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.