DUST

I’d had some preparing to do, and I’d done it.  I’d brought a different set of tools this time as I didn’t think I’d have to break into this house.  I had a pair of binoculars, an infra-red homing detection device, and two kids.

OK, OK, so while kids and I don’t really mix well, they do sometimes have their uses.  The job’s the thing, and there are times when having a kid or two available is convenient.  I knew these two boys’ father.  The kids were 11 and 9 and cocky as hell.  Nothing seemed to bother them.  And I couldn’t see where they’d come to any harm.  Well, not really.  I mean, sure, it was possible, but a safe could fall out of the sky on top of one, also.  I felt the odds shouldn’t be all that much different.

We were stationed on a low hill a ways back from and overlooking the Cramer property.  This was a large estate surrounded by a shoulder-high wall with about a half-acre of back yard and the same in front.  The pool was carved out of some of the back-half acreage and there was what looked like a pool house but could have been anything which took some more of the grounds.  The garage was attached to the house, which appeared to be a 4,000 square foot job to me.  There was a car parked in front of the garage.

The boys were with me on the hill, looking the place over.

“You know what to do,” I told Ricky.

“Yeah, nothin’ to it.  I help James over the wall.  Then I wait.  That’s it.”

“That isn’t it.  What else?”  Ricky was 9.  You have to make sure with 9-year-olds or they’ll screw up every time.  Oftentimes, even if you do make sure.

“If James yells at me to run, I take off like a bat out of a bad word, making sure I can be seen.  I run off down the street, holding my cell phone to my ear and making noise.”

“Perfect.  And James, what about you?”

James was 11 and had an attitude.  “We’ve already talked about this.  What, you think I’m dumb or something?”

See why I don’t like kids?  All attitude, all the time.  “No, I don’t think you’re dumb.  But you’re a kid and you forget things.  It’s what kids do.  So take me through it.  Humor me.”

He gave me a look, clearly exasperated, rolled his eyes and then said with an air of talking to a simpleton, “I go over the wall with Ricky boosting me up.  I wander over and look at the pool, crouch down to feel the water temperature.  Then I go up onto the patio and look in the glass door.  Then I act sneaky, go to where they have towels stacked, take one, then run back over to the wall.  If I have to move a patio chair or anything else to get over it, I do.”

“That isn’t all,” I say, as exasperated as he is.  But with me, I meant it.  With him, it was an act.  Well, I was pretty sure it was.

“If someone comes out, I yell, ‘Ricky, run.  Phone dad,’ sounding scared.  Then I let myself be caught.”

“And what do you say when they take you inside?”

“I tell ‘em my dad’s a cop and they’re guilty of kidnapping and if they don’t let me walk out the front door right now, they’re in deep crapola.  Then I say I just came over the wall on a dare and didn’t do nothin’.  I act real cocky and not a bit scared.  You know, just like I do.”

I patted him on the shoulder.  Then told them to go do it.

I made my way down the hill with them, using a route where we couldn’t be seen from the house.  While they were doing their bit, I climbed a tree so the wall wasn’t preventing my seeing the house and scanned the place with the infra-red.  There were three people inside that I could detect.  They were all together and seemed to be in the alcove where Cramer and I had spoken.

I watched as James and Ricky did what we’d set up.  James did exactly as he described he would.  When he went to the glass, I thought he was seen because one of the heat blobs on my infra-red moved, but that was all.  James made his way back to the wall, where I couldn’t see him for a moment, but then his head and shoulders appeared, followed by the rest of him.  He jumped down, carrying the towel, and he and Ricky made it back to the street and walked away.

I looked at my watch.  It was going on 7, and we were into twilight.  The men were still together.  Perfect.

As I said before, I don’t like killing people if I don’t have to.  I will if needed, and have done so in the past, but avoiding killing is my usual operating philosophy.

Which is why I behaved like I did.

At 7:30, the blobs moved.  One stayed in the alcove, one moved back further into another room, and one climbed to the second floor.

I waited till 8, then went back to my car, drove up his driveway, and knocked on the front door.

Cramer opened the door.  He looked around and said, “Where’s Dustin?”

“He had a headache,” I said.  Then I took out my gun, not the small Springfield concealed-carry one but a Sig Sauer P210, stuck it up under his chin into the soft tissue there, pressed it in hard enough that he knew it was there and that I couldn’t well miss if I pulled the trigger, and said, “Let’s go inside.”

We walked into the foyer, and I kicked the door closed, then backed up to a wall, pulling him with me so he was standing in front of me. 

“Call up to those guys you hired to hit me.  Have them come down and stand next to the flower vase.  On this side of it.  So I can see them.  I’m kind of nervous here, so they’d better get here pretty quickly.  Before my finger twitches.  And if you say, ‘what guys?’, I’m pretty sure it’ll twitch.  Game time is over for you.”

He stood without doing anything for a moment, and I pushed the gun into his throat hard enough that he started to choke.  I pulled it back just a little and whispered in his ear, “Now!”

“You guys, come out here,” he said, his voice a little scratchy.

We waited.  Nothing happened.  I whispered again, “If they don’t come, I’ll have to shoot you and go hunting.  I know where they are, one down, one up, so I have an advantage.  But that won’t be troubling you any because there won’t be any you to worry about anything any longer.  There’ll only be some dead meat right here, missing the top of its head.  It doesn’t have to go that way.  It’s up to you.  But I’m getting very tired waiting.  I’m the impatient type.”

“Don, Marcus,” he called out, much louder this time.  “He knows you’re here.  Come in here.  Now.  Otherwise, you won’t get paid.”  There was some urgency in his voice this time.  Scratchy urgency.  Hard to talk with a gun pressed against your larynx. 

I had no idea if they’d come.  They were facing uncertainty if they did.  I didn’t know if he’d hired them just for the hit, or if they were regular employees of his and they’d be out of a job if they didn’t comply.  I did think it unlikely they could leave without my hearing them do so.  They’d either have to come in here, or I’d have to go find them.

I heard footsteps, and then the big one came down the stairs.  I increased my grip on Cramer’s arm and pressed the gun tighter into his neck so he didn’t get the idea of falling down and leaving me unprotected.  The big guy came and stood where I pointed.  He didn’t have a gun in his hands.  Didn’t mean he didn’t have one in his clothes somewhere.

“The other one,” I said to Cramer, and he called out, “Don, get in here.  Right now!”

We waited, and then the smaller guy showed up in the entrance from one of the corridors into the foyer.  He was standing profiled to us, his left side toward us, his right arm down along his side, hidden.

“Come all the way in,” I said, “and if the gun in your hand doesn’t hit the floor before you reach Marcus, I’ll shoot both of you.  You probably think you’re quicker than I am and a better shot.  You’re not.  Besides, I have a fat shield, and you don’t.”

Don moved slowly forward, and then there was a clatter from his gun hitting the tiled floor.  It was a large clatter as the gun was a sawed off shotgun.

When he was next to Marcus, I relaxed the pressure into Cramer’s throat just slightly.

“We have us a situation here, fellows.  What I’m aiming to do is let you guys go. Bygones being bygones and all that.  What do you think?  Can I trust you to just leave?  Not stay around to try to shoot me when I leave?”

They looked at each other, then back to me.  Don nodded, and Marcus said, “Sure.”

I nodded, accepting their pledge.  “OK, it’s not that I don’t trust you or anything, but before you go, take your clothes off.  All of them.  One at a time.  You first, Marcus.  And I want to see both hands all the time.  If you reach inside your shirt, say, and I can’t see both hands, I’ll put one in your stomach.  Impossible for me to miss from twelve feet.  Won’t happen.  So be very careful, very deliberate, and strip.  Don, you wait and don’t move a muscle.  Don’t think because I’m looking at him I can’t see you.  You two want to live, you can, but only if I don’t feel threatened.  There’s three of you and just one of me.”

Marcus began very slowly to undress.  He had a light jacket on, and the first thing he did was open it so I could see the pistol he had in a holster on his belt.  He unbuckled the belt, pulled it out of his pant loops, and the gun fell to the floor.  Without being told, he kicked it toward me, then continued to undress, slowly.

“The shoes, too,” I said when that was all that was left.  “Hard to sneak up on me across the gravel driveway without shoes.”

He took them off, then stood there, his hands over his genitals. 

Don followed.  He had two guns, one in his belt in the small of his back, one in a shoulder holster.  He was exceedingly careful taking them off, doing so with his hands never getting close to either.  He too slid them toward me, out of his immediate reach.

When they were both naked, I said, “OK, who drives?”

Marcus said he did, and I asked where the keys were, and he said still in the ignition.  So, I told them both to go to the car, get in it, and drive away, and if there was any hesitation at all in doing that, or I didn’t see them both clearly in the car, I’d shoot Cramer and then come after them.  They didn’t hesitate.  They took off out the front door, and I watched them all the way to their car, which drove off with both of them in the front seat, staying as far away from the front door as the driveway allowed.

“Now it’s just you and me,” I said to Cramer.  “You’d better get naked, too.  I hate surprises.”

When one man is clothed and another is naked, the naked one always feels at a significant disadvantage.  Clothes give a person a sense of self.  Take them away and all the physical flaws a person thinks he has and needs to keep hidden are on display.  When I’m trying to advance an agenda, having my opponent naked always seems to help.  Fewer arguments, and they seem to want to get it all over with ASAP.  I’ve never gotten much resistance from a naked man.  OK, maybe it seems quirky, but it works.

“We have to figure out where we go from here,” I said.  He was sitting on the floor in front of me.  Same reason he was naked.  I was in a chair, not one of the super cushy ones.  One I could get out of in a hurry if I needed to.

He didn’t seem to have much to say.  That was fine.  I was OK with doing most of the talking.

“The smartest thing to do, of course, would be to waste you, then tell the cops it was self-defense.  I can do that.  It’s easy if you know how to do it.  So that’s certainly an option that’s on the table.  And if I think you’re a serious threat to come back at me, if I think you’re the sort that can’t let a perceived insult go unavenged, that’s what I’ll probably do.  But we ought to discuss it, don’t you think?”

He didn’t answer.  I hadn’t expected him to.  All his bluster had disappeared with his pants.

“The thing is, I don’t really think you’re a serious threat.  I think you’d like to be.  You’d like to think of yourself as a player.  And you’ve got a big house, big yard, and you’re a large man.  But the tough guy role just doesn’t fit.”

I stopped and stared at him hard, and he dropped his eyes.

“You were certainly good lording it over Dustin.  I think you probably intimidated your wife to the point where she took the only way out she could see.  And that made you feel like a big man.  Then you hired some thugs to do your bidding, Don and Marcus, but they’re small time.  Pretenders, just like you.

“You want to know why I think that?”

Again, no answer.

“All right, I’ll tell you, since you’re so curious.  It’s because you come across as a rank amateur.  You make mistakes a real hood wouldn’t.  When you let me in the first time I was here?  A real heavyweight would never open the door himself.  He’d have a strong-arm guy do it, and that guy’d leave me outside while he was checking with you to see if you wanted to meet with whoever it was at the door.  Saves you from getting shot if whoever came calling was unfriendly.

“Also, a pro never would have met with me one on one.  What’s scary about that, for me?  If you want to intimidate—and guys like you always want to do that—again, someone should be sitting in on the conversation, making the visitor sweat a little.

“And, today?  You knew I was coming.  You should have had Don or Marcus with you at the door.  You can see why now.  I couldn’t have done what I did so easily.  And another thing: real thugs with a lot to hide have alarms set up around their house so they don’t get invaded and hit.  You didn’t have that.  No motion detectors, no perimeter sensors, no guard dogs, no nothing.  I checked that out before I came in.  Your yard wasn’t monitored at all.

“So, I think you’re an amateur, a wannabe who imagines he’s a thug but doesn’t have the know-how.  I’ve been through things like this enough to know how they should be done; you haven’t.  I don’t worry too much about wannabes.  So, I’m not going to kill you.”

I thought maybe he’d take a deep breath.  He didn’t.  He just sat there.  Maybe he was mulling over all the mistakes he’d made.  Maybe he was considering going out of the scary bad guy intimidation business.  Of course, maybe he was figuring out how to kill me when this was all over, but I doubted that was his plan at that point.

I continued.  “But I am going to settle some things.  Here’s what we’re going to do.”

“You’re going to relinquish all custody of Dustin.  He’s going to live with me.  I’ll arrange a custody transfer, a court date, and you’ll be there, on time, and we’ll get it done.

“Next, you’re going to sign a trust agreement.  It’ll be funded with half a million dollars.  All interest it collects before it’s redeemed will remain with the trust.  The trust will be irrevocable, and will settle on Dustin when he turns 18.  He can use it for anything he wants.  My hope is that it will be college.”

He spoke for the first time.  “I don’t have that kind of money.”

I shook my head.  “Of course you do.  But, if you have to, sell or borrow against your house.  That’ll certainly bring in that much.  This place is worth what, two mil?  Three?  You must have at least a half a mil equity in it.  Have to.  Dustin says you’ve had it as long as he can remember.

“Next, I see no reason why I should have to pay Dustin’s living expenses.  If you were dead, I would, but since you aren’t, it’s your responsibility.  The courts would agree.  So, you’re to sign an agreement paying him $2,500 a month, every month, till he’s 18.  The money is to be automatically transferred to his savings account every month.

“Finally, you’re never to come close to him, you or any thugs you might hire.  If he or I ever see you around him, this whole deal is off and I’ll come after you.

“OK, that’s it.  Do you agree to all that?”

He looked at me, and for a minute I thought he was going to give me one of his hard stares, but, maybe remembering he was naked and sitting on the floor, he didn’t. He dropped his eyes and said, “OK.”

“Then we’re done here.  I’m going to get documents drawn up by a lawyer to make this all tidy and on record.  You’ll come sign them, and a notary will authenticate that signing is all done without duress.  My lawyer will call you in a few days when everything is ready.  You can deal with him, or have your lawyer do it.  But eventually, we’ll get together and you’ll sign.  Otherwise, well, there won’t be an otherwise, will there?”

He shook his head.

I got up and started to leave, and he stood up.  When I got to the door of the alcove, I stopped and turned around.  “Oh,” I said, “silly me!  I forgot to tell you why  you’re not going to hire a couple more thugs to make a run at me again and why you’re not going to try anything else foolish.  Why you’re going to roll over and accept all of this.  You were probably wondering that all along.  Well, here’s why.”

I walked back to where I’d been sitting in the overstuffed chair on my first visit to his house.  I reached down to where I’d apparently been nervously picking at the fabric of the arm and, using my fingernails, withdrew a slim pointed object only slightly thicker than a needle.  Then I walked over to the picture I’d looked at then, too, and took a small object that looked much like a computer memory stick from behind where the hinged flap unfolded at an angle to support the picture frame on the table.  Then we walked out to the foyer, and I removed another object, again a little larger, from the vase of plastic flowers.

“A listening device, a voice activated recording device and a transmitter,” I told him.  “I have all your conversations recorded.  I heard when you spoke to Don and Marcus about the hit on me, how it would be done, where they’d stand, how it would go down, and how they’d be paid; the mikes were picking it all up.  You have been recorded suborning murder and for conspiracy to commit murder.  You’d be away for a long, long time if this ever went to court, especially with Dustin on the stand talking about what a terrible father you were and what you drove his mother to do.  I might just look into that, too, if I get the time.  I’m not sure it was a suicide after getting to know you a little.  But, that’s for later if there’s any reason to look at it; I just know you didn’t have any qualms about killing me so understand your mindset.  Dustin would be called as a prosecution witness at your trial.  And he’s a boy who can easily evoke sympathy.  The jury would love him.

“I’ll have copies made of what’s been recorded and give them to several people you don’t know, with instructions.  You’d better hope I live a long and healthy life.”

I left the house and headed to my car.  The last I saw of him, Cramer was still standing in the foyer, naked, his head down, looking like a man wondering what the holy hell had just happened.