Chapter 19.
Four days after we formally surrendered Berg Boiven to Interpol on the tarmac outside El Paso International Airport (ELP) we received the anticipated phone call from an unnamed EU office in Brussels about our reward. She said they already dispatched a messenger with a package for us, we needed to show him our passports to sign for the box. He was flying from Brussels to Atlanta, then to DFW, and lastly to ELP. We were supposed to meet the courier at baggage claim.
The messenger was to be an elderly man in a black suit with a small wheeled suitcase. David did not ask any questions but said the guy with the box could contact us at our regular phone number; we'd be waiting for his arrival in El Paso. He was due to arrive tomorrow afternoon. I checked the Interpol Most Wanted web page and they had already removed Berg Boiven and his picture and bio. Berg certainly pissed off a lot of very wealthy European families. Berg told David when he jumped in the car by the gas pump that he thought the car was being hijacked by some '...drug crazed teenager.'
Needless to say we had a hard time sleeping that night too. That day we also received our construction paperwork package from the pool builder with the formal bid on the job but more importantly had another pack of papers that outlined the steps needed for zoning and permitting.
We needed signatures from the eight adjoining property owners, those forms were attached. Those signatures were due to the noise ordinance, the zoning variation, and official notice of the job and its related dust and vehicles in the neighborhood.
He said their equipment would destroy everything on the ground between our homes. We decided to have the sidewalk removed, but we'd protect the curb with large boards, timbers, and a pile of dirt.
The plans showed their design specs and full measurements for the pool, the plumbing and associated parts (water heater and filtration), the patio deck, and what it would look like after completion -- that view included our back yard perimeter stone wall and the back wall of the house. His timeline showed construction could start after permitting was completed, possibly next year. Companies like that tried to avoid outdoor projects during the heat of the summer so it could be over half a year or more until we started, assuming none of the neighbors protested the job.
David visited all eight neighbors one Saturday with pamphlets we made for each of them that outlined our pool project, the noise, and dust control. Every one of them signed, but it really only directly affected the family to the west of us and they were fully cooperative. They were the family with the teenage son (Jeremy) that worshipped David but hated his parents. Jeremy was a lanky high school aged boy with very long blond hair that looked like he had Marfan's Syndrome and a list of odd medical problems.
The couple to the east of us signed but weren't talkative, they seemed to avoid speaking to the neighbors. David got the impression that's just the way they were, grumpy looking and quiet.
After he got home from The Grumpy's David had to immediately get out of his business suit, I had just showered and was only in underwear. The bathroom was still hot and humid but smelled nice. David tried to mimic how Mr. and Mrs. Grumpy looked by imitating their facial expressions (and comments) in the mirror, he was hysterically funny. He leaned against the bathroom counter towards the mirror trying out different grumpy looks.
He made funny faces in the bathroom mirror and spoke all serious and grumpy sounding but couldn't keep a serious face for more than a few seconds. When he finally found the best face, he turned to look at me which made me laugh loudly.
"Mister Larsen, we're concerned a pool would lead to certain outdoor activities which was not something we wanted to hear over the wall during our nightly bible study," he said trying to look seriously concerned.
After several minutes of mocking and laughing he grabbed me and kissed me for a while and thanked me for being the best husband. He even got emotional and teary eyed while he held me tightly. I turned to watch us hug in the mirror because when he cried it easily upset me too, but he turned my head back so we looked in each other's eyes when he shared his feelings.
After he was done he hopped up on the bathroom counter and wiped his face dry. I stood between his legs and ran my thumbs across his nipples for a minute. He leaned his forehead against mine during our quiet moment of intimacy.
David put his hands on my shoulders and smiled at me while I toyed with his tits then he made grumpy faces again since it made me laugh.
I had him wait in the bathroom while I ran for my cell and took photos of his best grumpy faces then made fake business cards: Malice McGrumpster, Motivational Speaker. Low Rates.
I delivered all eight signed forms to the pool contractor and put him in contact with our lawyer to draw up the papers and the one with the neighbors. We also had to create a $25,000 escrow account for the sidewalk, curb, and landscaping for the neighbors property. We both had a ten foot strip of yard between our houses and the common property line that the backhoe, cement truck, and dump trucks would drive on during construction.
The contractor said a semi would deliver three pallets of paving stones to tile the back yard and along the side of the house. There would be very little exposed ground left on the entire lot.
We didn't believe they would start digging this year, maybe next year. We also decided to hire a board-up company to cover both sides of our houses with protective panels, those walls would be covered until construction was finished. Their son (Jeremy) demanded full time pool access after it was finished since he would lose his bedroom window for almost three months.
We believed their entire family knew we were a gay couple but Jeremy didn't appear to care about possibly seeing men kissing in the pool. He wanted to swim laps or relax on his floating lounge chair while sipping 7-up with Maraschino cherries and thinking about guitar chords. We've seen Jeremy outside during the summer wearing only stretchy shorts, knee pads, and gloves trying to master basic skateboard tricks on their driveway and recalled his body was not very attractive. David suspected the teen might have a very long pencil dick, like a bun-length hot dog. But it might be a nice conversation piece. He thought hetero sex with a dick like his might be uncomfortable for her if the head of his dick was constantly poking her cervix.
He also had a long surgical scar down the center of his chest, like the kind you got during open heart surgery.
The next day we hung out at ELP since the old courier guy from (what we jokingly called) Publishers Clearing House with our reward money was on his way, and they said he was on the airplane from Atlanta to Dallas (9:30am).
After lunch he called David's cell and said he was on another plane at DFW and should take off in the next few minutes for the flight to ELP, which was only seventy minutes depending on the winds at 34,000 feet.
We met the old guy at the gate instead of the baggage claim to save him some walking.
He looked like he was over 80 years old, a white haired elderly short man with a metallic case and a cardboard box strapped to a wheeled luggage cart. We sat down at the gate since there was nobody waiting to board yet.
He held our passports beside our faces and asked our names, then had us sign his form and handed us the box and turned around and boarded the same plane; its next flight was back to DFW.
We walked to our truck and drove home and cut open the box with a sharp kitchen knife.
Like before, the money was all US 100 dollar bills that smelled old. They were tightly packed and wrapped in plastic and fit inside a box about 13x13x13 inches.
We counted each bill then added $400,000.00 to our home stash which gave us about $1.8 mil in cash at home now. We had more coming from the capture of fugitives around town, but Texas (and El Paso) were not as fast to pay rewards as the EU. It had been months since the last time one of us opened the Hello Kitty box on the closet shelf in the Tac-room. Both of us pinched a short stack of bills to replenish our wallets. It always made stores and banks nervous when you paid with a 40 year old 100 dollar bill.
We decided to dig out the oldest bills and get them exchanged for new bills at the bank, which would have to be pre-arranged.
That weekend we went to Sun City Honda and purchased two CRF125 dirt bikes and spent a lot on riding gear. We also bought an aluminum ramp for loading the bikes and straps to secure them in the truck bed. We got a five gallon gas can and basic metric hand tools, a GPS, and first aid stuff. We didn't know if there was cell coverage out in the desert, north and west of Orogrande. It was doubtful there was any signal out there.
On Highway 54 (US Route-54) between El Paso and Alamogordo was a small town called Orogrande, it was almost a ghost town that failed to die all the way. Most of the town was gone now, mostly dirt roads, empty lots, and more street signs. There were maybe eighty residents left, but not much else except modular homes and some fallen down old buildings. We heard there was an abandoned mine shaft in town near the highway that used to be part of a ghost town tour.
What was left of Orogrande was about nine blocks north-south and six blocks east-west, but most of the town was bare desert, even the power lines and poles were taken down. It used to be the hub of a big mining area in the desert where people sent their gold (silver, copper, and uranium) ore to town to go by train for refining in El Paso. Those train tracks were still there along US-54 but the tracks from Orogrande to the ghost towns were removed long ago, just the railroad bed scars were left. The big question that town left unanswered was: could an actual ghost town still have people living in it?
When the price of gold dropped most of the mines closed because it cost more to remove the ore than they were paid for the metals. Some of those mines were hand dug shafts, some went down at angles, others were vertical shafts into the bedrock.
Over the years since the price collapse all the train rails and ties were removed leaving only straight/level roadbeds across the desert that ran from town to town and now served as popular dirt bike and hiking trails. We avoided those old railroad beds because soft loose sand was no fun to walk or ride a dirt bike on.
Decades after the mines closed White Sands Proving Grounds was created and fenced-in. There was a large area of county owned land between WS and US-54 where people rode and played in the sand on bikes and ATVs.
We decided to investigate the party scene in the desert. We heard sometimes they had actual keg parties but we're not sure how a gay couple on dirt bikes in the desert would be accepted. We didn't anticipate trouble. We were the same age range as most of the ATV riders up there.
All we did the day the bikes came home was to quietly ride them up and down the street by our house but neither of them were street legal, but they did have electric start.
David said he'd seen motocross magazines and lots of them showed fit young guys, half naked, while they re-fueled and repaired their toys in the desert. We thought it was a very masculine/hetero activity that appealed to young men that liked to stay in shape and show off their bodies to other like-minded hetero guys and the occasional moto-babe. The pictures reminded me of the showers in the dorms at UTA with thirty young studs in their underwear shaving and brushing their teeth.
There was another desert area that had become a military range called Doña Ana Range, it sat between the state line and the south boundary of WSMR. It ran all the west way up and into the mountains, but it didn't extend east out to Hwy-54. To understand the desert expanse northeast of El Paso, basically everything east of US-54 was Fort Bliss, and west of US-54 (some people called it Dyer Street) was county land then WSMR or Doña Ana Range, that continued all the way north to highway US-70. It may not look that big on a map but it's a huge expanse of desert with an interesting human history that went back over two thousand years ago. I bet it was a desert back then too.
Six days after we got the reward cash we saw in the news that Berg Boiven hanged himself in his jail cell in Brussels. Neither of us believed that was what actually happened. Berg even told David that was how `they' would kill him to prevent his testimony in court. He never mentioned stealing millions of Euro cash while he was in our custody, nor did he mention the plutonium or the diamonds.
We'd entered a three week quiet period with regard to significant crimes so we spent time finishing the back yard mini-golf course. What David designed was a broad U-shaped four-hole course but the fairways partially overlapped in the middle. He added air powered and mechanical features that slowly altered the contour of the deck every few minutes. The floor had short grass carpet but when he plugged in the power cord it slowly raised, lowered, and tilted in sections. Both ends had two small putting greens that didn't move but they weren't flat or level and took practice to master. Some people said it was like shooting pool on a table that wasn't perfectly flat.
Each hole was a Par-4 but only seventy feet long. The moving parts were the long straight parts that liked to trap your ball in caves, ponds, and sand traps. We built the entire thing with 1x2" (2.5x5cm) boards screwed into carpet covered plywood strips. You didn't stand on it but stood beside it, except the putting greens. It was fun to try after a few glasses of wine and we had a few tournaments and Jeremy joined us a few times but all of our putters were too short for him so he had to hunch over even more than normal for his frame. Jeremy had a difficult time with the parts that slowly moved and his balls ended up in the traps often, which made him angry. Our golf time with Jeremy made us create a house rule that swearing out loud in the back yard was against the rules. We threatened to tie him up to one of the yard cover poles, naked, and whip him for swearing but when he said it sounded like fun we stopped joking about it.
A few times when he joined us for golf he actually stunk like he hadn't seen a bar of soap in days so we started calling him Germy instead of Jeremy. We could tell he tried hard to be a good guest but was still very awkward, worse than us! But Jeremy failed on some basic social skills, so we decided to sit him down to discuss BO and hygiene under the assumption he sometimes went to school stinking badly too.
We had to use the leaf blower on the course almost every time because it liked to trap leaves and sand. When mosquitoes moved into Put-Put-Pond we drained it and replaced the water with large bird shot. When we went to the gun shop to buy a can of bird shot David got an idea and purchased boxes of 9mm ammo for our machine guns. Then one weekend (with permission) he took Germy up to the desert but left the bikes at home. They hiked into the wilderness near the southern road (Nike Avenue) into WSMR and let Germy shoot our civilian pistols. After he showed he could be super obedient about shooting safety David went to the truck and got out his 9mm machine gun. He said Germy practically screamed with excitement. David explained it was an actual weapon, not a look-alike and the bullets were about two bucks each. So they first tried target shooting one round at a time to master aiming the short barrel machine gun, then they hand reloaded the magazine and he let Jeremy put it into auto mode and empty one entire mag in a few bursts.
David said he peeked, and Jeremy had a boner after shooting in full auto! He also said he didn't have a skinny long dick like we expected, but was short and thick.
The place they went shooting was between some dunes so the sound stayed locally. The sound of a fully automatic weapon tended to get people's attention, sometimes not good attention. David got five boxes of fifty rounds each for ($52 ea) that trip.
David instructed him the safe way to handle a rifle on any range, and how to operate and un-jam a machine gun. When it came to weapons safety David turned into Mister Rule Follower. He was very strict and serious when he handed over the weapon with a 30 round mag and had him load and chamber the first round.
Jeremy wanted to know why he had a machine gun but David couldn't tell him the truth so he told him it was a secret, he can't tell anyone.
David stood to the side and closely watched Jeremy as he shot at their target of scrap boards. He soon learned that a machine gun was extremely difficult to aim and basically sprayed bullets.
David said when he got to the end of the clip Jeremy looked at him with an expression like he'd just enjoyed a powerful orgasm! He said if he'd told the kid to blow him he was certain he'd habe been on his knees in less than one second!
They took turns but Jeremy fired the most ammo and even improved slightly, the lesson he wanted to teach the boy was that a good hunting rifle with a scope was best to take into many combat situations.
On the long ride back home Jeremy was ultra talkative and willing to tell everything about his life.
David told me the boy said he was a virgin, nearly friendless, seldom touched other people, kids at school constantly teased him about his size and ugly long skinny pale hairless arms and legs, he said in most classes he was always the tallest person in the room. His only teacher who was taller was the varsity basketball coach.
David asked what sports he played and Germy said: none, because of his heart valve.
When the topic of gay came up he said he didn't care what other people did in bed and since he'd never been touched he had no idea what anything felt like, nor did he have a clue what to do in bed, he'd only seen pussy online. He said his parents blocked porn on their wifi but he could watch porn on his cell but the image was so small it wasn't worth the time. He liked Chaturbate.com and thought about posing naked to make some money. He raised the bottom of his shirt and asked David if he thought people would pay money to watch him jerk off. David said maybe but he'd never get rich doing it. Most of those people did it because they liked to display their bodies in public, not for the money.
David said their conversation reached a peak when they were back in town driving south on Dyer Street when Jeremy asked 'If I was gay would I have more luck finding friends?'
David said he told the kid, "Probably not, they say only about one in thirty people were gay or bi and most were very secret about it." Then he added a very important point, "When you see gay characters in movies and TV shows please remember in real life most gays were hetero acting masculine men. It's a tiny minority of gays that dressed like women, spoke with hissy accents, or took female hormones. So the best way to visualize real gays was to picture a group of guys like we saw riding dirt bikes in the desert. They're just normal men that preferred sex with other men, that's something you shouldn't share with the public."
Jeremy asked, "How did you find out?"
"I realized I had no interest in sex with girls in high school. I did it a few times but I always went back to guys because I understood them and enjoyed it a lot more."
"I wish I was gay." He softly told David.
"You might want to keep that to yourself until after high school. You think your life sucks now? Let that rumor fly around school and you'll understand why so many gay teens kill themselves." David warned. Jeremy stared at him with a look of worry on his face as they parked in our driveway.
David grabbed the machine gun and empty magazines in the truck and stayed in the driver's seat and watched the lanky and awkward tall boy walk across his yard with his very long blond hair swaying behind him. The kid walked with a limp but never said why, probably normal adolescent knee pain. It almost looked like one of his legs was an inch longer than the other.
Back inside we put an old towel on the counter and disassembled his machine gun and cleaned each piece so it looked new. He said it never jammed and Jeremy fell in love with it. "I think if the situation were slightly different he might have asked me to adopt him." Later on he told me about their gay conversation.
We turned on the radio and hand cleaned his pea shooter and David said he believed the boy was hetero but curious, and also lonely and frustrated with his life, maybe even depressed a bit. He said he felt it would be good for the boy to have a place where he could be himself and have good role models to watch and learn from. I agreed. So perhaps for a couple more years he might be a part-time member of our little family. I asked if they spoke of college and he said he hadn't decided yet but planned on taking the SAT at the end of the school year. He had two SAT prep books at home he was reading.
We discussed calling him George instead of Germy (Curious George).
We received word from the FBI, kind of a heads-up about threats to a west coast nuclear facility. The way we understood the situation was the Diablo Canyon Nuke plant was permanently off-line (reactors disassembled and removed to underground storage) but they still had a large amount of nuclear materials stored at the site which made them a target. They said the two domed containment buildings were now used to store nuke waste and some un-used fuel.
There were two types of groups that would attack the site: a radical environmental type group opposed to the storage of radioactive materials beside the ocean and others that wanted to steal Uranium for use as a weapon.
With a small private airplane someone in possession of uranium ground-up to a powder could fly over a city and toss handfuls of the material out the window and contaminate a huge area with minimal effort and risk.
We were alerted to the possibility of such an attack but when the notice was fully read they had no specific evidence that such a plot was even in progress, just that groups were discussing it via email and text. David said that report set off his bullshit detector, it was just more `keep the slaves afraid' crap. We recorded the TV news off four TV channels from Los Angeles for three days and heard the exact same story, almost word for word on each newscast and suspected it was a paid promotion, possibly for an upcoming movie. The giveaway was each news story was exactly thirty seconds long, the same as a standard TV commercial.
All TV stations inserted ads into the news that were actually paid commercials disguised as news, they were called `native ads.'
David immediately went to the web page of Variety Magazine to see if a movie was due to be released in the next year with that as the plot or subplot because those things sometimes created the intel the FBI saw and misunderstood to be an actual threat. We also looked into state and federal training ops for such an event because they often preceded an actual event.
We were not trained or equipped to deal with radioactive dispersal events, but we were good at spying on those groups when they posed an actual threat. Lots of people talked about stupid stuff they'd like to do some day but it rarely translated into action.
We've learned years ago that the FBI used informants posing as activists to infiltrate extremist groups and encouraged attacks so they would have people to arrest and look like they were stopping terrorism. Whenever we were alerted by the FBI and discovered that their own people were involved we always declined those cases.
The theft of rad materials from Diablo Canyon appeared to be such a case so we declined any involvement. Without the involvement and encouragement of FBI informants this case and others like it would likely never happen.
We kept a journal in the living room and maintained a written record of TV news reports that started with statements like: Police prevented a, Police arrested a man suspected of involvement in, Federal agents raided a gathering of men suspected of, or authorities broke up a plot to blow up... We kept a short record with the day date and time of each and perhaps three sentences of description, then watched for follow-up reports or for patterns like the one we caught where the FBI arrested someone suspected of plotting a terror attack that always occurred exactly six weeks (to the day) apart. People forget stories like that over time, but we kept a written record and found some very interesting patterns.
Sometimes when the repeat interval was due we'd make small cash bets on what city or state was going to be involved. Those were also highly predictable.
We drove north to ride our bikes in the desert five times over three weeks and finally found the best route to ghost town of Brice New Mexico. It looked like we heard: piles of junk metal and faded remnants of long ago destroyed buildings. Most of the remnants were concrete, like foundation piers for houses and some building walls, a few barricaded mine shafts and remnants where train tracks once sat a hundred years ago. There was nothing recognizable like you saw in old movies: an old sheriff's office, the two-story saloon/hotel, and a blacksmith. We saw lots of corrugated galvanized sheeting, all twisted and bent, full of bullet holes from years of being used for target practice. Anything made of wood was rotted and gone because termites were common in the desert.
Since the town (Brice) sat on hilly/rocky ground there was no grid of streets or obvious center of town. You can see the area on g-maps, search for `Orogrande' and locate the dark hilly ground just north-northwest of town, which was that area today. But there was no recognizable town, just rubble. So we ran around on the bikes and chased each other and had fun anyway. We saw lots of other guys on dirt bikes in the desert. I was surprised we never had a near collision with so many dirt bikers in the desert.
We rode back to our truck that was parked near US-54 and carefully ran the bikes up the ramp and strapped `em in the bed, side by side. At first David wanted to ride up the ramp but chickened out.
It took some practice to get the bikes pushed up in the truck bed, he pushed from behind and I stood on the tailgate and kept them upright. After the bikes were loaded we paused and ate some beef jerky and drank the rest of our water. The ice in our tiny cooler was almost gone but the waters were still ice cold.
I thought David looked sexy-hot in his motocross suit, his shirt unzipped and his wide belly button on bright display in the brilliant sunlight.
I reached over and rubbed his obvious ridge a few times. Sometimes even the most innocent physical work made David hard, I guess loading bikes in the truck did it today.
As I gripped the ridge I felt it respond by inflating fully. He stood there and let me do whatever I wanted while he drank his water and pretended to ignore me. The sun brightly illuminated the hairless flesh between the waistband of his pants and his belly button and I suddenly craved his salty soft flesh. Our moto pants laced in front and left a V-shaped gap that went down a few inches into the top of his pubes, in direct sunlight looked very inviting.
The sunlight felt warm and the sand here was soft like the beach so I got on my knees and un-did the laced front of his moto-pants and pulled it out, it sprung free into the sunlight and pointed at my face. At first I slid my hand end to end while he leaned against the truck and softly moaned and slightly moved his hips against my hand. When I stared at his pink helmet head it looked happy to see me again, so I slowly kissed it!
David did what he usually did at first, he said nothing and pretended to stare off in the distance at the desert and let me do whatever I wanted but I knew I was giving him fantastic dick pleasure. No matter how serious he may act around others (sometimes including me too) when it was just the two of us and his boner was the center of attention he turned into a totally different person, I saw it like a puppy rolling on its back in a gesture of surrender.
I think it only took a few seconds before he was leaking pre-come. So, I took him in my mouth and savored his salty flavor.
When I had David's dick in my mouth and he was fully hard it was such a pleasant sensation, I swear I could do it six days a week if he was up for it. When my jaw muscles needed a rest I pressed my face into his hairless belly and slid side to side and tasted his flesh, then I moved upward and licked out his belly button which was very wide and in the sunlight I saw every contour on the inside and all the way to the bottom. While I French kissed his belly button he humped his boner along the side of my neck and moaned with pleasure. The entire side of my neck got slimed with precome.
When I took him back in my mouth David didn't last long. He grabbed hair on top of my head and fucked my face, then sped up and moaned louder. I kept my tongue pressed against the underside while his head rubbed against the roof of my mouth. Then I heard his groans turn into one long vocal rumble like a deep growl.
He softly whispered, "Oh My God," then he produced milk for me. I swallowed all of it and he pressed hard into my face and stopped moving. His silky soft belly was pressed against my forehead and I could have stayed like that for a long time.
David reached down and lifted me up with his hands in my arm pits and we kissed frantically, his mouth went all over around my mouth, he kissed me so many times I lost count. After that stopped he pulled me into him tightly so his boner was sandwiched between our bare stomachs, he told me that he loved me over and over, so I guess he had a particularly memorable orgasm. I was in need of one too. But he held me tightly in his arms with his erect boner sandwiched between us. I nearly started to cry, he had tears on his face. I think our experience in New Orleans had something to do with his behavior out in the desert and in our bathroom last week.
After we cooled off he walked me to the back of the truck (with his rod still fully on display) and un-did my moto-pants and lowered them to my knees and lifted me and sat me on the tailgate. Then he got on his knees and reached up and stroked mine exactly like I taught him for a super powerful orgasm.
He made a loop with his thumb and first finger around my boner and slid the loop back and forth across the rim of my head, like he was micro stroking me, with the knuckle pad of his palm rubbing my piss slit. Ever so gently he stroked my dick which was super intense and almost made me super angry and frantic it was so powerful.
While he stroked me he leaned over and we deep tongue kissed at the same time. My balls and dick felt like they might explode. I think it took him four minutes to get me to the start of a powerful orgasm. I slid forward so my legs were spread wide, the edge of the tailgate was nearly below my nuts. When I grunted into his mouth he let go but kept his fingers under my dick to aim it straight out, we watched me spurt into the air, I counted five shots before it stopped. It was one of the strongest orgasms I ever had, we found white drops on the sand nearly five feet away! My prostate contractions were so strong they hurt.
I sat there on the tail gate while my dick dripped for a while and formed a long string of semen dangling off the end. He licked that off then we kissed again for a couple minutes. I could have easily kept that session going. I told him to step aside then we watched me piss on the sand.
He helped me to my feet and together we carefully packed away my boner and laced my pants, then we packed his away and laced his pants too. We both reached down each other's moto-pants to reposition slowly fading boners so they looked comfortable. He closed his tailgate and we got in his truck and drove home with the windows down and the music cranked up.
It's a slow bumpy ride over to the highway, then we had to wait for a traffic opening, then he stomped the gas pedal and we roared out into Route 54. I turned around to watch the bikes in case one broke loose and fell over or worse.
The first song he played we both sang loudly: Orleans, 'Still the One.' As we cruised south through Orogrande I bet the blasting stereo was audible all over town. We both loved the words and took turns singing to each other.
"We're still having fun, and you're still the one."
After that he played Norah Jones: `Don't Know Why.' He played it twice, I un-did my seatbelt and scooted forward on the seat to play air-piano on his dashboard. We loved singing the lyrics to that song together, no matter how lousy we sounded.
We always ended that song by him saying: "I know why you didn't come!"
"Whyzat?"
"Because you ran out last night!" He'd say with a chuckle, it wasn't that far from the truth.
Then we sang the song "Is anybody goin to San Antone" five times, but when we got back into the city the traffic was too loud.
All the way home I thought about his body and my unfulfilled fantasies, things I wanted to do with his body. I always wanted to pour chocolate syrup or scoop Cool Whip on him and lick it off. I wanted to fill his belly button with ice cream and lick it clean. Chocolate covered David Larsen was one of my fantasies, there were others.
At the traffic light at Transmountain Road he closed the windows and turned on the AC then the music came back on and we sung to the song: `Back For Good' by: Take That. We sang that three times.
At home he backed the truck a little way into the driveway with most of it still in the street.
There was about a three foot difference between the curb and the sidewalk, so backing in like that lowered the tailgate to about two feet above the driveway, we could unload he bikes without using a ramp.
We rolled our bikes into the back yard and hosed 'em off, then rolled `em into the garage by the Goldwing. We showered together and checked the alert box but it had no record of activations today or for the past several days.
In the shower I asked David how we were going to clean the bikes after the pool was built, but he had no answer. I didn't either. The pool plan included a concrete tile decking over almost the entire yard and a matching area along the side of the house that ended at the driveway.
We could probably wash them on the side of the house near the gate after the entire side yard and back yard was tiled.
David said we should hang out with a group of dirt bikers and see how hetero boys our age cleaned their toys. Then we both snickered.
I cooked us dinner that evening, we had meatloaf, peas, and broccoli, with four glasses of wine for desert. Over dinner we discussed spying on the hetero dirt bikers and maybe we could park and hang by them and maybe fit in but go unnoticed. Lots of those guys were around our age (mid-twenties to mid-thirties).
After dinner and dishes we watched a movie on DVD (The Ninth Gate 1999) that night in the basement and went to bed after the movie. I licked his tits for a little while after I turned off the lights.
We waited for months but finally got an alert on the last of the three Saint Paul bombers, the three morons that bought, built, placed, and set off the bombs on a steel frame skylight, seventy feet above a busy indoor mall food court in Minnesota. The falling glass and steel killed ten people but recently added an 11th person. She died from chronic infections that finally ended her life.
Since then that part of the mall was gutted and re-built without skylights. The 11th victim had three surgeries trying to correct belly wounds from falling glass, but she developed an infection that did not respond to antibiotics and eventually killed her. She was a 31 year old mother that left behind a husband and one small child.
We were alerted because of an entry in the cell network log when the cell number of the #1 guy (Saad Hadi) of the trio originally from Saudi Arabia. He was the man that obtained the funding, placed the bombs on the window frame, and destroyed two of our spiders in their apartment. The alert we received said his cell (matching number and serial number matched) showed up on a Texas cell tower near DFW, so he apparently arrived in Dallas and was near downtown, possibly a hotel. We were ready to run in a few minutes and had just enough time to catch the last passenger flight of the day so we grabbed our cases and raced to the airport and got on the plane seconds before they closed the door.
At our home airport the TSA people knew us. In a rush we parked in our normal spot, what they called Tarmac Employees Parking. This was a lot adjacent to the terminal for people that worked on the tarmac (where the airplanes parked). That gave us access to the ground floor where airport offices were located, it also allowed us access to the terminal that bypassed TSA screening, or we could use another stairway that would put us out front in the ticket sales area (near the hoagie sandwich booth). It was not uncommon for airport employees to see us exit the door that bypassed the TSA with luggage, this was how we were easily able to board with weapons. That was not how we were treated at other airports, but we were working to secure quick access at DFW since we were there every month.
At first they denied us boarding since last call was over. David flashed his ID card and explained we were federal agents rushing to capture a fugitive terrorist in Dallas, so she let us board (without boarding passes, which was common for us).
Ninety minutes later we were inside DFW with our cases (there was no time to surrender the case with the machine guns to the pilot so it sat in overhead storage along with the nuclear bombs!).
We walked fast and even jogged out the nearest door and grabbed a taxi for downtown Dallas, a 45 minute drive in a taxi, we offered him fifty extra bucks to go extra fast, but I don't think he actually did.
We got out of the cab outside the steakhouse where we had met Mark Larsen but they were already closed for the day.
We walked to Dealy Plaza and activated our case and the tablet computer to access the DOD computers to track Saad's cell on a map, it showed he wasn't far, maybe a hotel so we noted the location and started walking, not even knowing if it was a hotel or a city jail!
We'd only seen Saad in spidercam photos and his most recent driver's license photo but translating that into a person on the street at night would be a difficult task but we kept going. It took ten minutes and sometimes we jogged but it was two blocks to the east and two blocks north and it turned out the location was a mosque, but it looked empty. The inside lights were all on and the doors were wide open. The building was beautiful on the outside. We could see the large indoor praying area but it looked empty from out on the sidewalk.
We used Whispernet to discuss possible scenarios and David felt Saad was inside talking to someone and after everyone was gone they'd close the doors. Neither of us knew anything about that religion but I suspected they might leave doors open as a display of welcome to strangers.
The mosque sat on a large corner lot (Young Street at Park Avenue) just outside the downtown area and the buildings around here were mostly three and four story apartment buildings, it looked like a nice neighborhood, it looked like some of those places might be expensive to buy, like loft condos. We suspected he was visiting and would show up outside soon. We stood on the corner as if waiting for something, with our backs towards the street. We could watch down both sidewalks and see two entrances to the mosque. The tablet computer showed his cell was active and less than 120 feet away.
Soon we heard laughing of two men that paused outside one of the doors, they were talking in a language we didn't recognize, we saw them hug then shake hands and we also saw lights inside the large building start to turn off.
One guy walked down the sidewalk to the street and turned towards us so David grabbed my arm and pulled me into him and we kissed on the corner (beside the traffic light support pole) so he could see the guy's face with one eye wide open. While we kissed David whispered `It's him!' We moved apart and turned to follow him across the street and down the sidewalk.
Up ahead on Young Street we saw a vertical neon sign that said: HOTEL. We walked that way with our cases and halfway down the block David suddenly set down the Batsuit case and quietly ran up behind our target and grabbed him around the neck from behind and dragged him backwards down the alley into the darkness and shoved him hard against a wall. The man gasped for air and grabbed at David's arm during the struggle.
"Well hello Saad, nice to finally meet you!" David growled between clenched teeth, his best Harry Callahan imitation.
"Who're you?" He asked looking very worried.
"We're here about the mechanical spiders you crushed in your apartment in Saint Paul."
His eyebrows raised and he stammered and then said, "Where?"
"Saint Paul Minnesota."
Saad said he'd never been to Minnesota in his life.
So I stepped in closer and softly told him we knew he, "...just flew into Dallas from Minneapolis, so you're a liar and a PIG!"
Saad looked angry, scrunched his eyebrows and told David to fuck off and hockered back to spit but David was ready and punched him in the mouth really hard, I sort of felt the impact too. That spun his head and we almost saw the stars dancing in the air above his head (like in the movie Who Framed Roger Rabbit). We saw his eyes roll around like he was dizzy, then David asked him again what he did with the tiny mechanical bugs and he said they tried to take `em apart but they caught on fire and burnt the kitchen counter.
David was pleased and I was sure his questioning was over. I'd already pulled out my knife and opened and locked the two sided blade and inched closer to David and whispered to him to reach back. He swapped hands on his chest and reached behind his butt, then did the old `I'm gonna sneeze' routine to cover his mouth. I stepped back to make it look real.
He started to raise his arm like he was going to catch a sneeze but in the final inches he thrust his hand very fast and stabbed the left side of Saad's neck.
We stepped back, grabbed our cases, and walked away, Saad was free to spend the rest of his life however he wanted. He was welcome to kneel and pray again but he better move quickly because he only had about twenty seconds left. David softly said towards Saad: "Welcome to Texas you sick fucker." In all the panic I doubted he heard it.
As we walked down the alley we both heard splashes on the pavement and the sound of scuffling shoes, like maybe he was struggling to stop the bleeding with direct pressure. Either way our work was done and we walked six blocks south to the train station, crossed the tracks, and got a room at the Hyatt Regency, the same hotel we used when we came to meet Mark last year.
It took us twenty minutes to walk that far and we never heard any sirens and were sure Saad died alone in the alley and our plan to punish the killers from the mall bombing in St. Paul was concluded.
I asked him, "Do you suppose those deaths were ever mentioned in the news in the Twin Cities?"
"Nah. It never happened."
We got our room key and carried our cases into Reunion Tower and drank a few beers and had more nachos deluxe and that was when we saw the flashing lights of several police cars and an ambulance down at that alley, we saw it clearly from the bar up in Reunion Tower (also on Young Street).
We clinked glasses and I whispered to him that I loved him and he smiled back and told me the same thing, then winked when he took a large swig from his glass of beer.
We both glanced down at his glass of beer as it sat on the round table with bubbles rising to the top and probably both thought the same thing about his beer at the pool and how he got poisoned and lost two weeks of his life. It could have cost him his life or his security clearance.
Most of the time people used Roofies, and some people died from it too. We still hadn't heard back from the lady detective in New Orleans about the surveillance camera video from the night he got poisoned.
We made it home the next day in the afternoon.
We had an alert in Denver from a utility company that operated underground natural gas pipelines around the state that also fed two electrical generating plants. They'd received multiple threats by email from a group claiming to have explosives, either shut off the natural gas furnaces or face bombings. The threats were signed Peaceful Earth Alliance, the name made us laugh.
We drove to Denver because it was a one day trip in good weather. It was also slowly uphill the entire way. Denver sat at 5300 feet ASL and ELP was at 3961 feet, you really couldn't feel the rise (except for near Santa Fe on I-25) but if you tried to jog in Denver while visiting it was like a chain smoker climbing three flights of stairs.
We met with state police investigators and gas utility security people and together we applied our computer databases to try to identify the sender. Our meeting was held in a gas company office building downtown; in that building was the gas pipe network control station for Colorado, Utah, Wyoming, and western Nebraska and Kansas.
After our review of the facts of the case and the known evidence we were walked into the control room and saw a large display on the wall that showed the western USA and all the gas pipelines, pumping stations, and LNG storage facilities.
Without warning one of the pipelines started blinking red, then turned constant red and everyone sort of went crazy and phones started ringing. One of the managers told us one of their pumping stations in Nebraska just went offline, which was sort of what we were here for if it was an attack. He said it was too early to know. One of the managers said it could take an hour or more to learn the actual cause.
They walked us back to the conference room and while we were gone a caterer had set up a spread of decent chow. David whispered to me it looked like we were being held prisoner with a food buffet instead of locked doors.
We grabbed plates and helped ourselves to the grub. We both got big salads with Caesar dressing, and lots of veggies. We added fried chicken and mashed potatoes. David mumbled: No smoked ribs?
We sat and ate and went back for second helpings from the large salad bowls, I grabbed another fried chicken thigh and drumstick. When we were almost done someone walked in and introduced himself as a VP of pipeline services and told us their North Platte Nebraska pump station was just bombed and on fire. They were called by the fire department and updated on the situation and had remotely shut down that station a crew was enroute. While he was speaking his cell started to ring, he answered and looked pale and when he hung up he said their pumping station at Green River Utah was just bombed too, which effectively shut down LNG flow to most of Colorado and would shut the Denver area peak demand power plants in a couple days if there were no more bombings.
So far they had little evidence to go on, this was not really a case for us, this was more a case for the FBI since the crimes were already over, we were more of a prevention service and they had no suspects. We were not equipped or trained to recover forensic evidence from those sites, but the FBI certainly was. They didn't want us to leave and were desperate for help. So I went back to the food table for more salad and raw veggies while David asked how they knew it was a bomb and not a large gas explosion.
The VP guy said both sites had the letters PEA spray painted on buildings near the explosions and they knew exactly where to set the explosives, they had inside information (or specific industry knowledge) on both sites.
"Where are your most vulnerable pumping sites in Colorado?" David asked. The manager gestured for us to follow him.
We walked back down the hallway into the control station with the huge map on the wall and he used a laser pointer to show us the gas routes across Colorado and how gas entered from two directions, the ones that were just bombed. But they had a large underground LNG storage site north-east of Denver, near Fort Morgan Colorado.
I asked if we could go there and have access to the site, but he said there wasn't much to see, it was totally underground with a few pipes and pumps in a small building on the surface. The site was a former copper mine converted into LNG storage. It held enough gas to keep the entire state powered and heated for a few days during the coldest winter weather.
"How's it protected?" I asked.
"Fencing, lights, remote alarms, and the police keep an eye on it, but like I said it really doesn't look like much, just a white pipe and a building the size of a two car garage. The LNG is deep underground."
We asked what local person had access, keys, and plans. We got her name and they called her but got no answer. We told them to keep calling, we'd meet her at the site, and we left for their underground gas tank, about a two hour drive away.
We raced across northeastern Colorado at night. The land was mostly flat, slightly rolling like Nebraska, it was grasslands and rather boring. It was mostly farming and cattle ranching in that area. We used our OD to do more research into crime (and criminals) in Fort Morgan. We researched environmentalist demonstrations and supporters in the counties all around that area but didn't find much, even looking back twenty years.
When we drove through Hudson Colorado on I-76 we got a cop on our tail with lights on since we were driving at 89mph but we didn't stop, he finally slowed and turned around at the county line. Our truck was clearly marked for police to not detain or search under strict penalty. On the outskirts of Fort Morgan we called that person again and woke her up at 1:25am and insisted she meet us at the pump house. The last thing she said to us was, "Oh my Lord, I have fifty two voice mails!"
The place didn't show up on our GPS so we called their office in Denver to get the street address, then we let the GPS direct us to the site.
When we arrived it was dark and cold outside, it was drizzling rain, windy, and quite miserable. We stood by the truck for ten minutes then a white Toyota Prius arrived and out stepped a younger lady, well dressed but kind of a nerdy looking girl. We introduced ourselves and asked her to open the building. While we went back to our truck for flashlights she unlocked the building and reached in and turned on the lights; then the building exploded in an enormous ball of flame. The blast instantly killed the woman and blew us into the side of the truck. Luckily we were far enough away to avoid injury but we saw her body on the ground in pieces (on fire) and the building was a very tall flame shooting towards the sky like a signal from God himself.
I assumed we didn't need to call 911, I'm sure the entire town heard the blast and the enormous roar of the natural gas fire. We used the cell to tell Denver that the building exploded seconds after she opened the door. And we reported her body was blown literally to pieces and scattered around the property. They remotely closed the underground valves from the Denver office.
Slowly, the vertical column of fire got shorter and shorter and finally went out. The local volunteer fire department arrived but there was nothing for them to do but watch the police photograph the scene. State Police arrived to search for evidence, but most of it would have been destroyed.
"I'm glad we had to turn around to get our flashlights." David mumbled as we watched them collect and bag body parts off the ground. "...that could have been us."
We got a hotel room in town and talked to our OD that there wasn't much for us to do here, they had no evidence and no suspects. The OD said someone had uploaded a video to youtube demanding money or the bombings would continue, he said as of now Colorado had two or three days of gas left then the state would be dark and cold, no gas meant no power and no heat. They had to pay the ransom or suffer the consequences.
I was quiet on the drive to the hotel, I couldn't get the image of a woman's leg on the ground, her shoe blown off. She was blown into six pieces by the blast. One of her legs landed near our truck, about 120 feet from the explosion.
The next day the FBI had a tentative ID of the masked person in the video, he was a well known militant anarchist guy that lived on a large ranch not too far away, just over the state line in Nebraska. We ate breakfast in town then left for Keystone Nebraska, just north of I-80 in western Nebraska. The guy lived on a 300 acre cattle ranch somewhere on the property and had followers living there too in their own tiny community, that the FBI described as a well armed freedom cult.
Next stop: Keystone Nebraska.
We drove there still in our stinky Batsuits and had our OD do some research for us on the ranch and the suspect, a man named Warren Stone. He was a Vietnam War vet and had a wife but no young kids. Supposedly they had 21 people living on the property in different clusters of semi-underground homes.
We had our OD run our own facial ID on the youtube video and got different results from the FBI (based on the same photo database), but the guy our OD identified was supposedly arrested yesterday on unrelated charges and was in jail in Arizona last night. That was the first hint of rotting fish we got on this case and the ransom video on youtube.
We stopped in the town of Ogallala Nebraska and got a motel room and a hot meal while our OD did more research to verify what the FBI said. The more they investigated the Youtube video the more our people said the guy in the video had no resemblance to the man they said recorded it in Nebraska, but it was a great match to the guy in Arizona that was in jail last night. But nobody knew how long ago the bombs were planted so the guy in jail could not be ruled out.
The case was still mostly not appropriate for our service and we discussed driving home. But since the place in Nebraska was definitely a dead end we decided to re-check the blast site in Colorado.
On the way back toward Fort Morgan we decided to stay there for one day. We got a motel room again, same place as before. We had the OD Fedex a battery powered, motion activated HD nature-cam with cellular, to photo and capture images of anyone that drove by the gas storage pump site and slowed down, it took their photo and texted it to ELP.
We got the same room and waited for the box to arrive tomorrow, probably from Chicago.
At 10am the delivery truck rumbled into the parking lot and we met him outside. The driver stepped out of his truck with an odd smile and asked to see an ID to sign for the package. While I dug out my card he said, "You guys must be Spooks, I used to work across the street from that factory in Berwyn. It's a fortress with no signs on the street but everyone knew they made secret government stuff." He handed over the box and got back in the ugly white truck and left.
We took the box inside and assembled the camera, it uploaded via cellular and with some help from the crew at the site replacing the pumps and tearing down the old building remnants we installed the camera on a sign post near the street and ran a thin wire for power to some outlets the power company installed to support the repair crew. We aimed the camera at the street and linked it to our public email box at the ELP office. It was set to snap a photo of every vehicle that slowed or stopped to see the site. On the local news it was not described as an attack or a bombing, it was called a gas leak explosion, but the FBI had located trigger fragments and explosive residue.
We captured images of about fifteen people each hour and cropped them and had our office run facial ID scans, mostly from Colorado and Nebraska driver's license photos. The thing that surprised us was how many were probably people in the USA from Mexico that had no driver's license.
We captured an image of a person of interest, a parolee with experience in explosives and environmental protests, multiple arrests for property damage, and threatening people. He was a 52 year old guy that lived in the small town of Akron Colorado, about 40 miles east of Fort Morgan. After eating we drove to Akron and had our OD do in depth DOD background on him: where he lived, worked, what he drove, any firearms purchases, recent credit card transactions, and anything else of interest they could find. We now had two people back in El Paso on the case. The OD desk in our office had plenty of space for two researchers.
Our suspect drove a 1999 black Chevy pick-up truck, six cylinder with body damage on the passenger side that was never repaired.
He worked at a barber shop in town and had a girlfriend that worked at a nail shop. He (Steven Harding) was about to be prosecuted by the IRS for non-filing for the 5th year, the IRS office on that case was in Denver and the lead IRS agent lived in Fort Morgan.
We had our OD compare the driver license photo of Harding to the images we caught on the motion cam at the blast site and got an excellent match on his face and a 100% vehicle match. One of our beliefs was the perp usually returned to the crime scene, which was why we took those photos.
We arrived at 1:31 pm at Harding's residence, which was a small wood house outside of town. Just a house, a small garage, and a propane tank in the yard, but not much else, the house looked old and in serious need of repairs. The land around it was flat farmland.
We parked in the driveway and walked around the house but saw no signs of life inside so we tried the doors and found the back door was unlocked so we went inside with machine guns in hand, fingers on trigger guards, headband flashlights on our foreheads, red laser dots on the walls ahead of us. We searched the entire house and the basement.
In the basement we found a large workbench with all the gear to make more bombs out of simple stuff: batteries, relays, wire, solder, PC board making stuff, blank PC boards with copper on one side, and several sticks of dynamite. David said he could make a bomb out of this stuff easily and had no idea why this stuff would be in anyone's basement otherwise.
I asked David how people got sticks of dynamite and he said lots of regular old people used dynamite, like in landfills for loosening the ground during the winter, farmers for removing tree stumps, and sometimes rural cemeteries used it during the winter. It was commonly used and sold in rural America, in many places no special permit was required but you had to show ID and sign for it.
We took video of the entire house then we searched the garage and found more bomb making stuff, electronics to make remote triggers, activation by cell phone, relays, photo strobes, and electronics to trigger blasting caps to trigger larger explosions.
All a blasting cap did was explode like a large firecracker to trigger a larger explosive, and the blasting cap was fired by applying DC voltage to the two wires that came out of the cap, which was a small cylindrical aluminum tube about half the length of a cigarette.
Use a burner cell phone, call the number and leave a voice mail. The light comes on, on the outside of the cell, which triggers a relay which sends DC voltage into the blasting cap that fires the big explosives. Anyone could build a trigger for under $200. Even cheap walkie talkies could be used for remote controls.
We drove into town and parked near the barber shop. David said he'd go inside after we reviewed the images of him in case there were multiple barbers working. He carried a spider with a sleep pellet he might use. He went in and waited his turn in the chair, the barber there was the suspect, and he was ranting about taxes and the IRS. There was one other guy ahead of David sitting in a nearby chair reading a copy of Field and Stream.
During the rants David carefully turned on the spider and dropped it on the floor. Then he asked the barber about making bombs and bombing the gas storage place forty miles west of here, his face turned red but he stammered and denied knowing anything about bombs.
While they were talking I drove the spider over to the barber chair and jumped it onto his clothes and up to his shirt collar.
David told him we saw bomb triggers in his basement and garage less than an hour ago and the barber pulled a pistol. The customer in the chair bolted out the door with the apron still around his neck, the other guy waiting also took off out the door, but David stayed in place.
I whispered to David that the barber was ready for nap time.
During the middle of their argument David suddenly blurted out, "Go ahead and sleep this mother fucker." The guy looked at him and with a confused look on his face he said, "What?"
I pressed Control-S, while David slipped filters into his nostrils (which was actually an uncomfortable feeling).
A few seconds later he reached his hand towards his forehead and held onto the sink. He staggered around the barber chair, dropped the pistol, and fell to the hair covered floor. Our OD called the FBI and local police, by the time the cops arrived Steven was sitting on our tailgate in handcuffs. And just to be nice we used his tiny broom to brush all the hair from his clothes and we locked the front doors of his barber shop too.
We drove home that night and begged our way out of being charged for another night after we said we caught the bomber.
On the way home our OD texted and said the gas facility in Fort Morgan was running again and Colorado would not run out of heat or power but they came close, with less than eighteen hours of LNG left.
The guy we busted (Harding) was charged (so far) with twelve counts and could easily spend the rest of his life in prison, which I guess ended his tax problems or worries about getting his roof re-done.
We got out of Colorado before we could be celebrated as heroes and drove home at the speed limit.