Chapter 5: Racketeer

I spent the next four weeks planning out how I was going to do what I was going to do; between Amazon and Walmart and a few other online shopping stores, I completed the outfit I was going to wear while I was ‘working’. Finding a wetsuit online was the easy part; finding out how to create pockets between the layers of the suit, in order to put in thin ceramic plate for ‘protection’ was a nightmare, though. On the other hand, finding gloves and a face mask and heavy steel-toed boots to complete the costume were some of the easier things I needed to do.

Making the helmet, however, took me just about the entirety of those four weeks, and was one of the hardest things I had to complete. Cobbling together a modified ‘Google glass’, an altimeter, smart phone, satellite radio and an aviation radio- and then putting all of that electronic hardware into a 3D printed helmet was just a little bit short of hell, and that was with help, though to be fair, it was the electronic software— making a program to make it all work together— that gave me the most trouble, and what I needed the help with. Thankfully, the anonymity of the internet made getting the programming done, possible. Actually physically putting it together was simple; just snapping the pieces into the frame of the helmet. I designed the helmet to be able to be put together around my head, and then taken apart again, repeatedly.

But through the process of putting my costume together I still had to do my day job, working as high level tech support for Apple; until I could start making enough money as a vigilante— IF I made money as a vigilante— I needed to have an income to pay for things, like the aforementioned costume; while it wasn’t expensive, and it only took about five hundred dollars to ‘build’ the costume itself, it took another nearly thousand dollars to find someone to make the ceramic inserts that I had to put into the wetsuit, as well as the time and energy of learning just how to modify the suit for those inserts, time which also cost me money. And I wasn’t made of money. But, if I had my way, I would make some money.

One of the things I had been doing— emphasis on had— was trying to go back to school to get a Master’s degree in Psychology. I had majored in it— with a minor in computers and computer sciences— and the plan had been for me to get my Masters, and then she would do hers, and after a few years of saving up, we would each try for our Doctorates, and then work towards having children. Of course, plans never go to plan; and doubly so in my case. Maybe triply so, now that I thought about it; a child on the way, years before we’d “planned” for it, and then I had become a widower, dragging down all our other plans as well.

My plans had, obviously, changed after becoming a widower— and changed again, after my failed attempt- or, rather, my unsuccessful attempt, since I didn’t fail so much as I just didn’t succeed- at suicide. I’d given the majority of my possessions, and my place of residence, and so as a result, I’d been living in this motel room, my hotel room, for the last month; it was cheaper than our shared apartment had been, but it was expensive enough, nonetheless. Add to that, that I had been getting packages to my room over the last month, some interestingly sized packages, as I thought about them later, and- again in hindsight- I guess that that made me a decent prospect for being a target, as I found out one afternoon just before I was ready to get started on my second ‘career’. A knock at the door heralded my not yet willing introduction into my new life.

I didn’t give a lot of actual thought to the fact that the peephole seemed to be covered— because it was dark when I went to look through it, and that to me meant that someone was definitely trying not to be seen, and that made me frown, made me suspicious, and made me not want to answer the door; it was just an automatic response of the paranoid, me.

“Who is it?” I called through the door.

“Neighborhood welcoming committee,” the answer came gruffly back at me.

“Don’t want any,” I answered.

“You should open the door,” a second, slightly higher pitched voice remarked.

“And why would I want to do that?” I called back.

“Because if we have to let ourselves in, we’ll be very angry,” the second voice replied.

I chuckled at that; despite my not being really ready to make this happen, life was telling me to get ready.

I momentarily debated on simply letting them break down the door, and then taking my anger out on ‘them’, but then I thought about how the door would be broken and how that would upset me, and I decided that it would be less of a hassle, for the moment anyway, to open the door.

“Good choice,” the owner of the second voice said, as I began to open the door; he put his hand up on the door, and pushed kinda hard, as though he expected that doing so would make me reel back and just open the door for him and his friends. But with my foot braced at the bottom of the door, it only opened as far as I let it— which was only a couple of inches.

There were three of them; they were all male, and all appeared to be hispanic. The closet one, the one who had done the most talking so far, was the shortest one; he stood about maybe 5’8” or thereabouts— though, to be really honest, it wasn’t like I could measure their height by eyeball; I was just guessing— and fairly slim, wiry frame; he reminded me a bit of John Leguizamo. The second guy was a couple inches taller, and a bit broader in his body frame; he could have been a stunt double for Luis Guzman, but like an angrier version. The last guy, though, was easily as tall as I was, and looked like he could snap a log in half. He looked like a lighter, hispanic version of Tom Lister Junior.

“Hey! Open the door!” Leguizamo-look-alike snapped.

“I did,” I deadpanned.

“Let us in, smart-ass,” he shot back at me, “open the fucking door and let us in, before I beat your ass!”

I seriously considered being a smart ass and telling him to say “please”, but— and then the bare bones of a plan popped into my head, and I decided to just let them in.