Chapter 7: Battered Bowling Ball

In a football game, the block would have probably earned Matt at least a fifteen-yard penalty on top of being ejected from the game. In real life, the block earned him bruised ribs. He also had a large knot on the back of his head from where it hit the pavement, and a serious headache. “This was,” he mused, “one of those cases where you could legitimately say, ‘Yeah, but you should see the other guys.’”

The two men had been running down a very slight incline. When Matt hit their knees, he heard a loud pop that made him cringe, even though he could tell by where the popping came from that it wasn’t from him.

Both men went sprawling, inflicting major road rash on their hands, as well as their chests and faces. They both had been reaching under their shirts when they got to Matt, intending to pull their guns once they passed him. The guns had skidded about ten feet away.

Groaning from the pain, Matt struggled to his feet with a Herculean effort and headed for the two guns. One goon was trying to regain his feet and pushed himself up on his hands and knees as Matt approached. Without consciously thinking, Matt lined up like a field goal kicker and tried to launch the guy’s nuts through a pair of imaginary goalposts fifty yards away.

The goon collapsed face down, screaming. Matt chuckled, thinking that his legs were so tired that a real field goal attempt might have only gone two yards.

The second guy was still curled up holding his knee, screaming. Matt heard a car alarm and then car tires squealing. Affording himself a second to look up, he saw the girls in their car hauling ass for the far exit. “Now, to keep from getting shot by the cops,” he thought as he covered the goons with one of their pistols. He was so winded he almost forgot to disable the safety. “Oops, no safety on a Glock,” he thought. A couple of minutes later he heard the first siren.

“Duh, dumbshit,” he thought, and called Roger.

“I’m about a hundred feet inside the main parking lot. Let the cops know that the goons are down for the count and I’m sitting down. I have both of their guns, covering them.”

“What?” Roger exploded. “How the hell did you manage that?”

“Call the cops, first. I’ll explain when you get here. Maybe I’ll be able to catch my breath by then,” he said and hung up. By then Matt could hear enough sirens that he thought the entire Santa Cruz Police Department was headed his way.

The first car to arrive skidded around the corner and into the parking lot driveway. Seeing two men down on the ground and Matt sitting there, the officer skidded his car ninety degrees to block the entrance and to put the car between himself and the three suspects.

With one last glance at the two men, Matt set the gun down and raised his hands even before the officer was out of the car.

“Down on your stomach,” he shouted.

Matt complied, hollering, “Please keep an eye on those two.”

Rather than approach, the officer stayed where he could cover the three of them and called in on his radio. More cars began arriving, including some entering through the exits.

They quickly had the three in cuffs. “Not him,” a female voice shrieked. Matt turned his head as far as he could and saw the blonde standing up in the back seat of a police car, her upper body hanging out through the window.

“He’s the one who warned us,” she hollered when the cop holding Matt pointed at him.

A supervisor walked up talking on his cell phone. “Blue jeans, light green T-shirt, and an Anaheim Angels ball cap,” he told someone. “What’s your name?” he asked.

“Matt Young,” he answered. The officer repeated the answer into the phone.

“No kidding?” he asked the cell phone. “What’s your pen name?” he asked Matt.

“TK Owens,” Matt answered quietly so only the two officers could hear.

“Cut him loose,” the sergeant told the officer holding Matt.

“C’mon, Sarge,” the officer whined teasingly. “He’s wearing an Angels ball cap. Can’t we arrest him for that?”

Both officers laughed at the stricken look on Matt’s face. “Kid, you’re a freaking hero. The news crews will be here shortly,” he said.

“Not a good idea,” Matt said adamantly. “Get those girls the hell out of here so the Russians don’t find out who they are. Keep their names off the radio and don’t put them in any reports--same with mine. My life won’t be worth a plugged nickel if they find out I was involved and who I am.”

“Shit, I didn’t even think of that. Get him out of here,” the sergeant said.

“My car is just over there. Why don’t I get in it and leave? I still have to meet my friend who’s coming here with the feds.”

“You okay to drive? You look a bit banged up,” the Sergeant queried.

“I’m not going far. I just need to pick my friends up. One of them can drive.” He waved Matt away and turned to the car the girls were in.

“Get in the car and get them out of here. Have them use their own cell phones to call their parents. Have the parents pick them up somewhere far away from the station and out of the public eye. These clowns are Russian Mafia,” he hollered at his officers. It took a second for his meaning to sink in, but the officers were quickly moving to get the girls out of there. Once Matt was in his car, he pulled out slowly, fighting the impulse to flee. A block away, he pulled into a 7-11 and called Carla.

“Where are you? What happened?” Carla asked anxiously.

“I’m fine. The cops let me get out of there before the news crews showed up. It wouldn’t be a good idea for my face to be plastered everywhere so the Russians can figure out who I am. Can you meet me by the exit in ten minutes? That should give Brian a chance to get to their car and pick everyone else up.”

“Okay, ten minutes,” Carla agreed.

Matt called Roger back. “Where are you?” Roger asked.

“Still close to the Boardwalk. I have to pick the girls up in a few minutes.”

“Come by the hospital. That’s where we’re picking up the two Russians in about twenty minutes. Here’s the address,” Roger said. Matt wrote it down and went to pick up the girls. They were right in front of the park’s exit. Brian’s car was there, too.

“Hop in, I’ve got to meet Roger at the hospital in a few minutes,” he told the girls.

“Ohmigod, there’s blood all over the back of your head,” Sue exclaimed from the back seat. That was news to Matt.

“I hit my head on the pavement,” he replied. I’m a bit sore, but I’ll be fine,” he assured them. He wished someone would reassure him. He hurt all over.

When they got to the hospital, Matt turned off the lapel pin camera, popped the trunk and gave Carla the keys. He dug out the bottle of Dart and put it in his pocket.

When Roger found Matt, he took one look at him and ordered him into the green van in their eight-vehicle convoy.

“Did you remember your eye drops?” he asked quietly. Matt patted his pocket.

“Are you okay with driving fast?” Roger asked Carla.

“Oh, yeah,” she replied, grinning confidently. Charlie, who was driving the other car, assured Roger that he didn’t mind driving fast either.

“You’re supposed to use a bowling ball to bowl with, dummy,” Roger teased Matt as he led him to the green van. Once inside, he had the doctor in the van check Matt over.

“You the one that took down those two?” the doctor asked as he examined the back of Matt’s head. Matt nodded ... and groaned.

“Yeah, I imagine you’ve got quite a headache,” the doctor chuckled. “I checked the other two over before they were hauled off and you’re in a lot better shape than they are,” he added as both he and Roger laughed.

Twenty minutes later, the doctor declared that Matt’s ribs were probably only bruised, but he wanted them X-rayed in the morning. He didn’t think that Matt had a concussion, and he’d survive the scrapes and bruises. The bleeding from the back of his scalp had stopped. When the doctor started to give Matt something for the pain, Roger warned him off.

“Give him something milder. I need him reasonably alert to back me up while I interrogate those two,” he explained, surprising the doctor. Barely an hour later, they pulled up at the same store that Matt had used Monday. He hobbled in and bought the zip ties and pitchers, as well as cloth towels and paper towels, getting odd looks from the cashier. Only then did Matt remember the blood on his shirt and in his hair.

Once they got to the same house as before, others carried the two men inside and secured them to the chairs. Then Roger shooed everyone else out. Matt gave Roger the bottle and he put one drop in each man’s mouth before handing the bottle back to Matt.

“They’ll search us when we leave,” he whispered. “Just tell them that your eyes get dry from staring at the computer screen when you write. By the way, I heard what you did. That was pure genius--stupid, but pure genius nonetheless,” he laughed. “That you could think up something like that on the spur of the moment is why your books sell so well. Your scenarios may not always be what others would have done, but they’re plausible.”

After four minutes, Matt started filling the pitchers of water for Roger, even though it was painful. A minute later, Roger turned on his cell phone camera. Fifteen minutes after he started recording, Matt and Roger exited the house and Roger swapped cell phones again.

“The guy with the busted-up knee is the head honcho. He went into the field to help after the two raids Monday rescued the girls in those two houses and significantly reduced the number of goons he had available.

“He has a contract to fulfill or he’s a dead man. The other two squads working for him are helping by collecting additional girls. He and his two lieutenants joined the hunt trying to help replace the rescued girls,” Roger reported.

“I can’t believe you got both of them to talk,” the man in charge gasped.

“You saw what he did to those two,” Roger commented as he motioned to Matt. “One has a ruptured gonad and the other has a torn ACL. How much more pain do you think they want to endure? Having him grinning viciously at them gave me everything I needed for them to believe they were in for much more pain if they didn’t talk,” Roger bullshitted.

“Oh, we even washed their faces for them,” he added, tossing the supervisor one of the wet towels as they walked away. The head guy started laughing.

“Take him home and feed him. Then, put him to bed. You’ll have to do most of the work tonight,” he told the girls. “And be careful of his ribs. They’re probably just bruised but the doc will make arrangements to X-ray them in the morning.”

He had them wait for a few minutes while he got a briefcase from one of the cars. “Monday’s Russians donated these. They’re already registered to you and I arranged for a special federal law enforcement concealed carry permit,” he said as he handed Matt the briefcase. “You’ll probably want to buy some sport coats and have them tailored so you can wear a belt holster,” he said, pantomiming holstering a gun in the back of his waistband.

Twenty minutes later, Matt and the girls were in the resort’s parking lot where his family gently mobbed him. Sue had kept his family apprised of their whereabouts and let them know when they were on the way back. Matt was glad that he’d thought to wash his hair in the sink at the interrogation house when they finished. He had wrung out one of the wet towels and used it to get most of the water out of his hair. The cut on his head was so small that the doctor needed a magnifying glass to find it. It bled so much because even small scalp injuries bleed a lot.

The pill the doctor gave Matt when they finished the interrogations was doing a yeoman’s job and by the time they got back to the resort, he was feeling almost no pain.

Gina took her overnight bag to their suite, using Sue’s key to get in. Since she couldn’t eat dinner with them, Matt gave her cash so she could buy dinner.

Everyone wanted to know more about what happened and Matt retold most of the story while they ate. Despite being a bit loopy from the medicine, he didn’t talk about how they really got the Russians to talk.

“What were you thinking doing something so dangerous?” his mom asked, clearly upset.

“One of the girls looked a bit like Sheila and I realized it could have been my sisters. If I didn’t do everything in my power to stop them, I wouldn’t be able to look at myself in the mirror,” he replied.

“You’re right,” she conceded emotionally. “I’m proud of you.”

Unlike Monday’s attack, this one made the news. However, it was downplayed as a jilted boyfriend confronting his former girlfriend. The police said that they had responded in force because someone had reported that the boyfriend had a gun. They claimed that there was no gun and they released the boyfriend into the custody of his parents.

Gina, Sue, and Carla were reasonably gentle with Matt when they went to bed, but they were still happy when everyone finally drifted off to sleep.

Friday May 31

In the morning, the three girls let Matt sleep in and ordered breakfast from room service. They had Gina for dessert. By the time Matt woke up, the heavy-duty painkiller had worn off. He was in no shape to do anything but breathe and keep his eyes closed, and even doing those two things hurt. Gina left about 10:00 and Carla called Roger to ask about the X-rays. He came over and let them know that the local hospital was expecting Matt. They would bill the government.

He also let them know that the FBI had raided the last two houses last night. They rescued twenty-seven girls and captured or killed all the kidnappers. He still didn’t say which agency or agencies were involved, but Matt figured they weren’t supposed to know.

As soon as Roger left, both girls insisted on taking him to the hospital right then. “What happened to my two submissives? They sure got bossy all of a sudden,” Matt thought while chuckling quietly so it didn’t hurt too badly. He convinced the girls that the three of them should eat lunch first, so he hobbled to the nearest restaurant. After a quick lunch, Carla drove them to the hospital.

There, he learned that the doctor yesterday had wanted to postpone the X-rays until this morning because some small fractures aren’t visible on an X-ray right away. They waited an hour for the doctor, who then sent him for a series of X-rays and a scan of his head. They waited another half hour before the doctor let Matt know that his ribs were severely bruised, but not broken. The X-ray of Matt’s head and the scan confirmed the doc’s diagnosis yesterday of no concussion.

Earlier Matt had taken ibuprofen, which reduced his headache and made the pain from his ribs more bearable--unless he moved or breathed. The doctor gave him a painkiller that wouldn’t make him loopy like the one last night, but eased the pain better than ibuprofen. The muscles of Matt’s legs still ached from the strenuous exertion yesterday, reminding him of the first week of high school football practice each year.

When they got back to the room, Sue pulled the laptop from its hiding place. Matt definitely wasn’t about to get down on his hands and knees. He doubted that he would be able get back up if he did. He set everything up to start writing, but drew a blank. He knew what he had written so far, as well as where he intended to take the story. He even knew how he planned to get there. He just couldn’t start.

“What’s wrong?” Sue asked when she noticed him just sitting there, staring at his laptop.

“I don’t know,” he replied. “I’ve had writer’s block before and couldn’t envision where to take a story. Sometimes, I didn’t know how to get where I wanted to go, or how I wanted the dialog to go. I know all those things but my mind seems to be cluttered with stuff keeping me from using it.”

She called Carla over and they helped get Matt sitting on the bed with his back against the headboard and the laptop in his lap. Each one lay next to him, Sue on his left and Carla on the right. They had their heads against his thighs and just lay there contentedly. Matt closed his eyes and a minute later, he was smiling.

When he had first closed his eyes, it was like being in the center of a whirlwind. The whirlwind consisted of random thoughts, including mental snapshots of nearly everything that had happened since their arrival Sunday. Also included were his emotions and the book. Surprising Matt, the story he glimpsed now was far more complex than what he had first envisioned. Originally, he had thought it a tetralogy, a four-book series, but what he now envisioned would take eight to ten or more books to complete. Fortunately, he only needed to make a few minor changes to Dying Breath to set the stage for the longer series.

Matt also realized that he let Carla and Sue bring too many women to their bed. He admitted to himself that he had enjoyed the sex. However, he realized that’s all it was. Sure, he came to care about each of the girls, but nowhere near the way he cared about Carla and Sue. He also cared about the two girls he had rescued yesterday, even though he never touched either of them and didn’t even know their names. Well, except that neither girl was named Stella.

In the end, Matt realized that he had envisioned this vacation as time to spend with the girls and to write. He figured the three of them would do some things together, like Santa Cruz. He also felt that the girls would want to do things with his sisters. Matt had felt that he would get a few hours to write each day. The unexpected excitement yesterday and Monday and the unexpected women had severely curtailed how much writing he did.

As the whirlwind in his mind slowed and finally stilled, the chaff had been eliminated and the important things remained: his family, Carla, Sue, his writing, and surprisingly, Roger.

When Matt opened his eyes, he could have started writing. Instead, he enjoyed the simple pleasure of feeling the naked skin of the two girls under his hands. He wasn’t fondling them; he simply had his hands resting on their naked hips and drank in the warmth while relishing the soft smoothness of their skin and the gentle feminine curves beneath his hands.

A ringing woke Matt up. It woke both girls up, too. Sue answered the phone and asked, “Dinner’s in half an hour. Are you up to walking over there?”

“Yeah,” he groaned as he tried to move a little.

“Half an hour sounds good,” she said before hanging up.

The girls helped him stand. Matt hugged each of them as he thanked them, telling them that their closeness was just what he had needed today. They were quickly redressed and Matt was reaching for the door when someone knocked.

Looking through the peephole, Matt didn’t recognize the man. He wore a suit with the resort’s logo and had a resort nametag. He also noticed one of the resort’s golf carts behind him, so he opened the door.

“Mr. Young?” he queried.

“Yeah?”

“We received a visit from two FBI agents a short time ago. They informed us that you were injured yesterday assisting them and asked us to extend every courtesy to you, including bringing you this cart to make it easier to get around the resort,” he said, motioning to the cart behind him. “Just park it in the same spot each night and someone will replace it with a fully charged cart. If there is anything else we can do, please don’t hesitate to call my assistant or me,” he said as he handed Matt his business card.

Matt thanked him and they shook hands. The manager noticed Matt wince and made the handshake very brief.

Since they were ready to go to dinner the manager drove them to the restaurant, showing Sue and Carla how to operate the cart.

The trio arrived at the restaurant early and were on their second soda when the others arrived. From behind, his mom hugged him gently around the shoulders. “We had a great time at Half Moon Bay today. Then the resort manager called a few minutes ago offering to let us play the Pebble Beach course again--free. We’ll play it Sunday,” she said.

Roger came in and walked over grinning knowingly. He sat next to Matt at dinner so Matt knew he wanted to talk because Sue and Carla usually bookended him.

“I bet you’re wondering what the FBI has to do with this,” he chuckled. Matt nodded, noting that everyone in the family was listening. “Since it involved kidnapping, the FBI was the lead agency. When they checked you out, they found out about you discovering the hidden cameras, too. When they asked about you, the director of the group I work with told them that you were just an observant civilian with friends in special law enforcement.

“That poor FBI guy was so excited that he was ready to send a recruiter here to talk to you. He was sure they could convince you to join the FBI and he’d get credit for finding you. He called me to ask about the best way to approach you. I told him they couldn’t pay you enough. I had to tell him your pen name and I swear I could hear the hiss of air over the phone as his ego deflated.

“My director is going to reimburse you for the cost of my room and meals for the week. He wouldn’t kick in anything for the golf, though,” he chuckled.

“CC’s already blocked any external inquiries about my room and once we check out, she’ll fix it so my reservation isn’t connected to you in any way,” he said.

“Wow, you guys are thorough,” Matt said.

“You were the one to point out that it was important to keep the names of the girls and their families out of the news. This just goes a step further.”

“And if you ever decide to quit writing and get your hands dirty earning a living, I can introduce you to somebody influential in every federal law enforcement agency,” he offered kiddingly.

One of the resort employees who acted as a gofer found Matt during dinner. He told Matt that the resort had a physical massage therapist on staff and suggested a visit to him after dinner for a complimentary treatment. He went on to explain that the therapist would loosen the muscles up a little and could have an acupuncturist available when he finished. The acupuncturist could help speed up the healing process and reduce the pain. Matt was all for that and readily agreed.

Carla drove them over to the spa after dinner and the girls stayed with him the entire time. The therapist started Matt off in a warm whirlpool, although it was cooler than a Jacuzzi. Then he moved Matt’s arms through their entire range of motion, which frequently brought tears to Matt’s eyes.

When he finished, he gave Matt one of the resort’s thick, fluffy robes to wear. It felt warm like it had just come out of the dryer. He led Matt down the hall to a room the acupuncturist used. When Matt saw the acupuncturist, he turned to Carla and Sue and said, “No.”