Un-Connected (14 page)

 “Next time you get a good chance to
seriously talk to Otis,” Jim said, “please mention the FBI is not overly happy
about some missing avionics. They especially want to see the black box, so they
can find out where that bird has been. Apparently, a couple of those devices
were the latest technology and would be worth about half a mill to a user and to
someone in China— probably millions. So please tell Otis they need to be
careful. Someone may come looking for that stuff.”

I called Otis later and relayed the message.

“We’ll be very careful, and you do the same,”
he said. “I know what we have and who we might be dealing with. Look, one of my
great nephews just got back from Afghanistan, and he was using the best the
military had. He said what he was using was similar to this but older. He’s
playing with the stuff now.”

Then he wanted to know how we were doing. Deb
who was always eavesdropping said, “We couldn’t be happier.”

That made my day.

He told us we were family, and he wanted us
to come back often.

“Fifty cents a gallon off next time to be
sure you come back.”

We joked about the .308 cases found and how
they were shot out of 9mm handguns. We laughed, and joked about what they would
have done if they had found a .50 caliber case.  He had pulled the case out of
the gun.

“We reload most of those cases especially the
.50 caliber. The brass itself is pretty valuable that size.”

It had been great to talk to Otis. He had
made me laugh and had lifted my spirits. But it was a short reprieve because I
had some really big problems. And I was worried they might get worse.

Chapter 10

The Helicopter, the SUV, and a New
Proposition

Jim called to tell me the FBI found Ben
Raines’s fingerprints at the truck stop outside Phoenix.

“The FBI is going all out to find this man
who killed his wife. They’ll be putting his picture out all over the place. They
wanted to find out how he was involved in the shootings. They suspect he cased
the truck stop for the attackers. Or maybe he was a scout for them. Anyway he
was now connected with the black SUV people and probably involved with them.”

I nearly threw up when I heard this. I had
been running for my life from the black SUV killers and the police. Now I would
be hiding from the FBI. I asked Jim what he would do, and what I should do.

“You need to be out of sight for a while,”
Jim said.

“But how can I? If I go to Otis’s, someone there
would certainly remember seeing me before the shooting. I have no place to go
where I have friends to help me settle in. Being on the road and having a
hundred new people every day see me at truck stops and rest stops and on the
highway would increase the probability someone would recognize the man from
Virginia.”

“I’ll help!” Jim said. “I have to go now but
stay out of sight, and I will get back to you shortly.”

I thanked Jim and told him I would be very
glad for him to call back later. I needed time to think.

Jim called back immediately. “I had forgotten
to tell you, but the men in black did not have dog tags on them, and no one is
admitting to hiring them. The FBI knows who they were but haven’t been able to
tell who they worked for.  The military had lost track of them. Neither the
helicopter nor the SUV was owned by anyone they knew of. They were hitting dead
ends everywhere.”

Jim reiterated by telling me he would think
of something, but in the meantime, he told me to just stay out of trouble and
preferably out of sight.

I could hardly breathe. Then my sweet wife
asked me what was wrong, and the fear came over me that maybe I had been rash
to get married and drag Deb into my nightmare. I told her all the things Jim
had told me.

Her face went pale, and she was silent for a
minute. “We are in this together, and we’ll get through it,” Deb said, her
voice trembling. “We need to hide. If you went to jail, I don’t think I could
live without you. I would die of a broken heart. And it could be worse than
that.”

I hugged her, and we cried together. And I
told her I felt the same way.

Then we prayed. “As an understatement I am at
the end of my rope,” I told God. “I am in over my head. I am drowning in deep
water, and I am unable to help myself.”

And I was angry with myself for ruining Deb’s
life. The best that I could pray right then was, “God, please save us!”

We sat in silence for a while, not knowing
what to do next.

Then my phone rang. It was Otis. He told me
he had a proposition for me and wanted to know if I would come back to his
truck stop.

“Otis, I’m married.”

“
What?
Deb screeched. Who is that? What’s
going on?” She grabbed the phone, put it on speaker, and handed it back to me.
“Who is this?” Deb asked.

Otis laughed. He told us he had us on a
speakerphone too, and the proposition was for both of us. We couldn’t talk
about it over the phone, though. He wanted both of us to come back to the truck
stop.

“Is that why Sam said he was married?” She
asked.

“Yes,” I said.

Several voices on Otis’s end yelled “Yes!”

I told Otis that Deb had calmed down, and she
and I would discuss it. She was already nodding “yes”.

“We need to be out of sight. They have found
Ben Raines’s fingerprints at the truck stop and will be putting out pictures of
him and looking more seriously, especially at the truck stop.”

“We will be closed until you get here, and no
one will be here but family. If anyone comes poking around, we will call you
but otherwise it will be okay.”

 “Those are good reasons to not come back,
but most of those are offset by equally good potential. Many of those people
will never be back here again. And I believe you will like our offer,” Otis
said.

Deb and I agreed. “We haven’t changed our
minds about coming. It’s just that we had concerns. We’ll be there as soon as
we can get there.” I didn’t tell him about the new paint and how the truck
would look different.

“Understood.” He said and was gone.

Deb and I picked up the truck, and it looked
good. We wouldn’t have known it was hers. Even the lettering on the side of the
cab was new. We paid them and left.

Deb was driving, and she told me she would be
driving for a while because she was going to keep me out of trouble. She pulled
into a parking lot and made a few phone calls. In about half an hour, she had a
load to Phoenix.

“This load doesn’t pay what I normally could
get, but the pickup is close, and the drop is where we want to go.” She entered
a new address into her GPS, wrote in her log, and away we went.

We agreed that I would wear some kind of hat
all the time. I would keep my head down and not let anyone see my face. And
better, I would be out of sight as much as possible. Deb would get meals to go
and we would eat in the truck.

 I settled in to consider all the things
whirling around in my head. This was good for Deb to drive because I needed
time to think. One amusing thing came to mind.

I asked Deb if she remembered the
conversation about getting a second truck. She did. Then I asked her if she
remembered me asking about buying into this truck and if she remembered she
changed the subject. She smiled and said she remembered. I told her she should
have taken me up on the deal and let me pay for half because now I’m half owner
and didn’t pay anything.

She laughed for the first time in a while. “You
will pay all right. I intend to be high maintenance for a long, long time. Besides,
the reason I changed the subject is that I was beginning to think you wouldn’t
have to pay anything. I thought at the time you might be part owner and didn’t
want to tell you right then. I was afraid I had come to love you before you
loved me.”

So we were feeling a little better, but there
was a heavy cloud over our heads. I was having digestive problems, which was very
unlike me. I used to be able to eat anything that was dead and as much as I
wanted and never get sick. That wasn’t true now.

In the evening we decided to be nice to the
truck stop people and use the same shower to save them hot-water money. It was
just for their benefit of course.  She made a hot shower even better.

We picked up the load, and before we got more
than a few miles down the road, a motor home pulled in behind us and a black
SUV behind that. Deb was white knuckling the steering wheel, and I was in the
bunk with a gun.

About an hour down the road, the motor home
pulled into a rest area and the black SUV followed them. Deb began to relax a
little and I took a nap. I was exhausted.

We delivered the load, and pulled into Otis’s
place late one morning. There was a big sign out by the road which said
CLOSED
UNTIL FURTHER NOTICE.
The front door to the store was locked with a big
chain and pad lock.  That was obvious from the street as well.

Otis wasn’t there, but the nephew running the
restaurant was on the phone as soon as he saw us. Will came out of the shop. He
waved at us, and after looking the truck over, gave us thumbs up. Deb pulled
into “our” parking space, and I stood where she could see me in her rearview
mirror.

We commented on the spot where the helicopter
had been and headed inside. We decided we were hungry and asked the nephew if
we should go ahead and eat. We didn’t know the schedule.

“That’ll work great. How are you feeling?
Ha-ha!” he said as he looked Deb over.

Little did he know I was not well at all. But
I wasn’t about to lie down and die just yet either.

We ordered and sat there holding hands across
the table. I told her I was really sorry our life was such a mess.

“I am better off being in a mess with you than
being alone in a truck. As long as I can touch you when I want to, I’ll be
fine. I don’t want you dead or in jail unless I get mad at you. And then I’ll kill
you myself.”

After she said that, I started thinking we
hadn’t had any serious arguments. We disagreed on several things, but we didn’t
really argue. Our relationship and our friendship were very comfortable.

“What are you thinking about? Why so quiet
all of a sudden?”

I told her, which made her smile.

Our food arrived and then Otis arrived. We
asked about the schedule.

“We need to have a family meeting, and since you’re
family we couldn’t start without you.”

We asked about the helicopter and the SUV.

“Now that is a story. It’ll take some time to
tell it all, but I’ll start and then finish later if we get interrupted.”

 We got interrupted a lot. Every time someone
else came in, we had to get up and hug them. They would tell us their name and they
would say it was OK if we didn’t remember yet.

Anyway, putting the story together a piece at
a time, Otis had claimed the helicopter and SUV were his. The state law enforcement
hadn’t agreed, but he’d stood his ground. A day or so after we’d left, Otis,
Tilly, and Will took down all the crime-scene tape and burned it in trash barrels.

So the tape was gone, and soon all evidence
of it was too. Then the family moved the helicopter and SUV to a barn. A few
days later a semi with a flatbed trailer showed up and another truck with an enormous
forklift.

The people drove all around the building and
then came inside. “Where are the helicopter and SUV?” one asked.

Otis was real nice but made it clear it was
none of their business.

The guy driving the semi made a phone call
and was told to stay there.

“A sheriff is on the way,” the man said.

Otis gave the drivers a free meal, which was
all they were going to get for the trip. They weren’t happy.  They could
already see it shaping up that way and didn’t like it much.

A couple of state police officers showed up
about an hour later. “Where are the helicopter and SUV?”

“Why do you want to know?”

“We were told to take them to an impound lot.”

“They’re mine, and you can’t take them
anywhere.”

One of the troopers got in Otis’s face. “Where
are they?”

Otis stood his ground, and they were nose to
nose. “Where is your warrant? Where is your title?”

The troopers’ faces were red.

“I think you guys work for me as a citizen,
and there are laws preventing you from taking what doesn’t belong to you. The
people who brought the helicopter and SUV here gave them to me. They brought
them over here and said I could have them. I would call them up and have them
verify it but they are dead.”

That gave everyone in the family a good laugh
but not so the officers could hear it.  Otis’s family had all heard this or
heard about it if they were there.  They were telling it pretty often because
even over time it was still funny to them.

Otis’s timing might not have been the best in
the world, but he stood his ground, and they were really angry but not winning.

“If you have the title for one of them,
Officer, then just let me see it and I will help you find it. Or if you guys have
a warrant or court order, then maybe we can find one of them.”

 The trooper said everything at the crime
scene and involved in a crime could be taken by law enforcement.

Otis said it was only true if the landowners
where the crime occurred didn’t object. Otherwise, they had to have a title,
warrant, or court order. The trooper said he needed the location of the two
properties, so he could get a court order.

“I am not giving you the location or address.
If you can’t get an address, how do you expect to get a court order?”

The officers knew it was true. And they
weren’t going to find them unless they got multiple orders to search everyone
in the family.

The officers clearly had been very upset, but
they’d had nothing more to say. They’d told the driver there was nothing for
them to haul and then had left burning rubber all the way to the street, throwing
gravel on the front of the building.

Otis looked down for a moment. “The next part
could get interesting. I’m sure they’ll be back with court orders to look in
several barns and shops owned by different family members.”

The equipment was not on family property, so
they had some time, but it would be hot around there for a while. And they’d
likely see a lot of warrants to look in a lot of buildings. So Otis and his
family would be moving a lot of other stuff they didn’t want law enforcement to
see.