It Gets Complicated After That

I lay atop her breathing hard. She said in a small voice out of breath, "That was fantastic... You can kill me now."

I wanted to... I have no idea what I wanted to do. Ashley asked, "Why would Tigger kill you, Piglet?"

She looked stunned, like it was obvious. "My momma said that you three were only interested in having s.e.x with me. If all three of you had s.e.x with me, you would kill me."

"You allowed this to happen... even though we were going to kill you. Why?"

Marsha said, "I hate living like this. If I was totally stupid, then I might could handle people helping me all the time. I could handle everyone treating me like I was nothing. I'm borderline. I know enough to dream, but not enough to expect the dreams to become true.

"This morning you found me in your house. Instead of beating me up and dumping me outside, you accepted me like this was how things should be. Then you punished me for being bad and rewarded me for being good. This was the best day of my life. I'm ready to die now."

If there was ever a speech to cause a limpon, this one was it. My mouth fell open and I just sat there on top of her... more than just stunned. I was appalled. Her life s.u.c.k.e.d. Her answer: Have a good day, then die.

I pulled out of her then pulled her up into a hug. I kissed on the lips and held her. After a while, I said, "Was I any good just then? Was I your Best Time?"

"You were good. I liked it, Tigger. That wasn't my Best Time... I've had five men. Three r.a.p.ed me and two were kind... I like girls better." All of this was said in a little girl's voice that was extremely painful to listen to. The s.e.x angle wasn't going to work. Time for something else.

"You are not looking at this correctly. We were happy to see you. We NEED you. We are having some problems where we need someone who has a solid identity..." This wasn't working either. I could see it in her eyes. "Look. Let's just say that we need you. I want you around, because my p.e.n.i.s is huge and I needs lots of girls around willing to have s.e.x with me or I am going to go crazy... In return, I'm going to try to make your life better. A lot better... Please, Marsha, let me at least try. Let's start talking about living a good life instead of dying... Tomorrow, we have a lot of work to do around the mobile home park. An extra pair of hands would be useful. Please start there and let me build you a better life... Come on. Let's get some sleep." After about a half hour, everyone had had a shower and brushed their teeth and put on PJ's... even Brittany.

--- === === ---

The next morning, I unplugged all the throwaways. I set ten more cellphones to recharging. I activated one of them and logged onto my new gmail account using one of the hotspots on the other side of town. I sent email to the hacker. I asked whether he was ready to go to work. Almost immediately, he got back to me. I sent him pictures of the prepaid cellphone cards and told him that I wanted each of them tagged. I wanted to know who inquired about them.

I sent him the address of my server and his account name and password. While I was at the McDonalds, I had set up an account for him on the server. I told him that I wanted him to log on and set up a tagger system to find out who was trying to penetrate the security of the system. Then, I wanted him to tag the node just upstream from the server to find out who was snooping. The response time was like molasses, but I put up with it.

When I was done, I closed everything down and turned off the cellphone.

While this was going on, Brittany was making breakfast. I gave each of the twins their guns. They put them in the back of their pants.

When we all finished eating, Brittany put the dishes in the dishwasher and we went down to the manager's office. She had about 80 to-do tickets. I took all the replace-the-outside-lightbulbs tickets. Ashley took the mow-the-yards tickets. Brittany and Marsha took the inside cleaning and repair tickets. The pool tickets would wait.

I made sure each of the girls had a key to our mobile home.

All I was doing was keeping busy while I waited for things to percolate along. I didn't want to think about my parents being dead. I did not want to think about there being some extremely angry drug lord who wanted me dead for no known reason... Find the burnt out lightbulb. Get the lightbulb type. Find it in the storage area behind the office. Take the ladder. Replace it. Repeat.

I finished replacing the last lightbulb before we broke for lunch.

During lunch I said, "Look. We need to keep busy. First because we can't stop and think and second because people will notice." I turned to Marsha and asked, "How was your checkup yesterday?"

"Afraid I might have given you something?... No, I'm clean. I went to a free clinic for a checkup. I went by and got a copy of the results. Mostly, I am just not eating right... Rabbit, you really know how to cook."

"Piglet, you are too easy to please," said Brittany.

"Piglet, I need you to come with me today to get a P.O. Box and buy some other stuff in your name. The goal is to hide behind your identity everything that we don't want anyone to know about," I said.

"What about Ms. Dewhurst? She knows Piglet's name," said Ashley.

"Ha! She won't be able to remember that name even under torture in three weeks. We need to refer to each other with Winnie-the-Pooh names until we get back home," I said chuckling.

"Why do you need me?" asked Marsha.

I said quickly, "It's going to take forever to get the drug lord to leave us alone. We will need you to do some stuff for us that requires valid ID. My Sergai Brzezinski ID is good, but yours is better... Think it through. The drug lord is looking for two girls and one boy, not three boys and a girl. Why would a set of rich kids live in a trailer park? Why would we bust our asses to clean up said trailer park? The goal is to blend in and be ignored. The A-Team is coming. I've set it up so that they will be hunting me on the east side of town instead of the west side."

The tea was good. Everything Brittany made tasted good. When we were done, I had Marsha help me unload the Beetle. The big screen TV was a welcome surprise. We put off installing it until later. On the way out, I got a different baseball cap.

I drove east. Marsha asked hesitantly, "Did your mother and father really get killed?"

I sighed and said, "Yeah, they were murdered in Dallas. The best guess is that a Colombian drug lord is convinced that they had something he wanted... When they did not have the information he sought he came to my house and tried to kill me... We ran... Finding you in my backup house was a blessing."

"Why do you want to have s.e.x with me, when you have Rabbit and Owl?"

"You don't understand guys. A girl asks for it in his own home... A guy would have to have superhuman resistance to say 'no', particularly with Ashley and Brittany right there... Everyone is twisted to one extent or another. I like the idea that the two of them watched as I had s.e.x with you, just as I like watching them have s.e.x with each other. I don't know why... If you refused to have s.e.x with me, I would be good with that. I would not try to kick you out. I..."

"What about afterwards... when you are in your home again?"

"Too far ahead to plan... My thinking right now is that you would make a good addition to my household. If you wanted to have s.e.x with us, then we would be up for that. How it would all work out, I do not know. I want you to remember. I do not screw over my friends. You help me now and you're fixed for life, if I survive this rough spot in the road. Piglet, whether you like it or not, you are not suited for living alone. Being a part of my household would not be the best solution, but it is the best you could expect given how things have been going for you." She became quiet and looked out the window.

When I crossed US 610, I stopped and called the president of Thunderbolt Security, Steven Brewer, using one of the payphone passthroughs. "Hi! What have you found out so far about this case?"

"Sir, the people responsible for this appear to be the Laurentia Cartel. In Colombia they are considered small. They have been making a lot of risky attempts to move up. How they became involved with your mother's sugar, I do not understand.

"The story I am getting is that the containers filled with the Panamanian sugar passed through customs with only a cursorily testing. Your mother had a good reputation, so they have not been checking her cargo very closely. They..."

"Wait... Something bothered me about the attack on my house. The attackers brought one eighteen-wheeler. The sugar shipment on Thursday was five shipping containers on flatbeds. Each eighteen-wheeler can have about 20 tons or the State of Texas gets upset. Most run at 18 tons to avoid that. So the single eighteen-wheeler was looking for a shipment of 20 tons... The guy who normally supervised the unloading said that the shipment on Thursdays was usually six containers, five with Panamanian sugar and one with Peruvian sugar... What did he say?... Oh, yeah, the Peruvian sugar would sit in the warehouse for a month. Last Thursday and the week before someone had bought the sugar right off the boat at $1.50/pound... Sugar sells at 10-40 cents/pound and a dollar/pound on the spot market... That Peruvian sugar was unloaded onto a flatbed and shipped directly to the customer... in its shipping container... That's it!... They weren't looking for 100 tons of sugar, they were looking for 20 tons of cocaine... Thursday a week ago, they had a test run... probably one pallet weighing a ton. Mr. Brewer, my mother has the equivalent of an air traffic control pit at her company. They track every single container that moves Saginaw Industries goods. Please find out where those Peruvian sugar shipments went those two Thursdays after they left the Port of Houston... For that matter, find out where the containers have been from picking up the sugar in Peru until they were unloaded in Houston. I got this feeling that the drug lord behind all this thinks that someone hijacked his cargo between Colombia and its destination... He's going nuts trying to figure that out, because the first shipment went so smoothly.

"The actions of the drug lord bespeak someone who is desperate. They need to resolve this situation quickly or the drug lord may not survive.

"Get me that information on the containers and we shall proceed."

"Sir, you are calling from a payphone in east Houston. If I can find that out, so can someone else," he said trying hard to avoid counting coup.

"Funny thing about that payphone, Mr. Brewer. Nothing is as it seems. We shall talk again, Mr. Brewer." I hung up... Then I realized that the Hispanic kids who hassled me might have gotten my license plates... Time for a change.

I called the same payphone, then had it call Megan Hunt who answered with, "Megan Hunt, how may I help you?"

"Hey! Megan, it's Taegan Shrike."

"Taegan, holy shit. How have things been the first day of your exile?"

"Nothing much. I have been trying to blend in. Are the police still after me?"

"Taegan, you killed twelve people. My information is that the bodies were literally blown apart. Don't tell me you got to use your Red Rider BB Gun?"

Buying a weapon that cost $10K that was designed to fire from the shoulder, even though you had to be at least 6'4" to wield it, had seemed crazy to everyone in my circle of friends. The recoil had left too many people on their a.s.s... and spectacularly bruised. "I have the bruises to prove it. You might want to have a sidebar about how hard it is to shoot a M82A2 from the shoulder.

"Let's go over some things I need to know... Are they buying that I exited the room through the top of the house using a hidden panel?"

She chortled. "Jenkins forced them to get a warrant. Your lawyer got the judge to limit the search to your room and the warehouse... If they found drugs, then the judge would grant a more general search... They found the panel, then broke it down and went up a ladder and found the rope... How they missed the rope in their search around the house, I do not know... They also believe that you somehow called a friend to come and pick you up... They found no drugs." She laughed delightedly. "Your mother had already sold the sugar. Those poor bastards went through over 200 tons of sugar in the clients' warehouses looking for drugs and found nothing. Their lawyers are going to sue for damages... From what I can tell the police from the narcotics division of Houston PD were all set to become heroes for busting the evil rich boy. Then they found nothing after testing a gazillion samples from the empty warehouse. They finally brought in the drug dogs... and still found nothing... They brought in the

cadaver dogs and found... a dead dog behind the warehouse."

"Billy was a good dog. I was devastated when he died when I was 10." Wait... Why would they find Billy after all these years? One of Life's Mysteries.

"Yeah, well. They're starting to believe that something was screwed up in the shipping. As in you got the wrong shipment."

"That's good, because I had come to that conclusion myself... If you want to do some investigation yourself, you might ask the Port Authority for a copy of all my mother's shipments of sugar for the last year... Get with the guy at your newspaper who reports sugar commodities. He'll tell you that her last two Thursday shipments were abnormal. Some nutjob bought a container of sugar, 20 tons, at $1.50/pound for the sugar. Who bought it and why? Where did the two containers go? What happened to the sugar after it reached its final destination?" I could hear her scribbling furiously. When she finished, I asked mischievously, "This is the start of the trail of the mystery. Guess where it leads? What will be at the end of the trail?"

"Your parents needed the money, so they somehow diverted the drugs, not knowing that the drug cartel would come after them."

I blinked, then said, "Nope. At the end, you will find that someone on the list of 31 names I sent you two weeks ago are involved somehow. Or rather some of them are. You need to find the movements of all those people, then compare them with the movements of all the lieutenants of the Laurentia Cartel."

"How, Taegan? That seems impossible."

"Megan, think of it as a training exercise. The older members of the newspaper will show you how to track a person. You might have to develop contacts with the DEA. They are going to be extremely interested in those 31 names, once you explain that that some or all of them somehow learned about my mother's sugar operation and took advantage of it to import drugs... Megan, an outsider would not have noticed that my mother imported 120 tons of sugar every week. It's impossible. It had to be someone within Saginaw Industries... I am beginning to believe that the goal was not to import the drugs, but kill my family so that someone on that list could move up in the standings."

"Taegan, is this one of your wild hunches that turns out to be true even though no one could believe it at first." Her brother, Michael, and I had done a LOT of things together. She had been s.u.c.k.e.d into too many of our plans... Sometimes I would just jump to a conclusion with minimal facts and... the conclusion was proved valid.

"Afraid so. The guys who came into my room tried to shoot my a.s.s. They should have wanted to take me prisoner for questioning... In the end this will be a ruse used to kill off my family... Look, I have to go. I will call again using another phone."

"Yeah, talk to you then. I appreciate your giving me this exclusive."

"Always willing to help out a lady."