Excerpt from novel, pretty long, but I want comments from anyone who reads it

Aftermath: Or a New Beginning

One Sunday morning in late February after coming in from a walk in the overgrown orchard that surrounded my house, I sat alone in my kitchen, bored, restless. I knew that I should have been working on the paper on Weberian Theory that I had to have ready by the end of the week, but was not ready to start writing yet. Actually, I still had a hundred pages of The Protestant Work Ethic and the Spirit of Capitalism to read before I sat down to write, though I was tempted to just wing it, since I had been using the ideas developed in that book throughout my undergraduate studies, even though I had never read it in its entirety.
The truth of the matter is that my muse was on vacation and I was feeling office-phobic. I just couldn’t bring myself to walk on down the hall [I really like this Morrisonesque reference] and sit before the computer screen, so I picked up one of the remotes off of the kitchen table and clicked on the TV. Turning on the tube was an odd thing for me to do as I seldom use it for anything other than watching movies. In fact, the only reason I have cable at all is for my internet connection, but I do get a hundred or so channels nonetheless.
One of the current crop of mind-numbingly stupid commercials for some feminine hygiene product was flashing across the screen. I was just about to turn the channel when the tube went briefly blank and then cleared to show a weathered pink clapboard house at the end of an orchard surrounded by police and crime scene tape. I recognized the house, from driving past it on my way up into the Sierras a number of times, but I couldn’t recall exactly where it was located, one of the many long straight country roads bordered by pink blooming nut trees in the early spring of California’s central valley.
The caption “Breaking News” appeared in the foreground and an announcer began speaking, “The third home invasion robbery in Stanislaus county this week happened last night at the home of local almond farmer Dez Wilmington. Two unidentified men apparently knocked on the door asking to use the phone because their car broke down, and then kicked it [was thinking they kicked in the phone? Just unclear to me at first glance] in and assaulted the farmer when it was opened to the width of the chain latch [could end the sentence here, or reword? Maybe: “... when he had opened the door the width of the chain latch to speak to the men.”] so that Mr. Wilmington could speak to the men. Mr. Wilmington is in critical condition, having suffered a fractured skull and two gunshot wounds to the abdomen. His wife, Claire Wilmington, is dead though cause of death has yet to be released, and their two children Mike and Janine, aged six and eleven, are missing. Due to their fathers injuries an their mother’s untimely death, it is unclear whether or not they were in the house when the assault occurred. Law enforcement officers say that they have been unable to find the children through friends or relatives and so they are appealing to the public to help find these children. If you know where Mike and/or Janine Wilmington are, please call the Merced County Sherriff’s Department immediately at (209)… ”
I turned off the TV. That sort of bullshit is why I almost never turn it on; people being cruel to one another is all the news these days, [could end sentence here, because it seems to you of course, you're the speaker.] it seems to me. I suppose that bad news sells advertising, and I know that overall the crime rate is down more than thirty percent since the late eighties, but more crime and horror is reported every day. It was bad when I was young, but the news is worse than ever, the media spreads fear and discontent in an ever expanding effort to send the citizenry into a feeding frenzy of consumption. I try to resist these messages, and I do so mostly by not watching television –except in my professional capacity as a graduate student with an emphasis in Network Culture.
I had only started my graduate study a few weeks earlier, the fall had been spent in recuperation from the facial wound I received at the hands of the man who came to be known as the Torturer in the papers though I still thought of him as “The Dead Guy” [you use “The” in his title here but not later]. I spent late September in L.A. in the care of plastic surgeons employed by William Patterson, the producer who’s [whose] son I had rescued from The Dead Guy one morning in early September. I have already told that story though and do not want to get into it again right now [is this not the first chapter? Feels like I missed that story].
After the media storm cleared away I was a guest of the Patterson family in Bel Aire while my face got fixed. It was more complicated than it should have been because of the emergency patch job that I had done with Nuskin. The wound had to be reopened, actually cutting out the patched section and grafting in some tissue from my buttocks to span the resulting gap in my cheek and I went into a lengthy period of recovery during which I tried to avoid getting hooked on painkillers all over again. It was odd, but the overwhelming desire for MORE that I remembered [this read awkwardly: “for MORE that I remembered” – after reading it a couple times it made sense, though.] from my youth was just gone. I had no difficulties using the medication as directed and I even had the doctors telling me I should be taking more because being distracted by the pain could slow my recovery. I didn’t finish even the first prescription in the time allotted [confusing]. In the second week I even [maybe take out “even” from previous sentence to avoid repetition] began having a brandy and cigar with William Patterson after dinner, and enjoyed it but I did not crave more once it was gone. The demon of my adolescence had apparently left the building with Elvis [“with Elvis” distracts/confuses me]; I will keep aware in case he comes back, but while he is gone I’ve been enjoying a few of those pleasures I had thought were forever lost to me [the Elvis confusion persists here with “in case he comes back”]. Meanwhile, the Patterson lawyers helped me set up a trust account for the half-million in reward money the family insisted I take. Then they helped me get accepted into grad school mid-year at UC Merced and also set me up with the realtor who found me this house on five acres only a few dozen miles East of the campus.
The week before Christmas I was cleared by the doctors, the bandages were gone and the scar nearly [ending with “nearly” is artistically appealing – cool!]. The week after Christmas I moved out of the Patterson guest house, said goodbye to Billy and his parents and moved north to Merced and into my house. That was a weird feeling. I never had a house before, I never had a new car before either, but there was a brand new forest green, four-wheel-drive, crew-cab, Toyota Tundra pickup in the parking circle in front of my living room window, the mortgage for this four bedroom house was in my name, I had nearly fifty g’s in the bank and I had more than three-hundred thousand dollars in an investment account that the Patterson attorneys had assured me would earn me approximately eighty-thousand a year with the firm that held the account. In any case, I was in no danger of running out of money any time soon unless I went crazy with it, and I was a man of simple tastes so there was not much chance of that.
I was out of sorts, I did not know how to adapt to my new life yet. Even the fact that I had a six-pack of Sierra Nevada Pale Ale in the fridge and a fifth of Jack Daniel’s Old Number 7 on the sideboard in the living room was weird. Not that they were there, but that they had been there for more than a week and there were still two beers in the six-pack and three quarters of the Jack Daniel’s in the bottle. A couple of nights I’d had a beer with dinner and a whiskey after, a couple I’d had one or the other, and about a third of the days since I’d moved in I had nothing alcoholic to drink at all.
When I first got here the house was furnished with pieces, mostly dark wood and canvas, I had selected and ordered online. I paid for the furniture, but Patterson sent a couple of his set designers up to put everything together and the house looked like a movie set. These set designers were great, and they must have enjoyed their work because they painted several rooms and the outside of the house as well as arranging the furniture. There were drapes and folding screens I had never ordered as well, I loved it. And, [I'd take out the comma after “And”] I felt indebted somehow, like I hadn’t earned any of it.
Part of me said that I had earned it. By chance, I had walked down the mountain one morning and killed the man who had kidnapped and tortured young Billy Patterson. If I had not shown up, Billy would almost certainly be dead and would have been begging to die long before he did [I get it, but it's awkward as written – “long before he did” b/c it ends abruptly and infers that he actually did something or something actually did happen, when what you're talking about is what could/would have happened.]. The bodies of seventeen children had been discovered, [I'd omit this comma, but I see why you have it here. I'd consider breaking up the sentence – maybe end it after “Personnel”.] by federal agents and Forrest [Forest] Service Search and Rescue Personnel, buried within a quarter mile of the clearing where I had found The Truck that morning. There was evidence that the Dead Guy had been active even before he had started burying kids in that particular valley and no one knew just how many he might have tortured and killed in total. Seventeen was enough.
I had no regrets about how that hike ended, even if the Dead Guy showed up in my dreams too many nights trying to kill me again, or trying to explain himself to me –explain what a noble sacrifice these innocents had made towards his becoming and what a great mistake I had made by stopping him when he was so close. I didn’t like those dreams, but I was not trying to drown them and my days were mostly productive.
The thing about the killing is that I didn’t want to share it with anyone. It was renting enough space in my mind as it was, I didn’t want it to be the first thing in people’s minds when they met me. Patterson respected that, he asked me to tell him what happened up there, what I had seen and done, but he had never tried to get me to tell anyone else. [either insert comma or capitalize And] and his security people had assured that I was not hounded by the paparazzi in those days right after I came down the mountain. [would take out “that” because I want it to say “people had assured him that I was not ...”]

Interlude: Or, The First Time
I came stumbling down the mountain in the dawn of the fourth day, the sky was light in the east but the sun had hours before it’s [its] rim kissed and then cleared the peaks behind me. I was starving; hunger and lack of sleep had combined to transport me out of body in the night and I had traveled far in vision, still seeking the light of righteousness while it continued to elude me. Typical – they say that God is always listening, but he/she/it doesn’t answer very often. Oh well, I had already decided anyway and I didn’t really expect the Lord of the Universe to speak up to tell me I should start killing people, even people that clearly have it coming. The weird thing, the thing that started all this and made it real, is that I received some sort of message in the events that occurred as I was coming down the mountain that morning.
There was a little more light, so I was moving downhill at a pretty good clip, half running, half falling, dancing from rock to rock across the glacial scree slope. I was beginning to wonder if I’d gotten myself on the wrong side of the ridge coming down, as I didn’t recognize the terrain I was passing over, and the stream was on my right when it should have been on my left. I could see the reflection of firelight on some trees near the creek a half mile below me and I was thinking about food. A campfire in the early morning usually means that someone is cooking breakfast, and I hadn’t eaten anything except a couple of King Bolete mushrooms and some wild garlic since that steak nearly eighty hours past. I was beyond hungry. My mouth began to water. I stopped my headlong plunge down the mountain by catching myself against a tree and considered—bacon and eggs? Or oatmeal?
Then I began to move more slowly, the dawn light had yet to penetrate beneath the pine and fir trees and I did not want to break any bones. As I came near the water I began to smell wood smoke and I turned downstream towards it after stopping to drink and splash water on my face.
I had made it about halfway to the fire when I heard a shout, “Come back here you little fucker! Shit, I’m gonna kill you this time.” Then I heard crashing through the trees along the stream heading my way.
I didn’t hesitate, or think. I was suddenly up under the skirts of a big fir, still and silent. I could feel the blade of my K-bar against the outside of my forearm, the hilt gripped pommel down in my right hand – I had no memory of drawing it, but there it was.
Not five seconds later, I saw movement along the stream bank. Suddenly, a kid came running, straining, breathing through his nose –because something was in his mouth, maybe a ball gag. He was running like the Devil was after him. The light was beginning to filter down into the gap between the trees caused by the brook, and as the boy passed I could see blood on his feet from the stones, his back was also black with it [his back was also black with what?] and torn, his nose was flared like that of a blown horse, and his eyes were huge and glistening in the dawn.
Five steps behind him came a much larger shape, bald and hulking, covering ground quickly, catching up, even though he appeared to be overweight, or just bulky. He was wearing black leather pants and boots, with one of those bondage arrangements of straps and steel rings in lieu of a shirt, and a sliver headed cane or swagger-stick was raised in his hand. He was nearly close enough to bring it down on the boy’s back as he came abreast of my position under the tree.
Everything seemed stretched out, slowed down. I had time to step out and raise my arms, my right swept out in a clothesline move for his head or neck, my left going up to block the cane, which I missed. He must have caught movement out of the corner of his eye, and his reflexes were good. My knife hand blurred towards his head, butt first. It was unconscious, I was not thinking enough to decide not to stab him, it’s a consequence of how I’m holding the blade. I see the silver head on the cane, no, it’s definitely a swagger-stick, and there is a silver eagle’s beak heading for my face.
I twisted my head out of the way, but not far enough, translating the movement down my arm, whip cracking the butt of my knife into him at the same instant that silver beak slammed into my cheekbone just outside and below my left eye, ripping a furrow down my cheek and driving me to my knees. I couldn’t see for a minute, but I felt his feet go out from under him and felt the solid thud as his shoulders hit the ground. I rolled farther left and scrambled crabwise away, trying to put some distance between us, trying to clear my head, trying to see, and feeling blood begin to pour down my face and onto my shirt –hot and smelling of metal.
I was moving, shaking my head, vision gone black and red, mouth full of blood now, and I felt air coming into my mouth through the rip in my face, but there was no pain, only adrenaline. I put my left hand down into a berry patch and that hurt for some reason, all those little thorns woke me up like a splash of cold water. My vision cleared and I got my feet under me and lurched into a wide armed stance, preparing for an attack that was not coming.
I saw that I stayed facing him through all my scrambling blindness, and I saw that he had not moved. Well, he dropped the stick, his hands were at his throat scrabbling as if at a rope that is not there, and he is writhing, gagging, and coughing blood while his legs kick around spasmodically.
I stepped foreword [forward] and kicked the swagger-stick out of his reach and then stood there watching him suffocate. There is a round, purpling indentation in the center of his throat, where the bulge of his Adam’s Apple should be. That was some kind of lucky shot, I think, broke his esophagus.
I start [started] looking around for the kid, pulling the poncho out of it’s pouch on my LCE belt to staunch the bleeding on my face. After two or three minutes the gagging and kicking stopped, his hands fell away from his throat and he lay still beside the creek, dead.
“Well, Fuck!” I said to the morning, pressing the folded poncho into the hole in my face, “That fucking hurts.” [I love this!]
“Hey Kid…this guy won’t hurt you anymore. He won’t ever hurt anyone again…the fucker’s dead.” I walked over and kicked the body, hard, and felt a few ribs cave in under the heel of my boot. “See, he ain’t getting up.”
No answer. Well, I couldn’t blame him, little sucker was obviously terrified, [I'd take out the comma after “terrified”] and, if that really was a ball gag in his mouth, he couldn’t talk anyway. “Hey kid,” I tried again, voice sounding rough and tight in my ears, ”I’m going to check out the campsite, and see if there is a phone or a radio so I can call the rangers and the cops.”
I added, “If you come down, I’ll take that thing off your head. I promise I won’t hurt you, and I won’t let anyone else hurt you. If anyone tries, they’ll be following this guy to hell.” Then I stooped down to check the dead guy’s pockets – nothing. The leather pants were so tight I doubt he could have got a dime in there and there were no pockets in the arrangement of leather straps and buckles on his torso. The guy was barrel shaped and pudgy, but solid under the flab, good thing it was over so fast or I might have been in trouble.
I spat blood, and started shambling downstream towards the fire. I was hoping the sicko had a first aid kit, or some tape, or something. I needed stitches, and I was losing blood pretty fast, head wounds always bleed a lot. The adrenaline was wearing off a bit and I was starting to get dizzy. So I started thinking how I was going to explain this. That brought the juice back. Shit, I really didn’t want to go explaining to the cops how I came to kill this guy. I know, I saved the kid, and I was badly hurt, it should be a simple case of self defense, defense of another, whatever. I really didn’t want to explain this though. I’d been arrested before, a bunch of times, and in my experience the cops will sometimes make shit up, and usually take the worst possible interpretation of a given situation.
Of course, I was being a fuck up back then. Maybe clean living these past few years would catch me a break. Still, I thought, if it weren’t for the kid, I’d just walk on down the hill and pretend that [think you could do w/out “that”]this never happened.
I came upon a clearing a couple of hundred yards downstream from the dead guy, it was more of a turn around about thirty feet across at the end of a partially overgrown logging road. The stream ran across one end of the teardrop shape made by turning vehicles some years back, and at the tail end was parked a big truck with its nose pointed back down the road.. The damn thing looked like one of those S.W.A.T team rides, all in black on a deuce and a half frame with a big box on the back, the box had tinted windows, there were double doors at the rear, and a single on the right side of the truck, a couple of long antennas and a small satellite dish sprouted from the roof and the front bumper was a ram covering the radiator with a winch inset. Just the vehicle for demented perv with a tiny dick [“Just the vehicle for a or the demented perv...” ?].
The rest of the clearing held a campfire in the middle with a folding table next to it, a cast iron skillet in the fire smoked and tinged the air with burnt bacon and eggs, for some reason I no longer wanted to eat. There was also a percolator on the table, and a couple of enameled tin plates. Personally, I was hoping that there was coffee in the percolator; but first things first.  Nearby, there was a large chunk of granite about eight feet high and roughly pyramidal. Set in the ground between the fire and the rock was an X shaped cross made from fir logs with the two lower legs set in the ground, manacles dangling from the top and some dark, congealing substance staining the trunks. I had a bad feeling about that, remembering the bloodied, torn look of the boys back as he ran past me. I kept the K-bar loose in my right hand and circled the clearing. I noticed a makeshift cage, made of stripped fir branches and chicken wire, up under the edge of the trees near the back of the truck. The wire had been staked down with long iron tent stakes around the perimeter, and most of the floor of the cage was a bloodstained slab of granite. Looking closer, I could see where one of the stakes had been pried lose and the wire bowed up. There was blood on the wire and I figured that the kid had escaped through the gap as the perv was cooking breakfast.
All of a sudden I had an image of that boy-child, beaten bloody, huddled on that stone in the night and praying for help that never came. I tasted blood in my mouth again and I was struck with a wave of dizzy nausea. My gorge rose hot in the back of my throat and I stumbled, tasting blood and vomit. I caught myself on the rear bumper of the truck and puked between my boots. Blood and yellow bile, that’s all there was in me, and I suddenly knew my time was short. I knew that if I did not get the bleeding stopped, get hydrated, and find something to eat I would pass out. If I passed out, there was a good chance I would die, drowning in the blood from my torn face.
The kid hadn’t given up, at some point he had stopped praying and started digging, getting away just in time for me to interfere. Cool, I wasn’t much for giving up either, at least not in the past few years. I pushed myself upright and contemplated the back doors of the truck. They were pretty high off the ground, so I stepped up on the hitch-bar and pulled down on the lever. Not locked. Good.
The doors opened and I pulled myself inside… [I like how you break the paragraph]
To the left, at the rear of the compartment, was a sturdy metal cabinet with a wire mesh door – it was empty and an open padlock was slid through the hasp. I guessed that this is where the kid was transported. Ahead of the cabinet was a single bunk, made up with a black comforter and red silk sheets. It was made military style; hospital corners and I bet you could bounce a quarter off of it. The rest of the compartment was similarly neat and organized in a military fashion. This guy was a perv and a neat freak, maybe a little OCD, at least it should be easy to find stuff. Above the bunk were storage compartments, ahead of it was a low refrigerator with a propane stove-top above it. Then the door into the cab of the truck in the center. To my right was another large cabinet, this one with solid metal doors and a regular handle like you would find on a gym locker, locked, worry about it later. Ahead of it was a table for one with a laptop computer on it and a rack of sophisticated communications gear built in to the side facing the front of the compartment. Ahead of that was the side door, steps leading down to it, and then the center door again. Storage compartments lined the roof on the right as well as the left. I moved forward and noticed a red cross symbol on the door of the farthest forward compartment on the right, above the side door and decided to look in there first.
It contained the best first aid kit I have ever seen, bar none. An army field medic might have the surgical equipment and morphine ampules, but I doubt they have a complete emergency pharmacy. This guy had Percocet, Diludid [Dilaudid?”], Keflex, Penicillin, Ampicillin, Darvocet, Tylenol, Motrin 600’s, Benzedrine, and Desoxyn, among other things.
I looked at the good painkillers and decided against, not ready to start that again. Instead, I took two Tylenol and two Motrin and chewed them up, tastes nasty but works fast. Then I grabbed a tube of Nu-skin liquid stitches and a hand mirror and went to sit at the table. Looking in the mirror at my face was almost a relief. It was bad, but not as bad as I had feared and the bleeding had almost stopped. I could see my cheekbone peering out from torn skin at the corner of my right eye and then the gash went straight down about three inches, almost to my jawbone. It was relatively clean and there was only maybe a half inch in the center where I could see through into my mouth revealing a flash of white where my upper teeth shone through. I took the tube of Nu-skin and squeezed a generous amount along the length of the wound. I opened my mouth, stretching my face out and forcing the cut mostly closed, then I reached up with my right hand and used my fingers like tweezers to hold the edges together. I froze like that as I felt my face catch fire. That shit burns like gasoline, but it works fast. In thirty seconds I let go with my fingers and relaxed my face; the gaping hole had been replaced with a swollen, angry, meaty red line.
It was then that I noticed how wrung out I looked, strung out was more like it. I hadn’t looked this bad since my last 90 day drunk, hollow cheeked with that big bloody line down my face, wide, staring eyes that looked ready to roll right out of my head. And the pasty complexion I used to get from too much booze now compliments of losing a couple pints of blood. My hair was filthy and matted and my field jacket and t-shirt were soaked with blood, good thing they were black at least. Anyway, it was about time to try to figure out this guy’s commo set up and see if I could call for help. But first, I opened the fridge to see if he had any beverages and lucked out with a quart of OJ.
I guzzled half of it at a draught and sat down at the table before the laptop, which was powered on. I tapped the touchpad to bring up the screen and realized I’d hit the jackpot, the guy’s Hotmail account was up and running. Apparently that disk on the roof was an Internet uplink so I was good to go. I clicked through to Google and searched for Forrest [Forest] Service offices and FBI offices in California figuring that the Forrest Service was probably closer, but that this was a probable kidnapping with torture and a dead man so it was probably an FBI case. There were no e-mail addresses on the FBI page, or the Sierra National Forrest page, but there was a headset attached to the computer, so I was hoping I could make a phone call through the net. I started looking around in his system to see if he had a way to call out.
The next several hours went by in a blur as the past days on the mountain caught up with me. All I know is that I was unconscious with my head on a log by the fire when the first rangers arrived. Apparently I had managed to get through with a GPS fix before falling out.
When I walked them up the stream bank to show them the body I don’t think that they were ready to believe me, I must have been raving like a madman by then, but we came around a thicket of red dogwood and the corpse came into sight just as a crow landed on its head.
The crow made a noise, “Squark!” and drove its beak in, pulling the dead guy’s left eye out of the socket with a small wet sound. The bird cocked its head then, staring us down with one eye like black stone –one of the rangers made a gagging sound and turned away from the stream to be noisily sick shoulder deep in the tangle of red branches and green leaves. The other tightened his grip on my arm and went pale around the mouth, his Adam’s apple working as he swallowed convulsively in time with his partners retching. Then the bird leapt into the air bearing its grisly trophy aloft, a black silhouette against the pale blue sky even though it was after noon by that time. The surreal image of that crow flying off with the deflating eyeball spitted on its beak has stuck with me, reminding me of the Norse ravens Huginn and Munin (thought and memory) and the price Odin paid for knowledge. That sight after the nights and days I had spent on the mountain left me wondering just which mythology was sending me messages, but I was too disoriented to think about it then and later I decided it did not much matter.
Anyways, after seeing the body wearing a bondage halter this far from the city and the small bloody footprints that continued up the stream bank from where the dead guy lay, the wilderness cops eased-up a bit towards me. I did not have a back country permit, but hey were convinced that I had a good reason for killing the guy, and coupled with my torn face, this bought me a little consideration. Pete Rogers and Bob Jennings were the rangers’ names and they were both large men, one blond and one dark haired, both tanned and muscled with the obligatory sunglasses and mustaches. Decent guys really, though I did not appreciate how decent they were at the time. My head was swimming and I just wanted to lie down and they wouldn’t let me. I’m afraid that made me a bit of an ass, but it turned out for the best because no one believed that I could have managed to make up a story as ridiculous as the one I presented them with and then stick to it when I was exhausted and disoriented from lack of sleep and blood loss.
Later that afternoon they found the boy using a Search and Rescue K-9 unit. He was badly beaten and would bear scars inside and out for the rest of his life, but none of his injuries were life threatening. He was suffering from dehydration, bruises, abrasions and some nasty cuts on his back and thighs, but everyone involved agreed that he was lucky I came along, and we wound up in adjoining rooms at a Fresno Hospital.
It turned out I was right, it was an FBI case. The boy’s name was William Patterson II, and he was known as Billy. He was nine years old, and his father was a big time Hollywood producer. The boy had been abducted from a park near his Bel-Air home on August 30th, a little over a week earlier and the same day I quit my job to find a new purpose in life.
There had been a $500,000 reward posted for the return of William Patterson’s son, which I gratefully accepted for the TV cameras, and Billy’s father picked up my medical bills as well. He could afford the best plastic surgeons and you can’t even see the scar on my face unless the light hits it just so, and even then it is just a fine white line from the corner of my right eye to a point about an inch outside that corner of my mouth. William Patterson Sr. also offered me a job with his security service, which I declined. I decided to go back to college to seek a Master’s degree in Sociology since I did not have to worry about making a living for a while. William Sr. and I became friends of a sort and I did end up working for him, though in another capacity and several years later. I have stayed in touch with Billy, become a sort of surrogate uncle, and we spend weekends together in the mountains sometimes.
That vision quest gave me my purpose, though not quite the way I had envisioned it. Life is like that. I have killed a number of men and a few women since I came down the mountain that early September morning, none of whom I regret killing. Some I have killed just because it needed to be done, and some have been contract jobs, but those are stories for another day.


I came out of it all relatively unscathed and anonymous in the press, and I wanted to keep it that way. When my new classmates asked about the still healing scar on my face I told them I’d been in a car accident. The same accident also explained why I had not entered the small graduate group until mid-year, only the dean of graduate admissions knew that I had not applied until the fall term had already started, and as I had completed my BA at CSU Northridge summa cum laude, there was no reason why I wouldn’t have been regularly admitted anyway. I was also ahead of most of my classmates even though they had started earlier, so my professors were happy with me and the other students at least felt that I had earned my place.
UC Merced was still a new and untried institution in those days, beautiful campus, but only partly finished with construction going on everywhere. New buildings full of the newest technology, and new people everywhere as well. More than half of the faculty had only been teaching there for a year or less and recruitment was still in full swing. Everything was chaotic and there was a looseness there in those first years that was inspiring. I was taking nine units in three classes and working on some research into internet culture that I had started at Northridge. It kept me busy and kept my mind focused on business most of the time, but periodically I would hit one of these dead zones, times when I did not want to do anything academic, and my isolation and the events of the fall would begin to get to me a bit.
I remember that Sunday pretty well for some reason, the Dead Guy had been in my dreams the night before, the action had played out all over again, and I had woken sweating and cold before five. Unable to go back to sleep I had made some espresso and some drip coffee and tried to read Weber for a while. I couldn’t concentrate on that either so I picked up a Robert Jordan novel I had read before and fell into the richly textured world of The Wheel of Time for a couple of hours while I smoked and drank coffee, waiting for the sun to rise. Then I took my walking stick and my knife belt out from behind the door and, buckling the heavy Gurkha-knife around my hips, I undid the deadbolts on my front door and went to walk in the orchard as the sun rose over the mountains to the east. I circled my new property twice and headed back to the house, it was cold and clear with a biting wind and a hint of frost in the air and I found myself thinking that I finally had enough room for a dog. I remember thinking that I should get one, maybe a Sheppard or a Lab, and I remember seeing a large crow sitting in one of my almond trees looking at me and I remembered the crow on the Dead Guy’s forehead squarking at us just before it pulled one of the corpse’s eyes out and flew away. I thought again of Odin and the price he had paid and I wondered, was the crow really a messenger? And if so, what was the message and who was it from?
Inside, I booted up my laptop in the big farmhouse kitchen and poured another cup of coffee and steamed another shot of espresso to add to it with organic heavy cream and raw sugar. I held the mug with both hands, sitting in my new breakfast nook and looking out the bay window at the trees in the early morning as the heat of the mug thawed my cold hands and I thought about why I had gone up into the mountains back in September.
Interlude:
I had been clean and sober for nearly five years, had attained a certificate as a substance abuse counselor, and had been employed in the field for three years while working on my long overdue B.A. at CSU Northridge down the coast a ways. I was physically and emotionally exhausted from the rigors of going to school full time in addition to being a counselor to the rebellious and the broken.
My clients were men and women who could not refrain from alcohol and other drugs despite serious consequences. Perhaps ninety percent of them were mandated to treatment by the court as an alternative to incarceration. There were five to ten clients to a group and I facilitated two groups a night; so much denial, so much pain, so many dysfunctional family relationships. Most of them came from families with a long history of alcohol and drug dependence going back generations. Many of them came to us broken, beaten down by years of physical and sexual abuse that they were trying to hide from in the bottle and the spoon. For instance, I had one man in his thirties who had been born addicted to heroin and who had returned to its dark solace in his early teens to escape the memories of what had happened those nights his mother locked him in a room with a pedophile in exchange for dope. Now he was a father, trying to stay clean, to give his children the healthy, loving childhood he had been denied.
The one that broke me was a young woman though, figures huh?
Her father had introduced her to shooting heroin at the tender age of seven; he had beaten her mother and gave his young daughter drugs. She never talked about any sexual abuse, denied it even; but the signs were there in her promiscuity, and in her choice of men.
She was a little thing still, about five feet tall and slender, with ash blonde hair; she tried so hard, going to 12-step meetings, getting a sponsor, staying clean for months at a time. Then she would meet some guy at a meeting, and she’d be all excited about this new person in her life. Then he’d get her high, just like daddy, and it would start all over again. This happened three or four times over the course of a year, until she got kicked out of the sober living house she was staying in as a condition of her probation. The court mandated that she go back to living with her parents until she could find a bed in another suitable sober living environment. Sentenced by the court to live with the same parents who had left her with deep emotional scars, how’s that for justice.
About a week after moving back home, she came to the program with a black eye one evening; a good one, someone had hit her hard. Apparently, Dad hadn’t changed much; he’d just started hitting her too now that she was a grown woman. He probably did not like to look at her now that she was trying to stay clean.
Neither this girl nor anyone else told the court that these are the people who got her hooked in the first place. We couldn’t, not without her permission, any abuse had taken place too long ago to do anything about without her cooperation; and the black eye wasn’t enough to justify violating her expectation of privacy. It would have been considered a breach of client confidentiality under Title 42, and could have resulted in felony charges for the reporting counselor.
Sitting there in group that night listening to her make excuses for the monster that had shaped her I decided I was done. I could no longer do this. Night after night listening, gently suggesting alternatives to using drugs, guiding the obstinate and ignorant on the path to recovery; or even worse, trying to teach the broken how to repair themselves using prayer and meditation instead of booze and dope and rage. Teaching them to accept suffering as an inevitable and necessary part of life; which it is. Teaching them that they are not responsible for the actions others have taken against them; which they are not. Asking them to put aside their fear and their anger in exchange for the pursuit of love and serenity; which they may never find. [could use commas instead of semi-colons]
I was anything but serene; I decided right then that it was time to get proactive before it was too late for me. Maybe I could not change the world single handed, and doing it this way was depressing – but I could change one dad’s world.
I waited three and a half weeks before I gave thirty days notice on the first of August with a formal letter of resignation; my boss asked me why I was leaving and what he could do to change my mind. I pled burnout; told him that if I didn’t get into another line of work for a while, I’d inevitably get loaded, and no, my mind is made up. Thanks anyway. He told me to take a nice break, go to some al-anon or CODA meetings to deal with my transference issues and co-dependence then come back when I started missing the work. “We're saving lives and souls here every day boy! You won’t feel whole without it. I know I’ve been there.”
It worked out pretty well for me financially; I’d given notice to my landlord the same day as the recovery center, so on September 1st I was free of obligations for the first time in five years. My severance package worked out to about twenty-five thousand dollars; I was thankful I’d chosen to contribute $400.00 a month to the 401k plan, before taxes, and I had taken only about ten vacation days in forty-eight months. Turning my drug addiction into an obsession with my work had finally paid off; I’d have a certain amount of freedom to pursue my nebulous plans for vengeance upon the despoilers. Vengeance, not revenge; you take revenge for wrongs done to you; vengeance is payback for wrongs done to another.
Early in the morning on Saturday the 6th I headed north on the 101; on vacation, sort of, and for the first time since I got clean I didn’t have anywhere to be in the near future. The sense of freedom was exhilarating and frightening at the same time. I could go anywhere, do anything; and for a person in recovery from addiction that raises all sorts of possibilities that most people never have to deal with.
I did not feel like drinking or using; but I was on the road alone, and that brought back memories of cross-country night rides fueled by methamphetamine and Jack Daniels. What I was doing now was eerily reminiscent of my old M.O.; I couldn’t help thinking some about the old days, wondering if I was setting myself up for a relapse, but even then I really believed that my demon was gone. I believed that I could drink safely, and that belief scared me as it was so contrary to the way I’d been living. The thing was, I thought that I had grown up during those years and that I was no longer the person who had allowed the drink to take over his life.
I got off the freeway at the La Cumbre exit in Santa Barbara to fill up the tank on my 10yr old Taurus. Then I picked up a Blackeye [my favorite], with half’n’half and seven sugars, at Starbucks and took the 154 out of town over the San Marcos Pass. Climbing from sea level to over three thousand feet in 20 minutes, I hit the crest and was looking out over the beautiful Santa Ynez Valley by 11:00, a hot wind coming in the window at 70mph, I listened to a compilation I’d made of old rock and punk on the CD player and headed north. Bopping along with the music and carefully not thinking about the confidential files I’d scanned into my laptop. First, I wanted to decompress a bit, do some camping on the way. I also needed buy some equipment, just not in California.

I rolled into Santa Maria a little before noon and stopped to pee at a Chevron just off the highway, while I was there I picked up a couple Lipton unsweetened iced teas, a Sobe Adrenaline Rush (they are my favorite energy drinks – taste like tangerine) and a bag of beef jerky. Ten minutes later I turned east on the California 166, following the county line between Santa Barbara and San Louis [Luis] Obispo counties towards Bakersfield and the junction of the I-5 with Hwy-99. The 166 is a (mostly) two-lane blacktop winding through the Sierra Madre Mountains that separate the California Coast from the Central Valley and the Sierra Nevada (which I consider the “Real” mountains) [me too] beyond. They were my destination, whether I followed the 99 to Sacramento and then turned east or I chose to head into the mountains sooner didn’t really matter, I wanted to get up into the high country. Spend a few days with the granite and the pine trees, sweet clear mountain lakes and streams fed by glacial melt were calling my burned out soul to be healed.
The Sierra’s had always been a balm to me, the place in this world where I felt closest to God, and it was there that I was heading to fast and pray. I needed time to think before I committed myself to a course of action that was in many ways inimical to the new way of life I had chosen when I stopped chasing the Dragon into sleep every night. The California 166 carried me past the Twitchell Reservoir and on into these junior mountains, mostly grassy steep-sided hills at this point, cattle country, and I tuned to a local country station to suit the terrain.
I have always liked long drives, probably one of the reasons I wound up getting seven DUIs' before I quit drinking. I liked the solitude, the radio, the wind in my hair when it was warm enough to cruise with the windows down. I had yet to be pulled over on the highway and I really was not worried about it any more. What were they going to do? Give me a speeding ticket? or one for failing to wear a seatbelt? who cares. There were no warrants out for me anywhere. I had five thousand dollars in my pocket, more in the bank and I was sober, nothing to fear at all. This is the great freedom that people in recovery get that normies never will understand; after spending nearly 20 years looking over my shoulder, knowing that even casual contact with law enforcement was likely to wind up with me behind bars again, it was hard to believe that they couldn’t touch me [how sweet that is]. Nevertheless, it had been five years and the reality of it was finally sinking in though it still felt like a novelty.
To tell the truth, I am only spending so much time on this part because I want to remember the flavor of those last innocent days. I want to give myself perspective on what happened; see if I can recapture the inevitability of it all, the righteousness that I started this endeavor with. I want to remember my state of mind; before and after, if you like, so let us get on with it.
Later that afternoon I pulled into Fresno and made a stop at an Army Navy store to buy an LCE rig; LCE means load carrying equipment and consists of a military green web belt and a pair of padded suspenders, from which may be suspended an infantryman’s core equipment. I purchased the LCE, an entrenching tool, two canteens, a canteen cup, an ammo pouch (for coffee and tobacco), a poncho and a black U.S. Army issue field jacket.
I had decided to head up into the Sierras from here and I needed the LCE, as I wasn’t planning to carry a backpack or very many supplies. This trip was to be a vision quest of a sort, hard climbing and a liquid diet to purify my body and, hopefully, to open my soul up to the spirit world. Many Native American tribes did this with hallucinogenic mushrooms, datura or peyote. But, since I was off drugs, I decided I’d have to settle for fasting, hard physical labor, coffee and cigarettes to prepare for the trance. Besides, I was always forgetting stuff when I went camping; maybe by trimming back to the essentials I wouldn’t be cursing my lack of foresight the first evening.
That night I stopped in Oakhurst; I headed northeast out of Fresno and up into the high country, arriving in this pleasant mountain town about five o’clock and had no trouble getting a room. I showered, dressed, and took my notebook PC, along with a particularly complicated historical novel I was reading, out in search of coffee and dinner.
I found a steak house on the main road through town, the highway that heads straight through to Yosemite, and confirmed that they made good strong coffee before getting a table on the patio so I could smoke. In another month it would be too cold to eat outside here at around 4000 feet above sea level, but this September at least it is quite balmy and the scent of pines is in the air along with wood smoke in the twilight .
The waitress was pretty, black hair in a ponytail, green eyes, slender, with narrow waist, slim hips and small breasts; she wore jeans, cowgirl boots and a white button down shirt with a black apron tied around her waist. “Hi I’m Judy,” She said, “Can I get you a beer or something to start with?” as she set a large menu and a glass of water before me and took out her ticket book and pen.
“Coffee and Pelligrino or Perrier, whatever sparkling water you have, in the bottle, no glass, wedge of lime, if you don’t mind.” I replied, looking her over and smiling a bit, a little flirtatious but not leering, “I’m not drinking tonight.”
“Cool, I’ll be right back, hon.” And she swayed back towards the door.
I lit a cigarette and opened up my notebook and [either make the “and” a comma or change “logging” to “logged”] logging in through my password protection. I was careful as always to get the code just right as I had installed a really nasty crash program I found on the net as soon as I started putting things on my drive I thought might someday be used against me. With the Patriot Act demolition of our fourth Amendment rights, and the first Amendment falling under attack as well, I figured that it was better to be safe than sorry. If someone tried to log on using the wrong password twice running, the computer would disable the keyboard and all communication ports and proceed to write random strings of 1’s and 0’s across the entire contents of the hard disk, starting with password protected files. To be extra safe I had disabled the computers ability to communicate wirelessly without a prompt from the user and installed vigorous anti-virus and anti-spyware defenses; also my primary password was Twenty-four characters long, so the chances of getting it right by accident were about nil and the only place it was stored was in my head.
So far I didn’t have anything in there that justified even that level of security, except for a half dozen names and addresses with some personal information that I might have a hard time explaining to a professional ethics committee – such as social security numbers and Driver’s License numbers, birth dates and what I knew of jobs and criminal history. I also had some really hard-crypto I’d picked up through a buddy of mine; he said that it was over a thousand bit string to represent each character and that it would take the National Security Agency longer to break anything I put in there than I would live. It could take hundreds of years with the tech they had now and no one else was even close to their capabilities. I had yet to break any laws so I wasn’t using it but I was once a Boy Scout and I took that always-prepared thing to heart.
The waitress showed back up while I was thinking about crypto, setting me up with French Roast, cream, sugar and a large Pelligrino, she blew a strand of hair out of her face and asked “you decide what you’d like tonight Sir?”
“Don’t need to call me Sir; I usually work for my living.” I replied, grinning, and continued, ’’I’ll take that16oz Rib eye medium rare , a fat baked potato with sour cream, butter and chives, chili beans, green beans and a green salad with blue cheese, oh yeah, corn tortillas instead of bread.”
You hungry tonight or d’ya always eat like that?” she asked, just looking at me with those green eyes.
“I usually only eat full meals in the evening and tomorrow I’ll be starting a fast so I thought I’d celebrate. Can you bring me some extra blue on the side, a side of raw horseradish, and keep the coffee coming please.”
“Sure hon. No problem.” And off she went again.
I put cream and sugar in the coffee and turned my chair so that [remove “that”?] I could put my boots up on the porch rail, leaned back, lit another cigarette, set my coffee by my right elbow after tasting it [after tasting your elbow?] (very good) and set the notebook in my lap. I wasn’t looking at files, at least not those [I know which files “those” are but maybe clarify this] files, I went online through an anonymous re-mailer my hacker friend had told me about and went tool shopping, not to buy, just window shopping. I was trying to decide what type of tools I would need if I decided to move forward and the list kept growing.
Some of the stuff I already had; I’d been collecting knives as long as I could remember, or rather buying them as I never spent more than a hundred dollars on one and usually much less. Sporting good’s [goods] outlet stores are good [repetition of “good”] for knives if you visit frequently and look for sales. I was definitely going to need some night goggles. Duct tape already in the trunk, and zip-ties, wire and batteries. Mostly I was cruising firearms dealer’s websites, trying to decide what types of guns I was looking for. I liked guns but had not owned one since an amazing chain of circumstance had deprived me of a nice stainless thirty-eight revolver; just before I would have used the piece to kill myself, or do something equally stupid, in the bad black days of the year before I got sober.
There was one just like it on the screen now, Taurus Model 82SS .38 special in stainless steel, priced at $398.00. What I was really looking for now was a Ruger Mark II .22, or maybe a High Standard .22 automatic pistol. .22’s are accurate, have no recoil to speak of, and relatively high magazine capacity. The ammunition is cheap and using hollow point’s [points] makes up for the small bullet and relatively low muzzle velocity. They are also not very loud, a sharp crack instead of boom, and can be effectively silenced. I can get one new for between three and eight hundred dollars, depending on the model and extra’s [extras] chosen; used pistols are also plentiful and much less expensive [than new ones, I assume].
I saw the waitress heading my way and clicked off the net, closing the notebook and pulling the novel closer. She arrived in seconds, setting my steak and trimmings deftly in front of me with her left hand while topping my coffee from the pot in her right. No wasted motion, her hands performing their designated tasks simultaneously while she looked at me, asking, “Do you want A1, or Worsteshire [Worcestershire] with that?” I had a tendency to notice such things [notice her asking a question?], having spent years waiting tables and tending bar, it was a difficult job and the good ones make it look easy.
“No thanks, I’ll take some extra sour cream when you get a minute though.”
“Back in a second then.” And she was off.
I busied myself with cutting the steak and preparing the rest of the plate, as I wanted it, so that I could eat with one hand while holding my book with the other. She came back as promised and I fixed my potato and had a bite, perfect.
After dinner, I settled back and turned my attention to the novel where a Persian slave girl of British decent was busy building a merchant fortune in Amsterdam circa 1674ce, and drank coffee for a while smoking and glancing at my watch from time to time, until seven thirty. Then I left a twenty-dollar tip, about 80%. I was feeling bloated and well disposed towards the talented young woman whom had brought me the feast. Then I headed back to my room, and to sleep, planning an early start for the next morning.
The next day I headed up deeper and higher into the rocky fastnesses of the high Sierra, parked my car at the end of a logging road around 7500 feet above sea level and followed a passing stream uphill. I wore jeans, boots, a t-shirt with LCE harness over it and the new field jacket over that. The LCE supported everything I needed to survive in the mountains: two ammo pouches packed with instant coffee and loose tobacco with rolling papers, two canteens I filled from the stream at the first good falls, a rain poncho that could double as a tent, an entrenching tool, and two knives –one a heavy bladed Gurkha knife, shaped like a boomerang and sharp on the inside of the curve, excellent for cutting wood or flesh, and one a U.S. Marine issue K-bar, probably the best all around field knife ever made. The Gurkha rode my left hip and the K-bar my right, I had them along for utility, not any expectation of combat. I never went anywhere without at least a pocket-knife, and I never went anywhere out of easy walking distance from the nearest 7-11 without that pair. With those two knives and the entrenching tool I could make anything I might need to live in the mountains –from a lean-to to a log cabin, a spear, a bow, anything that can be made from wood and earth you can make with the right iron.
I did not plan on using the knives for much except cutting green fir branches to put on a fire to keep the insects at bay, or throwing at unsuspecting trees and fallen logs. But as I mentioned earlier, I was in the habit of being prepared. It had been too long since I had practiced the basic survival skills I had once learned so well. That was really my purpose in going into the mountains, simply to live and smell the trees and the earth. I was not going to hunt, as a matter of fact I was not planning on eating anything or sleeping. The plan was to fast on water, coffee and tobacco until I had some visions that might put my desire for vengeance into perspective. I felt like I needed perspective. I felt like I had been too close to too many problems for too long and I wanted to lash out. I was not sure whether or not I ought to act on my anger or if that anger was blinding me and I felt that a few days of solitary contemplation would help me figure it out.
Well I fasted, and I hiked, and I had visions. I gained a long view of my troubles, but I did not get any clear answers, just spirits muttering in my ears about life, the universe, and everything. Then, on the fourth day I headed down the mountain and got lost. Getting lost resulted in me walking into a kidnapping, I was wounded, killed a monster, and gained this shiny new life in exchange for my old one. So, why was I uneasy? And what were the crows trying to tell me?
Story:
The truth of the matter was that I thought I had had an answer up there. I thought that [omit “that”] the fact that I got lost in my delirium and walked down that particular canyon on that particular morning was something’s way of telling me, “Go ahead, kill them wherever you can find them. Kill them all.” And I thought the crows were there to remind me, they seemed to pop up all over the place, and they were always looking at me. I also thought that I might be going crazy, but I didn’t think I really cared or that it really mattered…kill them wherever you find them.
I came back to myself in my new kitchen, my cigarette had burned to ash between my fingers, my computer was ready to go, and the sun was now definitely up, casting the shadow of the orchard across the backyard. My fresh cup of coffee was now room temperature and my hands were warm. I took a big gulp of the coffee anyhow, and sat in my breakfast nook wondering about home invasions –who did them and who would have taken the children. I did not like the answers I came up with, but figured that[omit?] I was probably right. I decided that the original targets of my anger were going to have to take the backseat. Maybe the crows were trying to tell me to do what was in front of me, right in front of me, like the Dead Guy. And I could be tied to those names down south…best let them wait.
I got up and dumped the dregs of the now cold coffee, and then [omit “and”?] I brewed a couple more shots of espresso and poured coffee on top of them in the cup, adding heavy cream and six packets of raw sugar from a clay pot on the counter next to the machine. I was suddenly cold again, so I checked the thermostat –“69 Dude!” I said to myself, “Crank it up!” and pushed the button to increase the heat of the water flowing through tubes in the floor to eighty degrees. One of the best things about this house was the fact that the former owners had installed hydronic heating. A boiler and pump arrangement in the basement pumped hot or cold water through tubes in the walls and under the tile floors as well as feeding the hot water tank that sat next to it in place of a water heater. This heating method is both more economical and more comfortable than traditional forced air heating and cooling systems. I could set the temperature of the house to exactly where I wanted it to be, relatively quickly, regardless of outside weather and at half the monthly gas bill.
I took a sip of coffee, sat back down in the breakfast nook, and pulled up my home network on the computer screen. I selected “Music,” then “Albums,” then “Nothing’s Shocking” by Jane’s Addiction, and set it to play throughout the house at low volume while I contemplated rage and depravity [well-put].
For a start, home invasions were almost always committed by members of the same race and social standing as the victims. In California’s Central Valley, with a nut farmer named Wilmington involved anyways[omit “anyways”?], that meant that[omit] the perpetrators were probably white, working-class country boys. And that probably meant Tweakers (methamphetamine addicts), maybe organized, maybe not. The level of violence involved and the missing kids also supported that conclusion, speed-freaks are notoriously paranoid, and excessively violent. Possibly they took the kids because they were witnesses, possibly for ransom, and possibly for some darker reason.
If it was because they were witnesses and might have known the assailants, those children were as good as dead; their bodies would show up in a ditch sometime in the next few weeks, or they would never be found –either way, nothing much I could do about that. If they were taken for ransom, the kidnappers would contact someone very soon, and the cops would handle it; again, it would be outside my purview, and though I would be happy to execute the perpetrators given the opportunity I was not going to go after anyone in police custody and kidnappers almost never get away from the law in the U.S..
What concerned me was the other possibilities. Whoever broke in there wanted something specific, and if it wasn’t a kidnapping gone bad, which seemed unlikely since they had killed or badly injured the people most likely to want to pay a ransom, thereby destroying any opportunity to keep the whole thing below the radar. There were only a few possibilities that I could think of and all of them were bad. If the invaders had come to collect a drug debt (still supposing that[omit?] they were Tweakers), the violence would be explained by a failure on Wilmington’s part to cough up the money owed and the perpetrators might have taken the kids to sell them into the sex trade as slaves or as kiddie-porn actors. There is a lot of money in children I hear, maybe as much as $200,000 each, and that would pay off a lot of dope –with interest.
That was the worst scenario I could come up with off-hand, and it sort of scared me that it only took a few minutes to get there. In between, there was the possibility that the invaders decided to take the kids for their own sick use, or that they were involved in, or knew someone who was involved in homegrown kiddie-porn right here in the valley. That was better than if they were to be sold on the open market because it meant that there was actually a chance of figuring out who had them, and either getting them back alive or at least finding out what happened to them and punishing everyone involved.
You might think that I was being arrogant to think that I had any chance at finding anything that the police with all their resources could not, but I was operating under an entirely different set of rules than the police were. I knew how to identify Tweakers and from there I could get information about the local Meth scene. I did not have to worry about violating anyone’s civil rights, as a matter of fact I was planning on it. They would tell me what I wanted to know, one way or another, and if they were good, I would let them live.
“Jane Says,” I sang along with Perry Farrel, “Have you seen my wig around? I feel naked without it…” Then I made some sourdough toast with butter and Strawberry preserves, finished my coffee and went back to reading Weber’s theory of how the Protestant Reformation had led inevitably to the development of the capitalist economic system in Europe and North America.
Late that afternoon I turned the television on again, just before the local news broadcast at six, to see if there was any more information forthcoming about the missing children. There was nothing new –except for the fact that their father had died in surgery –and they were still missing. Also, I got the street name where the attack had taken place. It was not far from my new digs, maybe two miles north and five miles east, and that got me thinking about doing a little exploring. The police were probably finished with the crime scene by now, the house’s owners were dead, the kids were missing and there might be some illuminating evidence left behind.
I found myself wondering what the police might have missed, thinking that it was a home invasion robbery gone bad they may not have really looked for other clues in the house. I was thinking that this crime might be about something else, that the killers were after something specific, and that that something (or traces of it) might still be there. Besides that, it had been a long time since I did any nocturnal scouting and I figured that I needed the practice, or maybe I was just feeling antsy and wanted something to do. I decided then that I would scout the house late that night, and in the meantime, I had a call to make about getting some untraceable firepower.
One of the advantages of my checkered past is that I know a lot of people from different backgrounds. One of my clients as a substance abuse counselor had been a heroin addict named Reggie. Reggie got busted with some smack and had taken a Prop. 36 plea and gone to rehab instead of being prosecuted on the felony. But heroin was Reggie’s crutch not Reggie’s business, his business was supplying firearms and specialty ammunition to various Southern California gangs, Militias, and citizens who did not want the government to have a record of their weapons purchases. Reggie guaranteed (with his life in many cases) that the guns he sold would not trip any police alarms should someone get caught with one. His weapons were all in good condition, would never be reported stolen, and had not been previously used in the commission of any crimes. I had gotten to know Reggie pretty well over the course of the two years he took to complete an eighteen month treatment commitment, and he had told me to call him if I ever needed a piece. Making that call would put me over the line, I would have made a decision to go forward and I would be committing a crime by purchasing weapons through Reggie, so I had been putting it off.
At seven-fifteen that Sunday evening, I plugged a headset into my laptop and made the call. An answering machine picked up after the first ring, “This is Reggie, leave a message.”
“Reggie, it’s Jake Day, long time no talk, I have a need of your professional services this time. Call me at (209)…”
I left the headset on and started making a list in Word, typing in the names of weapons that I thought I might need: Ruger Mark II .22 caliber or High Standard model OSS, Glock .40, Dessert Eagle .50A&E, 12gauge pump shotgun with cylinder bore and a high capacity magazine, AK47 and a Remington 700 sniper rifle, add 5000 rounds for each gun and I was looking at a big ticket purchase. I didn’t need it all at once, but figured I’d make the order and see what he could do. At 7:23 a window popped open on my screen saying Incoming call from (661)…and there was a trilling noise in my earpiece. I clicked the answer button and said, “Reggie? This is Jake.”
“How’s my favorite counselor doin’ these days?” I heard Reggie’s gravely voice with it’s trace of a Central American accent, “Never thought you’d actually take me up on that offer my man.”
“Yeah, well I’m not a counselor anymore, I’m getting into a new line of work and it seems like I might need some bite to go with my bark this time. This gig is strictly off the reservation man.”
“Well then my friend, you called the right dude, I can supply all the bite you could ever need.” He replied. “I saw you on TV a while ago Bro, this have anything to do with that? It didn’t sound like you’d be needing to do any real work anytime soon.”
“Sort of, different set of circumstances, but I’m looking into something local that smells a lot like that situation.”
“Well shit, then it sounds like you doin’ the Lord’s work to me.”
“What’s your email address Reggie, it might be safer if I send you the list that way.” I said, “don’t need to get into specifics verbally. Unless you got encryption?”
“Shore I got encryption mi hermano, I’m talking through my computer right now all it takes is a little electronic handshake if you are set up for it.”
“Oh yeah, I almost forgot, you love these gadgets almost as much as I do, go ahead and initiate the link.” Another window popped up saying, ENCRYPT CALL and I clicked it. A moment of static and strange whining noises on the line followed by the original window being surrounded by a red glowing line and the hieroglyph ENCRYPTION ACTIVE in brilliant orange superimposed itself across the call window. “We’re golden man.” I said, at that point and waited for Reggie to reply.
“So what’s really shakin’ Bro?” He asked, there was an odd hollowness behind his words, as if we were speaking in a large auditorium, almost, but not quite large enough to spawn an echo. “Just what kind of shit you got yourself involved in, and where are you?”
“I decided that since I don’t have to work for a living, I’d go back to school, get my Masters –so I’m up herein Merced at the new UC. There was a home invasion a couple days ago, a nut farmer’s house. well[Well], Mom and Dad are dead and two kids are missing. The cops are not going to get anywhere. You remember Fat Freddy?”
“That was one sick crazy gringo man.”
“Well I’m thinkin’ that some of his Central Valley cousins done this.”
“Oh shit man, that ain’t good.”
“Nope, but it occurred to me that someone who knows the animals and is not required to play by the rules might be able to figure something out. So I’m gonna ask around.”
He whistled through his teeth, “You are one dumb motherfucker, you know that.”
“Yeah, but I kinda liked killing that sick fuck last year, and I might actually be able to find those kids.” I said, “I know I’m sticking my head in a hornet’s nest man, don’t trip, that’s why I called you. I might need some serious bug spray.”
“You start fuckin’ around with those Redneck Tweakers, you sure gonna need something Bro.”
“You might not remember, but I did train in this sort of shit, long ago and far away, so I got a pretty good idea of what to do.”
“Well dude, I either got what you need, or I can get it.”
“I need a full kit really, I want a deuce-deuce pistol, preferably something like the High Standard OSS with an integral suppressor. Then I’ll want a Glock .40, a Desert Eagle .50A&E, a good pump 12-gauge with a high capacity magazine, and a Remington 700 or equivalent sniper gun.
“Well shit man, that ought to be a good start.”
“I’m not done, and I can afford it.” I continued, “I’d really like to put a Fabrique National M-249 SAW, one of their new 5.7s, and an M-16A1, preferably with an M-203 mounted in the bag too. I got to play with those in the Army…handy. I’ll also need 5000 rounds for each piece. Then I’ll be wanting some good armor, just in case I have to go chat with someone at home, if you know what I mean.”
“Holy shit man! You are serious, aren’t you?” He said, “I never pegged you as the violent type Bro.”
“I’m a completely different guy these days Reggie, the counselor is gone. To paraphrase our sorry excuse for a President, God told me to fuck up anybody who messes with kids –so I’m going to.” I replied [is he replying to himself?], “I wouldn’t tell anybody else this, but with you I don’t really give a fuck, you sell shit to the AB, the MM, and a bunch of Hollywood types, plus you got a history with Chesters that I know about; I know you ain’t gonna turn me in.”
What I did not say was that any DA with a brain would give me immunity on homicide of a child molester for breaking open Reggie’s operation. Reggie could tie them into major weapons felonies on a whole bunch of wanted gangsters. The reason none of the gangsters had done it was that they needed him, and they knew burning him would get them killed–I’d never snitch him for the same reasons, unless he started the ball rolling. Reggie wasn’t a bad guy, for a sociopath, and he hated the pedophiles more than I did; he didn’t know it yet, but Reggie was going to be Q to my James Bond.
Not long after that we said goodbye, with Reggie promising to deliver the items he had in stock within forty-eight hours, and then I went out and got in my truck—heading into town to the Walgreens for some anti-forensic medicine. If I was going to go into the farmhouse that night, I wanted to make sure I wouldn’t be leaving any hair or fiber evidence.
At the twenty-four hour pharmacy I began to fill my cart with three sets of extra large sweatpants and three matching hoodies, all in dark grey, I added a pair of generic black nurses shoes (two sizes too large), an extra large red and black Hawaiian Shirt, a box of Sally Hansen roll-on depilatory sugar-wax, a set of hair clippers, a 24oz Hurricane High Gravity Lager, a manicure kit, a box of latex gloves, a gallon of bleach, some dishwashing detergent, two bars of Lava soap, a Do-Rag from the Afro-care section of the hair isle, an eyebrow waxing kit, a box of tampons, two elastic bandages, a vial of Nu-Skin (just in case), a couple of protein bars, some sour cream, and two packs of Camel Wides.
I drank the beer on the way home and tossed the can out the window into my orchard as I turned up the drive. Then I went inside and unpacked my bags on the kitchen counter. One nice thing about living alone is that I could just get naked in the kitchen and go to work on the hair problem. If you are seriously contemplating committing a series of major felonies, hair is a problem, so is wearing your own everyday clothes. With the technology available to police forces these days it might be possible to identify someone through their hair, their skin cells, semen, blood, or even sweat. I planned to shortcut the problem of forensic technology by eliminating as much hair as possible (without looking like too much of a weirdo) and by buying cheap, generic, outfits that I can dispose of after each job—hence the depilatories, cheap shoes, and 3 for $10.00 sweats [I'd suggest inputting hyphens: “and 3-for-$10.00 sweats” cuz I got tripped up by it as written].
I ran the sink full of hot water and dropped the container of roll on wax in to soften it. Then I stripped off my clothes, piling them on the kitchen table, and lay the strips of waxing paper out on the counter in preparation for the pain to come. At least I knew what I was doing with all this stuff as I had a girlfriend a couple of years prior to this who had got me into waxing my body. The habit didn't last much longer than the girl, who turned out to be a freak in more ways than I was ready to deal with, because waxing is really a pain in the ass—both metaphorically and literally—but it did increase sexual sensitivity and the pain was interesting while the hair was coming off. It hurt enough to get the endorphins kicking in without being enough to actually dissuade me from doing it again. Very similar to tattooing actually, but the hair coming out was not as intense as the needle going in. Hell, I eat blindingly hot peppers for the same reason, endorphins are cool.
The sugar wax had softened and I took it out of the sink, patted it dry, removed the stopper, and screwed on the roller-cap. The microwave clock said 9:47, so I clicked on the TV and put it on the local channel to catch the news at ten. Then I started rolling the wax on: first the left big toe, the top of that foot, carefully around the ankle and on up the calf to just below the knee. That is about as much as I could do in one run, or the wax would stop sticking to the paper well.
Next, I took a strip of waxing paper and carefully smoothed it over the bridge of my foot, making sure that it stuck evenly, and then I grasped the leading edge and pulled—hard, but smoothly—and wallah! There was an abrupt burning sensation across the top of my foot, and all of the, admittedly sparse, crop of hair was gone. A few tiny spots of blood bloomed from eviscerated pores, and the skin reddened. I moved the strip of paper up and smoothed it down my shin, then pulled again, hissing through my teeth as the much denser hair disappeared from a two inch wide swath of my lower leg.
By the time I had finished with the left calf, the news was on, the endorphins had kicked in and I was feeling very hot, so I opened the French doors leading out back and cracked a can of seltzer water. I guzzled half the can and lit a cigarette, inhaling deeply and savoring the smoke, then I moved over to my right foot and calf. By the time I reached my thighs I was feeling good, I had always had an idiosyncratic reaction to pain—unless I was actually damaged it just made me feel alive and horny, or angry, depending on the situation. I didn't have to worry about the pubic area as I had continued shaving the full Monty after that girl had been left behind, so the hair stopped at the top of my thighs and started again on my belly, so I skipped upward and continued to rip.
The news made my anger spike again. There was still no sign of the kids, “police are pursuing all available leads and still requesting that anyone with information regarding the whereabouts of the Wilmington children call 209...”, there had been yet another motiveless shooting spree in Stockton, and Wal-Mart was trying an end run around the city council's decision to refuse zoning to a new superstore. Shit! Sometimes I wondered if I might have to expand my mandate. Maybe the crows would tell me.
By eleven-thirty I was as hairless as I was going to get, having followed the waxing with a shower to wash off the excess, a shave to catch any hair I'd missed below the eyes, then I'd run the clippers over my head with a number one comb on the sides and back and a number three on top, and I'd finished up by waxing my eyebrows, snipping long ones, and pulling all loose eyelashes with my fingers.
Almost finished, I poured myself a shot of Jack and lit another cigarette. With the Camel between my teeth, Jack in my left hand, and can of seltzer in my right, I walked out into the yard and looked around. It was February 26th in the Central Valley. The night was partly cloudy and the moon almost full. An hour past, the news had told me that the ambient air temperature was 43 degrees Fahrenheit and the cold air prickled my freshly denuded skin, but I was not cold. My body was a furnace, burning bright against the endless dark and I felt charged—as if the my heart were a nuclear reactor. I saw a bat fly across the pregnant moon and thought again of the crows as I stood bare to the world. What were they trying to tell me? And who were they bearing messages for?
I pulled the cig from my mouth with my seltzer hand, poured the shot of Jack into my mouth, asked these questions with my soul, and swallowed. Then I chased the Tennessee whiskey with seltzer, took a drag from the cigarette, and shook myself like a dog coming out of a lake. Fuck the dumb shit, the eternal would answer me on its own timetable, time to get ready for work.
I went inside, took another shower, scrubbing with the lava soap to get rid of skin cells and bits of hair from the clippers, and then dressed in my newly purchased generic clothes and shoes with my LCE rig under the hoodie. I tucked a flat steel Wonderbar into the e-tool pouch, a couple screwdrivers into the ammo pouches, added a hammer hanger from my tool belt with a 22oz. framing hammer through the loop, and a five-cell Mag light with a blue lens. I tied the Do-rag over my head, strapped on my knife-belt and went out to the truck.
In the driver's seat I pulled the hammer loose and set it beside me, adjusted the Gurkha knife so that it didn't dig into my ribs, started the engine, turned on the headlights, and took off. Fifteen minutes later I drove past the pink farmhouse and took the next left, about two-hundred yards down the road. Nearly a mile after the turn, driving through a tunnel between almond and walnut trees, I came to a cross-street without having seen another house.
Apparently Wilmington had quite a spread, I continued on for a quarter mile and killed the headlights, then I slowed and turned into the orchard on my left. I carefully navigated down the aisle between rows of trees until the road was just a faint shimmer of moonlight on blacktop in the rear-view mirror. I stopped and lit a cigarette. I sat there and smoked it to the butt, looking around for lights and/or movement. There was none.
Suddenly I remembered the dome-light would come on when I opened the door, so I reached up and removed the bulb by feel, and put it in the ashtray. Next, I closed my eyes and counted to a hundred and twenty, letting my night vision develop further, and then I pulled some amber lensed shooting goggles out of the glovebox and put them on. If anything, they helped in the low-light conditions and the way they sealed to my face would protect against losing any eyebrow or lash hair during this shindig.
I stepped out of the vehicle, grabbed my hammer, and closed the door softly putting the hammer in its loop a [as] I did so. Then I walked away from the driver's side at a 90 degree angle. The road I had driven up should be about a hundred yards to my left, and I could see a brightening in that direction that corresponded with my internal map. I should be able to walk forward, crossing only one country road, and find myself at the rear of the Wilmington homestead just over a mile through the trees. Compared to some night orientation exercises I had done, this would be easy. The trees were planted in nice, neat,[omit comma after “neat”?] rows, oriented to the compass, so there was no way to get lost as long as I didn't panic. And panic was not in the picture, I still felt bullet-proof and ten-feet-tall, so I needed to guard myself against overconfidence instead of the reverse.
I started walking swiftly towards my goal, careful not to run into anything as my eyes adjusted to the gloom under the trees on that moonlit night. I didn't worry about making noise yet, I wanted to know if there was anyone out there with me, and the easiest way to find out was to saunter along as if out for a stroll and see if anyone revealed themselves. It was highly unlikely that there was a hostile ambush in place, but there might be some cops on stakeout closer to the house, and if there were I wanted to know about it.
Orchards make beautiful places to walk on a moonlit night, the ground is nearly weed free and level, better groomed than most golf courses. After about five minutes walking I came to the one road I would need to cross, so I paused for a minute under the eaves of the last row of trees to look and listen. I could hear birds singing sweetly and wondered if they were nightingales, but other than that nothing stirred in the darkness or on the moonlit road, so I crossed and began moving faster towards the Wilmington farmhouse.
I was moving fast and loose, not hiding, but neither was I advertising my presence. Occasionally there was a small metallic noise from my hammer or one of the other items on my belt, my shoes made scuffing sounds in the manicured dirt between the rows of trees, my night adapted eyes looked for movement among the trees, and the moon shone pale silver through the branches overhead whenever it peeked between the sporadic clouds above. As I drew nearer to the farmhouse, my senses seemed to become ever more sensitive until I was hearing the twitch of every branch and leaf in the mild breeze. Nonetheless, as I came up upon the back of the farmyard surrounding the house, I neither heard, nor felt any sign of watchers among the trees or buildings.
When I reached the border of the yard I stopped and waited,[omit comma after “waited”] silently, for five minutes listening and looking about the homestead. Between me and the house was a barn and a squat silo which I supposed would be used for storing nuts during harvest, as well as a three car garage. All four buildings were dark and silent and there was no crime scene tape visible here at the back of the property. When I was satisfied that I would not be observed, I walked across the farmyard to the barn and stepped inside, lighting a cigarette as soon as the door was closed behind me. After lighting up, I closed my eyes, savored the smoke and listened again. Nothing.
When I opened my eyes again, I kept the cigarette cupped in my hand to avoid damaging my restored night vision, and looked around the barn.
I did not know what I was looking for, but since the door was closed and there were no windows, I turned on the flashlight. With the blue lens it would not significantly impair my night vision, nor be visible through the crack in the door. Suddenly, I saw movement in one of the stalls at the back of the building. Something small, maybe a rat, possum, or a raccoon, but it vanished into the floor. Not the wall, the floor, and the floor I was standing on was poured concrete. So, I wondered where it had gone, and walked slowly over to that stall. There was some horseshit in there, a bunch of straw/hay/whatever, and the floor was still concrete.
Hmmm…I started kicking the straw around to see what there was to see, and the toe of my shoe bounced of [off?]something. There was a ring set in the floor, about four inches around, and made of rusted iron. Clearing off the hay, I saw that that[take one or both “that”'s out] the ring was set into a trapdoor,[omit this comma?] made of wood and old [made of old?], with a gap on one side, and set into the slab. So I pulled it up and entered the second version of hell I’d seen that year. Well, not that year—technically the situation on the mountain was the previous year, but it had been less than six months. I found myself in a finished basement containing a fairly nice bed, a wet bar and mini-fridge, a toilet, sink and shower behind a thin partition, a vanity station w/armoire, some high quality audio/visual equipment, and some halogen floodlights. Oh shit! Not good. Not here anyways. There was also an entertainment center containing a thirty-six inch TV, some good Microphones, speakers, and a couple of drawers. The drawers were full of DVD’s in cases labeled only with dates. There was also a plain pine desk with a computer sitting on top of it. I suddenly wanted to leave, I didn’t want to know what was on disks hidden under the barn in a house where two kids had disappeared, but it was like a car wreck, I had to at least check it out, and maybe I would find a face, or faces to look for.


I don’t ever want to talk about what I saw on those disks, but I found other things, curious things as well. Before beginning the search, I pulled on a pair of thin stretchy gloves to keep my prints off stuff, clipped the flashlight to the left side of my chest so that the light shone directly on whatever I was facing, and then I started by going over, under, and around the bed. Nothing there but semi-soiled linens and the fact that there were ringbolts set into the bedposts. Then,[omit comma] I looked at the vanity-dresser-armoire arrangement on the wall behind the camera. To the left stood a chest of drawers, about chest high that contained only an assortment of undergarments and lingerie (in sizes from very small,[omit comma] up to adult) and, in the bottom drawer, a small but varied collection of sex toys, collars, straps, and other fetishist paraphernalia. I walked around the vanity section to go through the armoire to the right and found much the same—nightgowns, flannel pajamas, cheerleader outfits, boy/girl scout uniforms, and so forth, most of it hung up, some in the two low drawers. On a whim I dropped into a low push up position, looked underneath it all, and viola!
There was some sort of briefcase stuffed behind the armoire. I pushed off the floor, stood and retrieved it. Then I carried it over to the vanity table and turned on the makeup light so I could see better. No one should be able to see the light through the trapdoor from outside the barn anyway, and if someone began to open the door I would hear it. Nice case, in brown leather with brass corners, worn but well cared for, it looked like it should be carried by a respectable lawyer into court each day—not be hidden behind the costume section in a kiddie-porn operation. I examined the latches and found it locked with the dials scrambled. So I crossed my fingers and set them all back to zero (I never reset the combo on one of my briefcases—maybe not many people did), then I tried the latches again. Click. Well hallelujah, it opened and I caught my breath. Money. Lots of it. And a gun. More than half the case was full of inch thick stacks of rubber-banded $100’s, there was another, thicker, banded stack of fifties and twenties, and the gun looked like a Colt Python .357 tucked into a well worn clip on holster [clip-on]. Wedged between the money and the revolver was a box of bullets for the pistol. Hmmm…cool I was armed for bear now [comma after “cool” and what is “armed for bear”?], and I didn’t have to wait on Reggie’s delivery for that little extra security I was feeling the need of [either “feeling in the need of” or “feeling the need for”].
I picked up the revolver and drew it out of the holster, nice gun, worn but well maintained like the briefcase, probably made thirty years ago, but, aside from some of the bluing wearing off and the wooden grips being darkened by sweat and linseed oil, it might have been new. I released the cylinder and ejected the bullets—semi-jacketed, soft lead hollow-points in perfect condition. Mankillers. I reloaded the weapon and clipped the holster to my LCE belt on the right in front of the knife, sliding the K-Bar around to hang above my back pocket, and picked up the box of bullets. Federals, thirty-one rounds in the box (out of fifty) meant that thirteen had been shot and six were in the gun.
Thirteen rounds equal two cylinders plus one bullet, and I wondered where that one bullet went. In my experience, if you are practicing with a firearm you shot the cylinder clear, and then reloaded, but if you were shooting at something you shot until it was dead, and then reloaded. One bullet from this gun into the targets center mass would kill it. Oh well, worry about that later. I put the box back into the briefcase, latched it, set it on the floor, and turned my attention to the vanity table.
Under a mirror, surrounded by lights, there was a large assortment of cosmetics, brushes, body lubricant, body glitter, hand mirrors, a box of small tampons (“for those light days”), fingernail clippers, toenail clippers, various nail-files and pumice stones, some incense, nail polish in a wide spectrum of colors, a feather boa, a stuffed penguin blowing a trumpet, a clock radio which informed me that it was 12:17am, and a small Asian chest of drawers. This was a very nice piece of the furniture maker’s art, it was crafted by hand and out of teak wood, cleverly joined without nails, sanded smooth as silk, and oiled to a beautiful grey/orange glow. The whole was intricately carved with scenes of court, war, Chinese rural themes, ideograms, and the front was covered by a pair of cunningly fitted doors which joined along the sinuous line of a yin-yang symbol. The dark side of the symbol appeared to be a [an] ebony inlay, though it was so well done I could not find the join with my eyes. And where the dot goes, each in the other color, there were knobs instead (light orange and darkest green jade—intricately carved [
intricately carved is used earlier – fyi]), each of appropriate size. This whole thing was getting weirder by the minute and I still hadn’t looked at any of the disks. I sat and thought for a minute then I grasped the jade knobs and pulled the cabinet open. The inside was carved even more intricately than the outside, yet the figures were much more personal. People squatting over pit-toilets, people having sex in a variety of ways (some nice and some not), people giving birth and taking life, weddings and funerals, dinner parties, teas and sacrifices. It was so exquisite and disturbing that it took me a minute to realize that there were dozens of racked drawers in the face of this carving, each with its own ideogrammed brass knob with a thin white label above it. Five drawers across and fifteen high, each drawer big enough to hold a large deck of cards, seventy-five drawers and all with labels. In normal light, I would have needed a magnifying glass, but under the vanity lights I could puzzle them out, and they were all psycho-active herbs and pharmaceuticals. Centered at the top was a brass plaque inscribed “Wisdom,” in old English lettering. Apothecary, that was the word, this was an apothecary cabinet. I had seen similar items in herbal stores an old movies, but never one as fine as this. I inhaled deeply of the strange fragrance emanating from the cabinet, and again, as I thought about what those labels meant and my head started to swim a bit. Seventy-five small drawers, about fifteen of which were modern pharmaceuticals I recognized easily, and most of the rest I either knew or had heard of, but what was “Bloodseed?” Or, “Tears of Never?”
“Shit!” I exclaimed and startled myself by pounding my fist on the desktop. This was the most complete mind-bending kit I’d ever seen, or even dreamed about. It made Hunter S. Thompson’s bag’o’tricks from the first chapter of Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas look like a girl scout picnic basket. This whole thing was about more than porn, more than kids, more than drugs, what the fuck was going on in Merced County this millennium? Suddenly I was paranoid. They could be watching, or someone could be on the way—time to go.
I stood and swept everything except the mattress pad off the bed and onto the floor, the pad I loosened at the corners and then I closed the doors on the cabinet and picked the whole thing up, lying it gently in the center of the mattress pad. I put the briefcase on top of it, and folded the four corners in towards the center—wait, the disks. I selected five disks randomly from beginning to end of sequence and tossed them in too [there's usually a comma before “too”]. Then I folded the corners in, took them all together in my hands, and began twisting. Once the package was wound up tight, I pulled a small roll of duct-tape out of one of the ammo pouches on the LCE, pulled an end loose, and used the tape to bind it all together in a package with a tail that I could sling over my shoulder. Having done so, I turned off the vanity light and waited a minute for my eyes to adjust to the dim blue glow of the flashlight still hanging on my chest.
There was no light or noise coming down from above, so I slung the package over my shoulder and went up the stairs. I stopped a minute at the top to listen, then walked to the doors and waited another long 180 count. Nothing. Good. I set the bundle down and went back to conceal the trap-door under straw, alfalfa, and horseshit once more. The cops needed to know about this, but I might need to come back at least once, and I was not sure how to tell them without queering my deal, so I hid it again and set the problem for later. That night I was out of good ideas. I picked up the package, heaved open the door, exited, closed it behind me and headed back the way I had come in. My heart was thundering in my chest, I belatedly remembered the flashlight and clicked it off, and my mind was whirling, so I took long strides and deep even breaths to cover ground and bring myself under control. Just as I left the farmyard and went back in under the trees, there was a fluttering and a “Grakgawawa” sound directly over my head. I almost jumped out of my skin looking up and saw ravenesque wings against the moonlit sky, flying away—goddamned crows. I just kept walking, and fifteen minutes later I was standing under the trees by the road I had crossed, looking, listening and making sure there was no one waiting for me. Nope. So I crossed and found my way back to the truck. There I put the package in the back seat on the floor (glad I’d remembered to pull the dome-light), then I climbed into the front and started ‘er up. Gave away about a second’s flash of brake light to do it, then shifted into drive without touching the brake again and slowly rumbled my way back to the road.
Twenty minutes later I was pulling the truck around back of my house, into my “never finished projects area,” turning the engine off, and climbing out. Now I needed the big bowl, so I went over to the scrap heap in the corner and pulled out one of the large tank-ends I’d acquired a few weeks back. I’d bought a surplus water tank, four feet in diameter and ten feet long from the scrapyard, then given them fifty bucks, plus the center tube to cut the ends off for me. Those ends were quarter inch sheet iron bowls four feet in diameter and eighteen inches deep. I meant them for fire bowls set in tiled table tops, a backyard fireplace/BBQ combo with seating and a place to put feet or food around the edges. That was an idea I’d been messing with in my head for a couple of years and the time was now—except this situation sort of got in the way. But it was perfect for the rest of what I had to do before I slept all by itself [“before I slept all by itself” makes no sense to me].
“I don’ need no stinkin’ table,” the bowl said to me, “just set me up somewhere, feed me and light me on fire man…hngh, ha, ahgh..”
Well, no, the bowl did not actually talk, but it seemed like it, those deep breaths of the cabinet must have unhinged something in my head. Anyways, I dragged it out into the middle of the yard, maybe twenty-five feet from the French doors off the kitchen, and spun it in place a few times until its weight had made a nest in the sod for it, then I went around and gathered a double-armful of cut fruit and nut branches curing for firewood. Those I dumped unceremoniously into the bowl. I went and got the lawnmower gas can and poured a stream of gas over the cut branches, and let the gas soak the wood for a couple of minutes while I lit a cigarette and let myself into the kitchen.
I turned on the espresso machine to heat, turned the radio to a local rock and news station (coming in at the end of Alice Cooper’s Desperado), grabbed the big box of stick matches off the counter, the long, sharp boning knife out of the block, stuck the rest of the Jack Daniel’s under my arm, and went back outside. I put the Jack on a stump about four feet from the fire-bowl, stuck the boning knife into the wood next to it, and put the matches down.
Then I went back in and pulled a can of seltzer water from the bottom of the fridge, went back out, and pulled a comfortable lawn chair around to sit next to the stump with the whiskey and the knife. I put the can of seltzer next to the knife and sat in the chair, stretching my legs out and measuring with my eyes, ok, right about there. I went and got a chunk of sawn off [sawn-off?] trunk about two feet long and set it in the spot I’d chosen for a footrest. Hmmm…I surveyed my domain, yep, good. So I flicked a match alight and tossed it into the bowl—whooosh! Suddenly the yard was bright with dancing shadows and orange light. After a few minutes, the excess gas burned off and the flames retreated a bit, but the hardwood had caught and the fire burned merrily on its own. I unbuckled the LCE, hung it from a cut off branch nearby, then unclipped the Python’s holster and laid it next to the bottle of Jack. I stripped off the sweatshirt I was wearing and threw it on the fire. I opened the bottle of Jack and cracked the seltzer, chasing a long swig of sour-mash with a guzzle of bubbly water, and belched resoundingly. I pulled off my shoes and socks and fed them into the blaze, had another shot, then got up and shuffled around the house to the woodpile and came back with another double-armload of cut branches that I dumped atop the rest. A half hour later I was naked in the chair and using the boning knife to disassemble the package, tossing the cut off portions of mattress pad into the blaze with everything else except for the briefcase, the apothecary, and my tools.


Section Missing
Shopping in Modesto
And making some calls


“I have to tell you, I couldn’t get the Five-Seven.” Reggie said. “Or rather, I couldn’t get the ammunition. It’s some kind of special plastic armor piercing shit and they’re holding on to it tight.”
“Yeah, that’s kinda why I wanted one. But I’ll be happy if you got most of what I asked for.”
“Oh I got the rest man, and I threw in a case of grenades. You know how I pride myself on being able to get anything, and it pisses me off when I can’t—bad for business, those Russians in L.A. are some stiff competition.” He hit the little button on his key ring and the locks clicked faintly on his new, black Dodge Charger-Hemi as we approached the trunk.
He popped the lid and pulled a blanket off the top. Underneath were several plastic rifle cases, and two pistol cases. There were also boxes of ammunition a case of grenades, as advertised.
After we admired the weapons and he familiarized me with how to adjust the integral scope on the sniper rifle. I field stripped each weapon and checked the springs and firing pins for wear. All the weapons were in great condition, either brand new or close to it. Then we discussed the relative velocities and stopping power of the ammunition. Verification of the merchandise completed, we walked into the house, carrying the guns and grenades but leaving the ammo boxes in the yard—too heavy to carry it all at once.
In the kitchen I put on a pot of coffee, and started four shots of espresso. Said, “Have a seat Man, I’ll be back in a minute with your cash, and a bonus. I went into my bedroom and pulled a banded pack of hundreds and five hundred in fifties out of the briefcase and returned to the kitchen. “Here ya go man,” I said, tossing the money on the table, “Now, How ‘bout some coffee?”