Chapter 5 unwelcome visitors
I had the real stablehands I had hired go through tack with the kids whilst I took a long sleep; I was expecting to be up half the night, and Willow did the same, leaving baby Tarquin with Auntie Fee. Dave and Julia kept an overwatch whilst we rested.
Fortunately, the boys were too exhausted with unaccustomed exercise and early rising to do anything but collapse thankfully into bed after enduring Washington Dix’s ability to burn mashed potatoes.
Still, at least the boy was trying, and the chops were fine.
We let them go up to bed, and slid out of the house.
Anyone wanting to intimidate us had to come to the ranch house after all; they had no reason to suppose any of the bunkhouses were occupied, and the girls had orders to put up shutters before showing a light, and to stay inside.
The cellar was fireproof, and had a tunnel out of it to a hidden exit inside a hay rick. It also had what was essentially a bomb shelter down there in a bunker, because that was one of my conditions.
The Feds are very good at getting things done if you let them.
And my ‘dogs’ were out.
Then my phone went.
I answered.
“Mr. Tiber?” said Obama’s voice. My official name, the one I had chosen to teach under, was Horace Tiber.
“Yes, Hermione?” I said.
“There’s a big black car coming up the back road towards our bunkhouse,” she said, sounding scared.
Ruth had plainly put the flaky ones on early watch.
“Wake the others to stand by for operation evacuate,” I said. “Get Ruth on watch.”
“Yes, sir,” said Hermione, I must remember her name, sounding firmer now she had orders.
Willow activated a drone near the bunkhouse.
“They are likely to assume that if their drones are blocked, all drones are blocked,” she said. “I doubt those sort of thugs are aware of milspec kit.”
She was probably right.
“They disappear,” I said. “If Cliff wants to play psychological warfare, let him. I know more about it than he could possibly imagine.”
Willow nodded. This was her baby they were targeting.
“Kill,” mewed Orville, who was riding in her hoodie. Puss and Amy were on watch in the house. Orville enjoyed the hunt, and was as content with a human style hunt as in stalking pigeons. I was glad we had uplifted them.
“And we won’t bury them; you can find burial sites by satellite,” I said. “Dung heap should get hot enough to destroy any DNA, and we can burn the skulls and pelvis to break up later,” I added.
“Car?” said Willow.
“I’ll have Hammond help me strip it,” I said. “Get me a little furnace like we have at the chop shop. It’ll do for the large bones too.”
Willow nodded.
“It can go in the farrier’s shop,” she said. “It won’t notice there.”
She was right.
I had not bothered before; I had no need. But now, we had to deal with enemies.
The team Cliff had sent had decided to park the car by the bunkhouse, and use it as a base.
They were surprised to find the door locked.
“What if there are cow pokes there?” asked one. “Or the brats. We aren’t supposed to make any examples this visit.”
“It’ll be the brats,” decided the leader. “He locks them in at night. We might set a fire another time. I don’t suppose Cliff will weep if Jamie dies.”
Nope, I would have no compunction in killing him.
It was a logical conclusion, mind; he was assuming I would not have a bunch of juvenile delinquents under my own roof.
He made a note in his pocket book, and would have pinged the information back to Cliff, but I pressed the jammer. His signal cut out. He frowned, but shrugged.
This was the back of beyond, after all. Sometimes phone signals drop off at certain times of day, if the satellite is not in a convenient place; it happens, even nowadays if your location is sufficiently isolated.
There were four of them. They were carrying surveillance equipment; presumably to install to record, with the expectation of collecting it to send back. This meant that they probably had a base nearby. Likely in that town we walked to, that nightmare night after my field trip was kidnapped.
They trudged up the dirt track, two and two. Inevitably, one straggled behind.
I took him down first.
A cord round his neck from behind and a swift pull strangled his startled cry as I strangled the life from him. I dumped him in the long, rank grass at the side of the track.
I could afford a little more finesse on the next, who did not hear me come up behind him, or assumed it was his fellow. A chop to the throat silenced him, then I kicked his feet out from under him, and left him dying at the other side of the track with a collapsed trachea.
Willow and I homed in on the two in front; I grabbed chin and back of the head of one, with my knee in the small of his back to break his neck, and Willow put hers down by grabbing his feet from behind to drop him on his face, and rammed a knife up into his skull from the base of his neck.
It was over faster than it takes to tell it.
I learned from Troy; and Troy had been a SEAL for a while. I’d also worked out with King George’s Royal Marines and SAS. It was useful. We had exchanged some skills.
I might be responsible for making the SAS even more formidable than they had been before; I taught them how not to look military.
So, now they were dead, and I ghosted back to the car to open the door and check if they had a driver.
They did.
He wasn’t expecting me. I, however, was expecting him, and he moved out of the car at speed. He was alive when that journey started, and dead before he hit the ground.
“Rick, had you considered who we were going to question about where they came from?” asked Willow.
“You’re going to ask the car’s GPS,” I said.
“Of course,” said Willow. “I’ll do that before I get someone onto getting a furnace.”
I nodded. Willow is an expert gurfer, guerilla surfer, and I could just leave such things to her, and she wouldn’t leave a trail.
I drove the car up to the house with the bodies in it, and unloaded them. I stripped them, and put the bodies onto the dung heap, where I used a katana to dismember them to speed up decomposition. Blood flow had ceased, so I could do it without getting too messy. I stripped to my skivvies anyway; no point spoiling my clothes. Then I piled more horse shit in straw on top of them, and left it all to my little allies, red worms and microbes. I had a shower, burned my skivvies, re-dressed, and went to the boys’ room. I woke Hammond Fitzgerald by blowing in his ear.
“It’s Ranny,” I said as he jumped. He turned to look at me. He was having bad dreams from his withdrawal. “Get dressed,” I said. “I need your skills.”
He got dressed, rather shakily, and came out.
“Sir?” he said. “I feel terrible. Can’t I have….”
“No,” I said. “But I’ve got something to distract you. Your gang can strip cars, right?”
“Sure,” he said. “We used to mix and match to sell on hot cars.”
“How fast can you strip a car?” I asked.
“Three hours, if I have the tools,” he said.
I smiled, grimly.
“I’ve got a car I want reduced to its parts before sun up,” I said. “You’ll have all the tools you need, and we’ll have a furnace by then as well.”
He blinked.
“Are they…”
“These guys came with surveillance kit to try to frighten me into doing what they want, by showing me they could get photos of my family,” I said. “They can’t, and they won’t. I’m playing games back; and I want them to vanish.”
He grinned.
“I get it,” he said. “You want me to turn it into a totally different vehicle?”
I blinked.
“Can you?” I asked.
“If you’ve got files and acid for the engine number, and a stencil to etch another, and paint, and welding kit, and if I can use the cars I noticed out back, you’ll have a new car,” he said. “But that’d take me into tomorrow.”
“We’ve got barns you can work in,” I said. “There’s one with a repair station next to the farrier’s; you deal with the car, I’ll see about brushing out the tyre tracks.”
“And the driver? And other guys?” he asked, anxiously.
“Decomposing,” I said. “Treat the insides with bleach.”
“Geez, sir, will you teach me how to hotwire a truck, too?” he said.
I laughed.
“Good, I’m glad you know all the protocols,” I said. “I want to track them down to where they are based, and do a job disappearing that too.”
He nodded. He drove the car into the barn with the pit and repair station for tractors, and I left him to it.
Willow had pulled the GPS of their last stop, and provided me with street surveillance images of the thugs.
She narrowed it down to a motel suite. The same motel I had avoided with my charges when we had walked into town.
I took my motorbike.
There’s a good excuse for a biker to have his face obscured, and Willow would wipe all evidence of me from the system as I went through it, even as she was erasing all evidence of our unwanted visitors.
She was also using Gary to help her pull everything from our visitors’ phones, identity, bank accounts, contacts, the works. Unless they were family men, which seemed unlikely, they were going to cease to exist.
And then we would burn the phones.
A man named Kevin McGinty was driving through the night with a furnace which he had been directed to pick up, and bring. Kevin owed me for having a steady job, and his son living with him, and I was paying for his time and gas as well, of course.
It was going smoothly, and I prayed to the great Glitchlord, Murphy, not to put the kybosh on it. With good preparation, there should be no problem, but life always has its little uncertainties, and I could be hit by a truck in town, turning carelessly, or someone might wander drunkenly around the motel lot at an inconvenient time, or Willow might be hit by an extremely selective meteorite. You can’t predict everything.
“Rick, there’s a dame in their motel room,” she said into my ear bud. “Come back, we need to prepare for this,”
“Not Sylvia, surely?” I said, doing a U-turn. She was right, the time spent setting up a way to handle this would be time well spent.
“No, she’s their gurfer,” said Willow. “They have boosted systems on the surveillance cams and she’s supposed to handle it from there, if she can. She’s getting impatient that no feed has been turned on, yet.”
“Turn one on and see if it reaches her,” I said. “If so, blow her mind a bit.”
“It’ll be a pleasure,” said Willow. “She calls herself ‘Little Mommy,’ and she specialises in surveillance on kids to sell to perverts, or for snatches.”
One dame I would have no compunction in sanctioning.
I know it’s old fashioned. I don’t like killing women. Those who enter my field, that’s different, they know the score. But in general… but she wasn’t a woman, she was scum.
I got to the motel, and parked.
I moved in to cabin seventeen, which was where they were, hired as Mr. and Mrs. Novak, which might as well be Smith or Johnson as far as anonymity goes. Little Mommy’s real name was Barbara Jackson, but she hadn’t used it for many years. Her other handle was Barbie Jay. Not that it mattered. She was about to become Jane Doe. I could not compost her, so she would have to become an anonymous body. I doubted she had a dentist who was legitimate, so I did not think identifying her would be easy. I knocked on the door.
She opened it, saying ‘Well, about time!” and stumbled back, as I inserted myself through it. I strangled her. She was going to be a sex worker, killed whilst working. The cops will tell you they put in as much effort for anyone in their bailiwick, but if there’s a type of crime they tend to skimp on, it was a prostitute killed at work.
I stripped her and changed her clothing for clothing from the dressing up box we always carry with us; Willow has been known to play a hooker to gain a contact or the right angle for a surveillance camera. And yes, we burned any kit we wore, so as to leave no DNA evidence, so everything was brand new. Even if made to look old. In black stockings and a short denim skirt with no panties, and a short jacket over a black bra, too much makeup, Barbie Jay looked authentic enough. I had made her a driving licence with a photo of Willow wearing a face to look like her, and declaring her to be Jenny Smith. I put a second skin on the woman to give her the fingerprints of a long dead FLOTUS, one Jackie Kennedy.
There are four thousand, seven hundred and forty-two Jenny Smiths in the US. There are over one hundred of them who would be around her age, and half a dozen who were officially dead.
I put her through the back window, which was pretty small, but it took her and it took Ricky the Snake, who is careful not to put on weight, despite the phenomenal cooking of Auntie Fee and Willow. I had to strip, though, and was glad I had put on a skintight full body suit under my leathers.
Motels are usually close enough to the red light district.
I left her body in the bushes around the motel, which are either there to cut out noise and the lights of traffic, or to conceal drug deals going down, depending on whether you buy into the advertising of moteliers, or believe the cops. I didn’t bury it; that preserves evidence. We were close enough to the outskirts that the odd coyote might take a nibble before she was found. Then, I went back through that window, and sanitised the place, taking Barbie’s kit with me.
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