Judge Walter Cormell Gregson
Chapter 1

Copyright© 2019 by price26

Week one, Day one, Saturday, 0700:

I checked my watch yet again. Then I heard the sound I’d been waiting for. Two minutes later than the previous Saturday morning came the soft thump-thump-thump of her trainers on the hard ground of the path, then she hove into view round the curve. Yep, it was her, not another runner out early. I watched her through the cover of leaves as she got closer to my ambush site, carefully but quickly checking around me one more time for signs of other people or dogs, but seeing and hearing nothing that posed a threat.

I took a deep breath.

Time to fish or cut bait, as my Dad would have said. Last week I’d had to abort the second attempt at the last moment because some guy out walking his dog was approaching; if I’d have gone ahead, he most likely would have seen me and raised the alarm. The week before there’d been another truck in parking lot, meaning there was someone about. Both times I’d stayed in cover and watched as she jogged by.

This week? Go or no go? Looking good. Time to fish.

I went big game fishing. There’s no bigger game than another human being. Okay, so this one was unarmed and hopefully unaware, but she was going to be a very valuable catch once I got her into my keep net.

I pulled on the ski mask to cover my face, and slipped the ether pad out of its baggie. As she got near enough, I leaped out from behind the bush, grabbed her, held the pad over her mouth and nose, and hauled her back behind the cover. She struggled wildly at first, but the ether worked quickly and she collapsed in my arms. I pulled her further into the trees and scrub; even with her height, she wasn’t that heavy, maybe 120 or 130 pounds, and once I’d put the pad back in my pocket and checked twice that neither of us had dropped anything, I could easily pick her up and carry her.

I stuffed my ski mask into my cargo pocket; now it would hopefully look to the casual observer like maybe she’d fainted and I was taking her to safety. That would be my backup story if I did meet someone, but I was intending not to. Even keeping a watchful eye open for other people, I could still move fast. In less than a minute, I got close to where I’d parked my truck, carefully looked around, and put her down again behind a bush to check on her. She was still out of it. I quickly applied the padded handcuffs; I’d decided to risk not gagging her in case the ether made her vomit and choke. I removed her ipod and earphones, and the black box taped to her arm, and searched her to check that there was no cell phone or other possible GPS-enabled tracking device left on her. With her sports bikini and tight running gear, there wasn’t much space to hide anything.

Another negative check for any spectators who might be eye-witnesses, and I bundled her into the passenger foot well of the truck, draped the blanket over to cover her from casual view, shut the door on her, then stood to look and listen yet again. Silence. There was nobody about, it was still too early for most people. It was the dog walkers I had been most worried about, but for once there were none to be seen. My early test rehearsals had been split 50/50 between no-one in the vicinity and a potential witness; I guessed that luck and probability had both smiled on me today. All was quiet and peaceful; you could even hear the birds calling in the trees.

I walked over to the nearby trash bin for dog waste; I pulled off one of the plastic poop sacks provided and the two potentially suspect electronic items went in there, then in another bag to disguise the contents. Not that anyone who wasn’t flying high as a kite on crack cocaine was ever going to rummage through a bin full of dog shit in search of possible valuables. It was only part full, but it stank. What the heck do they put in some of these canned dog foods?

I wanted to be well clear of town before she woke up from the ether and started screaming. I was away from the parking area and driving along the street before I saw the first dog being walked by its owner; if they’d been four minutes earlier out of their house, I’d have had to abort the attempt again. It was possible my truck had been seen parked up, but it’s hardly distinctive. There are any number of similar vehicles around town, so I wasn’t too worried about that possibility. It sure seemed like I had gotten away with the abduction so far.

The girl came back to life some ten minutes later, while we were still on the road back to my cabin, and of course, as I’d feared, promptly threw up over herself. That’s the problem with ether, not that chloroform is a whole lot better. Shit, that stank the cab out, sour and acidic empty-stomach vomit and that cloying chemical smell. It nearly made me heave as well, but I’d been exposed to much more nauseating stenches in Iraq. I wound down my window to get some fresh air and switched the radio on loud to cover the screams and curses, not that there were any vehicles near me. Our road is pretty quiet even at its busiest. Not yet eight on a Saturday morning? We didn’t see a soul. The early risers were already up and away, the other neighbors were most likely still in their beds or maybe sitting out on their porches with the first coffee of the day, thinking about breakfast.

Once we got to my turn-off, I got out and very quickly checked my tell-tales on the track before moving on and pulling up in front of the cabin. I pulled the ski mask from my pocket and back over my head, opened the passenger door and hauled her out onto the ground before unrolling her from the blanket. Jeez, she’d made a real mess of the blanket, but it had protected much of her lower body. Man, the upper part was in one heck of a state. There was vomit and snot all over her chest, and her struggles had managed to transfer it to her shoulders, hair, and upper back.

She was cursing wildly as she shuffled into a crouching defensive position, glaring hatefully at me. If looks could kill – but I’d had much more visceral receptions from some of the craziest of the Iraqi detainees, some of whom were said to have carried out truly despicable and inhumane crimes that almost beggared belief. So I could look at her calmly. With her hands cuffed in front of her she could have tried to strike me a two-fisted blow, but I was counting on her not working that one out. I’d figured that she would be too helpless with hands secured behind her back, because I wanted her to be able to drink while cuffed, just in case she didn’t see sense for a while. On my own without backup, I had to be realistic about the risks of getting myself hurt if I had to physically subdue her, although the techniques I’d been trained in were more than effective. Same reason I hadn’t hooded her – you really need at least two of you to guide someone with a bag over their head, one gripping each arm, and somebody else to open and relock the doors. In Iraq, we’d always done it as a squad, which was why we’d never had any problems, even with the wildest insurgents, who struggled to break free as if your touch defiled or burned them.

Back in the real world, I bundled up the soiled blanket and put it out of the way on the grass behind me, then waited until she finally paused for breath.

“I’m going to unlock your hands so that you can wash, dry and change clothes. If you try to attack me, the cuffs will go back on and you’ll be in stinking wet clothes for a while. Gonna play fair?”

“Fuck you, you bastard! You touch me and I’ll fucking kill you!”

I shrugged.

“Okay, sweetie, if that’s how you want to do it, that’s your choice.”

I brought over a bucket of water I had standing ready on the porch and sluiced the top part of her down; that earned me even more screams and curses. Got rid of the worst of the mess from her chest, though it did spread it some. I fetched out another blanket, rolled her into it, and carried the struggling fighting mass into the room that was about to become her cell. I dumped her down on the floor and locked the door behind me, then briefly observed through the spy-hole as she wriggled free from the blanket and looked around her. My, she looked pissed. She’d have scratched my eyes out if I’d been anywhere within reach. I’d have to watch her; she was in pretty good condition, and she was plenty mad at me.

I pulled off the ski mask and went to make myself a coffee. A couple of months earlier, I’d finally given in to temptation and gotten myself a twelve-volt coffee maker; it pulled a hefty ten amps out of the batteries and through my cables, but it was a sight easier than setting up the camping stove and watching it as the coffee percolated through. I tended to make only two cups worth; the machine kept the jug warm, but there was no sense in stewing coffee I wasn’t going to drink.

It smelt real good after the sourness of the ether and acid vomit, and tasted great too. Then I decided that I’d earned a second breakfast sandwich, so I got the stove going, made myself another one and settled down outside in the morning mid-August sunshine to enjoy it with the second mug of coffee. It was turning into a real nice day.


Four months earlier...

How the heck did I get to this point, where I had abducted a young woman and was holding her prisoner in my cabin?

Well, it’s a long and complicated story, but here goes.

Let’s say that my name is Grey McKinley. That’s correct, Grey with an ‘e’. It’s an old family name, I’m of Scottish descent. We came over in the 1840’s, my ancestor knew how to build steam engines for pumping water and running machinery, and he saw the potential in a new country. I’m 26, six foot two, and I weigh two hundred ten pounds. I work in construction, so my weight is most all bone and muscle. I had thought I was happily married with a really cute three-year-old daughter, but when I got back from three months National Guard special support duty in the sandbox, I found out that I wasn’t. I guess that the lack of anything for me at mail call might have given me a clue, but Kasey had never been a great letter writer anyway, so I hadn’t expected to receive anything. We’d talked a couple of times the first month I was away, but I hadn’t been near enough civilization since then to be able to call home. I’d written her once a week, but there wasn’t a whole lot to tell.

My days were pretty repetitive, and the exciting ones were when we were being shot at, and I didn’t want her to worry that I was constantly in danger – I wasn’t. Just sometimes. Days of boredom, a few seconds of terror and excitement, almost gone before the adrenaline rush kicked in. Little point in following up, the shooter would be gone, possibly with the route or the firing point booby-trapped. A quick check on everyone, then back to the boredom of the patrol, a little more wary for a while, then down to normal levels of suspicion, trying to keep our minds on the job in hand rather than anything more distracting. There was no logic to their insurgency, our task was to stay alive ourselves, and reduce their numbers and resources every chance we got.

Our tour of duty completed, we had rotated back from Iraq as planned. No last minute extension, much to everyone’s relief. We were out-processed at Fort Lewis, put on another plane to our ‘local’ (250 miles!) military air base, in-processed and fed, and then put on buses for an overnight trip back to our unit Armory.

We got in at six, stiff from sleeping on bench seats during the long ride home, and, wonder of wonders, found the cooks from another unit waiting for our arrival to start on breakfast. I signed for receipt of my sealed envelope with the key to my locker, opened it up and pulled out my phone to call home; the battery was not quite dead enough to prevent me seeing that I had no service. I cursed and put it on charge. We cleaned and checked all our equipment, handed it in, ate breakfast and mustered out.

We showered and changed into civilian clothes; I tried again to call my wife but still had no service. I carried my kitbag over to my truck in the car park (giving it a really good inspection after all that time sitting there), and headed for home, real glad to be back.

I live about forty miles from the city; our town is in a valley where the road crosses the river that runs from the wooded hills. It’s a beautiful place all year round, lush and green; it looked doubly beautiful after the hot, dusty and rocky deserts, or beaten-up hot dusty concrete-strewn towns I’d been in for the last three months. I was going to sit on our porch with my baby girl on my lap and my arm around my wife beside me, just enjoying the clean sweet-smelling air of home once again, feasting my eyes on the May display of flowers and young foliage.

Only I found I no longer had a home, or a family.

There was a different name on our mailbox, a strange truck in our driveway, and a couple living there who I didn’t know from Adam and Eve. They said that they’d bought the place six weeks earlier from a single mom, a Miss Costin. Jeez! That was Kasey’s maiden name! What the fuck was going on? When I told them my name, they did recognize it, though; they had an envelope with ‘Mr McKinley’ written on it ‘that the previous owner left in case you called by’.

I opened it. No explanatory note, just a sheaf of legal papers.

My ex, may she rot in hell for eternity, had filed for, and somehow gotten, a divorce on the grounds of desertion, and had used the power of attorney I had left with her to sell our house.

Now, I had naturally assumed, if I’d ever even given it a thought, that there wasn’t a court in the land that would take service to your country as ‘desertion’, but it seems that one Judge Walter Cormell Gregson wanted to be the exception that proved the rule. Well, that was the name on the documents that said I was now divorced. The settlement list attached stated that, because of my deserting the family, not responding to the petition for divorce, and being deemed impossible to locate, the family home, savings, property and all other assets of the marriage were awarded 100% to the wife in lieu of child support and marital support, and that because there was a minor child involved, the court documents were sealed and the identity and location of the plaintiffs was not to be revealed. Oh, and just to add to my misery, I was not to approach within 300 feet of my wife and child.

Jesus H Christ!

What a stinking pile of shit!

I read those papers over three times before all of it finally sank in.

I guess I sat in my truck, outside that house that used to be my home, for nigh on an hour before I recovered enough to go and consult an attorney. He took one look at the papers, confirmed my own feeling that I’d been screwed without lube, and told me that my only recourse, if I could afford it, was to try and get a Federal judge to overturn the whole thing on the grounds that I had been on active service overseas. If I had the money to engage a real smart City lawyer who could handle these things. Potential cost? The guy reckoned, ballpark figure, that with gathering evidence, having to petition a higher court to unseal the records, and all the investigation and argument needed, I’d be looking at laying out north of a hundred grand, and I might not get any of it back even if I won – which wasn’t guaranteed. Kasey was the care-giver for Aggie, and the courts were almost certain to keep my daughter living with her mother, and charge me child support while they were at it. The guy said he was real sorry about my situation, and advised me to do a whole lot of thinking before I took any action at all. He even warned me about trying to find out where they were now living, saying that would most probably lead to an even harsher restraining order which would severely mess up my freedom of movement in a town the size of ours.

I thanked him and left his office, heading down the street to my bank, only to find that I didn’t have an account there any longer. Jeez! She’d also taken over the bank accounts and cleaned me out. The Guard pay I’d earned with my sweat and tears in the sandbox had gone into an account that I now couldn’t access? The manager was real sympathetic, but he couldn’t refuse a court order that said none of it was mine. My name wasn’t currently on any accounts, therefore I had no right to any information about them, even if he personally had received my pay check to be paid into that account many times in the past, and had greeted me by name when he saw me. He was apologetic, but he couldn’t do anything for me.

I drove the forty miles straight back to the Armory, luckily finding the admin staff still there finishing up the last of the paperwork. I showed my envelope and its contents to the pay guy, explained what had happened at the bank, and he was just able to cancel my final direct deposit payment and arrange to hold it until I had a new account.

I slept in my truck that night. I’d had much worse beds recently – steel armor plate has absolutely no give in it – and although my truck was pretty beaten up, the seat upholstery was better than that.

The next morning, I went and got myself a new account at a different bank, and took the details back to the Armory. I was able to get a hardship payment in cash, and I still had a little left in my billfold from our last field payment. I wasn’t going to starve quite this week; I was just so glad that I hadn’t blown my cash on gadgets at the Fort Lewis PX. Jesus, three months in the sandbox and two-thirds of my pay had been stolen from me. Thanks a fucking lot, Uncle Sugar.

I’d had just one secret I’d kept from my wife, and that was only because I’d wanted to give her a real nice surprise to show how much I loved her. I’d been scrimping and saving to buy us a fifth anniversary gift, and just under a year earlier, I’d found us a run-down cabin on a quarter section of woodland to be our weekend and vacation place while the kids grew up. I’d gotten it for pretty much just the back taxes, and my boss had let me take waste and surplus construction materials that would have otherwise been dumped to help me make the place livable again. To keep it a surprise, the deeds had been in my locker back in the Armory, along with my truck papers, and hence the bitch hadn’t been able to get her thieving hands on them, or I’m betting that they’d have gone too.

Next up was going over to see my boss, Henry Hallett, to check that HE was obeying the law and had kept my job open for me. Yeah, he most certainly had, and he welcomed me back as if he’d actually missed me. That was some good news at last. I asked him if he could spare me some uninterrupted time later, and he suggested I come back at six when everyone else would have knocked off.

I drove over to the cabin to check that it was still there. Knowing my current run of luck, it had probably been taken over by a gang of moonshiners, criminal bikers or drug traffickers, so I approached the final bit very cautiously. I almost ran past the entrance, it was so well hidden now. Three months of undisturbed growth meant that the driveway was more than three feet high in grass and weeds; I guessed from the lack of any tracks that no-one had been anywhere near the place since I’d closed it up. After checking on foot that the entrance was clear of any hidden obstacle – I couldn’t afford to damage my truck on a dumped fridge or something – I climbed back in the truck and headed cautiously up the drive. Mother Nature had clearly had a ball in my absence; a domestic weed whacker was never going to touch the new growth, not without buying a whole case of cutting cord. Still, I had a plain old-fashioned scythe somewhere in the barn, and that would at least make a start without costing me anything but time and labor. I’d done it before, when I’d first bought the property, so I guessed I could do it again. Honest toil sweat in my own place would beat heat-related sweat in the sandbox any day of the week.

The cabin was there and seemingly intact. It smelled real stale after being closed up for that long; I propped the door wide open and took down the storm shutters over the two small windows to let some air circulate. Then I took a good look around; there was no damp or crittur damage, and I gave myself a pat on the back for having left the place weather-tight. The barn too was fine. I forced a path through the weeds down to the creek and the small swimming hole; I’d had plans for improving that so our kids had a safe place to enjoy the cool water in the heat of the summer. As it looked like I no longer had a daughter, that idea was as dead as my marriage.

I sat there for a while in the peace and solitude; I guess that my situation hadn’t really sunken in yet. I was still in the survival mode we’d gotten into in the sandbox. Did I want to try to save my marriage? Hell no! A woman who could do that to her guy was no woman for me. Did I want to have my daughter back? Yes, but could I pay the price? Could I find her? The way my ex had behaved told me that there was no way on God’s little green earth that she’d play fair on me seeing Aggie; it was probably kinder on the girl to let her go and forget my existence. Yeah, so she was my blood and my little love, but I couldn’t give her the home she deserved. Wanting isn’t always the sign of a correct decision. Jeez, what a fuck-up!

With a start, I looked at my watch, and saw it had already gone five. I trotted back to my truck, and headed for my appointment with my boss. He was just finishing off signing the guys timesheets at the end of the day, and he asked for ten minutes to enter the job labor costs data. I sat on the wall outside his office until he came out to find me.

“Okay, Grey, what did you need to talk about?”

We went into his office, grabbed a coffee each and sat; he listened in horrified silence until I got to the bit about Judge Walter Cormell Gregson. He asked to look at the papers; he was shaking his head in dismay as he leafed through them.

“Shit, Grey, you REALLY want to watch yourself here. This reads as if he thinks you’re a deadbeat dad who deserted his family and should be in jail. That fucker is old school, and I don’t think he’s ever changed his decision in his life. You’ll be real lucky to find a lawyer in this town who’s willing to tell him he was wrong, and then if you interrupt or move a muscle in his court, you’ll be in State for thirty days at a time for contempt. Darn it, it almost reads as if he’d have happily given you thirty days just to start off with if you’d been there in his court.”

“That’s what I’d pretty much figured out. Kasey has totally screwed me; no judge in his right mind would have signed off that plea, but this bastard has done just that. He’s hardly going to give me a fair hearing two months later, is he? The chances of having some time with my daughter don’t look that good either, not when there’s no contact information. I’m also 100% sure that my ex will do everything to make it as difficult as she can. I really miss Aggie, but having to play nice with superbitch to see her? No way.”

Henry had sighed.

“It’s really tough, Son, but for what it’s worth, I think you’re making the right decision. I know it stinks, but at the moment there isn’t a whole lot we can do about it. I’ll keep listening, but for everyone’s sakes, don’t go asking questions, because Gregson will hear about it, and he’ll be wanting to know why you’re discussing a sealed case. It’s a surprisingly small town still. You might be able to do something about your daughter eventually, but watch your back every time you even mention her name out loud; he’s sealed the records so that’s a straight contempt. There’s got to be some reason the split is so final, either someone was hoping you wouldn’t be coming back except in a box, or someone the judge owes wanted your wife.”

That was going to take some thinking about. I thanked him for his honesty and support, and said that I’d report for work in the morning. He was pleased with that, and told me where to be. I got myself a cheap evening meal, drove to my remaining property and slept in the truck cab again. I’d kept a couple of old blankets in the cabin; they needed some time in the sun and the fresh air before the stale smell went out of them. I was awake with the dawn and headed off into town for some breakfast before work.

It was good to be back in the crew. They been with and around me for a few years now, but had never known me well enough to be fully informed about my home life. All that I’d ever said when they asked if I wanted to go drinking with them payday evening was that I had a young kid, and she came first. Okay, some of them had called me a wuss and told me that a couple of drinks wouldn’t hurt, but I stayed firm and they stopped being bothered about it. They were much more interested now in what life had been like in the sandbox and how many ragheads I’d wasted (zero confirmed, which disappointed some of them); none of them had any idea that my wife was now my ex, and I didn’t enlighten them.

I got right back into the swing of things. We were busy, and there was more work in the pipeline once this site was finished, so none of us were hurting for things to do. I hadn’t lost my knack, and by lunchtime you wouldn’t know that I’d been away from the job.

Henry Hallett asked for another word that night when I stopped off at the office.

“Grey, I’ve been doing some more thinking about your problem with Gregson. He’s got you tagged as a deadbeat dad who ran out on his wife and child. Yeah, I know that’s absolutely not the case, but judging from his ruling, that’s exactly what he’ll be thinking. I reckon that if you keep your head down and your nose clean, you’ll be okay, but if you end up in his court for any reason, and he makes the connection, he’ll gut you and spit out the bones. He’s got a thing about people he considers to be dead-beats, heck, there’s more than one family in town with a son in the services rather than in jail, thanks to him. My advice to you is to be extra-cautious for a while until we get a better feel of what’s happening. So, no drinking and driving, keep your truck legally roadworthy, no traffic violations or speeding. Get yourself a burner phone, and think about changing your appearance a little, just so your ex doesn’t suddenly spot you around town and decide to do you some more harm, like swearing out a restraining order for something else you haven’t done. How about growing a beard?”

I chuckled. Drinking was an unnecessary expense I now couldn’t afford to carry. Losing my driving license was something I couldn’t risk either. The beard was a no-no as far as the Guard was concerned, but I guessed I could do scruffy and unkempt in between training sessions. Kasey hadn’t liked facial hair, so she only knew me clean-shaven.

“My phone was the first thing that didn’t work; I guess when the payments stopped the contract got pulled. I’ll buy a cheap burner until I’ve earned enough money to get set up with another provider. The rest of what you say is good sense, so I guess I’ll lie low for a while. The beard will have to come and go depending on when there’s a Guard drill weekend, but it makes sense for me not to be instantly recognizable.”

“Good decision. If there is anything I can help out with, let me know.”

I thought for a minute.

“If my phone contract has dropped out, then I guess anything else to do with my old bank has also stopped. Boss, I’m going to need to see my insurance broker, and check that the DMV doesn’t have me listed as behind on the plates. I guess the internet account and the utility bills don’t matter any more, but I would think that my credit rating has probably taken a hit.”

“Talk to your new bank manager, warn him there’s a possibility of identity theft. If he gets funny about it, tell him to give me a call and I’ll vouch for you.”

“Thanks, boss, that’s another one I owe you.”

He advanced me some cash against my future wages, which was pretty good of him, so I could buy fuel and eat until payday. I camped at the cabin that week, getting one hot meal a day at a small Mom and Pop diner before I went ‘home’ to sleep in the truck parked by my cabin. Heck, where else could I have gone? It was okay as temporary measure, great when rated on price, but I had sure compiled a long list of necessary improvements by my second wake-up there.

Before I’d been activated to go to Iraq, I’d been working on the cabin some evenings and weekends, but always going home at night, so other than the blankets and some containers, I’d had no household stuff at all in the cabin. Heck, apart from my kitbag and the sports bag that had been in my Armory locker, I had no household stuff or clothing AT ALL. Hallett Construction supplied some of the necessary protective clothing as a company uniform and to keep the safety police away, so I’d be okay for boots, cargo trousers and heavy coat, but everything else I’d need to buy.

Saturday morning, after I’d talked to the bank, I took a trip down the Goodwill store, and picked up a few things, jeans, shirts, sneakers, a couple of plates and some silverware. All used but clean. There was a pawn shop a few doors down, and I wandered in there to see if there was anything larger worth having – like a commercial weed whacker at a knock-down price, or maybe a second-hand shotgun to get myself the odd free bit of tasty protein out of my woods. I took a closer look at what was behind the glass.

Shit! That shotgun with the distinctive chunk out of the fore-end had been my Dad’s! My own guns were in the cabinet, right in front of me! The bitch had fucking pawned them! When I stopped cursing, the guy behind the counter offered me a coffee and asked to hear the story. Guess it was a real quiet day for him.

I lucked out, in a way. He’d been burned by a divorce as well, and although he said he couldn’t afford to take a loss on the guns, he’d offered to show me his books so I could see what he’d paid, and he told me that when the tickets expired in a few weeks, he’d let me have first refusal at cost plus ten per cent. That was more than decent of him (better than his coffee, but I didn’t tell him that bit) so he got out the books so I could have a look. Now, that was interesting. She’d pawned them – and a number of other things of mine – under her mother’s maiden name but with our old address. Looked like she had no intention of being tracked down from that. The guy chuckled when he heard that; he reckoned that his suspicions of the deal had proved right, which is why he’d only given well below book value. We shook on our agreement, I took one of his business cards, and said I’d be back. Okay, I was gonna have to pay for something that was mine in the first place, but at least I was getting them back, not having to start anew.

Next up was the town dump. You’d be amazed at what some folks just throw away. Okay, maybe you wouldn’t. I was known there; I’d gotten some nearly-new tin sheeting for the barn roof just before I’d left, and the two guys who ran it let me have a walk through their open barn to see what else they’d salvaged. There was a small two-burner propane Coleman camping stove that someone had dumped; they let me have it for a buck. The rust on the side of the heat shield made it otherwise unsaleable; it didn’t take me more than a few minutes with some fine emery cloth to clean it up for use. It was easy enough to buy a tank of propane and a new connecting hose; I had my basic cooking equipment.

(I had looked at the Colman propane lanterns while I was in the camping store, but I reckoned that they would throw out too much heat in the summer, and attract the night-flying insects, so I’d be better off going to bed with the sun and buying one of those LED flashlights or head torches if I needed to be about at night, until I sorted something better.)

Now that I was going to be actually living in the cabin, there were four essential needs that I hadn’t had when it was just going to be a weekend hideaway – lighting, refrigeration, sanitation and drinking water. There was no way that I could afford to get connected up to the electricity grid, so I asked the tip guys what they knew about off-grid living. Not a great deal, but they had some books and pamphlets that people had dumped, so I borrowed a couple and did some reading. That helped me use up the evenings after work, and I learned a whole lot. Seems the key is to minimize your load – LED lights, low power consumption goods, nothing wasteful. I read in one of the articles that the average power drain on standby mode in an American home is more than most off-grid battery systems can supply. I don’t know how true that it, but if you think that near every appliance now has a clock, a back-lit control panel, and a standby mode, it all adds up. I asked at work if anyone had ever done anything off-grid; one of the electricians had, so I bought him a couple of beers and picked his brains as well. He’d given me a whole lot to think about; a twelve-volt DC system running off a bank of batteries and recharging from a solar panel and a small wind turbine was perfectly feasible, as long as I was sensible about what I tried to run off of it. If necessary I could use a generator to charge up the batteries, but it was easy enough to design a self-contained system if I didn’t get greedy for power.

Refrigeration was always going to be a problem off-grid. Yup, there are options with kerosene and propane, but they were too expensive for me at the moment. A source of purified drinking water too was possible with a bit of investment, but the cheapest short-term option was to buy bottled water for cooking and drinking, and use the creek water for washing.

Sanitation needed tackling before it became an issue, especially finding a solution that wouldn’t risk the safety of the creek water. In Iraq, I’d learned a whole lot about sanitation (what public infrastructure they had already had long broken down, and it was more a matter of doing whatever you could to avoid coming into contact with the local bacteria), so I knew what wasn’t acceptable; of course there were the local construction codes to help me. I’d need to construct some kind of outhouse with a tank or leach field; digging a hole each time I needed to take a dump had been fine for the odd weekend occasion, but ‘shovel patrol’ wasn’t gonna be an option, living there full time. It was something that I’d have had to tackle anyway before showing the place to Aggie and Kasey; I couldn’t have made them squat over a pit in the yard.

I talked to Henry Hallett; he nodded sagely when I explained my problem. He really was a great guy; he helped me out again.

“You’ve got a hitch on your truck; why don’t you take the trailer and the small digger home with you weekends? Let me know how much diesel you use and I’ll take that from your wages before deductions?”

That was a real kind offer; it would save me a bundle of cash and a whole load of time and physical labor. I can handle a shovel with the best of them when it’s necessary, but this was digging for the sake of digging, and a waste of my time. I borrowed the necessary code books from him, and marked out the distances at home that evening. Yeah, that could work, the problem was gonna be piping the water for flushing waste into a tank. I skimmed through the codes; it was possible to dig a pit like an old-fashioned privy with a drain to a leach field for liquids and use sawdust to compost the waste and reduce the smell. If I made the pit big enough from the start, it would be years before I’d have to dig it out and empty it.

Next Saturday, my available funds replenished by a week’s work, I had made another trip to the dump. The guys had remembered my request for a bed, and they’d put a couple aside for me. Once again I was amazed that someone could afford to ditch a nearly-new king-size with a mattress that was only stained a little from a soda spillage; I got it at a very reasonable price which still left me with some cash in hand. While I was in town stocking up on supplies I also hit the Goodwill store; I’d decided that drinking out of aluminum or plastic was slumming it, and I found myself some coffee mugs and beer glasses for a couple of bucks. The lady kindly wrapped them real carefully in sheets of old newspaper inside a cardboard carton, and I put the carton in the passenger foot well to keep it safe. Okay, I’d never need a matching set of four mugs, but I felt that it was progress on my way to getting my life back together.

I unpacked the mugs and glasses that afternoon, and was smoothing out the sheets of newsprint to save them for lighting the fire come the winter, when a name jumped right out of the page and thumped me in the eye.

Yup, you guessed it. None other than Judge Walter Cormell Gregson. Well, well.

I read the article, and then read it again. It was a puff piece about a charity event that had happened in town while I was away. They’d held a formal dinner and dance to raise money for the repair of the oldest building in town, which now houses our local museum. All the town’s notables were there in support; the many photographs illustrating the article included one which showed the pompous asshole in question, standing all dolled up in his tuxedo for the photographer, with his wife and daughter also in their jewels and finery, their smug faces pretending that their shit didn’t stink.

So, that small town newspaper image is the reason why some six months after that photograph had been taken and published, four months after I had returned ‘home’, Laura Amy Cormell Gregson, aged 20 according to the ass-kissing feature writer, a college pre-law sophomore, the only child of Judge Walter Cormell Gregson and his wife Amy Cormell Gregson, was now locked in my cabin.

You know the saying, don’t get mad, get even?

It had been a real busy time since I’d come across that article and gotten the idea of kidnapping her for ransom. What with intending to have myself a reluctant visitor to stay, there had been a whole lot of additional work that needed doing to the cabin, beyond what was necessary for a bachelor pad. Which was why it had taken quite that long for me to be ready to keep her captive.

That reminded me; I couldn’t just sit around all day patting myself on the back on how hard I’d worked to make that cabin habitable, then pretty near escape-proof. I had myself a guest to look after. Time to play the caring host, not.

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