Chapter 8

I really liked that Griffin .44. It was as accurate as any other pistol that size, and the cartridges were something to marvel at. The fire selector was great, and the larger 30-round magazine was a great tension reliever. I discovered that the most convenient way to handle things was to keep a 15-round magazine in the gun while it was in the holster and to carry additional 30-round magazines clipped to my belt where they were easy to reach.

The only place I used the 100-round drum was on the range. It looked to me like it was going to be useful only to the military and to SWAT teams. Nobody else could ever need so many bullets. If he ever did, he was crazy to get himself into such a situation!

We spent a year in testing the Griffin .44, mostly because I didn’t get to use it that much. In most cases, the baton was the only weapon beyond my hands that I needed, so it took a while to get a few hours on the mechanism out in the field. Of course, Mr. Griffin and I both spent a lot of time on the range just getting hours that way. We were trying to find weak spots in the design so that they could be strengthened. Eventually, Mr. Griffin wanted to pitch his ideas to S&W, or to somebody else if they were not interested. He managed four crucial patents from his design, and three more from the drum magazine. I thought he had a winner, and expected S&W to grab a license for the patent rights.

Whatever happened from the patent situation, I had a new gun that I thought was the best thing that I had ever heard of. Mr. Griffin made a second one and convinced Nancy to give it a try. We were all three amazed when she liked it. Of course, the recoil was greater than she was used to from her little Glock G26, but she could control it. She always did have trouble with muzzle climb when shooting on full automatic, but that was something that she could learn to live with. Overall, the performance of the Griffin .44 was spectacular, and we both came to love and depend on it.

The winter finally broke, and we started getting reservations for spring and summer excursions. Most of these excursions were for the Cape (Cape Cod), but some were for the islands of Nantucket and Martha’s Vinyard. Some people might question why a bodyguard could be needed at such popular vacation spots, but the reason was simple: teens congregated at these beaches and tended to show off to their friends by bullying the very young and the elderly. They were further emboldened in their bullying by the drugs that so many of them used. The upshot was that almost anybody who went to the beach these days needed some sort of physical protection. It’s disgusting, but that’s the way it was.

Our first job was to escort a low income daycare class to the Cape for a day of fun and frolic on the sand and in the sun. There would be a sufficient number of adult women to supervise the children, so we were only going to provide the protection they might need from teens. In a fit of civic something or other, we cut our price to the bone—we were charging for our expenses, only, and not going to make a penny of profit from the trip.

As it turned out, we had a caravan of six SUVs. Nancy drove one and I drove another. There were 33 children ranging from 4 to 6 years old, and there were 12 women ranging from 19 to 64 years old to look after the kids. We left early enough on a Saturday that some of the children were not fully awake, but they could maneuver enough to climb into the SUVs.

We pressed on and arrived at the beach about 10:30 AM. We had hardly parked before the kids stampeded for the beach and water. It was still early enough in the year that the water was too cold for the little kids to do much more than to stick a finger or toe into the water. In any case, they had rather play in the sand, anyway, so the cold water was a good fence for their play area.

The women did a good job of keeping the children bunched up so that it was easy to keep watch for them. Everything went fine for the first hour, but that was when a busload of kids from the Boston inner-city arrived. Just as happened with our bunch, the kids who looked to be 13-16, both boys and girls, headed for the water. There was a lot of squealing, screaming, and cussing when they found out how cold the water was. The squealing and screaming were bad enough, but I got tired of the cussing real fast.

I looked for an adult supervisor, but all I could find was the bus driver who was sleeping on the back seat of the bus. When I complained to him, he said that all he was paid to do was to drive, and he would be damned before he would try to monitor these hellions. If I wanted to control them, I was welcome to try, but he was sure that I would fail on my first try.

I backed down with that because I was hired to protect these children, and I might not be doing that if I took on the older kids. Shit! I was talking to Nancy about the problem when I heard a scream from one of the 6 year old girls. I looked around and saw that one of the older boys from the other group had stripped away the little girl’s swimsuit and was waving it at her to get her to chase it.

That did it! I think that I saw red! I’m not sure what I was going to do, but I was going to get that swimsuit back and make the boy pay for taking it. I picked up my baton and ran as fast as I could at the boy tormenting the little girl. I got to within about 15 feet of him when he was warned of my arrival by one of the amused bystanders, a girl. He turned and said, “Hey, Motherfucker, what do you think yo...”

That was when I caught him in the gut with my shoulder and sent him flying about 10 feet. His breath was already gone from my running into him, and the landing on the sand on his back knocked out what little air he had left. He was out for a few minutes, whether or not I did anything else to him, so I let him lie there while I retrieved the stolen swimsuit. I returned the swimsuit to a woman who helped the little girl get dressed while I marched back to the fallen thief.

“You stupid fucker! Pick on someone who is old enough to defend herself or come to me if you want a fight. The next trouble out of you and I may put you in the hospital or the morgue. I’m a licensed bodyguard hired to protect these children, and the law is on my side. If you think that you can beat the law, just touch another one of these people in my care. Did you get that, you idiotic bastard?”

The damned fool spit at me! I don’t know if he was that brave or that stupid, but I fixed him for a while by forcefully planting my heal in his solar plexus. He stopped breathing again, and I left him to mull over the recent events. I really didn’t want to kill him, but I was sick of his antics.

When I walked away, four boys about his age rushed over to try to help him. Of course, there was nothing that they could do for the fool but offer him sympathy that he didn’t deserve. One of the older women supervisors with my group came up to me and said, “I’ve known males of his type all of my life. You are going to have trouble with him until you hurt him bad enough to make a believer out of him. I advise you to break his arm right now while you can, otherwise you are liable to get a rock, or even a knife, aimed at you before we leave.”

“Thanks for the advice, ma’am. If I go over and break a bone now, I’ll be no better than him, so I’ll just keep an eye on him until we leave.” The woman walked away, shaking her head in disbelief at my foolishness.

Nothing else happened involving the kids, but, as we were getting ready to leave, someone said, “Where is Helen?”

I asked, “Who is Helen?” and I was told that she was one of the younger women helping to look after the kids. She was 22 years old and a real good looking woman. Uh-oh, I smelled a rat right then.

I looked around and saw a storage shed about 20 yards away. Some of the kids from the other group were standing around behind the building. There was a lot of giggling and carrying on among these kids, and I heard a muffled scream come from behind the shed. That was what I needed to stir me into action. “NANCY, GET YOUR PIECE FROM THE CAR AND COVER ME!” I ran toward the shed as soon as she acknowledged my shout.