Chapter 5

“Hey, Gramps. When do you plan to leave here?”

Emily was floating on her back in our swimming hole, sporting two of the nicest periscopes I ever saw.

“We need to be moving soon. Every day we stay here increases the risk of being found. We should probably leave tomorrow or the next day. I’ll go around later and spread some disinformation. I wanted to finish that activity simulator that your mom is working on before we left. It should buy us a day or so when they find this place. They might stake it out for a day or two before moving in. That will give us a little more cushion at the next place. Have you finished your projects?”

“Yep! All done. There will be some nasty little surprises for those who get too nosy after we leave.”

“Howdy. I’m Wyden Long, your neighbor down the road.”

“Howdy. I’ve been meaning to come down and get acquainted, but me and the old lady work most of the time and don’t get out much, any more.”

“Sounds like a country song, don’t it?”, I said with a grin.

“You know it, but I didn’t mention Momma or pickup trucks, did I?” He grinned back.

“Naw. You’ve been listening to too much David Allan Coe, sounds like. Anyhow, I was getting to Momma and the pickup truck. We’ve got to run over to Raleigh to see about my wife’s momma and we need to haul some stuff over there. Do you think it would be possible for us to swap my wife’s new car for your old pickup for a few days?”

“You know, I wouldn’t mind a bit, but I don’t know about the insurance. How would we handle that?”

“Tell you what. Why don’t we do a paper swap? She will sign over her car to you and you can sign over the pickup to her. When we get back in a few days, we can swap back. Meanwhile, our insurance should cover us. They usually give a few days grace on new cars, don’t they?”

Jim thought about it. It sounded a little fishy, but he always wanted a BMW and it was worth three or four times as much as his old pickup. What if they didn’t come back? He wouldn’t be out nothing. “All right. You got a deal.”

They shook on it.

As they headed out of town in the old pickup, they gaily waved at their neighbor who was out washing his new BMW, with his fingers crossed that the new neighbors would be gone a long time. He had no idea how true that might be.

“Dad, this isn’t the way to Guntersville. You should have turned back there.”

“I know, Honey, but I just asked the guy at the station for directions to Raleigh and this is the way he told me to go.”

“Ah! You are leaving bread crumbs that lead to Raleigh, aren’t you?”

“Something like that.”

“Why are we going to Guntersville, anyway?”

“One of my old friends owns a boat that he keeps in a marina on Lake Guntersville. He has agreed to help us on the sly by letting us live aboard his boat and will supply us with a sack full of prepaid debit cards for expenses. That will allow us to fly further under the radar.”

“Huh! Good idea.”

“Holy sheeeeit!, Gramps. You said, ‘boat’. Didn’t you mean to say, ‘yacht’?”

“It’s only 48 feet. It has three bedrooms and a den. We should be able to hang out there for a while, huh?”

“Holy sheeeeit!”

“I think she likes it, don’t you?”

“I like it, too, Daddy.”

“I like it because nothing will be in our names. The slip rental and paperwork will remain in my friend’s name. There won’t be any financial transactions to trip alarms.”

“Ah, pretty sneaky, Dad. How are we paying for all this?”

“My friend and I share some patents. I signed my rights over to him.”

“Were they enough to pay for all this?”

“About a hundred times over.”

“Oh.”

“Hey, Gramps. I found these pictures down below. Is that fat little old guy who looks like Santa Claus the owner?”

“Yep. He gets to play Santa every year and doesn’t need a fake beard. All the little kids give him a curious look when he is out and about near Christmas.”

“Isn’t he the same one who picked us up at the truck stop where we left the pickup?”

“Sure is. After he dropped us off in town, he arranged for someone to return the pickup to our neighbor in Pulaski and tell the neighbor to park the BMW at our house when he isn’t using it.”

“How much did he pay you for your portion of the patent? Are we rich?”

“Rich enough to stay out of sight for a while.”

“He seemed like a nice old guy, but he sure was grabby.”

“He has a true appreciation for young, hard-bodied girls.”

“I almost decked him, once.”

“You should have. That would have been fun. Let him explain a shiner and a set of bruised nuts to his wife.”

“Maybe next time.”

“Hey, Boss. We finished checking the tapes from the Interstate cams. We got the car heading south as far as Columbia, but no more sightings after that. At first we thought they might have just got off for fuel, but we didn’t pick them up again.”

“Do we have any connection between any of them and any towns around there?”

“None, so far. Do you still have the team digging, at headquarters?”

“Yeah.”

“Hey, Boss. What’s up?”

“The team discovered that this Wyden Long guy had a DNA test made last year, through one of those genealogy sites. Now we have his fingerprints from his security file and DNA, so maybe we are getting closer to working something out.”

“Hey, Boss. Got something else?”

“Yeah. We found that the woman’s mother worked at the same place this Long guy did, back in the 60s. Looks like we have our first real lead.”

“Anybody up for a cruise?”

“Where to, Dad?”

“Maybe just a shakedown cruise up to Chattanooga. It will give us a chance to get used to handling this big hog and taking it through locks at the dams. I want to see how much surveillance and record keeping is involved.”

“Ah. You are planning a longer trip, aren’t you?”

“Maybe. It depends on the number of surveillance cameras we see on this trip. We need to keep our own cameras going all the time, with the pattern matching set to identify cameras.

“Good idea.”

“Hey, Boss. Whatcha got?”

“We didn’t have any DNA records of the woman, but we tracked down her sister and got a swab from her. She was reluctant, but we convinced her lawyer that it was allowed under the witness protection rules. Now we know that this Long dude is very likely the woman’s father.”

“Wouldn’t he also be the sister’s father?”

“You’re right. We will keep her under surveillance, as well. Damn! This case us eating up our resources. A couple more like this and we are in deep shit.”

“Just imagine what sort of shit we are in if there are others like her out there that we don’t know about, yet.”

“Yeah.”

“You girls did a hell of a job back there. I’m damned proud of you.”

“Don’t be patronizing, Gramps. Have you ever done it before?”

“No.”

“Then why do you think you should be able to do it the first time better than we could?”

“Oops! My being impressed has nothing to do with the fact that you are females. It is based entirely on my dealings with the rest of the world at large, over the course of a long frustrating life, when depending on others to use common sense.”