Chapter 13
The thirty minutes Kelsey had remaining on her visit sped by way too quickly. Right on time, the Ombudsman picked her up and took her home. When they arrived at Kelsey’s apartment, she walked over to driver’s side of the car to say good-bye and thanked the Ombudsman, but as she spoke her voice trembled and she began to shake.
“Hey, Miss Tanner,” said the Ombudsman, who was as old as her own father and Irish as well, “don’t be afraid and don’t worry. We all love Dana, the guards, even most of the prisoners. He’s a hero. If he killed-” The Ombudsman stopped himself. Kelsey surmised that he was probably going to say that “if he killed Mike Tanner, he deserved it” or something like that, but held back once he remembered that Mike was her brother. The Ombudsman’s face turned red. After a moment of awkward silence, he nodded and finally said, “I will keep a special watch on him.”
“Thank-you,” she said and walked off to her apartment as the Ombudsman drove away.
Even if Dana doesn’t get out for six years or sixty years, I am still going to marry him and my father better get used to the idea, Kelsey thought to herself. She called work to let them know that she hadn’t quit her job and promised she would report tomorrow morning. One more day of an unexplained absence and she would have been automatically fired. She decided to drive down to the beach to Java Joes on the corner of Main and C Street and get a coffee. The fog had set in and the onshore winds chilled her as she drove her Volkswagen down Main St. She turned left onto C Street and pulled into the coffee shop. She got her usual, French Vanilla bean. On her way back her cell rang. It was Kwan,
“Hello, Kwan, how are you?”
“I need to speak with you right away Kelsey, it is very important. I am at my office on the corner of Channel Islands and Saviers. ”
“I was just going to call you myself. I am driving right now. Let me get home and I’ll call you back.”
“No, come right now.”
Before Kelsey could protest, Kwan hung up. Kelsey continued east down C Street toward Main Street and her apartment. She didn’t like being told what to do, especially by Kwan. Sometimes Kwan acted like she was her boss as well as Dana’s; it annoyed her. Nevertheless, Kwan had been a good friend to her over the years and she was never one to exaggerate. In fact, she was just the opposite, always choosing the understatement over the boast to make her point. It was then that it occurred to her that Kwan might be in real trouble.
She stopped, made a three point turn, which stopped traffic in both lanes, precipitating more than a few angry responses from the drivers with which she nearly collided. Then she pointed her Volkswagen west and sped down C Street. She turned left onto Channel Islands and headed south toward Saviers. After five minutes of high speed lane hopping down Channel Islands Boulevard, she reached the entrance of the Chevron Main Office for Ventura Operations parking lot. She spotted Kwan pacing nervously back and forth on the sidewalk in front of the office, holding a large manila notebook in her hand.
As Kelsey steered her car between the parked cars on either side of her to pick Kwan up, a rattling, clanking noise, from metal striking metal, startled her and she stopped. She was about fifty feet from the front of the office, when she observed a black, Ford Pickup drive up onto the curb of the sidewalk and screech to halt a little more than a foot from where Kwan was standing, frozen. The chain link fence that ran along Saviers had been flattened. A man wearing a black hood and a mask emerged from the driver’s side window. The manila notebook Kwan had been clutching was now gone. He moved the gun he was pointing at her as if he wanted her to get into the truck. Shaking her head back and forth, Kwan backed away from her assailant and then cried out, “Kelsey! Help me!”
Transfixed by the strange events transpiring before her, Kelsey couldn’t decide what to do. Then she pushed down on the horn of her car. Startled by the noise, the man in the mask pointed his gun at her. In a panic, she stomped the gas pedal of her Volkswagen to the floor and aimed it at the truck. The squealing tires of the Volkswagen frightened the masked man out of his pickup. Running over to Kwan, he grabbed her by the arm. A second later, Kelsey’s car broadsided the truck and sent glass and plastic flying across the concrete.
Fortunately, Kelsey’s car had not been able to gather much speed accelerating toward the pickup truck over the short distance between them. The windshield was broken and the side door was only slightly damaged. It had not been her intent to harm anyone anyway. Mainly, she had hoped that the noise from the collision would be heard by someone who could help them. Stunned from the impact, Kelsey stumbled out of her car as the masked man pointed his gun at Kwan’s head. Before the man squeezed the trigger, two security guards came running out of the building with their guns drawn.
The masked man put his gun away and then Kelsey heard him shout angrily at Kwan in a foreign language. The instant her assailant released his grip on her, Kwan dropped to the concrete and landed on her face. He jumped back into his badly dented, but still operable truck. The man put the black Ford in gear and backed it out over the curb and over the flattened portion of the fence where he had first entered. The security guards fired several shots, all of which missed. Once he reached Saviers, the masked man straightened out the truck and sped away.
Kelsey ran over to where Kwan lay on the concrete. There was a large shard of glass protruding from her thin, frail, neck and a small rivulet of blood streamed on to the sidewalk and pooled up beside her head. Any deeper, Kelsey observed, and Kwan would have already bled to death. It must have just missed an artery, she said to herself. She placed her hand on the wound and tried as best she could to pinch it closed against the glass. The bleeding slowed down considerably. Before she could tell him, the security guard was on the phone calling the EMTs. Then they called the Ventura City Police.
Kwan looked up and smiled at Kelsey. Raising her hand slowly, she pointed to the wheel of the car parked along the front of the walkway.