by Alec Peche
“He might, but I’ll hold onto his collar until you disappear from sight. Stop by again sometime. I’m often home at this time of the day, but not always.”
With a wave he was on the jet ski and soon heading back to his island. What a mysterious man, she thought. She was sure he was testing her with his explanation of his work; but she rather thought it fit with the story she had created about him. A story was all she had as she still didn’t know his full name or even much about his life. Miguel liked him, but then the dog liked anyone who dropped toys for him in the water and since Damian had devised a new play strategy, Miguel was in love. Oh well, it was a nice break to her day and he’d probably show up again some time. He was such a unique person.
Damian was thinking of Ariana as he bounced on the waves across the bay. She was a nice person, respectful of his privacy, had a great dog, was smart and knew something about technology. Looking around her exterior, he had engineering ideas for her and the dog. Since the dog loved water so much, he planned to design her a dog wash. He could envision it working just like a car wash, but he’d have to figure out a quiet blower system so as not to scare the dog. His mind designed one that would use filtered bay water, with soap that wouldn’t harm it and the blowers would run on energy stored from the wind in her area. Yes, he’d build a cool dog wash.
He pulled up to his island and hit the remote and waited while his dock slid out. Soon he was inside his home, writing notes on his dog wash idea. He checked his security systems and noted a few boats in his area as well as a helicopter with one of the local news stations on it. No one had tried to breach his home while he was gone. Changing out of his wet clothes he was soon seated in front of his computer scanning the results.
“Crap.”
Chapter Fifteen
Damian had set three programs running before he left with the third program translating the gang’s code back into English so he could immediately read through a string of emails. It was clear that there was a move afoot to kill Natalie. He saw reference to the fact her name was ‘in the hat’ meaning there was a contract kill announced within the gang for her. He was tempted to call her immediately and discuss his findings, but he wanted the whole picture about what this group was up to. He shook his head at the irony that he’d go to jail for hacking into their email system even though the gang was using it to plan murders; what a strange world!
He spent about twenty minutes reading through all the email. They had plans to end Natalie’s life, but they also knew about Trevor and Eddie which sent a chill through Damian. It was worse still when he read an exchange about Trevor putting one of the Brotherhood in prison. There was also mention of himself, but they hadn’t been able to locate him yet. Natalie and her family needed protection but it wasn’t like she could share the email trail with the police. If need be, he could relocate her entire family to his island but somehow he guessed that wouldn’t be a solution.
Dammit, he was an engineer; he should be able to think of a more creative solution. He leaned back and thought for a while. He made a list then called Mike to see if he was available to ferry him off the island in an hour or so. He packed his supplies and made sure his cats had food as he thought he’d be gone overnight. As soon as he got into his truck that he left at the marina, he called Natalie on his car phone.
“Hey Natalie, I’m on my way to your house. Where are you now?”
“What? Why are you coming to my house? Not that you aren’t welcome, but you’ve been there twice in seven years. What’s going on?”
“I wrote a program to search for the language of the AB and then it would hack the email and translate the message into English. I read an entire trail this afternoon and you and your family were mentioned.”
“Mentioned how?” Natalie said with urgency.
“You are targeted for a kill and it’s okay if they take Eddie and Trevor as well.”
“Fuck! Are you sure, Damian? Of course, you’re sure. So why are you heading to my house?”
“You can’t turn these emails over to the cops as I obtained them illegally. So I’m on my way to build some protection into your house and supply Eddie and Trevor with water guns among other weapons.”
There was silence on Natalie’s side as she thought about what Damian said and realized he was right. He was most worried about Trevor; he needed to work and he couldn’t do that from his mother’s house.
“I’ll call Eddie and Trevor and ask them to drop whatever they’re doing and head home,” Natalie replied.
“Natalie, until I add some fortifications to your house; it may not be the safest place. Let’s give you and I a little time to set things up and then bring them home, but you should definitely warn them and see if you can get them close to a police officer in the interim. If Trevor is at the courthouse, tell him to stay there since there are armed bailiffs in the court room.”
“This is going to be an ugly conversation with both of them. They’ll want to come home and take care of me.”
“Why don’t you conference the two of them into our line and I’ll talk with them. I’ll be bloody cold about the dangers they’re facing.”
“Okay, give me a moment.”
A short time later he spoke with the entire Severino family about the emails in detail. They were all horrified, and so Damian described his plan. After some discussion, they couldn’t think of any other way to approach their own protection than the plan that Damian had outlined.
“I’m in heavy traffic, so I’ll still be thirty minutes reaching your house, Natalie, and I’ll call you when I’m close. Let’s meet at the little café down on Second Avenue, and I’ll take you in my truck to your house so we can do surveillance of the neighborhood first.”
“You’re really worried about this despite the fact that their hand-picked murderer is in custody.”
“Natalie, these guys are like ants at a picnic, you kill one and there’s an army of one-hundred behind them. The prison system and the FBI haven’t found the bug spray to eradicate them. Once your name goes in the hat, it stays there until you’re dead and both of our names are in the hat, they’re just not sure if I’m alive or where I am. Did the police learn anything from Michael O’Brien during the interview?”
“They learned that he hates my guts for the death of his father and he has no conscience, but not much else. He gave no indication of how he knew I was at the police headquarters, or if he had any other gang bangers in the vicinity. I did enjoy the small victory of his eyes; they’d taken him to the hospital and they washed his eyes out but they were badly red rimmed and he was keeping ice on his face. I think he hates even more that he was brought low by a child’s water gun. So I have those small satisfactions.”
“Do you have a few fellow retired cops that could serve as watchdogs on your street while I get the technology set up? You could bring Eddie and Trevor home much quicker if you do.”
“Good idea, Damian, I’ll give some friends a call. Do you have any special weapons for them?”
“I do. I have water guns, ink smoke bombs, and a precision slingshot.”
“They’ll want to come for the weapons alone. How long do you think my house will need to be fortified? I don’t see an end to this.”
“I have a few incentives for the gang to take your name out of the hat, I just need to reach their leadership.”
“Damian, I don’t know if you’re brilliant or crazy!”
“I’m a little of both.”
As planned, they met at the little café and proceeded toward Natalie’s house. Damian’s dark blue Ford F-150 truck was not exactly inconspicuous, and if he hadn’t needed the cargo space and been pressed for time, he probably would’ve tried to find an older gray Honda Accord that looked like every other car on the road. Her street was quiet, tree-lined and part of the grid housing development. There were streets in front and back that perfectly paralleled the street she lived on. Each block was about fifteen houses long. They sat in the truck looking down her str
eet with Natalie looking at each car that was parked in the driveway or on the street. She could see a delivery truck farther down, but it was the requisite brown color of UPS. There was a car she didn’t recognize parked in front of the house across the street. She knew that the family had a teenager with lots of driving friends. This car appeared to look as though it belonged to one of them, and she gave her assessment to Damian.
Of course they couldn’t view into her backyard, but they had already driven down the two parallel streets to Natalie’s and seen nothing obvious. She didn’t know the cars of those two streets, so indeed some gang banger could’ve parked and hopped over the fence in the backyard, but hopefully they had a few hours before, as Damian put it, more ants arrived at her picnic.
Damian pulled into Natalie’s garage and they closed the door behind them and began unloading stuff from the truck. Some things Natalie recognized and other stuff, she wondered at. Once they unloaded it, Damian pulled out his laptop and had Natalie read all the translated emails. Her retired cop friends were expected any minute and so Damian was taking care of them first. Natalie wasn’t sure they would want the weapons that Damian designed, since they hadn’t tested them and they likely had their own firearms, but as she proved this very day, his weapons worked.
“What are ink smoke bombs?”
“I took old lightbulbs and removed the filament, then I filled them with a green ink that will take months to get off the skin and never off the clothing. I also added iodine and turpentine to create a nice purple smoke. All they have to do is toss the lightbulb at these guys and they’ll be covered in green ink and blinded by purple smoke.”
Natalie had to smile. It’d been a very stressful day; nearly getting killed and then finding that she and her family were targets of the most violent prison gang. Damian’s inventions had a way of lifting her spirits; they protected without killing probably anything more than weeds in her grass. The thought of a violent offender walking around with green dye on his skin made her day.
He looked out the glass of the top segment of her garage door to see a car pulling into her driveway. It didn’t look like a gangbanger car, but he knew she wasn’t tall enough to see outside the garage windows. He said to Natalie, “There a short African-American man exiting a Subaru SUV; does that sound like one of your friends?”
“That’s Sherman and yeah he’s a friend,” Natalie replied as she went to the side door of her garage to let him in.
After introductions were made, Damian demonstrated the water gun and smoke bomb for Sherman. He brought a You Tube video with him so he wouldn’t have Natalie’s neighbors calling the fire department. Sherman nodded his understanding and pulled aside his jacket to reveal a Smith and Wesson M&P Shield, a favorite of off-duty and retired police. Sherman liked the water gun especially since he had seen a replay of how Natalie had disarmed the thug that afternoon. The exterior video footage of her water gun had made the rounds far and wide that afternoon in the law enforcement community. He asked Damian if he could keep the gun for his wife once his guard duty was finished and Damian nodded.
“It’s a small payment for your help protecting Natalie and her family. I wouldn’t mind outfitting the entire world with hot pink colored water guns as it would really help control the bad guys.”
Damian went through the same motions with the other friend who showed up, Andy had also wanted to keep the water gun for his oldest daughter who was at a distant university. Soon the men were in place and Eddie and Trevor were given notice they could come home while Damian went to work setting traps around the house.
Gangs liked to carry out their hits via drive-by shootings; often this was the easier way to fire a gun and escape the scene. Bullets had no problem going through wood or glass. Damian had brought with him cloth sheets of a lightweight structured polymer composite made of alternating rubbery and glassy layers. It served to absorb the kinetic energy of things like bullets. He draped the front of the house and garage in the fabric and then used another quantity so that each of the Severino family could walk around with an invincibility cloak rather like the invisibility cloak that Harry Potter owned. He also went about adding both alarms and booby traps around the house. If the suspects entered the property underneath any of the trees, they’d find their bodies flung upward in a net. He had other wires that would trip and they would be shot with water again colored with a dye that would take a long time to get out. If the shooter managed to avoid all of Damian’s traps, then he had nail guns ready to go and the Severino family could nail any intruder’s feet to the flooring.
That was unless Natalie shot the intruder dead.
Chapter Sixteen
It was close to one in the morning by the time Damian had finished setting up protection for Natalie’s house. He felt pretty good about it and her family was impressed with what he implemented.
Now their only vulnerable time would be going to and from work. Trevor weighed in on reading the prisoner emails. He was in a very awkward position as he had knowledge of Damian’s illegal activity and he couldn’t claim attorney-client privilege. However, he decided to deal with the ethics later as his life was under threat as were that of his parents and he was frankly glad that Damian had the talent to read the email. They were some profoundly bad people; the kind he liked to send to jail for a very long time. As there was no mention of Haley, he had no worry for his fiancée, but they needed to avoid seeing each other. He was grateful he made plans to take her to meet Damian. He would have her go to the island thirty minutes ahead of himself and they would be safe together there, especially since the gang wasn’t sure if Damian was dead or alive.
Damian discussed his plan for getting their names out of the hat and Trevor and his mother weren’t sure it would work. Damian wanted Natalie to seek a meeting with one of the three bosses of the Brotherhood. She would show him that their communications were capable of being fully intercepted. If they refused to remove her name from the hat, then her source would start forwarding all emails to both the warden and to the leaders of the other prison gangs. Especially the Brotherhood’s number one enemy, a prison gang called the Black Guerillas. It felt like she was making a pact with the devil, but it was really the only way to stop a hit from taking place.
Damian was itching to get back to his island, but at least he could go now with a clear conscience that he’d done everything possible to protect Natalie and her family. Natalie contacted a friend that still worked in the gang area to understand the leadership of the Aryan Brotherhood. She felt she had only one chance for a rational conversation with their leader. If she got nowhere, then they would exert pressure by sharing a few damaging emails with the Black Guerillas. If they still couldn’t get anywhere, then Natalie might seek out the FBI and allege that she was fighting domestic terrorism. It was going to be an interesting couple of days as she was going to work from home as was Trevor; but he couldn’t stay home 100% of his work day as he needed to meet with colleagues and appear in court. He was debating calling in sick for a few days just to gain a little breathing space and be there for his parents if they were attacked inside their house. Maybe his parents would join him at Damian’s house this weekend, so for just a little time they wouldn’t have to worry about their own personal safety.
Damian knew he would sleep restlessly in one of Natalie’s guest bedrooms and as soon as he could, he’d leave in the morning for home where he could get a good night’s rest. The next day, he did one final test of the system, and then packed his unused supplies in his truck and he was on his way by ten. He could have left earlier, but traffic was so bad that he would have been stuck and frustrated in that parking lot called the morning commute.
Natalie had the names of the leaders by the time Damian left and was working on an appointment with one of the three. One name was recommended to her but she wasn’t going to wait long on his agreement to talk; she’d simply move on to the next gang leader. While the gang had formed at San Quentin in the 1960s, Ryan Murphy, the e
scaped convict that murdered Damian’s family had been at Soledad. The two prisons were about a hundred miles apart, but it appeared that putting Natalie’s name in the hat had come from Soledad. She hoped to be visiting one of the two prisons the next day.
When Damian got back to his island, he was going to write a separate program to garner the source of the original kill order. They say that nothing’s ever deleted in cyberspace, but he might be looking for a communication from seven years ago. It might not have ever been mentioned in the email system at the time of its origin, still both Damian and Natalie thought they had leverage. As he stashed his supplies aboard Mike’s boat and helped him cast off the lines tying the boat to the dock, he took several cleansing breaths of fresh air. He hated having anything to do with these prison gangs; it was hard dealing with people whose only moral code was one of loyalty to a white supremacist band of thugs. Once he unloaded his supplies, gave his cats some attention, and wrote the program for the email, he’d change into a wetsuit and go for a swim. Maybe then he’d feel cleaner.
Usually he chatted with Mike on the way to his island but this time he was silent; questioning what he would do if he met Ryan Murphy or now Michael O’Brien alone with a gun in his hand and nothing in theirs. He’d like to think he would do nothing, just walk away from those sad pieces of humanity, but other times he’d think about shooting them in the different areas of their bodies designed to give them a life-long disability or pain. It was an exercise in futility since Ryan had been dead seven years and his anger toward the son was different from that of the father. He really needed to shake these dark thoughts out of his mind as he was beginning to feel like that first year after his family’s death. Then he’d been in such a deep well of anger and depression that he hardly interacted with another human being on any level. For some reason, Natalie’s first wreath ceremony marking the passing of his family had lightened his load and allowed him the barest beginnings on moving past the senseless deaths of his family. It was one of many reasons that he would do what he could to protect her and her family.
