Chapter 1

I guess I was always sort of a mean shit ass, I never started many fights but when someone jumped on me they were going to pay for it. I had figured out way back in grade school that if you were going to fight, fight to win, and make sure that the other guy paid a hell of a price for messing with you. There was a Gym that taught boxing, karate, judo, and several other forms of fighting about six blocks from my home and I started cleaning the gym and washing towels there when I was about 11 or 12. I did well in amateur boxing, and before I left for the Army I could beat any of the instructors in any form of fighting they wanted to use.

I did OK in high school making C's with an occasional B. College didn't interest me and I guess it really didn't matter anyway because I didn't have the money to go nor the grades to get in with. Teaching at the gym paid by the number of students you had and nobody but the gym owner ever made any money at it. After graduation I spent three weeks looking for a job without even coming close to getting one. I had about three thousand in the bank and it wouldn't last long. My parents both worked and I had two younger sisters and a brother younger than them. There was no way they could support me and I wouldn't ask. They were good, but lower middle class parents. I talked things over with them and made the choice to join the Army.

I wish I could say that I did well in the Army but the truth is, I knew the first day that I was not going to be a career soldier. I didn't mind being told what to do but I sure as hell didn't like the way they told me. One day I thought I was going to get some pay back. The drill Sargent was being his usual loud, obnoxious self and asked if there was any of us that thought we could whip his ass, and dumb ass me told him I could and I did, and I paid for it. I did every shit detail in the whole training company, all by myself.

I was assigned to the Infantry, just a plain ole foot soldier carrying a rifle and a ton of supplies. I wound up in the sand box getting shot at by crazy people wearing rags on their heads. I guess I got a little crazy myself and I slaughtered a few of the sons a bitches and then I pissed on their dead raggless heads. That little trick bit me in the ass and I had to report to the company commander. He told me that he needed to explain the rules of war to me, and I listened to everything he said. Then I told him that with all due respect to his rank, that if there were rules to be played by, then it was a god damned game, not a war. He told me that as right as I was, we were still going to do it by the rules. I left without saying anything else. After that, I got sent on every one way mission that came up and when I was shot at, people died.

In my third year of service I was once again playing games in the sand box when a rag head got lucky with his wild full automatic fire, and tore a small chunk out of my knee. Unfortunately I had to kill him long before I was through punishing him because I was bleeding and we needed to move. They treated my knee at a field hospital and sent me to a hospital in Germany where it was determined that I was going to have some permanent damage and would probably be discharged. I figured they would send me to some place miles from home for rehab but I was reassigned to Fort Sam Houston, San Antonio Military Medical Center and for the first time in almost 4 years I went home. San Antonio had not changed much, employment was still a problem and I knew I would have to look somewhere else for a job because the Army wanted to get rid of me the minute I showed up.

I hadn't spent much more than the three thousand I had when I enlisted so when the Army released me I had a few choices I could make. I bought a full sized van from a neighbor, he was behind on payments and the bank was trying to find it. I gave him three hundred and paid it off. It was five years old and just a plain cargo van but it was going to be my home for a while.

The day I was leaving one of my high school friends called and talked a while, he was broke, unemployed, and had a wife and kid. He was trying to figure out how to ask me for a loan and told me he had a pistol for sale, a 10 mm with about 30 rounds of ammo and two extra magazines for $200 so I told my folks I was going to stop and see him on the way out of town, and I drove out to where he was living with his in laws. The pistol looked to be almost new but very dirty. No problem, he just happened to have a cleaning kit he would throw in. I gave him the money and left before he hit me up for more. He told me there was a gravel road about a mile north and on the left and I could try it out there. I decided I better do that just in case I wanted my money back. I turned on the gravel road and found a place to turn around, I was about half a mile from the pavement and the brush and trees were so thick you couldn't see more than 30 or 40 feet in any direction. I backed into an opening and went around to the side cargo door. I set down on the floor of the van with my feet on the ground thinking I might be better off cleaning the pistol before I tried it. I had been there about half an hour and had the pistol clean and back together. I had just started to load one of the magazines when I heard a car coming down the road. My first thought was that I had been set up, and my friend was going to become my enemy. Since the pistol was not loaded, I picked up the tire tool that was laying in the floor and stepped into the brush.

It was a car and a large SUV and they went past the turn off that I backed into and stopped. I moved further into the brush and waited ... And that is where this adventure began.

They got out of their vehicles and looked around, then started talking. They were not looking for me, this was a drug deal, a big one. One of them had a large roll along type suitcase and he opened it. The other guy looked through a few packages of bills and then the other guy started checking the packages of drugs. Now I just don't like drugs or drug dealers so I decided I would just slip up and knock them in the head and call the law. As it turned out it was not the best plan. It was just getting dark but you could still see good enough and one of them saw me and reached for a gun. I ran at him and whacked him on the side of his head a little harder than I intended. The other guy rushed toward me so I whacked him a good one. It was quiet for a minute then the SUV started bouncing a bit and I could hear someone mumbling. I picked up the gun and went to the side and looked in.

And that is where I met Tori. She had duct tape over her mouth and her hands were tied with tape. I put the gun in my waistband and reached in my pocket for my trusty Old Timer and cut her hands loose. She pulled the tape off her mouth and asked who the hell I was, what was I doing here, and did I have a car. After we got that out of the way she said we better grab the money and go. She had a suitcase in the back seat of the SUV and she grabbed it and I took the suitcase full of money, we loaded up and left. She talked nonstop for 15 minutes before I could even ask her name. Her name is Victoria "Tori" Ramos, and I am William "Willy" Culver. She was full of information and on her advice I wiped down the drug dealers pistol and threw it away. Then took apart the pistol I bought, wiped the parts and threw them away because everybody knows that there are dozens of stolen 10 mm pistols floating around San Antonio and if you get caught with one your ass is going down for robbing the gun store. Thank you Tori.

Tori's family had been in the dirt construction and landscaping business. She was 18 and had a driver's license to prove it. Her parents had long been dead and she had lived with her brother and helped in the business doing whatever job needed done. Her brother started using drugs about two years ago and had become progressively worse. He had traded her to the drug dealer for drugs and helped the drug dealer tie her and tape her mouth. He was taking her somewhere to sell her. She could not go home and if she went to friends or relatives he would find her. So, as she explained, that is why she is going with me. I asked if she needed to go home to get her belongings and she said she had everything she wanted in the suitcase.

We talked over where we should go and she said she would like to live somewhere that was not a desert. We stopped at a truck center to eat and get gas and bought a road atlas. We bought an ice chest and some sandwich and snack food and got on I-10 headed west. The closest mountains were going to be in southern New Mexico so I told her to check the road atlas for the best way. We were about a hundred miles from San Antonio when we started talking about maybe going to Mexico when we went through El Paso and I remembered the vehicle check points and told her we needed to go north and not get within a hundred miles of the border. I really didn't want to explain to the Border Patrol just what I was doing with a suitcase full of money. The speed limit on Interstate 10 in west Texas is 80 mph and I set the cruise on 79. I bought gas in Fort Stockton but didn't see a motel. We went northwest from Fort Stockton to Pecos and stopped at a Holiday Inn, the sun was coming up and I was tired. I got a 10:00 wake up call, took a shower and went to sleep.

It seemed that I had just laid down when the phone rang, I got up took a shower, dressed, and woke Tori. It took her 30 minutes but when she came out of the bathroom my first thought was Wow! This is a very good looking girl. I had never seen shorts and a T shirt looking that good. Her hair had been in a ponytail and she was wearing warm up exercise looking clothes yesterday. I told her to put two thousand dollars in her purse and I got the same amount. There was a Walmart across the street from the motel and we bought another foam mattress, sleeping bag, pillow, and two blankets for her to sleep on. Then we got a dozen plastic storage containers of about two quart size, another ice chest, a camp stove and fuel, lighters, a lantern, two flashlights, and a shovel. We also added to our picnic supplies and Tori got some personal stuff while I gathered a few more items.

We decided we would bury most of the money in plastic containers somewhere in the mountains but it looked like we might need more containers. Tori spent some time arranging the back of the van and made an estimate of two million dollars in the suitcase. We tried for hours to figure out a way to legitimize the money but couldn't think of anything. We continued in a northwest direction until we got to Artesia, New Mexico and turned west. We finally got to the mountains and stopped for gas at a convenience store in Cloudcroft, I noticed that the forest ranger station was across the street so we went and played tourist. We got some maps of the forest roads and trails and Tori found out about places to see. One of the places was Sunspot where a solar observatory was located. It was too late to go so we checked in to a motel and went looking for a place to eat.

Tori talked to everyone she got close to and I was beginning to think that the duct tape might have been a good idea, but she did get information about the area. She had a list of things she wanted to see and I didn't have any better ideas so we wound up visiting everything within fifty miles. We had visited two casinos and used up 20 rolls of quarters, watched horse races, wood carving with a chain saw, and been in every curio shop we could find. We were staying in motels and paying for everything with cash. Other than the motels requiring that I have a credit card on file in case we trashed the room, the area was cash user friendly. On our second trip to Sunspot, Tori started talking to some people that lived in a community about 15 miles south on the same highway. They were there showing some relatives around the area. It was around 9:00 am and she wanted to go see the little town the people told her about. They claimed you could buy lots there for as little as $3,500 and she wanted to see a mountain lot that could be bought that cheap, so down the road we went.

The road was paved going into the community and it had a few blocks of pavement in what was the business area. We found the Post Office and a Real Estate office, we found the water department office in a big log cabin building and Tori stopped everyone she saw and talked to them. She said we needed to go to the Real Estate office and get a map of the place. There were gravel roads running all over the place and direction didn't seem to mean a lot, they wound around until I was dizzy. The lady that sold us the map was nice and drove us around in a 4 wheel drive pickup. We looked at a lot of lots, the cheaper ones came with rappelling lessons, they had a slope of at least 45 degrees and some were worse. There were a few flat ones with ravines and washed out gullies running through them. All the time we were looking Tori was chattering away with the lady. When we got back to the office I was ready to go but Tori followed her in and continued to talk. About five minutes later the lady told her she would call and ask so I started paying attention. I tried to interrupt their conversation to find out what was going on but Tori just kept motioning for me to be quiet. They were talking about 3 lots on one road and two on the next road and also two other lots.

The lady started filling out some papers and told me to sign where she had marked them with a high-liter. Tori went out to the van and came back in with a handful of money and I was still wondering what the hell I was getting in to. We got 7 receipts and Tori told the lady to talk to someone about the other lots and we left. When we got in the van she told me we had just bought 7 lots for $22,750 I was suddenly very glad it was not my money. Tori was wound up like an eight day clock and talking a mile a minute. She was going to clean that money for us by improving the lots and re-selling them. All we had to do is ... buy a small bulldozer, a skid loader an excavator, a dump truck, and a trailer.

When I told her that I had heard that when you spent over $10,000 in cash it was reported to the government and they came asking questions, she told me to divide 22,750 by 7 and see what I got and that was why she paid for each lot and got a receipt for each of them. Yeah right, now we go to Alamogordo and see what we can find in the way of equipment. We got to Alamogordo and she changed her mind and told me to find a bank. She climbed in the back and got another handful of money. I told her you couldn't open an account without an address and she showed me the post office Box number of the real estate office and said that the lady told her if she had any trouble have them call her and she would explain where we were living. We have 7 addresses and we are living in a travel trailer that we haven't bought yet. Yeah Buddy, sounds simple to me.

I'll say this for the girl at the bank, she never had a chance. Tori had her convinced that we had a nice little place up the mountain a ways, and had just moved here from San Antonio and we used my parents address there. We now had $18,500 divided in separate accounts and we each had a check book. I noticed she had $500 more than I did but thought it wise to say nothing. The girl at the bank told us where a heavy equipment rental place was, so off we went again.

The guy at the rental place didn't have what Tori said we needed but we did get a lead on a guy who was wanting to sell some equipment. When we found the guy, I was not so sure I wanted Tori close to him, he sure was giving her a looking over. The sign on the window said he installed septic tanks, storm shelters, culverts, and half a dozen other things. He introduced himself as Grady and asked what we needed, Tori told him we wanted to buy some used construction equipment and the guy at the rental place said he had some for sale. He told her he would sell everything he had because he was going to have to go check into the VA Hospital in Albuquerque. He said he had a barn full of equipment and he would sell her the barn to go with it. I walked around and watched as she climbed into a Bobcat loader and told the guy that they had one of the same model before her brother sold it. She asked if she could try it out and he told her he would enjoy seeing her operate it. She drove it outside and then it looked like the thing had gone crazy. She had it spinning around and the bucket was moving up and down and going through all kinds of moves. She asked how much, and he asked her how much of this other stuff was she going to buy.

Tori played with all the equipment and asked me if I could drive the dump truck because she had no idea how to shift a 13 speed gear box. I told her I had a car once with a 5 speed and did that qualify me. Grady said he could have me driving it in 5 minutes, I had some doubt but just said I was willing to learn. I set in the office looking through some magazines and listened to them argue. She told him they needed to start writing it down because he kept changing numbers on her, He said bullshit you're using Meskin math. They called each other some more names and then came in the office and got a sheet of paper and a pen and argued some more It looked like they were having fun so I continued reading magazines. Grady called somebody in a town north by about 50 miles and asked if they were still trying to sell the small dozer and got a price, then told them he wanted the trailer they got with it for that price and they would have to bring it to him. He hung up and said he had to let the little bastard make $2,000 on it but it was worth it. He told Tori to add a Kamatsu dozer with trailer for $40,000 and he would go show her the travel trailer and house. She told me I could come along if I quit asking so many questions. They thought that was funny and it might have been, I wasn't really paying attention.

Tori got everything that Grady owned but his personal papers, clothes and enough other stuff that we had to rent a 6 X 10 storage building. He told her he would call his two kids when he got checked in to the VA and tell them where he was, she was to give them the keys to the storage unit and they each had a cardboard box about 6" square with their money divided the way he wanted it done. The boxes each had a name on it and they were wrapped in tape. He even had some papers they were each to sign before they got the boxes. We spent 5 days moving things as he went through them and going to the land title place and the courthouse to transfer the truck and pickup titles, and get a business license. The boxes went in the safe and we drove Grady to the VA hospital in Albuquerque. On the way he told us that he figured we might have come by the money in something other than a normal way and Tori told him the whole story and that she was sorry we had to pay him in cash. He told her it was his last payback to the two rotten ass kids that ran off and left him. I think leaving Grady at the hospital was the hardest thing Tori had ever done. They were both crying. He told her she had bought his whole life for $280,000 and if the kids didn't show up within 6 months to claim his personal stuff in the storage unit, she could consider the boxes a refund. He told her not to come back to the hospital and we got in the pickup and left.

Today was the day for moving some equipment up the mountain, right after we went by the title company to sign the paperwork on the 7 lots. They were officially ours and Tori could start showing me how we were going to make our fortunes. I still didn't see anything other than a lot of work but I had no where I would rather be. I could tell that the 30 minutes of driving lessons in the dump truck were nowhere near enough, I was going to be shifting a million times getting up the mountain. I had the excavator and the Bobcat on the trailer, Grady had told me the truck could pull it easy, just always make sure to lay the boom on the excavator as low as I could, but I wasn't having an easy time of it. Tori was behind me in the pickup pulling the travel trailer. Our plan was to leave it at the RV Park that was just outside the town or township, or community, or whatever you called it. The locals called Alamogordo, Alamo so we started calling them A-Town and T-Town. We got a spot in the RV Park close to the bathrooms for the travel trailer and got it hooked up, or I should say I got it hooked up while Tori talked to the couple that were running the place. She said we needed to stop and talk to her friend at the real estate office and got in the pickup and said she would see me there.

I parked across the street from the post office/real estate building, mostly off the pavement, and went looking for Tori. I could hear her talking to her friends about my truck driving, she told them it took me so long to change gears that I needed to shift back down because I had lost all my speed. When she got through talking we drove to our lot with the big ravine and we left the truck and trailer still loaded and got in the pickup and went to the five lots that were back to back. The elevation change between the fronts of the lots on one road was about 50 or 60 feet higher than the front of the lots on the other road. The lots were back to back and we had 3 lots on the lower road and 2 lots on the higher road, and I still did not know the plan so I made her explain what the hell she was trying to do.

We were going to use the 3rd lot for a ramp and make the center of our flat area about where the lines of the four lots that were back to back made a cross. We would have to move a lot of dirt and we will dump it in the washouts on the other 2 lots making them level. She didn't think we would be through with the 5 lots for a long time but we would have plenty of fill for whatever we needed it for. Before the day was over we had found the corner boundary markers which were rebar drove into the ground. The ones along the road were a bitch to find and on 2 of them we just measured from one of those we found and drove a wood stake. We tied orange engineer ribbon on all the stakes making them a bit more visible through the brush. She was going to use the excavator to cut and fill enough to get the dozer up to where the flat area would be, then she would push the dirt down the driveway and I would use the Bobcat to load the dump truck and dump it in the washouts on the other lots. See just simple as shit, Yeah Buddy. Two days later the ramp was good enough to get the dozer up, maybe. Tori gave me lessons on running the excavator but I made the action all jerky, when she used it the bucket never stopped moving. The bucket would grab a bite move and dump it and go for another bite just smooth as silk. She said she was in the first grade when she started running one. I asked how she reached the pedals and she said she couldn't if she set in the seat, she just kind of leaned against it. I think part of that story was bullshit but I didn't tell her.

The people that live in T-Town all have several different jobs and if you needed something done you just asked someone and they would tell you who to see. We were in the post office and the woman asked how we were doing on the project and Tori told her we were going to have to get a chain saw and take down some trees before we could get the bulldozer going. She told us to just go see Jackie and she and her husband would come take them down and drag them off. Then she showed us on the map where they had a little sawmill set up so, off we went to see Jackie. They were sawing, but when the cut finished they shut off the saw so we could talk. No problem, they hopped in their truck and followed us back to the lots. Tori showed them what we were doing and what area was going to be cleared, then said we were going to get the dozer tomorrow. They were going to get 8 big trees and a bunch of little stuff and said they would get it done tomorrow. We would get a 3rd of the cut lumber. Tori told her to go ahead and sell it, stack it, or whatever because we didn't need it right now but thought we would need some timber for a small bridge in the near future.

We left the pickup and took the dump truck down the mountain to A-Town. On the way Tori said we were going to need a small chainsaw for brush, some chain oil and a gas can for pre-mixed gas. Also she wanted to get a prepaid phone at Walmart so she could call her girlfriend Katrina. Then she sprung it on me, Katrina's family was in the concrete and brick business. Tori had worked for them quite a bit after her brother started running off all their business. Katrina's family paid her brothers twice what they paid her and even paid Tori more and she didn't know anything about the business when she started. Katrina could drive the dump truck, dozer, Bobcat, and excavator. She could lay bricks and finish cement. And here was the clincher, she could use a transit and level and figure grades. Then I made another mistake, I told her she could hire anyone she trusted.

We got the dozer hooked up to the dump truck then took the van shopping. We stopped at the bank to make a deposit and get small bills and rolls of change. Up in T-Town change was always a problem. Tourists always sprung large bills on the people at the little store and the sandwich shop putting them short of change. Walmart had a 14" chainsaw, oil and gas can. We also got more groceries and a phone. We had to get a battery pack, cable and a charger for the phone. You can plug it into the battery pack and talk without charging it. I left Tori talking on the phone and finished loading a few other things, an hour later and we were headed back up the mountain. The dozer is heavier than the bobcat and excavator combined and Tori told me it was about as small as you can get. All of our equipment is a little on the light side for what we were doing but it's what we've got. She said the only thing she would really like to replace is the excavator, it really needed to be bigger. It was fine digging but didn't have enough break out power to pull up big rocks. She had never had to deal with as much rock as what we had here. She thought it might just be learning how.

The dozer went up the ramp without any problem and she spun it around and started pushing dirt down the ramp. She backed up and got more dirt several times before she made it to the bottom. It already looked better than the road at the bottom. Some of the roads around here are real bad. If no one lives on the road, they don't grade it. The high road does not have any thing on it, and the lower one has one house at the end but no one lives there full time. The dirt she's pushing down looks sort of like caliche and large gravel that they use for road building. I moved the dump truck so she could push the dirt onto the flat area where I would use the bobcat to load the truck then haul it to the other lot and dump it. I struggled along for two days getting farther behind when the real estate lady drove down the cross street and honked. A pickup behind her pulled in and stopped in front of the truck and two girls got out. Tori pushed another load down the ramp and stopped, climbed down and started talking to them. I shut off the bobcat and climbed out.

The girls were Katrina or Trina and Julieta but you better call me Julie. They were happy to meet Willy the crazy bastard that takes a tire tool to a gun fight. I laughed and told them that guns make too much noise. We decided to shut down for the day and go to the RV Park and figure out how we were going to work things.

We got out the camp stove so we wouldn't have to cook in the trailer and the girls were laughing about Julie getting fired for dropping a scaffold board on a guy who had been giving her a bad time on the construction job she was working. She said she waited trying to catch him without his hardhat but finally dropped it on his shoulder. She said she had told him at least a dozen times to leave her alone. They seemed happy to be here and would stay as long as we needed them. I was thinking that forever would be fine with me. Tori and Trina started talking about the lots and what they could do with them to make them look the best for the least. Trina got a transit and several long scales out of the back of her truck and brought them over in the shade to show Tori how to set it up and how to go about figuring the difference in elevation between two points. Julie and I fixed potatoes, corn on the cob and my specialty, smoked spam. She told me that she could make some killer Beanie Weenies, and was also pretty good at Post Toasties. I told her she must have gone to the same cooking school as Tori, Oreo cookies and Coca-Cola was one of her best breakfasts.

The girls decided that they could all fit in the bed and I could sleep on the fold out couch, we all walked to the bathrooms and I could hear the girls in the shower acting crazy. I finished up and waited for them and we walked back to the trailer. When I woke up, Julie was in bed with me. I woke her up getting out of bed and I grabbed my bag and headed to the bathroom. I showered and shaved and as I was leaving the girls were just getting there. I went back to the trailer and folded up the couch, cleaned up coke cans and empty cookie package and took them to the trash dump. The girls put away the stuff they had carried to the bathroom and we loaded up the transit in the big pickup, locked everything up and I headed to the little store to see if it was open and if they had coffee. The sandwich shop was about 50 yards from the store and there was 4 cars there so I drove on down. I told the girls that the sign on the door said the hours were from 10 to 2. We went in and the girl told us that anytime there were enough workers in the area they opened for breakfast. I told her the girls already ate all the cookies but I would have a sausage and egg burrito and coffee. I told the woman that we would be here for breakfast in the morning and lunch today and tomorrow but we would be gone over the weekend. We should be back all next week. The girls got a Coke and we went to work