Chapter 16.
That Friday night while the ribs were cooking in our smoker (which was identical to our friends') one of our neighbors stood on his lawn chair and looked over the rock wall (behind our house) and pretended to be complaining about our noise, then laughed and raised a beer can in the air so we all laughed and invited him to join us (but bring your own chair). He jumped down and tossed a folding chair over the wall and we laughed again. I went to the front door to let him in.
Twenty minutes after he joined us someone else pounded on our front door and the people that lived next door joined the party too which made it eight people.
Everyone was impressed by our in-home restaurant. In the back yard we had a partially built four-hole mini golf course and a propane fire pit and a few lawn chairs. The late comers all brought their own chairs but we had plenty of beer, wine, and booze. We offered tours to everyone that arrived because we had to walk through the diner to get to the back yard.
We suspected the closable sunscreen above the entire yard was what the neighbors wanted to see more than anything else. The ribs in the smoker were for tomorrow so we offered food to everyone. Luckily, we had a large tub of coleslaw, pounds of frozen fries, and two dozen burger patties but no buns. We cooked burgers on the griddle, and served them on toast using a similar style as Louis Lunch in New Haven CT (except ours weren't flame broiled), a burger with a slice of grilled onion, a slice of tomato, cheese optional, on toasted homemade bread. We offered mayo, mustard, pickles, and catsup as options.
We also had French fries fried in vegetable lard (unhealthy but delicious), and cole slaw too. Everyone drank beer, our friends from New Mexico brought two bottles of their own wine from their two acre backyard vineyard.
We played some music softly but mostly we sat around the gas fire pit and told stories, jokes, and laughed too much; it was a great evening but I'm sure some of our other neighbors were not happy with the noise. Party noise was never appreciated unless you're helping make it! After 10pm David stopped the music and played a repeating recording of outdoor nature sounds, like crickets, bats, frogs, and owls.
When asked why our yard was so ugly we told them we were going to build an in-ground pool and when the work started everything had to go, including the weeds.
When David was in the house doing something he whispered to me that he switched-on the door lock silent alarm on the Tac-room so we'd know if anyone grabbed and turned the knob.
After a few hours it was getting late and everyone looked tired. Our neighbor (Frank) the guy that lived behind us was the first to heave his chair back over the wall and leave for home. The first time he tried it flew up but didn't clear the wall, he covered his head and ducked while everyone laughed. Next time he threw too hard and it sailed over the wall and we heard it crash in his yard, he shrugged his shoulders and bowed to the audience.
Not too long after he left our neighbors to the west left with their chairs. About 1am we were back down to the original five then Mark went to bed. Lastly, we left and the Bonhams got in their tent after using the bathroom. David reminded them they could use the living room if the tent got uncomfortable.
Twenty minutes after our neighbors went home their son silently climbed over the wall between our homes and joined the party. Since he was a minor we couldn't offer him any beer but we did offer some soda, we had a 2L bottle of Coke on the bar.
He sat silently and listened, he said his bedroom was on that corner of the house, he had to listen to his drunk parents cackling from our party. I offered him some food and cooked him a burger and a huge pile of fries.
Jeremy was tall and skinny, looked like he had Marfan's. He had very long blond hair, almost to his butt in length. He loved music and played the keyboard. He said he'd probably go to college for music if he got a scholarship.
He had one local friend, another long blond haired local kid, both of them were in their third year of high school and had no luck with the girls. My best guess was he was 6'2" and 130 lbs, really looked like a walking skeleton. He smoked pot regularly but wasn't interested in other intoxicants. But most of all, at home he thought David was a superman.
Since we moved here, when he cornered David outside he followed him around like a duckling and acted like he was following Jesus Christ. David had that effect on boys but we had no clue why, other than David was beautiful and sexy and masculine. Skeletor hung out with us until 1am then left for bed, which was only 50 feet from our propane firepit.
Around midnight David asked the kid if he liked the recorded crickets and he looked side to side and smiled and said, "That's recorded?" We all chuckled, but yes it was a CD that played over and over, one track of ambient sound we recorded ourselves in New Mexico. We all laughed again when he learned and was amazed that those crickets were recorded. The bit of proof he needed was when David paused it briefly. We played it on a boom box near the back door and the way it softly echoed off the stone walls made it sound perfectly natural.
Mike asked Jeremy what else he did for fun and he said he didn't do much because he was going to have surgery this summer, a replacement valve for his heart. He said he was born with a bad heart and needed surgery then he lifted his shirt to his shoulders to show off the scar down the middle of his chest, he'd already had one open-heart procedure years ago. I instantly felt sorry for him, and never knew he had such problems.
When Mike asked why he came over after his parents left his reply was: guess! We all laughed. My guess was he couldn't stand the sound of his parents, especially when they were drunk. His mom was a little shrill and loud when drunk.
That was the first serious party we had at our house since we moved-in. We felt it might not have happened if Mark wasn't here. Everyone that came over seemed to like him, and some of them said they could see the family resemblance in his eyes and cheek bones with David. One of the nicest parts of the evening was that nobody treated us differently or asked about gay sex or gay anything. Gay was a non-subject.
The ribs smoked almost all day (Saturday) then it alarmed and shut itself down at 6:12pm. We sat at the picnic table and had a feast of pork ribs, baked beans (from a gallon can), and more coleslaw, beers, and I baked a platter of cheese nachos like they served in bars. The five of us used two rolls of paper towels and two bottles of Stubbs Sauce (spicy).
Trina admitted she loved our little diner but was surprised when we told her the cost and showed her pictures of what it used to look like as a 1950s Kenmore TV commercial.
When we told people we remodeled our kitchen most pictured new appliances and paint, but not that we stripped the room to the studs. What we did was uncommon but we wanted it to last a long time.
We sat outside after dinner and drank more beers and had another nice evening around the fire pit, Mark was there too. He was great at telling funny stories, he seemed to have met a lot of odd farmers when he sold dairy supplies around Austin.
Luckily, with Mike and Trina here all five of us knew about security clearances and nobody asked about what anyone did for a living. It was sort of like a family Thanksgiving where three of the people worked for the CIA.
We spoke about that with Mark before the party started. And Sunday night after the Bonhams left he said it was the best backyard party he ever went to, even though we forgot to get a keg and piles of munchies.
On Tuesday Mark was selling in New Mexico and we were called to Oklahoma City because of a series of bank robberies. We flew to Oklahoma in our street clothes and brought both cases along. We arrived at 10:35am and were picked-up by a patrolman in his car near the baggage claim. He walked in the door and looked around; we were just standing there waiting for our ride. We met and shook hands, he got us in his police car just outside the doors and drove us to the main police building downtown near the memorial to the Murrah Federal Building.
When we sat down at the conference table a detective started to explain the robberies and we soon learned we were once again sent on a wild goose chase by our boss. This was not a series of bank robberies it was a series of ATM thefts (a gang was stealing ATM machines from stores using a dramatic smash and grab method with chains and a truck), which legally was an entirely different matter covered by different laws. Stealing a privately owned ATM machine was not the same as walking into a bank with a gun and demanding cash.
It was completely inappropriate for us to get involved because there was no public safety or terror involved. We asked for a ride back to the airport but everyone was pissed off, so we walked out and waved down a taxi and rode back to the airport and called our OD for tickets. He said the boss just left and he was mad too, but us being here was totally his fault for not asking questions before he alerted us.
We'd seen a trend in our cases where the number of bad calls we were getting seemed to be on the upswing and our boss was too distracted by something to do his due diligence first. This was clearly his fault.
We made it back to ELP at 8:10pm but decided to go home instead of to Captain Jones' house. Tomorrow would be a not-nice day at work.
We got to the office and brought up the false alarms and dishonest pleas for help he'd passed along to us and the waste of our time and money, not to mention that flying around in that jet was expensive and risky too. David stood up, pointed at him and spoke loudly that he should do his job or we'd get someone else who would. That was ballsy of him to yell at our boss like that, but I think he had every right to demand he did his job correctly or get the hell out.
It's not that often in the military that the underling threatens to fire the boss! And if he fired David he'd pretty much need to fire me too, which would violate federal and state laws.
Well, Captain Jones didn't do his job right and he was mad about having his nose rubbed in it and it added a layer of danger to our jobs, so we started to call the OD every time we got alerted to clarify it wasn't yet another wild goose chase (geese can run pretty fast I guess).
I guess you didn't want a goose to get mad at you because they can seriously injure a human if they get pissed off and they'll out run you too, especially if they have baby geese nearby. Our boss was not a goose but he was a clown and turned out to not be a very good Army officer either, but that had been a problem since we arrived.
Since we had the money we hired one of the best known civilian lawyers in El Paso that specialized in military law. We got his advice and he said to document and record everything and come back next month to see him again. We'd already started recording meetings with the boss and keeping written records of everything.
Two months later Mark found a suitable apartment in town on the east side and was making decent money now but he was on the road ten to twelve days of every month. We'd really grown to like him and I thought it helped David knowing he had family in town he could call if something happened, or maybe just for fun.
If you're moving to El Paso one big decision you have to make is what part of the city you want to live in, each one has its own personality. El Paso is sort of like three cities in one. The sections are the west side, the northeast side, and the east side - south of I-10, which is very Hispanic and cowboyish. For Mexican men moving to El Paso there was a powerful cowboy attraction in the southeast side.
Mark's divorce negotiations started and he showed us what she wanted from him as far as money went. She wanted him to pay her tuition and books (her student loans 100%) but he wanted to only pay half of it. They owned their own cars and never co-signed for each other. They had no kids and no mortgage, Mark and Sandra had rented a house, which really saved him. Sandra made decent money at her job before she quit work to go to school full time and finish her degree (and have her clitoris tongue massaged all weekend).
They finally agreed on terms and he signed and owed $25k which he didn't have and wasn't going to borrow so he had to agree to make payments with small interest to the court, he agreed to $12.5k a year for two years, or about $1060.00 a month, that meant he had to get a smaller apartment. The money Mark paid would go directly to the education finance company, not to his wife. They both agreed to the terms and signed the papers ending the marriage, both of them got what they wanted but Mark was sort of quiet for a while after it was final. He really loved her before she turned against him. Both of us suspected he had cash hidden but nothing in the bank.
While he was with us he saved a bunch of money, he actually earned more than us in commissions but we got bonuses in the form of cash rewards. So while we had over one million in actual cash in a box in the house he had money in the bank, but ours was safer from judgments. A few times a year we took some of our excess cash and bought gold ounce bars from a local jeweler and stored them in an old Folgers can hidden in the basement.
One evening at home when Mark drank too much beer we asked him if we could make a rent payment for him and he excitedly said yes so we had him show us online how he made payments and after he left the room and we were still logged into his rental payment account I paid six months in advance for him but we never told him. We knew money would be tight for him for a while, it was just a gift from a relative.
When Mark moved out he rented some furniture so he wasn't moving into a bare apartment. He rented an apartment on the north-east side up by the mountains near the VA hospital and McKelligon Canyon. I thought it was overpriced but he paid for the location and the view.
Being halfway up the mountains meant his living room balcony had a fantastic view, he could see mountain peaks nearly forty miles east and had an early sunset every day. His apartment only had that view when the sky was clear, like after a big rain storm. He showed us once with binoculars that he could see Eagle Peak and Sierra Blanca from his balcony.
The bad thing about living on the side of the mountains was when it rained hard some of the streets filled with rocks and sand washed down the side of the mountains. The city had to use skid loaders and trucks to clean the streets, which took days to get cleared and increased the chance of getting a windshield chip.
David helped him move his boxes while I did laundry and David told me that on their last trip Mark told him, "Now you guys can go back to sport fucking in the living room again." David laughed and said we'd miss him anyway, he actually told him to email us at least once a week to let us know how he was doing, where he was, and could even include any hetero sex updates.
David said he got teary eyed when he left to get in the taxi and Mark even kissed him on the cheek and squeezed his butt when he turned to walk out the door. David said he was surprised Mark had never playfully goosed him. They moved all the boxes in Mark's vehicle which was why David took a taxi home.
On Monday we got alerted to a possible hostage/terror situation in a place we'd been before, it was near the PCH in southern San Francisco, we were called by the FBI to assist them. Someone had taken two children as hostages at a daycare and demanded one mil in cash for their release and demanded transport to the airport and a plane ride to Pyongyang North Korea.
The story sounded odd, first because there were no flights from the USA to North Korea, you had to fly to China first then to Pyongyang. We doubted China would let the airplane land, which meant any airline would likely refuse to board him in San Francisco.
So we called our coordinator at the FBI office in San Francisco to hear the rest of the story. While that was going on our jet transport arrived and the pilot shut it down when he learned we were still on the phone. The jet was fueled, turned around, towed away from the building and ready to load and leave for California but we weren't. He said he could only stay a few minutes.
By asking lots of questions we found out it was another custody dispute between a husband and wife, he wanted to return to North Korea and she wanted to stay in the USA with their two kids so he got mad and threatened to kill her and the kids if they didn't go back to North Korea. We told the pilot to go back to Kansas City, we didn't do custody cases. This was a matter for the local people to deal with. Once again our boss hadn't done his job.
This time we had everything recorded with our little note taking voice recorder. The boss had already gone home for the day. But when he didn't hear the jet fly over his home I'm sure he knew it was another false alarm, he'd screwed the pooch again.
Three weeks after Mark moved out he invited us over for dinner on a Friday evening. We offered to contribute the meat, like smoked pork ribs but he said he was getting delivery stuff so we could hang out, play cards, and drink too much. I think he wasn't as much of a red-meat foodie as us.
On the drive up to his neighborhood we realized he lived rather close to our boss and they probably heard the little jet when we flew over the mountains on a mission. We couldn't tell Mark unless we found a way to say it that didn't compromise secrecy of the jet transport service for US dignitaries.
We got there at 7pm, I was starved. We showed up on time and he had everything out ready to serve. He ordered a huge spread and had it set out like a buffet with all kinds of Japanese dishes of rice, fish, salads, and chicken. He also had Sake in four different bottles and supposedly Sake appropriate glasses (they looked like wine glasses to us).
After dinner we played Blackjack for an hour then just sat in his living room and talked (and drank shots of sake) for another hour. Around 11pm I started to yawn and the day had been long. David had lots of work he wanted to do in our back yard tomorrow, like get the air powered features on his mini golf course working now that we had the small compressor. All we had left to do was install the regulator and make the last air line connections and it was ready to fire up two of the four holes. They should be challenging to say the least since parts of the deck slowly moved up and down (and leaned side to side too) while the course was turned on.
Since alcohol was going to be on the menu we had taken a taxi to his apartment up on Alabama St at Pierce Ave and texted him when we left home. After a fun evening we took a taxi home too.
When we got home David said he felt funky (he looked very drunk), his head hurt and he looked green so I stripped him to his undies and helped him to the bathroom then he barfed in the toilet. He sat on his ass on the bathroom floor praying to the porcelain God for relief and spent about fifteen minutes nearly asleep with his upper body on the toilet seat. Even sitting in front of the toilet in his underwear he still was super sexy.
After he felt better I asked what bit him and he said it was the sake, he didn't puke any food, just a few grains of rice and mostly alcohol. I helped him to his feet then into the shower and washed his body while he leaned against the cold tile wall. When his back was done I did his front side and carefully washed his naughty bits by hand. He had his eyes closed the entire time, even while I cleaned his tits with my tongue.
I should mention here that any time David did not feel well he sort of needed a mommy, so I was quick to baby him, which often included him being hand scrubbed. He's the kind of guy that will never totally outgrow the occasional need for a mommy when he was sick or injured. I could tell because when I did mommy stuff he always fully cooperated. Any time I was mommy my treatment for him always included a detailed hand scrubbing of his entire body.
After the shower I dried him off in the bathroom and walked him to bed and tucked him in and kissed his forehead. Out in the kitchen I took our only bottle of sake off the rack and poured it in the sink. Then I went to the living room and put us on off-duty (Misc Cause which was office code for: drunk) then we went to bed and slept with my back gently touching his.
On Saturday morning a pool designer stopped in and we went to the back yard to measure things (take photos) and had a discussion about designs, features, cost, existing utilities, and permits. He showed us photos of other custom residential pools he'd designed and built. We already had the entire property marked for buried utilities and the only thing in our back yard was the telephone cable.
The bad news was there was almost no room on either end of our house for their big equipment to get in the back yard so we'd have to work with one of our neighbors to get a section of the perimeter wall torn down and reconstructed afterward, and we'd need to get an agreement in writing about damages and how things would be repaired. We already felt that should be agreeable to our neighbor to the west, the family with the teenage son (Jeremy) that admired David. They've been over with beers and chairs after we got the smoker. The people on the other side of the yard didn't seem to care for us so we rarely spoke to them. I thought they were bible thumpers.
He said he would send us a proposal that included an outline of steps needed to get permits, and we should start on those items about six months before we planned on starting. Our back yard had a seven foot high, rock and mortar wall all the way across the back and half way up to the street in front. Rock walls like that between every property were traditional in El Paso.
After that the pool guy tried two holes on the golf course and quit after the first one because it was too hard. He said it was like playing mini golf on a cruise ship during a storm.
In the mail on Saturday several of our past-due reward checks arrived from the state and we cashed them right away that boosted our savings enough now that we've mostly recovered what we spent on a private investigator in Washington State and Idaho. The total deposit for all those checks was $125,759.26. Every time we did that (remove large amounts of cash from the bank) they always asked what we're doing with the money, I'm sure they were required to ask but it's really none of their business. David boasted we're buying a restored antique car. That way they had something to write on the (SAR) form that reported the transaction to the fed as being possible funding of terror.
We'd made big cash withdrawals before but nobody ever knocked on our front door. David always said if that happened he'd gladly shout at them to fuck off and slam the door in their faces.
Saturday night David was back to normal, we ate dinner at home. I used the InstantPot to cook a small roast cut up into cubes with diced potatoes and a bag of frozen stir fry vegetables, some organic vegetable juice in place of water, salt, navy beans, crushed red peppers, black pepper, garlic, Italian seasoning, and Cholula for heat. We found a store in the city that sold dried red peppers that were super super hot, we ground them to a powder and used them as spice in our homemade dishes because we both liked hot foods. We often made pots of chili and added lots of spice so it burned going in and coming out the next day.
We warmed the frozen chuck roast in the microwave enough so I could chop it into cubes with the cleaver and tossed it in the pot still half frozen. I set the alarm clock because it would be done after we went to bed so I'd get up around 1am and portion it into two glass food storage containers and put them in the refrigerator.
Sunday morning the house still smelled like beef soup because I never turned on the vent hood last night.
As a joke I asked him if he wanted to go to church this morning and he just said, "Nope!"
David spent an hour in the garage, lying on a piece of carpet on the floor detail cleaning the lower parts of our motorcycle, the bottom of the engine and the rims. I joined him on the other side but we didn't talk much because we had the radio blasting in the garage. He had his truck out on the driveway so we could move the bike over and have lots of space. After cleaning it he changed the oil himself, I stayed beside him and watched and stared at his upper body.
I loved watching his belly button change shapes when he worked with tools and his muscles. When he raised his arms up it stretched his nipples and made them look freakishly huge, which turned me on. To remove the engine oil drain plug on the bottom of the Goldwing 1800cc engine he got on his back and reached up with both arms to work the wrench on the plug to break it loose.
He already had all the stuff he needed, the new engine oil and filter and a seal kit just in case he killed one of the rubber O-rings. We poured the old engine oil into the empty quart bottles to take to the oil reclaim place on Railroad Drive.
After the oil change was done he drove it around the block then back in the garage, put it back on the center stand, and re-checked the oil level. The level was fine so I parked the bike in its proper spot in front of my car while he drove his truck in and then we cleaned up the tools and called it done.
I didn't know what he had planned after the garage work but he went into our Tac-room and got out our machine guns and some old bath towels and sat on the sofa with one on his lap and cleaned them one at a time.
I sat in the chair to be near him and so I could watch his body too. Staring at his chest while he worked I told David his tits looked like a former American porn actor that went by the name of Richie Fine. That actor disappeared in the 2000s and vanished from the porn industry despite his stunningly flawless body, nine inch rod, and huge flat red tits (like David).
He spent thirty minutes on each weapon then I put them and the cleaning gear away and he seemed to be done and was still in his old gym shorts, when he came into the dining room I shoved my hand down his pants and grabbed his Willie and pulled him into our bathroom and scrubbed his entire body again since he'd gotten all sweaty.
Even though he sometimes acted like it took too much time I knew he also really liked it when I hand scrubbed his entire body, I even brushed his teeth and flossed him too. I trimmed his finger and toe nails and trimmed his pubes front and back so he was hairless from ears to his mid-thighs. I even cleaned his ears and squeezed any blackheads on his back.
By the time his cleaning was done and I was almost done buzzing off the hairs between his butt cheeks he was hard and looked rather thick too. So I pulled him to the sofa, he sat down while I got on the floor between his feet and slowly sucked it, he lasted forty minutes.
After he was cooled off he got me on the living room floor and hand jerked me my special way and I spurted semen all over my front side. He landed on top of me after I was done and we kissed like lovers for almost ten minutes then he hand cleaned us with paper towels.
In late April 2016 we were alerted by the OD that another of our target perps from St. Paul popped up on our map, or at least his cell number did, so we had him check if his cell had the update so we could activate the cameras and microphone without his awareness or clicking on a text message.
Within ten minutes we had live audio/video inside the car, it was our #2 perp, Hassan Bilal. He was the guy that designed the bombs and obtained the remote control triggers. We got a 98% face match and it looked like him to us too. He was westbound on I-20 in western Texas near Big Spring Texas. We got permission from the boss to nab him and got into our suits and left town on the bypass and drove pretty fast down to I-10 and headed east to intercept him. We hadn't come up with a plan yet but the OD was watching both of us on his live tracking map as we approached each other. The OD predicted we would meet near the town of Monahans Texas if he stayed on the highway at his present speed. We had no idea where he was going.
David set the cruise control at 91mph because we wanted to meet him in the desert for the isolation and there being less likely we'd have to deal with local cops during his execution or afterward. We didn't want to deprive the vultures, they were helping our team.
We only stopped for gas and bathroom breaks at truck stops on I-10. A few hours later we turned over to I-20 that took us toward Odessa and the oil and gas region of Texas. That part of the state used to be all oil wells but now was hundreds of gas wells in huge fields.
As we closed in on him we got updates from the OD with information about his vehicle. Hassan was driving a 2009 Nissan Frontier 4-cylinder truck, white exterior, four door with Minnesota license plates. There was a small chance he planned on leaving the US into Mexico if he was going to sneak back to his home country, but we had no evidence to support any destination or motive. He was traveling alone and we didn't know much of anything else except that he was a facial match for the image we got from our spider in St. Paul months ago. As of today, two of the three bombers all headed towards the border but it might have been a coincidence.
We pushed it hard and the sun went down as we drove the bypass around Pecos Texas. After that town there were three small towns before we reached Monahans where the OD said we were likely to meet up with our target. David said he wished we had one of those crash bars on the front bumper like cops used to spin other cars out of control, we could come up behind Hassan and spin him then rescue him from his wrecked vehicle and accidentally bleed him during the rescue.
I asked the OD how many truck stops there were in Monahans and he said just one, he suggested we stop there and wait and he'd watch the icon on the map, he was likely to stop there for the bathroom, we could toss a spider inside his truck. David liked that plan so we got ready.
I loaded a spider with a poison gas pellet and got it ready.
Just like clockwork, minutes after we parked beside the truck stop driveway we saw a Nissan cruise past us that matched: a white Frontier with Minnesota plates, we only saw one person inside.
We sat in our truck and watched him park by the restaurant and walk inside.
I jogged over, opened the driver's door, switched on the spider and gently tossed it on the floor behind the bench seat and closed his door. I walked back to our truck and used the keypad on my arm to put it in the proper mode. The spider activated, we saw a green dot and watched it climb up to the headrest on the passenger side.
Ten minutes later our perp came back with a white paper bag and got in, started the engine, and drove over by the pumps to fill his tank. We watched the spider cam image while he filled the tank. We slowly drove our truck past the gas pumps and parked on the highway entrance ramp. I watched him get back in and start the engine. He reached into the bag and pulled out some French fries and stuffed `em in his mouth, that truck stop had a McD's.
He drove to the highway and got back up to highway speed and roared past us. A few seconds later we followed and sped up to 70mph too. The spider had already moved to the headrest behind him and we got close-up views of him reaching into the bag for more fries. I imagined how they smelled and the salty bland flavor of McD's fries. I was a fan of fries but not McD's fries, I heard for most of the year their fries spent many months in frozen storage which really killed the potato flavor.
Heading west on I-20 we stayed about fifteen seconds behind him and let him enjoy his fries. He crumpled the bag and tossed it on the floor and turned on the radio. It was too cool outside to open the windows, in fact we could see he had the heat on at a low level. It really cooled off in the Texas grasslands at night.
It was dark out and we had ¾ of a tank of gas and were doing fine. We discussed what to do and decided to kill him without any explanation, just like the three of them killed ten innocent people without warning too.
When David gave the word I used my keypad to activate the spider which would do a full gas burn followed 60 seconds later by self destruct mode. It might be destroyed in a vehicle crash before it had the chance to self destruct.
I pressed ALT-S for about one second then released the buttons and kept my eyes on the back of his truck.
We moved a little closer but it was really too dark to see much. After about fifteen seconds he appeared to be slowing then the vehicle drifted onto the shoulder and into the weeds beside the pavement and stopped without crashing. Nobody else stopped to check but us.
The truck sat there with the engine at idle with the radio playing, it looked like he fell asleep. We sat behind him for about ten minutes but he never moved.
David walked up to the driver's door and held his breath and threw open the door and we saw some faint smoke come out of the cab so he stepped back. I went over to the passenger door and pulled it open too, that would clear the gas quickly. It looked like the smoke we saw came from our spider destroying itself and blackening the seat upholstery.
I looked inside and saw the driver was leaned back with his head drooped to the side, his mouth open and saliva dripped onto his shirt, his hands were on his knees, his expressionless eyes were frozen wide open. Unlike in the movies, when you died your eyes usually stayed open, permanently stuck in that position.
We stood there for a while then David took a gulp of air and reached in and checked the radial pulse on his left wrist and tried to feel one on the side of his neck but found no signs of life. He wasn't breathing or responding and had no pulse we could find. He released his seat belt and shoved him hard toward the passenger door.
After a few more minutes we pulled him out of the truck on the passenger side and (when no vehicles were near) carried his body to the fence and on the count of three we heaved him over the barbed wire cattle fence. Then after climbing over ourselves we carried him about 120 feet into the desert vegetation so he couldn't be seen from the highway. We removed his clothes to make it easier for the buzzards and the coyotes, but in this place it could be years until someone saw the remains, if any. To some smarter cops seeing a group of buzzards landing was a clue to go check for signs of trouble, but there weren't a lot of people that would stop on the highway in the middle of the desert to check for such a thing unless there was a report of a missing person in the area.
We walked back to our truck and left. We told the OD our mission was a success, one spider used, Perp #2 was deceased. David said we should have driven his truck away. We drove to the next town and turned around and went back since it was at night.
I got in his truck (with rubber gloves on) and drove it behind our truck for 60 miles then parked it in a store parking lot in the town of Toyah Texas and left.
We stopped in Van Horn Texas and got a motel room and spent the night and drove home the next morning. At that distance we were about three hours from home. After we stopped I got grossed out and carefully scrubbed my hands and face in the sink after handling the poison coated steering wheel and handling a dead body. The tub was too small for both of us to shower together.
We left the motel at 9am and stopped at a Waffle House for chow, we both had steak and eggs and closely watched the guy cook our order to see how they had their kitchen arranged to see what we might be missing at home. Their griddle was a lot larger than ours but they didn't have deep fryers and their menu was very simple and probably wasn't the healthiest food either. At home we usually purchased organic whenever we could.
On the highway I scooted over by David and slid my hand under his shirt and told him I loved him while I rubbed his silky flesh, he put his hand on the back of my head and smiled at me while he drove along at 75mph. I wished I could have blown him but he didn't want me to while he was driving. He especially didn't want me to blow him while I was driving!
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