Chapter 25

We sort of settled into a routine and for about a week; everything went smoothly. I was at work during the day, we’d meet and have dinner, move some of Terri’s things over and then fall into bed together. Sometimes we stayed at the big house, sometimes the small house and once, we stayed at Terri’s, just so we could say we had.

I could almost think that life would have been perfect except for the nagging sense that Dennis Carmichael wasn’t going to sit idly by.

That conversation came on the following Tuesday. By that time, the plant consisted of me, nine other guys that had opted for the severance package and various drivers that were showing up to haul everything away. I was officially the Plant Manager, being the only one left on-site with a degree, and had the rest of the crew working at packing up and shutting down. The next few weeks were essentially us loading trucks here and shipping the whole operation to Mobile.

My cellphone rang in the middle of the afternoon and I picked it up, looking at the number. It was Luther. I smiled and answered it, taking out my iPod and starting to record so that Mel and Terri could get all the details when I got home.

“Mr. Brown,” I said pleasantly. “How are things going in DC today?”

“Hi, Mr. Dunn,” he said. “I felt like I needed to give you an update after this morning. We’ve been keeping Mr. Carmichael under some heavy scrutiny and it started to yield results. I have a lot of information to go on, but that’s not important at the moment.”

That brought me up short, wondering what was more urgent than our investigation.

“Something else come up?” I asked tentatively.

“This morning, we intercepted a phone call between Mr. Carmichael and an associate of his. We have laser mics trained on the windows of his residence and the call was made from his study. We can’t hear the details on the other end of the call, but he talked about sending someone to Charlotte and gave them both your home and work address and the Weaver residence for reference. He was vague on what this was supposed to accomplish, but he wasn’t calling FTD to send flowers. I’ve arranged a protective detail for both of you in Charlotte and they should meet you shortly. Mrs. Weaver will have her own detail and that will hopefully make his associate think twice about approaching either of you.”

I’d been overseeing the loading of some equipment to transport earlier in the day and I was still down in the area, so I sat down on the loading dock and digested this little piece of news.

“What do we do?” I asked seriously, my head already focused on working the problem.

“Well, we don’t have a lot of information on what his intentions are,” he admitted. “We don’t know who he’s sending or what their goals are, just that he gave them your addresses. It could be a lawyer, sent down to negotiate, a process server to inform you that he intends to sue. It could be his own investigations team to gather information on you, or it could be someone rougher to try to force you to do what he wants.”

“I’m starting to wish I’d just put my hands around his throat and killed him when I had the chance,” I muttered darkly.

“That might have spared Mrs. Weaver some of these complications, but you’d have ended up in prison,” he pointed out. “Not the best outcome.”

“I know,” I sighed, deflating. “I’m starting to feel like Dennis is about to be more trouble to us than he’s worth.”

“Don’t worry, Mr. Dunn. We have this under control,” he told me soothingly. “Give me your location and I’ll have a team meet you and Mrs. Weaver.”

“I’m at work, right now,” I told him. “Melody isn’t with me.”

“I’ll call her next,” he assured me. I’ll have a team waiting for you when you leave the plant,” he assured me. “Just stay calm and stick to them like glue. They’ll take care of you.”

He confirmed the plant location and the make, model and plate number of my car. I took a deep breath and didn’t like the thought of sitting back while other people did the work.

“Alright,” I said finally. “Send everything you have to Angela and I’ll call her next while you talk to Mel.”

“Relax,” he advised me. “We deal with this sort of thing all the time. We’ll keep you both safe.”

I informed him that there was someone else that was going to need protection and gave him Terri’s details. I hoped that she’d be with Mel or that she’d slipped beneath the radar.

I hung up and immediately called Angela. It took a few nerve-wracking minutes to get through to her, but when she came to the phone, I unloaded. I told her all about the call from Luther and the fact that Dennis was sending someone down here after us for reasons unknown.

“Okay,” she said when I was done. “Mr. Lawton and I both know that decisions about the business and the estate have to be answered by you. Mrs. Weaver has sworn out a power-of-attorney for you to handle all the business decisions without her. You’re the one in the most danger if he sent down someone to muscle his way into the process, Rand,” she reminded me.

“He could still try to use Mel to force me to make bad decisions for the business,” I pointed out. “Luther’s sending a protection detail for us, but I need you and Mr. Lawton to know what’s going on. The ink is still fresh on our new Wills. I want to make sure we’re both bulletproof.”

“Your Wills are ironclad,” she said certainly. “If you or Mel die, everything is split between you and Theresa Jackson or Mel and Theresa depending on which Will we’re processing.”

We’d changed our plans to include Terri after New Year’s.

“In the event you both die, she gets almost everything with small gifts to your former in-laws and a number of friends. If all three of you are killed, Col. Calder inherits the whole thing. It’s already certified and filed. Everyone named in the Will has been sent their copy for reference and their own records. He can’t get at Stan’s estate and yours and Mel’s are both airtight. You both even went so far as to name her family as being excluded from any inheritance due to the difficulties you’ve had. Just calm down and we’ll figure it out. You said Luther is on the phone with Mel right now? Let me conference in Mr. Lawton and we’ll talk it out.”

She took a moment to bring him onto the line and he listened attentively while we laid it out. He didn’t seem surprised that this was a step that someone connected to Stan would take.

“To be honest, Mr. Dunn,” he said with a sigh, “Stan wasn’t a particularly ethical businessman. It’s probable that Mr. Carmichael is at least as connected to less savory businessmen. To put it bluntly, Stan did business with whoever had money and he wasn’t picky about where the money came from or where it was going after it left his hands.”

I gritted my teeth, wanting to put my fist through Dennis Carmichael’s smug little face.

“So, you’re saying that Carmichael is probably running some kind of shady land-deal and we’re in bed with him?”

“It’s probably not the kind of philanthropic gesture to humanity that you’d want it to be,” he said carefully.

“Is our legal team in Washington ready to move?” I asked, feeling tired.

“They are,” both he and Angela confirmed.

“Foreclose on the property,” I told them. “I want it filed by the end of business today and served before lunch tomorrow. You’ve both told me that we’re in a fantastic position to foreclose. Let’s pull the rug out from under him and hopefully that pops the bubble for him.”

That gave them some work to do, so we hung up and I got back to work myself. I got a call from Mel and told her that I was fine and that I’d see her as soon as I was off work. She was scared, but she was at home with Eliza and George and her team was already there and overseeing security to see what we could be doing better.

When I left work, there was an SUV parked beside my car and two people got out of it as I approached.

“Mr. Dunn?” one of them asked. “We’re your protection detail. We’ve been briefed about your situation. I’m Chris and this is Mary. We’re going to be with you for the next few days while we figure things out.”

I shook Mary’s hand and then turned to shake Chris’s. While I had my attention focused on him, I felt the pin-prick on my neck and turned my head in time to see her pulling a syringe out of my neck calmly.

I still had Chris’s hand in mine, so being a gym-rat, I crushed it. I felt the bones in his hand give way like I was crushing a fistful of bubble-wrap. I pulled his arm tight and slammed my left hand into the bottom of his elbow, making him scream in shock and pain as I broke the joint of his right arm.

I was no fighter, but I was a big guy, probably bigger than they’d anticipated. I hoped that would mean that they hadn’t dosed me well enough to knock me out completely. I turned toward the woman, who looked like she was in shock at how quickly I’d responded, and I grabbed her by the side of the head, slamming her face viciously into the frame of the SUV with a sickening crunch as the world lurched, telling me that I didn’t have a lot of time before I was out like a light. I pulled her head back and slammed it into the frame a second time before I let her drop to the ground and turned back toward the first guy when I saw him fumbling with a gun, trying to get it out of the holster left-handed. I balled up my hand into a fist and hit him as hard as I could, staggering into him as the drugs robbed me of my equilibrium.

We landed in a heap and neither of us were in much condition to fight. I was losing the battle to stay awake and he’d been the recipient of the harshest handshake in history. I wrapped my hands around his throat and squeezed, willing my fingers to choke the life out of him before I lost consciousness. The edges of my vision were turning black and I couldn’t feel my fingers. I didn’t know if I was squeezing or just holding on. My vision continued to darken, and I panicked, thinking that I couldn’t let them do this to me. My last thought before I blacked out was that I couldn’t leave Mel and Terri.

I came to slowly, confused and uncertain where I was. I’d been in trouble. Danger? What was going on? I was ... at work ... and then? Nothing. I couldn’t remember. I knew that I was upset at work. Oh, yeah! The plant was moving. I remembered that now. That must be why I was upset. We were getting everything shut down to go to ... I couldn’t remember, but I knew that memory of it was somewhere.

I slowly drifted back to the surface and opened my eyes. That was a choice that I immediately regretted. The bright light staring back into my eyes filled my head with pain.

“Ahhh!”

I groaned in protest, turning my head away from the light. I tried to raise my hands to block out the light, but I couldn’t move. Was I paralyzed?!!? The thought started me into a panic, and I thrashed madly, trying to test my body. I could move, but I was restrained. That’s when I remembered and cast my eyes around the room, rage battling with fear. They’d taken me. The room I was in was bright white and had two doors, one on either side of the room. I was strapped to a bed and I took a few deep breaths before I started to pull at the restraints with more focus. I had to get away.

I was pulling with all my strength and I could feel some of the seams in the medical restraints start to pop, but I wasn’t going to be able to keep this up for long. I relaxed back, taking several deep breaths and letting my muscles relax before I tried again to tear the restraints free. I thought I was starting to get somewhere when I heard a conversation outside the room. They were coming.

I yanked at the thick cuffs madly, knowing that once they saw what I’d done, I’d get another injection and they’d double the restraints. I could feel one of the cuffs start to give when the conversation cut off in the hall and I could clearly hear one of them speak.

“Sounds like he’s awake.”

I wrenched at the cuff frantically, hoping to tear it from its moorings so I could free both my arms. The door opened, and people started filing into the room, but far from the mad dash to restrain me and sedate me, they seemed calm and accepting.

First came a doctor and a nurse, both of whom were quickly pushed aside by Mel, looking frantic and upset. Terri was a half-step behind her, and they came to the bed, confusing me. Why weren’t they restrained too?

Mel started unbuckling the cuffs while Terri freed my ankles from the restraints.

“Are you okay, baby?” Mel asked. “You’ve been out for hours.”

“Where are we?” I asked uncertainly as more people started pouring into the room.

I recognized Angela and Mr. Lawton, but everyone else was new to me.

“You’re at the Carolinas Medical Center,” the doctor informed me helpfully before he was interrupted by one of the people that I didn’t recognize.

“Mr. Dunn, I’m Detective Harold Richards. I need to ask you some questions about what happened.”

“I don’t know much,” I told him truthfully. “I got a call earlier today that someone was being sent to town looking for me for an unknown reason. We took it as a threat, and I was being supplied with a protection detail. They were meeting me after work. When I got there, they introduced themselves and while I was shaking hands with the man, his partner injected me with something.”

He nodded, and I noticed that he was holding a recorder, rather than take notes.

“What happened after that?”

“I realized that they weren’t the people that were supposed to meet me, so I fought back. I didn’t know what she’d injected me with, but I figured it was a sedative. I remember I crushed the guy’s hand and popped his elbow. Then I grabbed her and cracked her head off the SUV they were driving. I was hoping that if I knocked her out and hurt him bad enough that they wouldn’t be able to carry me away ... I don’t know what happened after that.”

He nodded again. “You said they were being sent after you. Do you know why?”

I nodded.

“Recently, I inherited a lot of money and part of a business, Weaver Saving & Loans. We uncovered some irregularities with one of the business deals after Melody’s father got extremely upset and agitated on hearing that the details of the Will had been changed. We’ve been taking steps to investigate, but it seems like Mr. Carmichael is engaging in aggressive negotiations. Have either of the two people who tried to abduct me had anything to say?”

“Mr. Dunn, the two people that were waiting for you are dead,” he told me bluntly. “The woman died of a skull fracture. I’m told that you caved in the front of her skull as well as her whole face. The man, you manually strangled to death after you broke his arm and several bones in his hand. We actually had to pry your hands off his neck even though you were unconscious. Your story checks out though. The plant has security footage and the syringe was laying nearby.”

“What did they jab me with?” I asked, stunned as I sat up, freed from the medical restraints.

“A powerful sedative,” the doctor advised me. “You’ve been out for a couple of hours.”

I nodded.

“Am I in trouble?” I asked. “I mean, I wasn’t trying to kill anyone. I just knew I didn’t have much time to fight back before I’d pass out.”

Detective Richards looked around and shook his head.

“We found your actual security detail. They had been shot and stuffed in the back of the SUV to wait for you,” he said. “We haven’t identified the woman yet, but the man has a record, so we got his ID back in a hurry.”

“He said his name was ... Chris,” I said, trying to shake off the fog.

“Chris Melton and Mary Cole were your actual protection detail,” he told me gently. “The man who attacked you was Vincent Giraldi. He’s done time twice for minor crimes related to organized crime in the past. Kidnapping is either a new hobby or he’s been more dangerous than we knew. No one’s going to cry at his funeral.”

I nodded.

“I think ... I think I need to get my paperwork to carry a gun,” I said earnestly.

“You have a firearm license?” he asked, and I nodded. “You can carry now,” he told me. “It has to be in plain sight and there’s some places you can’t take it, but you can open-carry without more paperwork. A concealed permit is another background check, some additional paperwork and a separate fee.”

The interview went on like that for an hour or so, with him asking more and more detailed questions about the Will and the business deal that we believed this to hinge on. We were still talking when a large African American man opened the door, letting himself in.

“Mr. Dunn,” he said. “I’m Luther Brown. I’m sorry that I wasn’t here earlier.”

“I’m sorry that your people got hurt in this,” I told him.

“At least I can tell their families that their murderers didn’t get away with it,” he said somberly. “It seems like you’re in considerable danger. I have a new detail waiting for you, Mrs. Weaver and for Ms. Jackson. They’re going to coordinate and maintain security without disrupting your lives too much.”

“Thanks,” I said to him gratefully. “Has anything else happened since we spoke last?”

“Mr. Carmichael is probably waiting for an update from the people he hired,” he said grimly.

“He’ll be waiting a long time,” Detective Richards muttered. “We’ve scrubbed their cellphones and there’s really nothing on them. I’d tell you that we’ll keep you informed, but your dad was a cop,” he said apologetically. “You know that we won’t share details on an open investigation.”

“You knew Dad?” I asked, surprised that he’d mentioned it.

“I was still working patrol when he was shot,” he confirmed. “I reported to the scene when we lost him. He was a good cop. The least we can do is take care of his son.”

“We all appreciate it,” I told him and shook his hand. “I don’t think that Dennis is done chasing this. We’re foreclosing on his big land deal.”

He made note of that and then gave me his card.

Luther waited for him, the doctor and the nurse to leave before he spoke again.

“You were very lucky today,” he told me. “Giraldi was a fixer for the mob up north. I don’t think that just putting a bodyguard on you is going to be enough.”

“What do you have in mind?” I asked warily.

“I want the three of you signed up for some self-defense training,” he answered. “We have a few people that are capable of giving some instruction. It’ll be an intensive instruction course that includes marksmanship, hand-to-hand fighting, a course on driving and some instruction on escaping from captivity.”

“That sounds a little invasive,” I pointed out, worried about how it would impact the rest of my time working at the plant.

“I know,” he said apologetically. “I think it’s necessary, though. Even if you get through this crisis without needing it, you are wealthy people. The fact is that this might not be the last threat you have to face because of your wealth. I want you to be ready if you need to be.”

I was still torn, but Mel stepped in.

“When do we start, Mr. Brown?” she asked, eager to be better prepared.

“Right away,” he said with a nod. “I understand that Mr. Dunn has a few weeks of additional work at the chemical plant. We can work around that, since he has some experience with firearms already. We’ll start you and Ms. Jackson out on firearms training while he finishes up.”

I didn’t see any reason to object, since I’d been intending to do the same for her. We talked about it for a little while longer and then I was introduced to my new detail. Gunther Westlake was a vet from Iraq who’d taken work with a private military contractor after his discharge. He was tall and rugged-looking, and I noticed that his eyes didn’t settle on anything for very long.

Cynthia MacArthur was nearly his exact opposite. She was short and thick, but she’d been in Iraq too, and there was nothing soft in her expression. I got the sense that our security detail was a little more top-shelf than the last ones had been. I was glad to have them.

After we were introduced, the doctor wanted to do a follow-up exam on me before he cleared me to go home for the night. He’d originally wanted to keep me overnight, but had been overruled by both Mel and Terry, so he contented himself with what they’d let him get away with. When he’d checked my eyes, reflexes, balance and general awareness, he released me reluctantly.

“You should take it easy for a few days,” he said, by way of a warning. “Driving or anything where you could injure yourself or others accidentally, drinking or anything too strenuous is off limits for a few days. It sounds like you have people watching out for you and that’s good, but you need to lean on them for now. You could get away with no lingering side-effects, but you could also be prone to sudden drowsiness, dizziness or disorientation, while the drugs work their way out of your system.”

“I understand,” I assured him. “My job is mostly supervisory at this point, so I won’t be very hands-on for any part of the next few days.”