Another Missing Person

Mike’s telephone could not have started beeping at a worse time for him, but of course I don’t know this yet. I answer the telephone frantically, ignoring my angry boss behind me; of course, it is too late.

“I will get someone else to help me with the Chandler case if you are, um, too busy,” the attorney says, sounding exactly like the boss from Office Space.

“I am not busy,” I say, now desperately curious about the “Chandler case.” Can this really be about my friend Mike Chandler?

Apparently so. The attorney reiterates the gossip I heard from his secretary earlier: Mike Chandler is the unreliable son of his best friend, the firm represented Mike’s father in a private matter when Mike was kidnapped several years ago, Mike has disappeared again, the firm has been asked to privately look into the matter before anyone contacts the police.

“Is it true that you know Mike Chandler and his fiancee?” my boss asks.

I nod, unwilling to give away more information than I have to.

“I am sorry to have to tell you this, but it appears that his fiancee was murdered yesterday morning. As we understand it, the main suspect is a girl named Sonia who works at a local card club. Would you be able to help us find her?”

I look blankly at my cellular telephone, now on vibrate. I have four missed calls from my home telephone number. Sonia. As I slide my telephone into my pocket, the phone vibrates again.

“I will do my best,” I reply, suddenly very tired. “Can I get back to you tomorrow?”

Mike Chandler’s whereabouts

While I prepare his file information sheet and gossip with random secretaries, my friend Mike Chandler is bound, gagged, drugged, and heading for Mexico as fast as the cargo train will go.  His two assailants are sitting on bales of hay, pointing guns at his head.  They have bandannas over their faces, like Jesse James and his posse.  Like Jesse James’ victims, Mike knows exactly who they are anyway.

“Where is Sonia?” asks the one on the left.  Mike knows he should not say anything because he is drugged and disoriented and barely holding it together.  It is a good thing he has experience feeling this way, Mike thinks incoherently.  The thought of Sonia makes him smile a little bit.

It is at this moment that Mike crumples against a bale of hay and loses consciousness.  He lands on his back pocket, hitting his cell phone in the process.  It dials his most recently received telephone call.

My telephone rings in the file room, just as an attorney walks in.  “Turn it off,” says the attorney, patronizingly, “and we can talk about what I want you to do for the Chandler case and I can pretend like I did not hear anything.”  Just as I do so, I look down at the caller ID: Mike Chandler.