Chapter 1

My dad. He was my hero. We did a lot of stuff together; my favorite was hunting. We lived on a big piece of land right on the outer edge of our school district. Thanks to his patience and instruction, by the time I was ten, I could hit a squirrel with my .22 rifle at more than 25 yards. I could take a deer with my 30.06 from over 200 yards. It was supposed to be illegal, but Dad said that was partially how we fed ourselves and it was all on our land, not the State’s or County’s or City’s.

My dad took me to school each day. He said it was so the bus didn’t have to come out so far but I knew he had another reason though. Riding with dad was more fun because he worked in a motor shop and he modified his car quite a bit. His specialty was high performance small block motors for local drag racers and stock car racers. Dad could take a V6 and jazz it up to over 500 horsepower. A small block V6 put drag racers in a lower competitive bracket and his motors blew guys away. Even big block nitro fed cars fell if the driver of the V6 was sharp and had good timing.

Anyway, another thing we always talked about was that the men in our family always had served in the military. He said that we had O’Dells fighting in the Civil War on both sides. He never told me that it was my duty or expectation to serve, but the way he talked about it in the context of our family legacy, it seemed like it was just something an O’Dell was expected to do.

I was too young to really talk seriously about it, being only nine at the time. I think he was holding off on the really serious discussions until later when I was a bit older. However, later never came. He was driving home from the shop one day and some guy in a big rig lost his brakes and plowed into my dad from behind, driving him forward into another big rig carrying 16’ lengths of 1/4” pipe. He hit with such force that some of the pipes came loose and one went through my dad’s stomach and through the driver’s seat. He bled out before anyone could help him.

Dad owned the property we lived on, so having a place to live was no problem for me and mom. Mom and dad had been married for almost ten years and Dad had made life in the country pretty easy for us. However, mom was not comfortable in living out in the boonies alone without Dad and after a couple of years, she sat me down and told me that she was worried about being out in the country without my dad to protect us.

I began to spend more time doing work around the property but even with me helping all I could, the grass was growing too high and the things around the property that broke were difficult to keep going without dad’s talents. She tried to hold on for another few years, but wasn’t sure how long she could go.

Shortly after my fifteenth birthday, mom was approached by some businessmen who saw the housing market growing out away from town and in our direction and they wanted to buy our place to build subdivisions on. Mom talked it over with me. I was more aware of the world around me by now and I looked around town and studied the newspaper real estate ads. I showed my mom what the price of new houses were in the newer areas of town.

We multiplied that amount by the number of houses these guys said they were going to build and came up with a figure for our property. At first the guy who came to the house to sell us on the idea said mom’s asking price was nuts. Well no one calls my mom nuts so I tore into the asshole.

“Look mister,” I said. “You are talking about building 110 houses on our land, Right?”

“Yeah, kid,” the guy answered angrily.

“Houses on the North side of town, the new houses that you guys are building right now, are selling according to the paper for $350,000. Right?”

He looked at me and scowled an affirmative.

“Well according to my math $350,000 times 110 equals $38,500,000. Now let’s say that you make 15 percent profit on each one, then 15 percent of $38,500,000 is $5,770,000. Right?”

“OK. So what’s the point?”

“The point is that we will sell you our land for 5 percent of $38,500,000 or $1,925,000. Cash upfront before the close of business tomorrow. You still make a 10 percent profit before you raise the price to pass on the cost to the buyers.”

“That’s crazy. We still have to prep the land and bring in utilities and all that costs money.”

“Which you should pay for, on your land, if it becomes your land. If you don’t go for this offer before the close of business tomorrow the price goes up 1 percent every day.”

“What!? That’s nonsense!”

“OK. Thank you and we are sorry to have wasted your time. The costs only go up, as you know. Later this year the cost will be huge! And then we may have to split the property into smaller sections and sell off each section at a price higher than what we are asking of you for the entire farm. Of course then you will have to compete with other builders and your profit per unit will probably go down significantly.”

“Give me some time to think this over,” the asshole said.

“We have given you time. You have until the close of business, 5PM in case you don’t know, tomorrow. Then you will have until 5PM the next day to agree to 6 percent and so on.”

A lawyer drove out to our house the following evening, before 5PM. He had a cashier’s check for $1,925,000 made out to my mom. We took the check and the contract and then told the lawyer that we would have our lawyer, Mr. Dewey C. Howe VI, look it over. If everything was correct and there were no hidden problems mom would sign and we would have our lawyer return the signed contract to their lawyer.

Their lawyer was not happy. And as it turned out, when Mr. Howe took the contract apart he found that it was fixed in such a way that we would have to pay back a portion of the sale price if the houses didn’t sell in 6 months, but they weren’t going to start building for another four months. There was no way they could meet those terms and it was obvious that we would soon lose all the money and the property.

Mr. Howe corrected the contract to say that any homes they did not sell in 6 months would become our property and the price of the land just went up 1 percent because all of this was going on after 5PM.

Yeah, it hit the fan. But we were in the catbird seat. We had the land and a house on it. We had no debts, except for taxes. We could sit and wait. And wait we did. For three more days, then on Saturday the asshole’s lawyer showed up with a new contract and a check for $3,850,000.

Mom called Mr. Howe and he drove out to our place like the amateur race car driver he was. For some reason unknown to me at the time, Mr. Howe’s street car had one of my dad’s motors in it. He looked over the contract and pronounced it to be fair and correct. My mom signed, Mr. Howe notarized it and we were rich. Well moderately so.

We bought a small, three bedroom house for cash that was in a perfect location in relation to the high school and mom had the rest invested. She was going to be set for life. Me? I was just a happy kid. My mom was safe and that made me happy.

Life proceeded to move along. I got a job at my dad’s motor shop as soon as I got into 9th Grade, working for the new owner, and I got a car when I turned 16. It was a 1992 Oldsmobile Cutlass Supreme Convertible. It had a standard 3.1 liter V6 that generated 140 horsepower. When it was new the car would top off around 120 miles per hour.

It turned out that my dad had made arrangements to buy the car as a part of his will. And it was held in storage until I was old enough to drive. While it was in storage, my dad would do little tweaks to the motor and after he was killed, the guys in the shop kept right on tweaking. Eventually the guys in the shop used the Olds as a tool to teach me how to work on engines and when I turned sixteen they had a birthday party for me and handed me the keys.

After the work the shop guys and I had done it now makes considerably more than 140 horsepower and has a considerably higher top speed. Oh and it was painted a Neon Blue Metallic with a Tan soft convertible top. I loved it.

I was responsible and frugal and a semi-normal teenager. As soon as my mom thought I was ready, which was way after I thought I was ready, she let me start dating. My few dates were treated with respect and always said they had a good time. I was not extravagant in my spending and I didn’t use my mom’s money as bait to get laid.

I wasn’t really interested in dating girls who were interested because I was a rich kid. I had my mom, my job, my car, and of course really good grades. Don’t get me wrong, I liked girls but some of them, like the one I was really and truly interested in, I never approached because I considered them to be way out of my league.

Then one October day in my Senior year, just before Homecoming, I was driving away from high school when I saw something down an alley that I didn’t like. There were several guys beating on a couple of other guys. Now I’m no hero, but something didn’t look right and something especially didn’t feel right. I turned the car around and drove right up the alley where the attack was going on.

It didn’t take a long time to see that one of the guys being beat up was actually a girl I knew. Her name was Jean Carlesetti and she was that out of my league girl I had been interested in. The other victim was her boyfriend. I drove straight at them, honking my horn. When the the guy hitting Jean’s boyfriend turned his head, the boyfriend grabbed a bottle from the ground next to a dumpster and used it to beat his attacker over the head. As soon as he did that the guy attacking Jean hit her in the mouth with a closed fist, knocking her to the ground and turned towards me.

I jumped out of the car, ran and jumped at the guy facing me, feet first, landing on the side of his knee with both feet before I fell to the ground none too gently. He screamed and collapsed to the ground clutching his right leg which was now bent inward at the knee. I stood up and found the guy being beaten by Jean’s boyfriend wasn’t moving and the third guy had taken a powder.

I quickly went over to Jean’s boyfriend and got him to stop hitting the guy on the ground. The guy was a bloody pulp, the boyfriend was covered in blood and the remains of the broken and bloody bottle were still in his right hand.

Jean was lying on the ground holding her face with one hand and her stomach with the other. I went to her and told her to stay still but she was unconscious. I looked at her boyfriend and yelled, “Are you OK?”

He looked at me like I was a ghost.

“I said, are you OK? Can you take care of Jean while I get the police?”

He still didn’t answer, but it became a moot point when the sirens came screaming down the street. One car stopped behind mine and the others pulled up the alley from the other direction. That’s when it got scary. With her boyfriend covered in blood, the cops had their guns out in nothing flat. I shot my hands in the air and yelled, “Wait! Don’t shoot!”

I stood still while I yelled and then dropped to my knees next to Jean, keeping my hands in the air. Several more police suddenly appeared and wrestled Jean’s boyfriend to the ground. Seeing what was happening, I lay on my stomach and put my hands behind me. I was quickly cuffed and when one of the cops was about to do the same to Jean, I yelled again.

“Don’t move her! Those guys were beating on her and her boyfriend. She could be hurt bad. Please don’t move her.”

The cop looked at me and nodded.

“Miss? Miss, can you hear me?” The cop asked gently.

Jean moaned but didn’t talk. Just then a couple of ambulances showed up. Next thing I know, I’m in an ambulance with the guy I’d hit in the knee and we’re on our way to the hospital. He stared at me during the entire trip, when he wasn’t moaning in pain, but didn’t speak to me or the EMT riding in the back with us. Our old hospital had just opened an emergency department within the past year. The injured guy was taken in first and then I was led in. I felt unhurt, I was just a bit bloody from handling Jean’s boyfriend and really dirty from rolling around on the ground in the alley.