Ledman Pickup

Twenty Four

Kandhi was still sitting at a table in the Burger Joint when the ugly brown van rolled by. She glanced up at it, thought, 'hey, that looks like Leonora Wells sitting in there', before returning her attention to the pink lemonade she was lingering over. A few sips went by and then she thought, 'why am I sitting here when Leonora Wells just went driving by', and that thought was quickly answered in her brain by the idea, 'it couldn't be. She's coming back here.'

"Oh", she said to herself, and returned to her beverage. A few more moments passed before she asked herself another question.

"Why would Leonora Wells be coming back here? She was just here and she left! Did she forget something?"

"She's supposed to be coming back here", the little voice in her head repeated, and then Kandhi grew suspicious.

"Hey You", she quietly murmured, "are you keeping secrets from me?"

"Um, I'm not allowed to say?" the You feebly replied.

"That does it!" Kandhi jumped up. "Frickin' Ginger MacAvoy! It's got to be. She's been sneaking around my back again. Well, I've got a surprise for you, Ginger MacAvoy. And you too, You!"

She pulled the You out of her pocket and hesitated.

"Wait a minute', she told it. 'First I want some information. About that van. Double Dee-liveries. Arizona plates. 006-DDX. Thanks. Got it. 4226 Hanson Avenue, Wetford Arizona. Wetford, Arizona? Holy!" and with that exclamation, she poked a bent paper clip into a teensy hole in the side of the universal personal device, and turned it off.

"So much for you, You!" she declared as she set foot on the sidewalk outside. "And you too, Ginger MacAvoy", she added.

Kandhi made straight for her car and decided she could do the nine hundred miles or so by morning.

"What's the difference?" she thought. "It's all I have been doing lately anyway. But this time, no frickin' You to be spying on me. It's all just me. Me and the radio for a change."

It actually felt good to go without that stream of constant data, that instant information, that knowing of whatever she wanted to know at a moment's notice. She didn't have to have a thought in her head, just the wide open road, the plains, the mountains, whatever there was out the window.

"I should do this more often", she told herself as she made it through western Nebraska, into Colorado, down towards Arizona, and all the way, straight as she could, to the very place she'd started out just a couple of long days before.