Phantom Drone VI

There, on a dark summer night chilled by alpine altitude, in a militarized compound right outside an ammunition storage bunker, my mind reeled. I could smell pine and dirt as well as taste the metallic tang of expended ammo on the breeze as I staggered. I’d been painfully struck, not just with the butt of a 12-gauge shotgun upside my head, but by the impact of the newsflash the man wielding said gun had just delivered.

“Yeah,” the gunman snickered, “I flew here. Like a real superhero.”

“More like supervillain,” I moaned, “You have the Phantom Drone.”

“Ding! Ding! Ding! That’s a thousand points for our returning champion folks!”

“The Phantom Drone is my property, Jess. I want it back!”

“Your property?” Jess cried, incredulous. “Funny Dante, I could swear it was your company’s property. You don’t pay them; I don’t pay you. That’s fair, isn’t it?”

“I’d ask you how you got it from the Nazis, but I’m pretty sure you’re about to tell me.”

“Well, if you insist,” Jess agreed, and while it was difficult to see him – or anything else that dark, moonless night – I could clearly hear the mirth as he began, “Once the Brotherhood ran you out of Fred’s store…”

“In a hail of bullets!”

“…yes Dante, in a hail of bullets, it didn’t exactly take a Hercule Poirot…

“Hercule Poirot?” I interrupted. “Don’t you mean Sherlock Holmes?”

Jess paused hard enough to take a step back.

“Dude,” he told me, “Sherlock Holmes was a drug addict! You don’t respect junkies, do you?”

“I don’t know. You want me to respect a man who killed his brother just so he could screw his grieving sister-in-law.”

“Bradley didn’t deserve Leticia,” spoke Jess with a sudden hardness I had not yet heard from him. “He might have hated Dad, but he was still a racist. His feelings for his wife and daughter were the same feelings an old lady has for her cats. Yeah, people ‘love’ their pets Dante, but it ain’t the same, now is it?”

“Spoken like a man who needs to justify murdering his own brother.”

“Spoken like a man who doesn’t have a shotgun aimed at his right knee!”

“Far be it from me to interrupt a genius telling me how great he is,” said I, but I did raise my hands back up in surrender. “Do go on, please!”

“Thank you, I shall,” Jess sniffed. “As I was saying, once the Brotherhood chased you out of Fred’s Place, it didn’t take a Hercule Poirot to figure out that you must have stashed the Phantom Drone somewhere nearby. After all, your name and face were all over the news and social media, so everyone in the world knew that thing you stole lets the user fly. Hans Zimmermann? The same kid out there on gate duty? It was his idea to check the roof of the convenience store, and there was the drone, along with your winter wear and backpack full of camping supplies.”

“And they give it to you, a man they literally kicked out of their club, rather than turn it in for the biggest payday of their lives?”

“Fred has plans for that drone that mean more to him than a million dollars. As for me, the first day I came home from the Army, I set up the Internet at our church. Wi-Fi and everything. Since that day, I’ve been the IT guy around these parts.”

“The free IT guy?” I quipped, feeling a smile on my face. I also dropped my hands.

“Yes, the free IT guy,” Jess grumbled. “I earned my skills in the Army’s Cyber Branch in every war this country’s fought for 10 years, yet everyone wants me to fix their computer for free. But don’t cry for me Dante; Jess Wainwright got paid.”

“’I got paid’ is a bold flex for a man who lives in a tiny trailer out in the middle of the woods with five other members of his family.”

It was too dark to be sure, but I thought I saw a coy smile spread across my captor’s face.

“That’s called keeping a low profile,” he preened. “Till my drunken whore of a wife who repeatedly puts my kids in the Emergency Room is dead, and all my funds are squeaky clean. You’ve arrived at a fortuitous moment in my life, Dante Johnson. All my plans are finally coming together!”

“The best laid schemes o' mice an' men gang aft a-gley.” I quoted.

“Not this time, John Steinbeck.”

“Robert Burns, you illiterate redneck!”

“I think you’ll find John Steinbeck wrote, ‘Of Mice and Men’, homeboy!”

“Dammit Jess, the book was named after… screw it. How much money do you have?”

“It could be worth millions!” Jess crowed. “My lovely fiancé could appreciate my newfound wealth.”

“Leticia is not your fiancé.”

“You know, I’m glad I kept you alive. Not just for the reward money, but also so you could see your supposed girlfriend happy in my arms. Go back to your wealthy child bride, Dante; Tisha’s all mine!”

As I often do, I paused for a deep breath to calm myself before proceeding.

“How did you scam your money, Jess? And how’d you launder it?”

“Seeing as I’m about to turn you into the FBI, you’ll understand if I don’t share incriminating evidence with you. I will say that yes, there is the basic problem of some trailer-dwelling redneck in the economically depressed backwoods somehow becoming a multi-millionaire while supporting a family of five on a paramedic’s salary. So! My original plan was to explain how Dad ran his businesses on the downlow to hide them from the Brotherhood – not the government of course, all those taxes are duly paid – but from the Brotherhood, so he couldn’t be threatened into giving them a cut. And then, he’d sign those businesses over to me.”

“Your father’s going to give you businesses he doesn’t know he owns?”

“Well, he thinks he’s signing a particularly generous life insurance offer given his age and medical history. However, now that you’ve entered my life Dante, there’s a new plan!”

“Is there?”

“Sure! How do I explain my sudden wealth to the IRS? Easy! I was awarded a million bucks for turning in the infamous Chinese spy Dante Johnson, and another cool million for recovering the Phantom Drone. I’ll put 200,000 in the bank just be to extra, extra safe, but I’ll take 1.8 million and straight-up buy those laundering fronts from my father, fair and square! Of course, those businesses are worth far more than 1.8 million, but surely even the IRS can understand a lonely, dying old man offering a sweetheart deal to his only surviving son!”

A beat.

“We were talking about the Phantom Drone?” I reminded.

“I was wondering when you’d get back to that. Welp! I told o’l Fred it would take me at least three days to break into the device, and like the ignoramus he is, he and his equally brain-dead Brotherhood goons all believed me. In fact, it didn’t take me half an hour, and I was using second-hand obsolete Army gear and software freely available from the Internet! Dante forty-two me exclamation point? Pathetic!”

“It’s a solid password.”

“Yeah, if you’re six years old.”

“Stop… talking!”

“You know Dante, your employer should put a cap on the number of password attempts at say, six tries, and then you lose access to your account. Then you’d have to go face to face with your IT guy to get your account back. Sure, it’ll be more of a hassle for the employees, particularly the IT department, but you’d be virtually immune to brute force or dictionary attacks. I mean, it’s pretty freaking stupid that…”

“Where’s your brother’s money, Jess?” I demanded.

“Excuse me?”

“Leticia works two 8-hour jobs, can’t afford a reliable car, and eats the same stew five nights a week. Why wasn’t she given her husband’s assets when he died?”

“What the hell makes you think Bradley had any money to give?” Jess cried, rather defensively, in my opinion.

“This area is an economic wasteland. What did Bradley do for a living when he retired from the Army? Sell meth?”

“Nah, Bradley would rather shoot himself than sling that… crap again,” Jess reported. “The day he turned 17 he joined the Army. Just to get away from Dad, from the Brotherhood, from meth, from… from everything. Brad wanted to see the world and make an honest living. Following my big brother, I joined the Army as soon as I could, too. Except to be honest, I was never… honest. The system is rigged against people like you and me Dante, you know that. Anyone trying to make an honest living is a sucker!”

“Focus! Bradley lived in this community with his wife and child for two years. How did he provide for his family during that time?”

“Actually, Brad spent most of his time playing video games and watching streaming channels with his family, lucky bastard. Leticia says he was a travelling salesman.”

“Really? What the hell kind of travelling sales job lets you spend most of your time with your family?”

“Yachts,” Jess explained. “Letica says that with the commission on a high dollar yacht, Bradley only had to sell three or four a year to make a good living.”

“Ah!” I crowed, as everything finally clicked into place. “Let me guess. Bradley spends his days playing video games with his lovely wife. But three or four times a year, he must leave home for… oh, a month or so… and when he comes back, his bank account is full of… yacht sale money.”

“Sounds like a plan.”

“Tell me Jess; you think ex-Special Forces Operatives make particularly good luxury yacht dealers?”

“Not particularly.”

“Right. So how long was Bradley an international mercenary? Dude!”

Jess paused, apparently to keep from laughing. He even paced about on the dirt a bit in the meantime, though he made sure to keep me covered with that shotgun he carried. Finally…

“Dude, Bradley was a merc till the day he died.”

“That would be the same day you had him shot. Coincidence? Read the book!”

“Brad told me he made way more money as an… um… ‘Contract Security Specialist’ than he ever made with the U.S. Army, even as a Green Beret.”

“Where’s the man’s money, Jess?”

“I’ve got it. Drained every cent of his mercenary account into one of mine. And it was a hell of a lot more hassle than breaking your stupid-ass password, I assure you.”

“Leticia’s living like a broke college Student, Jess. She needs that money.”

“And she’ll get it, just as soon as she’s with me.”

“Oh, come on, man…”

“Would you look at the time!” Jess cried, definitely not looking at his watch, or anything else but me. “Turn around, Dante. Down on your knees. I’m going to strap your wrists behind your back with a zip tie.”

“That’s not necessary man,” I urged him. “Like you said, you’re the guy with the gun."

“Nice try, but the only thing keeping you honest is this shotgun. The same shotgun I am going to have to put down, because I’ll need both hands for this ammo.”

“Why do you… ah. Free ammo?”

“Hell yeah, free ammo! You know the price of freaking ammunition these days? I’ll be replenishing my own supplies from the Brotherhood’s ASP if you don’t mind. Or if you do. Seriously, down on your knees dude, face away from me. And no funny business! I need you alive, but I’m guessing you’d rather not spend the rest of your life in a wheelchair.”

What choice did I have? Before long, I was on my knees in the dirt, still not within arm’s reach of the heavy hunting rifle he’d already made me toss. Bardley’s heavy-duty bolt and wire cutters were within reach, but it’s not like I could swing the things at Jess before he shattered my knee with a point-blank shotgun blast. Soon, I felt the humiliating discomfort of a zip tie around my wrists behind my back.

Then I watched Jess bend down and pick up the bolt and wire cutters.

“Dude, check it out! I literally brought nothing with me to defeat the lock on that door. But I knew you, Dante Johnson, who believed your precious Phantom Drone was inside, would bring something, given how highly motivated you were. Honestly, I’d thought you’d bring lockpicks, but look at these! Wire and bolt cutters? Even better!”

He applied the cutters to the huge padlock on the metal door, and with about half minute of grunting, he – ping! -- finally snipped through the bolt. He was a big guy, too. Jess Wainwright might have been an Information Technology (IT) specialist, but he was clearly no stranger to workouts.

“Yes!” Jess hailed triumphant, but he struggled to open the door, and it screeched at us like an old hag in a fairytale. Whoever’s job it was to perform maintenance on the compound hadn’t bothered lubricating the hinges to the ammunition supply point door for quite some time. Defeated, I stared down at the ground in my humiliation.

“Whoah!” cried my captor. “This is not good!”

“What, there’s no ammo in there?”

“Oh, there’s plenty ammo. Rifle and pistol cartridges, shotgun shells, arrows, grenades, Chinese RPGs; you name it. But… there is a rather disturbing quantity of high explosives here as well.”

At that, I struggled to my feet. Between my hands zip-tied behind my back and the continuous ache in my head, it wasn’t easy, but I got there, staggering. The wound I had received in my lower right leg that morning at Fred’s Place, which Leticia’s expert Army Medic hands had so graciously stitched, chose that exact moment to flare up again, but my curiosity was greater than my pain. I stumbled toward Jess and looked past him into the room now illuminated with a large, battery-powered LED lantern mounted by the door.

“That’s a lot of C4,” I noted, looking at the stacks of boxes clearly labled as such.

“No kidding, Poirot!”

“You guys do a lot of mining up here, Sherlock?”

“There’s been no mining on this mountain in over a hundred years.”

“Y’all got problems with beavers flooding your land?”

“Yeah, but there's several orders of magnitude more boom-boom here than we need to handle all the beaver dams I know about.”

“Where’d they even get it, much less so much of it?” I expounded. “That guy who blew up the Federal Building? He used a mixture of fertilizer and diesel because it was all but impossible for a regular guy to get military grade high explosive, even back then.”

“We can’t let them have this!” Jeff hissed. “God knows what horrors those monsters are planning. We need to…”

“Jess Wainwright, you’re under arrest!” Leticia shrilled from behind.

It’s a wonder we didn’t break out necks whipping our heads round. There, visible from the harsh LED light spilling out of the ammo dump, was the shapely Leticia Wainwright.

She was pressing some sort of white bag-thing to her left eye with her left hand. With her right, she pointed an automatic handgun in our general direction. I’m sure she meant to aim it at Jess specifically, but her form was quite poor, so there’s no telling where that bullet would have gone. She was dressed in the same tee shit and sweatpants I’d left her with, except they were far dirtier, plus she was splattered with blood. I mean, just covered with the stuff.

“Leticia!” Jess yowled, “Oh my God baby, are you okay?!”

“Jesus Leticia, are you hurt?” I added.

“You idiot!” Jess screamed, rounding on me. “I would not have thought you’d bring her out here in a million years! Dude, what if she had gotten hurt?”

“Jess…”

“Look at her Dante! Look! The woman’s covered in blood, for Christ’s sake!”

“It’s okay!” Leticia shouted. “I’m okay guys it… it’s not my blood. Hans he… he didn’t wait 30 minutes. He was so fast! He punched me, knocked me down, got on top of me…”

I yelled something, but I yelled it at the same time Jess had something just as loud to say. Together, we made a noisy, incomprehensible expression of rage and despair, and to this day I couldn’t tell you what we said.

“I… groped around,” Leticia resumed, “found this rock in my hand… he… the guy was trying to take his pants off and hold me down at the same time. I hit… hit him in the head with the rock, he went all limp… I pushed him off me and stood to my feet. But when, when I tried to walk away, he… he grabbed my leg! So I hit him with the rock and hit him and hit him and hit, hit, hit, till he let go…!”

“Tisha, you are literally pointing an Army issue nine-millimeter handgun at us,” Jess reminded. “If Hans tried to rape you, why didn’t you just shoot the bastard?”

“I didn’t want to kill him!” the woman mewled.

“And you think having your brains bashed out with a damn rock is a kinder death than a bullet?” I yelled at her.

“He’s not dead! Hans he’s… he’s still moving. I didn’t come in here to find Dante. I came to find the Brotherhood guy on duty to ask him how they bring ambulances out here cause the phones don’t work! I heard you guys talking, so I followed the sound of your voices, saw the light come on, and here I am.”

Jess literally stepped toward Leticia and slapped her in the face. Pack! She reeled from the blow, the bag falling from her hand, unveiling a swollen eye that was going black.

“You idiot!” Jess howled. “Do you think some Brotherhood goon would do anything to a nigger he found in his secret base but blow her damn brains out? How could you?! You could have died…” and his tirade degenerated into a sob.

“I’m sorry Jess!” Leticia wailed, “I just… Hans needs our help. I don’t want him to die! I just… Oh God!”

She shivered, and the gun fell from her trembling fingers and thumped into the dirt. She embraced Jess and they wept together.

As the only adult who was not crying, I felt compelled to take command of the situation. I lay back down on the wire and bolt cutters Jess had dropped, and though it took surprisingly more doing than you might think, I cut the zip tie off. Then got all three guns; Bradley’s hunting rifle and Leticia’s 9mm went just inside the ammo dump, while it was my turn with the shotgun.

“That’s enough!” I commanded. “Come on Jess, you’re my prisoner now. Break it up.”

The two broke their hug, sniffling and rubbing their eyes.

“I… I know he tried to capture you for the award,” Leticia sniffed, “But he’s… Jess is impoverished Dante, and his family truly needs help. Can we really judge him for wanting to earn enough money to change his life and save his family? Can’t we just let him go? Please?”

“Jess.” I spat. “Do you really have a plan to destroy the Brotherhood?”

“Dude, those plans were in place before I even met you!”

“You’re going after the Brotherhood?” Leticia asked, worried. “Careful Jess, they killed your brother!”

“And when will these plans of yours be activated?” I continued.

“They start tomorrow night and end this weekend. I wasn’t kidding when I said you’ve arrived at a fortuitous moment in my life, Dante. This week, I wipe the slate clean and walk away a multi-millionaire!”

“Well, here’s a plot twist," I declared, "hero lets the bad guy go!”

“Oh Dante!” Letica shouted, and she rushed forward and hugged me, reeking from the iron pong of human blood. “Thank you for being such a kind, forgiving person! Now Jess, what’s this about you becoming a millionaire?”

“I'll let you go Jesse James Wainwright, on the condition that you keep your mouth shut, and I’ll keep my mouth shut.”

“Keep your mouths shut about what?” asked the woman holding me.

“I’m sorry, Leticia,” I told her, “But I… sold drugs in the Army.”

“Oh Dante, no!”

“Yes, I sold three kinds of drugs, until I discovered that my wife was addicted to… all three drugs. So… I got rid of them. The drugs. I got rid of the drugs.”

“Ah yes,” Jess joined in. “I too sold drugs in the Army.”

“Jess!” cried Leticia, and she let go of me to face him.

“Actually, I didn’t even sell the drugs. No, I hired someone else to sell the drugs for me. It was tough, because the woman I loved really liked the drugs I got rid of.”

“Smooth, Jess.”

“Guys!” cried Leticia. “Were you worried I would hate you just because you made some mistakes? The past is the past! I love and forgive both of you, just like Jesus forgave me. Come on, bring it in!”

She extended her arms to invite Jess and I, so we both closed in and hugged together in a little love huddle. But the huddle, as enjoyable as it was, would not long last before I broke it up.

“Come on!” I grumped, untangling myself. “We got work to do.”

“Like get Hans to the hospital?” Leticia asked, hopefully.

“I know what we’re going to do with all this C4.”

“Yeah?” piped Jess.

“We stack this stuff under every structure in this compound then set it off. You made the typical supervillain mistake, Jess. Instead of killing the hero when you had the chance, you captured me instead, and then detailed your evil plan. Now in the third act, Agent Double-oh four two is going to escape and blow up the secret enemy base!”

“I wish you’d wait till after this weekend to do that,” Jess explained. “The FBI is raiding this place this Saturday, when all the Brotherhood will be here. Well, all except for Frederick Metzger, their leader. If all goes to plan, I’ll have that Lovecraftian horror dead before the Feds even get a chance at him.”

“Fine!” I declared, “Plan B. I’ll get the Phantom Drone in… the shoot house?”

Jess nodded in response.

“In the shoot house, then fly it to Jess’ pickup and bring it back here to the Ammo Dump. Then you two load the C4 in the truck while I get Hansy Boy to the Emergency Room.”

“Follow the road from Fred’s Place down the mountain,” Leticia instructed. “Take a left at the bottom till you see the hospital on your left. The place has a big red cross Dante, you can’t miss it!”

“Jess, is there someplace the Brotherhood won’t find these explosives once we move them?”

“There’s an old mine within a mile of my house where I hide… stuff,” Jeff replied. “My trailer is where it is for a reason, and no one’s found my hiding spot yet.”

“Awesome. If I’m not back in 10 minutes, come looking for me.”

“Sure thing, Major.”

I rushed over to the looming shadow of the shoot house, propelled by intense anticipation, my sneakered feet thudding the bare earth. I found the entrance and dug in my pocket for my little squeeze light. It was such a tiny thing, but in the cave-black of a shoot house on a moonless night, it blazed like a handheld sun.

There it was, just inside the entrance. The gleaming plasticized cream-colored segments of the Phantom Drone. So much relief flooded my soul, I almost wept, right then and there. I plucked up the segments and locked them about my waist, just like I did in the private park across from my house – well, Matilda’s house -- when Molly Maguire brought me the drone a lifetime ago; a “lifetime” in this case being four days. I staggered out the shoot house with the weight of the drone around my waist and typed in Molly’s password on the control screen, “Dante42me!”

Two control sticks popped out in front of me; Jess hadn’t changed the password! I seized the joysticks in my eager fists and hopped into the sky. Fighting off a powerful urge to fly toward Seattle immediately and abandon all these mother… fathers, I flew toward where Leticia and I had left Jess’ truck to sneak up on the Boar’s Nest gate.

Flying at 60 miles per hour made the chilly mountain night that much colder, and I resolved to retrieve my artic gear before rescuing Hans. Finally at the truck, I disassembled the drone, putting the pieces in the bed of the pickup before getting behind the wheel.

I drove the old rattling truck to the entrance of the Boar’s Nest, then hopped out and opened the boom gate from the guard shack. I also glanced at the security monitor showing the black-and-white view from all the cameras around the compound that Hans had been too horned-up to notice.

I also saw that a clearly marked first aid kit had been opened and rifled through. It didn’t take a Hercule… Holmes! It didn’t take a Sherlock Holmes to deduce that the “bag” Leticia had been pressing against her left eye must have been a chemical ice pack. As for Hans’ body, I tried to ignore it for the time being.

Then I got back in the truck, drove it inside the perimeter, and then backed it up to the entrance of the Ammo Dump with Jess and Leticia both enthusiastically ground guiding me. Then I hopped out and began retrieving the Phantom Drone components from the truck bed.

“Sergeant, Captain, recover all C4 for relocation,” I commanded, even as I entered the Ammo Dump to retrieve my cold weather gear, backpack, and motorcycle helmet. “I will evac the casualty. Execute.”

“Yes sir!” shouted Leticia, still polluted with blood, and she threw me a smart salute.

“Sure thing, Major!” Jess echoed, and he saluted me as well.

Those two began loading marked crates of C4 into the bed of the pickup while I put on the cold weather gear, including the thermal underwear and helmet, and then returned to the truck to fit the segments of the Phantom Drone around me. After that, I flew to the gate to recover Hans Zimmermann. The boy still had a pulse and was breathing, but his head looked like a misshapen potato. I didn’t know if Hans’ friends and family even wanted the boy to wake up by that point, considering the almost certain brain damage, but I’d told my beloved Leticia that I would get him to the Emergency Room, so that’s what I was going to do.

I lifted that heavy football player up in my arms and rose high into the air. While there were scattered rural lights studding the inky black below me, I could not miss the unique sign that designated Fred’s Place, so I flew there first. There on the roof I tied the boy to me with some paracord; carrying him Lois Lane style was getting bad for my arms. Everything was black, so to follow the road, I flew almost as low as a normal car through the canyon of trees – trees I could just barely make out against the starry night -- the wind howling past my full-face motorcycle helmet but failing to penetrate my artic clothing.

As it turns out, there was a whole town at the bottom of the mountain, lights sprawled out like a bag of diamonds spilled onto black velvet. Lucky for me, the town lit up its main thoroughfares with streetlights, so it was easy to follow the route at a safe height to the clearly marked and fully illuminated hospital with the bright red cross.

I landed in the back of a restaurant across the street from the hospital, stashed the drone in some bushes, and then carried Hans across the street to the emergency room.

“Help! Help!” I cried as I rushed inside the bright, gleaming room that smelled of disinfectant with the boy in my arms, mindful of all the security cameras on my face.

Scrubs-clad nurses and orderlies rushed to take my charge. Once they had him, they asked a bunch of questions and wanted me to fill out some paperwork.

“Hey! Aren’t you that Drone Guy from the news?” one of the nurses yowled.

I sprinted out through the parking lot and across the street to the back of the restaurant where I had stashed the drone. I fitted the pieces about me and was back in the air. I flew to the Boar’s Nest to help Leticia and Jess steal the explosives from the Brotherhood.

We needed four trips with three and a half truck beds full of C4. It took us the better part of the night to get all that stuff to the abandoned mine Jess was using as his stash house. In the meantime, both Jess and Leticia simply failed to show up for work at the firehouse. Their boss called them frequently, but Jess assured Leticia and I that his increasingly violent threats were toothless, as there were no other qualified paramedics willing to take the shift. Finally, we wrapped up Fritz Conroy’s body and dumped him down a deep mine shaft so his Brotherhood buddies wouldn’t find his corpse in the morning. Or ever.

Afterward, Leticia and I parted ways with Jess and returned to the gated premises of stately Wainwright Manor.

“I’ll catch a couple of hours sleep here and maybe some breakfast,” I told the woman I loved. “But the FBI is coming by morning, so I gotta go!”

“Melody and I are coming with you,” Leticia insisted. “I’ve wanted to leave this Nazi-infested hellhole for quite some time, Dante. Now, I’ve found a good reason.”

“Don’t be ridiculous! The Phantom Drone won’t carry the three of us Leticia, especially with all the gear we need…!”

“Don’t be silly, Dante. Melody and I will take Jess’ truck. He won’t report it stolen, so they have no reason to look for us. I’ll drive ahead of you and recon decent places for us to sleep at night. I know enough to leave my smartphone here, but we can still keep in touch with these special hand radios Bradley brought back from the Army.”

Then she showed me the radios.

“These things only have a range of about five miles,” I complained.

“Then stay within five miles,” Leticia retorted. “Don’t worry; they’re Special Forces radios, heavily encrypted. No one can listen in, not even the FBI!”

I picked up one of the radios and studied it.

“There’s an option here to access the DSCS.”

“The what?”

“Defense Satellite Communications System. But yeah, let’s not do that… five-mile point to point should be sufficient. What about your father-in-law?”

“He won’t leave this house. It’s just as well.”

“And why is your six-year-old coming?”

“Because she’s my daughter, and I’m never coming back! Besides, her presence in the bedroom should short-circuit any adulterous activities you’ve got planned.”

Leticia and I did some hasty packing. Then she took some Tisha’s Stew out of the refrigerator, heated it up in the microwave, and poured it in a large thermos. She did the same thing with another thermos.

“That one’s your breakfast,” Leticia reported, pointing to one of the thermoses. “The other one holds my breakfast, and Melody’s.”

We said goodnight. I set the little folding battery-operated alarm clock she gave me for three hours, and it seemed the little thing was beeping like crazy as soon as I lay my head down on the couch. As I struggled up from said couch, Leticia entered the living room fully dressed, and her eye fully black, carrying a sleeping Melody in her arms.

I helped her get the little girl into her car seat in the truck cab. Melody never woke up during the whole process. We put one suitcase in the truck bed; Leticia assured me it would be enough. We did a radio check with the SF radios, and then as dawn broke over the mountain, we set out for Seattle; she driving, me flying.