Chapter 30
Clandestine surveillance cameras generally need to be monitored in a nearby van in order to pick up the signal. In contrast, the cameras in the studio apartment where Yolanda was staying were built in, so they had a live feed into the basement of the FBI office. The FBI had watched Yolanda as they had watched her predecessors, as a bit of a formality, a bureaucratic task that no one wanted. Peterson would usually fast forward the images. The first thing of interest that she found was the kanji book, but she still thought Campbell was making too much of it.
Peterson knew Yolanda had faked them out with the audio, but she also knew that Yolanda was with Jimmy.
However, at 10:47 AM on Thursday, Peterson was observing the monitors with the four different cameras in the studio apartment when Yolanda Vance had her first visitor in the apartment.
Peterson snapped to attention when she heard the doorbell ring. She had watched Yolanda on a single screen, sitting on the bed, writing in her kanji book for over an hour. But now Peterson’s eyes flitted from screen to screen, as Yolanda stepped out of the frame of one camera and into another.
“Who’s there?” Yolanda asked into the intercom.
“Sharon,” the staticky woman’s voice came through the system.
Yolanda buzzed her in and put her kanji book away in her purse on the desk and slid her FBI credentials into the bag as well.
When Yolanda answered Sharon’s knock on the apartment door, the two women hugged each other, and Sharon walked in.
“Thanks so much for agreeing to proofread the newsletter,” Sharon said, setting down the draft on the small desk.
“Thanks for dropping it by,” Yolanda said. “I’m so far behind in my bar review studies, I think I’m gonna get fired from this job. The funny part is that I don’t really care anymore. Do you want anything to drink?”
Peterson watched Yolanda step out of the frame of the living room camera, and into the kitchen area.
“Sure,” Sharon said. “What you got?”
The kitchenette camera observed from an upper angle as Yolanda moved things around in the fridge. A half loaf of wheat bread, mayo, cold cuts, a bag of tomatoes, a few cans of soda. Meanwhile, the other camera observed Sharon, pulling at the edge of a leather wallet sticking out of Yolanda’s bag on the desk.
“Girl,” Sharon said. “You got to be careful, your wallet was about to fall out of your—”
“Cola or lemon lime?” Yolanda asked.
“The fuck is this?” Sharon asked.
“What?” The kitchen monitor observed Yolanda looking up from the fridge to see Sharon with her FBI credentials.
“Give me that,” Yolanda rushed across room and grabbed the credentials. Peterson’s eyes flitted from screen to screen, attempting to see both women’s faces. She turned up the volume.
“You’re FBI,” Sharon yelled openmouthed. “Coño! You’re a goddamn agent.”
“It’s not what you think,” Yolanda snatched up the bag and shoved the credentials back in. “I was assigned to the case for everyone’s protection.”
“Don’t try to bullshit me, Yolanda. I’m going straight to the office and telling everyone that you’re an agent.” Sharon grabbed her purse and jacket.
“Please, just hear me out,” Yolanda begged.
“Too late for that shit,” Sharon said, and rushed out of the camera’s frame. Peterson heard the door slam, as Yolanda grabbed her own purse off the desk and ran out after her, slamming the door again.
“Sharon, wait!” Peterson could hear Yolanda yell from the hallway, as the monitors all began to reveal empty rooms, including the light spilling out from the open refrigerator door.
Peterson turned to the computer console and brought up the screen with the wiretaps on the various RBG phones.
A minute later, Peterson picked up a call from Sharon’s cell phone to Marcus’s RBG landline.
“Marcus, it’s Sharon. Are you sitting down?
“You sure you want to tell me this on the phone?”
“It doesn’t matter anymore. Yolanda Vance is FBI.”
“She’s what?”
“She planted the bugs.”
“This has got to be some kind of mistake.”
“Think about it, Marcus. How come she was the only one who didn’t get caught up in the arrests at the rally? The police must have known. How come the bugs showed up in the office after she started to work with us? A young black woman who went to Cartwright? They knew we would eat her up.”
“Sharon, we can’t start accusing each other—”
“Listen to me,” Sharon yelled. “I saw her badge, Marcus! I SAW IT!”
For a second, no one spoke, but Peterson could hear the sound of Marcus’s desk chair groaning.
Yolanda had sprinted the several blocks to the office, and arrived while Sharon was circling the block, looking for parking.
“Marcus!” Peterson heard Yolanda’s voice in the background of the phone call, breathing heavily. “It’s not what you think!”
“I can’t believe you,” Marcus said. “You’re a fucking spy. A fucking infiltrator.”
“I tried to explain to Sharon. It’s just—” Yolanda tried to catch her breath.
“Get out! Get out of this office. Don’t ever show your face here again!” Peterson heard the phone fall as Marcus lunged at Yolanda, and the agent’s rapid footfalls as she ran out of the building.
* * *
Yolanda walked quickly down the street, not even seeing Sharon’s white hatchback as it circled the block again, or the black Jeep that also hovered nearby. She picked up her cell phone to call Peterson, but in the basement of the FBI building, Peterson’s cell didn’t get reception.
“I’m blown,” Yolanda told Peterson’s voice mail, panting. “I just got thrown out of the RBG office. It’s over. I don’t know what the hell to do.” As she hung up and reached to put the phone back in her purse, a young man grabbed the strap and tried to take it from her. Yolanda planted her feet, tightened her core and yanked back with all her might. The young man stumbled, not expecting so much pull back, and let the purse go.
He was nearly six feet. Dark brown skin, dark hair, dark denim jeans, white t-shirt, dark shoes, dark shades.
Yolanda backed away from him, swinging her purse behind her back. He ran off and jumped into a black Jeep that sped away. The vehicle had dealership plates.
Dazed, Yolanda walked into the drugstore on the corner. She circled the store aimlessly for a minute, then she bought a roll of masking tape and a Manila envelope.
“Do you have any stamps?” she asked the cashier.
“Sorry.”
Yolanda paid for her purchases and walked home, observing carefully around her, looking for the Jeep, and avoiding other pedestrians.
After she stepped into the apartment, she locked and chained the door behind her. The place felt surreal. She grabbed her gym bag, and stuffed her purse into it, with the kanji book, a pair of USB drives with a digital recorder, and her gun. She also shoved in the plastic bag from the drugstore with the masking tape and Manila envelope and left the apartment.
* * *
In the women’s changing room of her gym, she put her clothes in a locker, but kept most of the contents of her purse with her. The gun, badge, wallet, and keys she put in a string bag for toiletries. She went into the toilet stall and used the masking tape to secure the USB drive into the kanji journal. Then she opened the book flat and taped it behind a toilet tank with the Manila envelope, checking carefully that it couldn’t be seen from above or either side, unless someone was really looking for it.
After that, Yolanda took her mesh bag with the rest of her stuff and kept it within reach as she jogged on the treadmill.
Two hours later, after some weightlifting and a shower, her body felt loose and subdued. On her way out of the gym, she felt alert and prepared to make her next move.
As she stepped out onto the street, a young woman skateboarded up behind her and sliced the strap on her purse. The girl sped off, her long black hair flying behind her. Yolanda chased her into a mini mall, but the girl was too quick, cutting across traffic and into a crowded food court. Yolanda scanned quickly from the Manchu Express to the Pizza Blitz, but the girl was gone.
To: ASAC Campbell
CC: Special Agent Rafferty, Special Agent Peterson
From: Special Agent Yolanda Vance
Re: LETTER OF RESIGNATION
As of this morning, my cover has been blown with all subjects. In addition, my handbag was stolen, including my FBI issued cellular phone. I am hereby resigning from the RBG surveillance case, as well as the Federal Bureau of Investigation. I am vacating the Bureau’s apartment. I will be turning in my keys, gun, and credentials at my earliest opportunity.
Yolanda walked to a pay phone on Holloway Avenue and called Donnelly at home. She just wanted to leave word about her resignation on the woman’s voice mail.
“Hello?” a woman’s voice answered.
“Donnelly?” Yolanda asked.
“No, this is her wife, Helen,” she said.
“My name is Yolanda Vance.”
“She said you might call,” Helen said. “She wanted me to connect you on the three-way calling. Hold on.”
“Vance?” Donnelly’s voice came through. “Are you okay?”
“I just resigned,” Yolanda said.
“I know,” Donnelly said. “I ran into Peterson on her way out. She said Campbell was in a rage after receiving your resignation letter. He sent her to Holloway to look for you.”
“He sent Peterson?” Yolanda asked, incredulous. “To Holloway?” Yolanda pictured the agent with her pantsuit, red hair in a bun, and pale skin, driving around in a dark car.
“Her orders are to call him if she spots you,” Donnelly said. “I don’t know what’s going on, but watch your back.”
* * *
Taxis were hard to find in Holloway, and she didn’t have a phone to catch a Lyft. Yolanda sat at the bus stop on Holloway Avenue waiting for the #36 bus up to Cartwright. The same bus she used to take when she worked at the Teen Center. She calculated that it would take Peterson at least another fifteen minutes to make it to Holloway. Hopefully the bus would arrive before then. The only things in her stolen purse were a roll of masking tape and her cell phone. Her keys, gun, wallet and credentials were all in her pockets.
Yolanda noticed a dark Jeep at the intersection and squinted through the glare on the window to see the driver. The young man at the wheel looked Asian or Latino, not the young black man who had tried to take her purse.
The light changed, and the Jeep took off. Still, perhaps because the Jeep had gotten her adrenaline pumping, she had a heightened sense of awareness, and noticed the charcoal gray sedan with tinted windows slow down slightly as it rolled up in front of the bus stop.
The passenger window was halfway open. He was in the center lane, so he wouldn’t be turning right or left. But the light was green, so why was he slowing down?
There was no glint of metal, just an intuition, and Yolanda dropped into a crouch, her mind recording every sound during the second before the blast: the blare of car horns, the hiss of a bus stopping at the adjacent corner, the agitated cadence of Reggaeton music bumping out of a car a half-block away. And then there were the sounds immediately around her: the wail of the fussing toddler at the bus stop, his chubby brown hand reaching for the piece of the cookie, and the exasperated response from his grandmother. “Boy, I told you it fell on the ground. You can’t eat it if—” The young woman next to them with the platinum blonde extensions, talking to an androgynous girl in boyish clothes: “I told him, ‘don’t be calling me with that oh-baby-can-I-come-see-you-bullshit. You wanna go see somebody, go see your girlfriend—’” The young man next to Yolanda with the bass seeping out of his headphones, rapping along to the song:
A nigga like me
wit a gun and a G
on the run wit a key
to the—
The bus stop had not been quiet. The street had not been quiet. But the blast of the gun eclipsed all the sounds with its invasive, explosive fury, as the gunman shot a hole clear through the thick plastic of the bus shelter.
Everyone scrambled for cover: the grandmother screamed and scooped up the grandson, ducking behind a car. The young man dived behind a cement garbage can. The blonde hit the pavement with a shriek. The androgynous girl, however, pulled a gun from the waistband of her sagging jeans, and fired several shots at the gray sedan, nicking the bumper as it sped off. After firing, she jumped onto her scooter and headed off in the other direction.
For a brief second, the only sounds that registered were the ball-bearing rattle and the scooter’s rubber wheels against sidewalk, and the departing engine of the gunman’s car. Then slowly, the bus stop ground back to life, everyone checking themselves and each other for damage.
Yolanda stood on unsteady legs and looked at the location of the bullet hole. It had blasted through the spot right behind where she’d been standing.
As she slipped away from the crowd, the ground didn’t quite feel level beneath her feet. As she came around the corner, she wandered into a busy supermarket parking lot, and was nearly hit by a car.
“Damn, bitch!” the young man yelled out the window. “Watch where the hell you going! You tryna get killed?”
Beyond the car, she saw a taxi, and sprinted across the parking lot to hail it. As she ran, she felt jittery and out of synch.
“Sorry miss, I’m waiting on somebody,” the driver said. He was an African American man with salt and pepper hair peeking out from under an A’s baseball cap.
“I’ll give you fifty in cash to take me up to Cartwright College now,” Yolanda said.
“Get in then,” the driver said.
Yolanda spent the first five minutes of the ride making sure she wasn’t being followed, sending the taxi on obscure turns and quiet streets. No sign of the gray sedan. No other cars seemed to be tailing her.
“Do you even know where you’re going, miss?” the driver asked, irritably.
“I just wanted to drive past a couple of places on the way,” she said.
“This is a cab, not a guided tour,” he said. His dark face frowned back at her in the rearview mirror.
“Look, I’m paying you fifty dollars for an eight-dollar ride,” she said, pulling the bills from her wallet.
As Yolanda sat back and buckled her seatbelt, he sucked his teeth. “Must be nice to be a college kid with money to burn,” he muttered.
* * *
The science building had been renovated since her years at Cartwright. They had maintained the historical facade, with its tall cement columns and gargoyles, but expanded the interior, and built out into the lot behind the original structure to include bigger, more modern labs, and more faculty offices.
The Biology department was on the fifth floor of the new wing of the building. Jimmy’s office was halfway down a long corridor, bright with florescent lighting and white linoleum. Yolanda wasn’t quite sure how she’d gotten from the taxi to the hallway in front of his office, or even how long she had been standing there.
The door said “Dr. Olujimi Thompson,” and the note on the bulletin board beside his door showed his office hours and class times and locations. It took Yolanda a moment to get her brain in motion, to figure out that it was Thursday afternoon at 2:41 PM. Another couple of minutes to put the current date and time together with his schedule, and to realize that he was in class from one thirty to three in a lecture hall in the old wing.
She found the room and peeked in through the little window in the auditorium door. Jimmy’s back was turned to her. His lovely, broad-shouldered back. The sight of him comforted her, grounded her.
Yolanda sat down on the floor outside of his class. She found she still had her wallet in her hand from paying the cab driver. She went to put it in her pocket, and she realized her hands were shaking.
A sudden shriek of laughter made her whole body jump. The cookie fell on the ground—wanna go see somebody, go see your girlfriend, cause—a nigga like me/with a gun and a G—all ran through her head with the sound of Reggaeton music in the background and then the beginning of the blast sound. Like some abstract film montage. The echo of the blast stayed with her and left her slightly queasy.
Yolanda looked up to see a cluster of young women trooping past her down the hallway. Her body was clammy with perspiration. As the young women passed, Yolanda recognized their varsity sweats—bright magenta and gold—the college’s colors.
“Post-traumatic stress,” Sharon had explained. Yolanda had eavesdropped on a support group at RBG, and one of the teens had brought a friend who had witnessed a shooting. Yolanda began to shudder. A long, quivering tremor ran through her body, and she felt some of the fog lift from her mind. She needed a piece of paper.
A pair of young women walked by, and the closest one had a notebook in her hand. At Yolanda’s request, she pulled out a few pages. Yolanda took them and began to scribble a note on one of the pages.
When Jimmy’s class broke up, Yolanda slipped in the door to see students packing backpacks and chatting.
One young blonde woman was speaking earnestly to Jimmy. “Professor Thompson, our study group is gonna come by your office hours, okay? Because we’ve got the theory, but we still don’t quite get the application. I heard you missed office hours last week, because no one was signed up, but I’ll definitely be there.”
“No problem,” he smiled. “I’ll see you all on Monday.”
Yolanda saw the girl’s crushed-out grin as she turned back to her friends.
“Have a good weekend, everyone,” he called to the class, and headed for the door.
Yolanda stood between him and the exit.
He looked utterly startled to see her. “Is everything okay?” he murmured as he took her arm and they headed down the hallway.
“Outside,” Yolanda hissed, as they walked out into the cool afternoon.
They sat on the grass in front of the science building, out of hearing range of everybody.
She took a deep breath. “Someone took a shot at me.”
“What?” He moved toward her, as if to shield her body with his.
“Jimmy, please don’t freak out. If we’re gonna be partners, I need you to stay cool and listen.”
“Okay,” he stilled his body and his voice, but his eyes were still wide. “Yolanda, we shouldn’t be outside in the open like this,” he grabbed her hand. “Let’s go to my office.”
“It might be bugged,” she said. “Besides, this is a gated women’s college, with one entrance and a security guard. No one’s gonna take a shot at me here. They wouldn’t be able to get away clean. And I need to tell you about this plan I’ve been working on.”
“Did your plan include you getting shot?”
“No, and it still doesn’t.”
“What the fuck are they after?”
“Something I need to put in the mail. What time do you get off work today?” she asked.
“I teach ’til four thirty.”
“Can you give me a ride somewhere later tonight?”
“Of course. Where?”
“I dunno. Maybe Canada? Or Mexico? Whichever one is closer.”
“You’re crazy.”
“I’ve gotta disappear, Jimmy. They’ll come to you first to look for me, which is why I can’t tell you anything.”
“Which is why you need to tell me something. Shit. I thought we were partners.”
“I’ll think about it.”
“You’ll have a lot of time to be persuaded on the way to Mexico.”
“We can’t take your car,” Yolanda said. “Unless we want the FBI to overhear our entire conversation. We need an out of the way Rent-a-Car.”
“They can track a rental,” Jimmy said. “But we can go by my parents’ house and borrow one of their cars.”
“Do they have something nondescript?” Yolanda asked.
“A battered old brown Toyota,” Jimmy said.
“Perfect. Can you meet me at five o’clock today?” Yolanda asked. “Come pick me up at the post office in the Mercedes.”
“If somebody took a shot at you, you should be waiting here, safe, until I can drive you someplace.”
“No, Jimmy. If anything happens to me, I need to know that certain information is secure and in the right hands.”
“Mail it from here.”
“I don’t have it with me,” Yolanda thought of the book and USB drive taped behind the toilet tank in the gym.
“Let me go with you to get it,” he suggested.
“The post office will be closed by the time you get off work, and I can’t leave it in a mailbox. These folks won’t let a little mail-tampering felony stand in their way. They’d just break in to the box and take everything. I need to get this in the slot in the actual post office building. There’s no telling if they’ll try to get it out of the post office, but they’ll have a much harder time.”
“Fuck it then,” he said. “I’m gonna skip class and go with you.”
“No baby, they know your car. I’m safer in a cab. Less likely to be spotted. Just pick me up afterwards and we’ll get the Toyota and get the hell out of here.”
“Yolanda, I’m not letting you out of my sight.”
“No, Jimmy,” her face was hard and serious.
“I don’t like this, Yolanda. I do not fucking like this,” he stood and began to pace. “Someone is shooting at my woman and I’m supposed to just be like, okay, see you in a couple hours at the post office.”
“Right now, I’m not your woman,” she stood and faced him squarely. “Right now I’m a trained FBI agent, a skilled athlete, and I’m armed.”
“Yolanda—”
“Jimmy, don’t argue with me. If you don’t want to meet me at the post office, I can just do this by myself.”
“You are so fucking hardheaded,” he turned his back to her.
“That’s right. Take it or leave it.”
He turned to face her, clenching and unclenching his fists several times. She looked at him with eyebrows raised, her face a carving of conviction.
“Okay,” he conceded. “We’ll meet in front of the Holloway post office at five PM.”
“I’ll be out front at five. If you’re not there, I’ve gotta keep moving. I’ll call you when I can on your cell. I don’t have mine. They stole it.”
“You won’t need to call. I’ll be there at five.”
“Thank you. I—we can talk then.”
They kissed once, briefly. Then he turned, and she watched him walk back into the building, spine straight, not looking back.
Yolanda walked over to the pay phones in the student center and called a cab. While she waited, she went to the student store and bought a booklet of stamps and a Ziploc bag.
Once at the gym, she tucked herself away in the bathroom stall, Yolanda carefully un-taped the book from behind the toilet tank. Into the Manila envelope, she put the kanji book, the USB drive with the digital recording, her FBI credentials, and the longhand letters and notes she had written on notebook paper at Cartwright. She addressed the envelope to David N. Wiseman, Attorney at Law and put all twenty of the first-class stamps in the booklet onto it. No return address.
On her way out, she was surprised to find everything she had left in her locker. But the scratches on the bottom of her lock let her know that someone had been there, and was uninterested in her digital recorder without the USB memory drive, her empty ankle holster, and the shades she wore sometimes when the glare through the windows of the storefront gym was too much. She plugged a duplicate USB drive into the machine and put the earbuds in her ears.
* * *
Everything between her and the mail slot was the enemy. Every square of sidewalk under her running sneakers, every traffic light, every insect that flew past, distracting her. Behind the dark wraparound glasses, her eyes scanned every car, every pedestrian. She ran against the traffic on a one-way street so no car could follow, and so fast that few could have kept up on foot. Her sneakers struck the ground in a rhythm that should have synchronized with the beat in her headphones. But there was no music. Only conversation. She ran in time to the song of eavesdropping, surveillance.
“So as of today, the FBI will be taking over the investigation into the homicides of Anitra Jenkins and the two Mexicans.”
“Sir, how can you take over the investigation when this institution has a clear conflict of interest. The FBI doesn’t want these murders solved if it’s going to lead to any investigation of RandellCorp before the defense contract is finished.”
“Vance, I don’t need any legal advice from you, okay? You’re on thin ice. The FBI will be taking jurisdiction on these murder cases and we will proceed at the pace that we see fit, and in the manner that we see fit, which will guarantee the completion of the project at RandellCorp that we have been assigned to protect. Is that clear?”
“Yes, sir.”
Sweat ran down her spine and pooled in a blister beneath the Ziploc bag that held the envelope. She had stuck the whole thing in the small of her back, down the waistband of her track pants.
As she ran, the wallet bounced awkwardly in her back pocket, and the gun in an ankle holster bit into the taut muscles of her calf with every step.
The back of the post office loomed a few blocks down, a white stone building crouching in the distance. She ran on, the skin at the base of her spine suffocating under the plastic, and cut through the post office parking lot, ignoring the “No Unauthorized Pedestrians” sign.
Once on Holloway Avenue, she began to sprint the final quarter block to the door of the long building, oblivious to the sweat that soaked the fabric of her shirt, athletic bra, pants, socks, underwear. Her throat burned as she gasped oxygen and bounded up the concrete stairs, through the revolving door.
Only once inside the post office, did she finally reach for the envelope. Before anyone else stepped into the building, she had snatched out the bag, slid out the envelope, and mailed it in the slot.