Un-Connected (20 page)

We talked about the future of the truck stop,
and agreed not to open it in the same location again, meaning close to the
street or in that building. Several thought they would rebuild farther off the
road at the same parcel of land. We talked about just having a pay window open
at night with thick glass protecting the cashier and no way for anyone to come
inside.

One of the younger ones made a suggestion.  His
name was Eddie and his nickname was “Evinrude” because he like to fish so
much.  Eddie was learning to do auto repair from Will.  “Why don’t we turn the
whole thing into a repair garage and parts house that closes at 6 p.m. or so.
Then we could have the fuel desk, office, showers and restaurant in a new
building in the back and put in more pumps. Open the restaurant from about 6 am
to about 8 pm. Bring in a little fill dirt and set the new building up higher
and put retaining walls all around it so no one could drive up to the door.
Then put a door behind a door front and back so we could control outside air
getting in, and with electric locks, it would be very hard for someone to get
through two doors quickly. From 8 p.m. to 6 a.m. there would only be a pay
window open.”

Most of the people there agreed. A tear came
to Otis’s eye. I don’t think anyone saw it but me, and I didn’t say anything
yet. Tilly told everyone they were getting too noisy and should take the
conversation to the waiting room. Nearly the whole crowd moved out still
talking loudly and talking over each other in their excitement.  They were
yelling they could do this and they could do that.

“Otis, why did I see that tear in your eye?”
I asked.

At that Tilly and Deb were right beside him. 
They hadn’t seen it.  He didn’t answer right away.

“I saw it Otis. What is going on?”

He held up one finger asking me to give him a
minute. He was choked up. Tilly put her hand on his arm.

Finally, he said, “I have always wanted to
run the business so the young ones would want to be part of it. To do that I
knew it needed to make enough money to pay a number of them a good wage and be
interesting enough that they would enjoy the work and successful enough that
the business had a future. Will, Barbara, and I have talked about this for
years. We have been so afraid they would all move off to places where they made
more money. We didn’t want to be left here by ourselves. To see one of the
young ones get excited about the future and want to be part of the new design
made me cry.  And several of the others got into the ideas. I haven’t cried in
a long time.”

“Not since your dad died,” Tilly said.

“Well if they are excited about it at this
low point then they seem to be here to stay.” Otis said.

“There were a number of them wanting to put
their ideas in.” Deb said.

“I hate to ask you right now but I need to. 
The FBI needs that black box really bad.” I said.

He asked me what I thought
we
should
do. I told him I could make the delivery and collect the money since I would be
dealing with the FBI guy I already knew, but I didn’t want to interfere with
his business.

“I don’t think you should sell it to anyone
else. Any other buyers probably are fronts for the black SUV guys.”

“I agree,” Otis said. “We have one buyer other
than the FBI who’s been really aggressive. The others don’t believe us when we
tell them they’ve been outbid, but this one buyer doesn’t bat an eye. He
doesn’t argue or haggle. He just raises his bid.”

“I just feel the FBI needs it, and you shouldn’t
any longer.”

He agreed and told a couple of the young guys
to go get it. “We need to get rid of it and tell all bidders that it’s sold for
our own safety.”

“The FBI would probably like to have that one
bidder’s phone number.”

“No doubt and it will be part of the package.
I have recorded every conversation with him and will hand that over with the
two phone numbers he has used to call me. They should be very interested in
that and feel like they got a little extra something. That usually makes people
feel like they got a good deal.”

As was his thoughtful way, he asked about us
and our land search. Tilly had given the truck keys back to us and whispered to
ask if we wanted our briefcase back yet. We agreed not yet.

We went to find the truck, and it looked
clean and ready to go. We decided I should get some old clothes on and do a
maintenance check on it while Deb found a driver and a load. I adjusted the
brakes on one axle, topped off some of the engine fluids, and replaced one
short piece of rubber air line. It started right up without any problems, and I
declared it road ready as much as I could tell.

I bought extra light bulbs and fuses. The
safety triangles and fire extinguishers were there, but no flares, so I got
some of those. The auto parts place had a sale on heavy-duty jumper cables, so
I got them. I didn’t ever want to have to jump a semi, but sometimes you have
to. I thought the truck was ready.

The next morning we had breakfast with our
new prospective driver, who was our driver after about five minutes. We gave
him a full set of keys, the remote, and an extra door key. We also gave him a
cash card and asked if he had active truck-stop rewards cards. He had enough
points with Loves and the Pilot Flying J Chains to get all the free showers he
wanted. So he was good to go. Deb knew him a little from way back and had told
him to bring his clothes. I agreed with her intuition, and we put him on the
road. We made sure he had both our phone numbers and we had his. He turned out
to be a good driver.

As soon as he was rolling, I told Deb we
needed to decide who his boss was going to be, because it wouldn’t work well
for him to have two bosses. She agreed and said if we voted she was sure I
would vote for her to be the boss, and she was right.

Life was good, and the stress of the recent
past was fading a little. There would always  be things in our lives to bug us like
the Internet people telling us they couldn’t get us online for ten days. But we
were together, and that was worth more than all the money in the world. We were
rich.

I called Jim. “I have the deal worked out on
the black box. How do you intend to pay?”

He laughed. “My boss prefers we pay by check,
but I convinced him to handle this as undercover support. I signed for cash,
and you will sign a receipt.”

“Would it bite me to sign my name or do I
need an alias?”

“Don’t worry, I’ll take care of it,” Jim said.
“Can you meet me at the Phoenix airport in the morning?”

 “Yes.”

I told Otis the deal was set, and he said there
were three guys who had the box with them. They were well armed and out of
sight. They’d pick me up and deliver me to the airport. He thought Deb shouldn’t
go. This shouldn’t be a big deal, but we needed to be safe. I couldn’t have
agreed more.

The next morning Jim called at seven. “I’m arriving
in about an hour. Ask for a TSA supervisor named Eugene who will take you to a
secure room, and I’ll meet you there.”

“Will I be in trouble for having that box?”

He laughed. “No, but that’s a great question.
I could have you arrested for possession of stolen merchandise, but I won’t, of
course.”

“You know I’m doing you a favor, don’t you?”

“I know,” Jim said. “But I’ll be doing you a
favor after I get the box because it will help solve the riddle of Rebecca’s
murder. Besides, that whole family is in danger until that box is gone.”

“You have an extra bonus with this deal. The
seller sent along an audio recording of conversations with the buyer who was
most interested in the box. This buyer never batted an eye at raising his bid.
He should be very interesting to you. Also included are the two phone numbers
he used. The seller’s voice is disguised in case you get a little extra curious
about him so please don’t even try to figure that one out.”

“We know it was someone close to Otis, but we
aren’t interested in the seller now. That is, except to hope he is alive and
well.”

“I will tell him you said that.”

“Do you have anyone with you to make sure it
doesn’t get stolen?” I asked.

“I’ll have agents with me at both ends who’ll
see me on and off the plane. And should the plane have to make an emergency
stop somewhere, we’ll have agents on the ground there as well. We are on alert
the whole flight path. We aren’t taking many risks with this thing.”

Jim asked if I ever thought of Rebecca.

“I do. Not as much now as I did, but I still
love her. I was quick to add, though, that I didn’t love her more than Deb, nor
did it affect my love for Deb.”

“I understand. My first wife died of breast
cancer. She went downhill for three years. It was awful to lose someone that
way. Back then, I couldn’t talk about how hard it was on me, but now I can. She
was suffering.”

“Did you remarry?”

“Yes, about two years later to a lady that
was one of my wife’s best friends. Her husband had died about five years
earlier from a heart attack. When my wife was sick, she said, ‘Marry her, and you’ll
take care of each other.’”

Jim paused. “I didn’t want to hear that, and
for over a year, I didn’t date. When I started, I didn’t date this friend for
several months. No one I dated was interesting enough for a second date, though.
 Finally, I took out my wife’s friend, and that was the end of dating different
people. We got married two months later. That always shocks people, but we had
known each other forever, and besides, how can a guy get in trouble for doing
what his first wife told him to do?”

He said that she had one black-sheep son, who
was wearing them out, but other than that, it was a great marriage.

When I got to the house, Deb was singing and
cleaning. Tilly and Betty had called. They each had some furniture they wanted
us to see that they’d loan or give us. They’d be out late this afternoon if it
worked for us, and it did.

Chapter 13

The Black Box

Jim couldn’t have been in his office more
than a couple of hours when he called again. He said their lab had pulled the
data off the black box. Then they ran comparisons with landing locations for the
bird and a list of suspicious deaths.

“There are a lot of correlations. You should
have gotten it to me sooner.”

I agreed.

“We’ll take most of the next few days to pull
info together, but we have at least thirteen deaths over half a dozen states
that we think we can link to that bird. Ask everyone out there to please not
talk about the box. And if anyone asks about it, say it was sold to an
anonymous buyer.”

“I’ll relay the message. I’m sure you can
count on them and I think they have already done pretty much what you suggested.”

“Why did the seller want information off the
black box anyway? What good is it to them?”

“They had helicopter parts to sell. Speed,
climb, radio capability, weather performance, telecom performance, stealth, and
all kinds of data were on that box that they could cut and paste to tell a
story about the capability of the parts.”

“They seem to be thorough.”

“Yep!”

When we got in Tilly’s car, we told her what
Jim had asked. I advised that it would probably be better not to tell Otis over
the phone. She said she was sure I was right, and that would be the first thing
she talked to Otis about in the morning.

Deb and I were not hard to please, and we
took all the furniture they offered. Different pieces had different rules, so
we put tape on the back of each piece and wrote either
given
or
loaned
.

When they saw what we’d done, they were very pleased
we were so careful to honor their wishes.

“This is a business contract, and you are
defining the terms of the possession. We just want to stick with our part of
the deal,” I said.

They ordered some young guys to deliver the
furniture for us and asked when we wanted it. We were ready to go home as soon
as we saw the last piece so Tilly took us home and it wasn’t long until we had
our “new” old furniture. Life was good.

The guys that brought the furniture were
telling us about ideas they had been talking about for the truck stop. 

“How many do you think are talking about the
new designs and are interested in what happens next?”

They looked at each other and then slowly
answered.  “Oh, I would guess maybe twelve to fifteen.  There are several of
us.”

“Have you told Otis about this?”

“No but we intend to.  He has been… well you
know and we have been busy.”

“You need to talk to him.”

They said they would and left.

Before we went to bed that night, Deb and I
walked around the house talking about different furniture arrangements. We
might want to buy other pieces, but we agreed we had all we needed. We would
add a few pieces if we saw something we really liked, but we were set.

I told her how amazingly beautiful she was
and that really paid off.  I will try that more often.  How often can you tell
the obvious truth and get that kind of reward?

The next day we went grocery shopping together.
At the checkout counter, there were some condoms in our cart. I looked at Deb.

She hugged my arm real tight and leaned close
to my ear. “That rhythm thing isn’t working all that well for me, and I want to
try something new if you are OK with it.”

“I’m your man,” I replied.

Dave, the driver, was doing a good job. He
was a little slower than Deb had been, but we never told him. He was reliable
and steady. Telling him a girl was faster than he was might not motivate him.

“You mean a woman,” Deb said.

Jim called. “The real Seth had a
breakthrough. Leon, the guy Rebecca had been checking on, didn’t have any
family, and he had named Rebecca as executor. But the will was not recorded,
and there was no copy of it in the house or in a lockbox he kept.

“Rebecca would have had a copy somewhere, but
the FBI didn’t find it in the house because they cleaned the house out. Leon’s
was under some carpet in the trunk of his car. The guy who bought the car found
the papers and tried to get it to Leon’s family. The FBI’s radio scanners and
text search engines picked up his advertisement.

“Leon had done well and was worth almost a
million dollars with house, stock, cash, and all his stuff. When he died, the
estate didn’t go where Leon wanted, but the IRS took it all. For that to
happen, the will had to be taken out of the way, or they had to get it all
cleaned out before the estate went to probate. Rebecca messed up their plans
somehow and was making enough noise someone was sure to get in trouble.

“We’re finding almost none of the suspicious
deaths involved a person with family or a recorded will,” Jim said. “
And
nearly all of the deceased had estates that went to the IRS or an IRS agent
instead of where they had willed them to go.”

This was really weird. If someone was going
to steal money from an estate, they wouldn’t want the IRS to get it.

“We don’t understand either, but right now we
are connecting dots and don’t really care about implications. We want to
establish comprehensive facts first and then see where they lead us.”

Jim then told us the black box indicated that
the bird was still owned by the IRS, meaning it wasn’t sold or leased to anyone
but was again inventory shrinkage.

“Now that is serious shrinkage,” Jim said. “Someone
just flies off with a very expensive bird and no one notices? This is too
strange. That is, unless someone in the IRS was using it for unapproved
projects. It also tells us that there was a “clean up” element reporting to
someone high in authority and connection.

“Also,” Jim went on, “remember the buyer who
didn’t mind bidding higher? We have traced the phone numbers to the IRS in
Washington DC. We don’t have the person identified yet because we don’t
normally have information on IRS agents. But we know what he sounds like. He is
very anxious to keep anyone from knowing the helicopters travels. We are
working on selling to him now.”

“We have a redneck militia lined up that is
large and has a few policemen in it and they are willing to help with the sale.
They have contacted the buyer. We are waiting for notice when he wants to pick
up the box. The selling individual is great. He is an old guy who never
finished high school and has never had a computer. He has never sent or
received an email.  He has an old flip phone and has never sent or received a
text message. He wouldn’t know how to get data off a black box if he even knows
what electronic data is.  The IRS will be able to verify that he isn’t an
electronic wizard.  He has told them he found this box on the side of the road
and he is surprised how curious people are when he gives them the dimensions
and the numbers off the box.”

“He is nobody’s dummy because he owns the
local Ford Dealership and is doing quite well, but he believes he can convince
them that he didn’t hook that box up to a computer.”

“Where will he make the delivery?  Those guys
would rather kill him than pay so he will need to be careful!”

“We don’t have everything worked out yet but
we think we can get them to come to his dealership pretending to be car buyers. 
Then they can go to an office to make payment on their “car”.  When they walk
out with the box we should be able to take them without too much resistance. 
We want them to be out of the office and away from people as much as possible
in case there is a gun fight.  We told the dealer we would be off his lot and
he said don’t worry about it.  All the cars are insured.  Just get away from
all the shoppers.  He said he would give up several cars to get killers or IRS
either one off the street.” 

Jim paused. “Later.” He said and was gone.

We called Otis to see how they were doing.  He
said Jack had refused to stay after he found he could live without the tubes. He
demanded release and was headed out the front door with a cane when they caught
him and put him in a wheelchair to get him to the car.

Will was doing much better. His
lung was back in shape pretty much. It wasn’t totally right, and he was still
not well, but he would be OK. Otis’s leg was going to need an additional
surgery, but he was going to keep his leg. He said he might go home in a
wheelchair next week.

“Tilly will take better care of me than these
people once they get over the disappointment of knowing I’m going to live.” He
said chuckling.

I told him the nurses were afraid it would
happen.

“What?” he asked. “That I would live?” He laughed
a big one. They said he wouldn’t be walking for a long time, but he could get
around in a wheelchair just fine.

I told him he couldn’t let Tilly lift him,
though, and ought to stay there a little longer. He told me they had a lift at
home that would put him in the tub and back into the wheelchair. Tilly could
manage it just fine. He’d have to have a sponge bath for a few more days anyway
because his leg wasn’t healed up enough to be underwater yet.

We’d been praying for him and told him so. He
was glad and said God was the biggest reason he’s getting to keep his leg.

Otis put out a call for another family
meeting at the closed up truck stop.  Everyone was there except Will.  Jack was
the center of attention.  Otis said he was limping worse than usual to get
attention.

“Okay, let this family meeting come to
order.” Otis yelled.  “Will won’t be here today but Barbara is so Will can get
the full story of what we decide.  I have heard there are opinions about what
to do with the truck stop and I called this meeting so we could talk about it. 
Who has an opinion about what should be done?”

Barbara’s grandson Micah raised his hand. 

“We’ve been talking about this place.  We
don’t want to get anyone else hurt.  But we don’t want to give it up either. 
So we want to make a plan that will be good for a long time.  Several of us
want to work here so we don’t want it closed.  We also like to come here to eat
so we can see everybody. So we don’t want the restaurant closed.  This is a
great family place.  So that is why we have been talking.  We aren’t trying to
go behind your back or anything.  We just think it needs to be different in the
future.”

Several started talking at once and Otis just
sat there laughing.  I whispered to Deb that it was probably to keep from
crying.  This was so much what he wanted.

After a few minutes Otis’s grandson Samuel
who was Sammy in the family got louder than the rest and got everyone’s’
attention. 

“I think we need to forget this building or
do something different with it.  I think we need to build a better building
close to the back of the parking lot back there.  It needs to be up higher so
no one can drive up to any door.  Several of us have talked about putting
double doors front and back so there is an air trap so we don’t lose hot or
cold air but it would also make it easier to keep people out we don’t want in
there.  We could put concrete or stone barricades out there but being higher
would look better and I think work better.”

Several started talking at once.  Otis just
sat there letting them work it out.  Aaron spoke up and got the floor. 

“I want to be a mechanic.  So I don’t want
all this front part to close.  I don’t know what to do with this building so we
could think of something or tear it down but I want to have at least the three
repairs bays we have now and I would really like to have more.  Will isn’t
likely to retire once he gets well.  I’m not the only one who wants to be a
mechanic either.  I think I heard someone say they wanted to be a diesel
mechanic.  That would mean we need more bays.”

Jack got up and everyone got quiet for him.

“It is obvious that all of us want something
here.  It may be different for each of us but this place has been a part of the
family and how many of us have come in here on fumes when we were first driving
and left with fuel in our tank.  How many of us have eaten here and had family
around?  How can we put a price on that?  I think we all want it to go on.  So
how do we get there from here?  How do we do it?  I think we need to form a
planning committee and let them sort through ideas and make a proposal to the
whole family.”

It was quiet for probably a minute which
seems like a long time in that setting.  Several said that is what they wanted
to do. 

Tilly spoke up, “Otis, everyone who wants to
can be on the committee, can’t they?”

“There is no reason not to be.” He said. 

So someone started writing the names of
everyone who wanted to be on the committee.  It included most of the
grandkids. 

“I think we should have one of the “old
people” on the committee,” said Jack laughing.

“Yeah!” several said.  Then they were quiet
thinking about it.  

Otis spoke next. “I need to focus on other
things right now and I need Tilly.  Will and Barbara would love to do it I’m
sure but they need time to heal so these two families are excited about the
committee but you probably need to do it without us.  If you want someone older
then you might be able to talk Betty into it.  She was there without Jim.