mart earlier in the evening. “I take it that you and your date were in the white sedan?”

“Yeah, that was Charlie and me.”

Christopher sat down with his cup of water.

“It’s time to pay the rent on the beer,” the young woman suddenly announced. “Would your wife mind if I used your bathroom?”

“I’m not married. I live alone. Knock yourself out.”

When she got up from the table to go to the bathroom, he looked her over to see what else might not quite fit her story. “She said something about going line dancing,” he observed. “So why is she wearing running shoes, not boots?”

He decided that he needed to put something more on than the pair of white briefs he had thrown on before admitting her to his apartment. He went to the other side of the partition which separated his living area from his sleeping area then slipped on a t-shirt and a pair of running shorts he had in a heap by the side of his bed.

“Could I borrow a clean t-shirt, please?”

The woman’s hand appeared from a crack in the door to the bathroom. Christopher drew a random clean shirt from his chest of drawers to hand to her. She came out a few moments later clad only in the t-shirt and a pair of panties. He sat back down at the table to hide his obvious excitement.

“Hadn’t you better put your jeans back on?” he asked.

“Why? I’m not going anywhere.”

“But…”

“I need to get some sleep. If you have an extra blanket, I’ll sack out here on the floor.”

She picked up a spot on the cheap carpet in front of his television set. The shirt he had randomly selected from his drawer was one of his favorites; it was black with the legend “Carpe Diem” written on it.

“You can sleep on my bed,” he heard himself tell her. “I’ll get out my sleeping bag and sleep on the floor.”

She got up while he got out his sleeping bag then helped him spread it out on the other side of the partition separating the sleeping area from the living area. There were several times he could have sworn that she was deliberately rubbing her body against his to stimulate him.

“Look, if you don’t mind,” he said once his bed had been made. “What is your name? Who are you?”

“Toni Anderson,” she stated. “Just another drone working in the mall near where you work.”

“I’m Christopher Michaels,” he returned the courtesy. “Maybe we can talk more in the morning. Right now, I’m wiped out.”

“In the morning. We’ll see,” she said, settling into his bed before he could change his mind. She was snoring softly within just a few minutes.

He stayed up a while longer to watch her. After he finally felt tired, he stripped off what he was wearing and hunkered down in his sleeping bag, hoping that maybe she would snuggle in next to him in the morning. She hadn’t killed him or robbed him, so he thought that the odds were in favor of waking up in one piece after the sun came up. If he knew what his visitor had in store for him, he might have considered waking her up and taking her home.