Chapter 18

### The Kidnapping of Buck, Gran, & Bug

Donald Jacob “DJ” Brewster brooded. He was not a happy man. Despite his wealth, his property, his international empire of drug smuggling and human trafficking, and his near-immune exercise of power in a state that he held quite literally by the balls, and his last hour in the bunkhouse with a young, hand-picked sample of his last human shipment, he was not satisfied. Hatred burned deep in his gut. The half-breed was back and he seemed to be both richer and happier than ever. And now he had a family at that damned mine! Women! Kids! And he and that old man, Buckmaster, were riding higher in the saddle than ever before. Worst of all, with that damned Sheriff Nelson and his deputies, they’d taken — actually ambushed and captured — his men and four of Delgado’s best men when DJ’s plan to seize some of the Adams people to get a hold on Reese, when it all went wrong and blew up in DJ’s face and Delgado had to rescue his men at great cost, and...!

DJ brought his fist smashing down on his leather desktop pad, sending a half-full glass of 12-year-old scotch whiskey bouncing to spill. He screamed in frustration.

“Asshole! Get in here! Get the cunt to come clean this up. And listen up, asshole! It was your fucked-up plan that sent everything haywire up the Yankee Fork. You’re gonna fix it! So here’s a plan to get it done right this time.”

DJ handed a typed sheet of paper to his ranch manager, Walter Davis, who glowered down at his despised boss. He said nothing.

“Read it, memorize it, burn it, and get the men together. Get it done. And no fuck-ups this time! Not unless you’d like to explain it to Delgado, who’s not so happy with you. Got it? So go do it! Now!”

Davis said nothing but folded and pocketed the paper. He stepped around the teenage servant, Maria, who knelt at the end of the desk wiping up the spilled whiskey that had run off the desktop. DJ, seeing her there, kicked out viciously and sent her sprawling.

“Get your wetback ass out of here, cunt! You didn’t hear a damned word, right? Run before I have you whipped!” he screamed.

Two days later, three days after he’d been posted to a rotating dawn to dusk watch, Brewster’s lookout on the hillside above the Yankee Girl mine road radioed his message: “The old man is leaving with the old woman in the passenger seat. A little girl is strapped in a car seat behind on the woman’s side. Vehicle is a two-tone green GMC suburban, dark green roof and sides with tan stripes under. The old man is driving; they turned down-river.”

“Okay. The boss says the plan is a go. Run to your driver and follow but stay well back. Close in fast when we’ve got them stopped. Assist the take-down as planned. Copy?”

“Copy! Leaving now.”

Buck glanced in his rear view mirror when a pickup truck pulled up behind them, but before he could identify the driver, another pickup veered in front of him from the on-coming lane and braked to a stop, blocking him in. A man rose up from under a tarp in the pickup’s bed and fired three shots over Buck’s head, just missing the top of the windshield. He lowered his sights to aim at Buck and Gran. Buck hardly had time to react, or Gran to yell in surprise, when another man carrying an assault rifle raced from the pickup behind them to the door where Bug sat strapped in her seat. He tugged the door handle; it was locked. Swinging his rifle back, he rammed the rifle butt into the window and shattered the tempered glass into a shower of fragments that sprayed into Bug’s face. She screamed in fear. The attacker shoved his rifle barrel into Bug’s side, under her arm.

“Turn off your engine. Get out and stand by the hood, both of you. I’m counting to ten. Do it now or I kill the girl! NOW!” the man shouted. From the front another man jumped out with a handgun and moved to cover Buck’s side. The man in the pickup bed held an assault rifle aimed at them through the windshield.

“Do it, Ms. Happy! They got us pinned. Try and help Bug out of her seat; carry her if they let you,” Buck said.

Gran swore under her breath but was far more worried about Bug and the broken glass. The girl had stopped screaming the moment her attacker jammed the rifle barrel into her side, but she whimpered and sobbed, closing her eyes to avoid seeing the ‘bad men’ attacking them.

The man on Buck’s side jerked him out onto the road and roughly forced his hands behind him to cinch them together with a zip tie. He pushed Buck to the rear of the Suburban, opened the rear door, and ordered Buck to sit.

“Stick your legs out, feet together,” he ordered, and when Buck complied, he cinched another zip tie binding Buck’s ankles.

Gran lifted Bug from her car seat, gently brushing fragments of broken glass from her clothing and hair. She joined Buck in the back seat after her wrists and ankles were zip-tied. Bug was shoved to sit between them.

“Jump in and drive. Follow us!” the man at the front vehicle yelled back. In moments three vehicles were speeding away. In the few minutes the attack took, no other vehicle had come along to witness the kidnapping.

Bug’s little back pack and her Tigger toy lay on the seat beside her car seat, out of reach. Gran’s purse lay on the front passenger seat floorboard. Buck had been roughly patted down and his wallet was now stuffed in the driver’s coat pocket. Buck’s .45 auto pistol was in its holster, tucked under the driver’s seat. He’d had no time to grab for it, and the rifle barrel pressed into Bug’s side had defeated any possible response. He waited, grim, silent, watching and thinking. Gran too was silent, murmuring to Bug to be still and be quiet, to trust that they’d be okay.

The caravan of vehicles stopped at a guarded gate at the riverside drive into the Brewster Ranch. A pair of armed guards, alerted to their arrival, held the gate open and waved them through, then closed and secured the gate closed. They tugged a logging chain across the gate entrance at waist height and locked it around the gate posts at each end. Nothing short of a 10-wheel construction truck would break through that barrier. They returned to their guard posts, small huts behind log barriers with gun ports looking out at the entrance.

“Take ‘em down to the basement apartment in the main house,” DJ ordered his ranch foreman. “Put the old lady and the kid in the master bedroom. Keep her tied up, and watch them. Put the old man in the kitchen. Tie him to a chair and soften him up like I said in the plan. Come get me in two hours. He should be agreeable to anything by then.

Gran could hear the sounds of the beating through the closed bedroom door, the sound of fists and saps striking Buck’s body and the gloating boasts, threats, and swearing from the men she knew were circling him like hyenas darting in to torment and attack him. She never heard a word from Buck other than grunts of pain when blows to his chest and stomach pounded the wind out of him. Her guard, a younger man, sat silent, watching the door. She began to think that he was frightened too, perhaps thinking that if things went wrong he might be on the bad end of DJ’s sadistic temper.

“Enough!” one man ordered. “Boss said to soften him up, not kill him. He’s no good dead, not yet. He’s passed out. Let him sit and bleed. We’ll go take a break. Time’s not up yet.

“Hey, kid!” the man yelled through the bedroom door, jerking it partly open. “Stay here. We’re goin’ for a break, but don’t leave the room. The old lady’s trussed up and the little kid’s no threat. Think you can handle that until we get back?” he taunted.

“Yeah, I can handle it,” the young guard mumbled, scowling at the insult.

Gran sat upright on the bed, her wrists zip-tied behind her. Bug snuggled in beside her, no longer sniffling or whining. Her dark eyes stared at the young guard, a frown on her small face. Gran leaned down to whisper in her ear while the guard fiddled with his smart phone, distracted, staring at its screen.

“Snugglebug, I know that you’re a big girl and can go to the bathroom all by yourself, but I want you to play a ‘pretend’ game now. Can you do that?”

“What kind of pretend game, Granny?”

“Pretend very loud that you can’t do anything on the toilet by yourself. Pretend that you’re not a big girl and that you still need help with everything. Be really loud about that, alright? Pretend that you can’t get on the toilet seat or do anything by yourself. Pretend you’re afraid of falling in and you need help with your clothes, and everything. Just pretend like way back when you were in training pants and needed help. Can you do that, even if the bad man yells at you? Can you just cry and yell right back that you can’t do it and you really need help? Can you do that? It’s really, really important!”

“Yes, Granny. I can do that. Right now?”

“In a minute, sweetie. I’ll tell the bad man that you have to use the bathroom and when he argues, you just have a big screaming fit until he does what you want. Okay?”

Bug grinned a very small grin and nodded her head: “Yes, I can do that.”

“Hey, you!” Gran called. The young guard’s head snapped up, frowning that he’d been distracted. “Shut up, old woman!”

“This child needs to go to the bathroom, right now! To the toilet!”

“Yeah, well I need a blow job, old woman! We’ve all got stuff we need!”

“I’m not kidding. This little girl really needs to go. You don’t want her to mess her pants, because then you’ve got to stay in here with the stink. Is that smart? Can you spend the next hour smelling that? I sure don’t want that!”

“Okay, so maybe we trade. The kid goes to the toilet and you give me a blow job. Does that sound fair? It sounds fair to me,” the guard leered.

“First, the toilet!” Gran raised her voice.

“Okay, okay. Hey, kid, jump off the bed and get your tiny ass on that toilet, now!” The guard jumped to his feet and reached for Bug to pull her along by her shoulder but she twisted away and screamed, “No! Not you!”

“Go by yourself, then!” the guard snarled back, releasing her and giving her a hard shove toward the bathroom door.

“NO! NO! NO!” Bug screamed, her shrill little girl voice echoing in the small room. “Gran helps me! I can’t do it by myself! You stay out!” Bug shoved her hands between her legs, a small wet stain starting to show in her red and white-tasseled cowgirl trousers. “Gran, Gran, help me, Gran!” she shrieked. Bug doubled over, gripping herself and jumping in small hops, crying and shrieking louder.

“Hey, you damned fool! I need my hands free to help her or you’ll be smelling shit any minute now,” Gran yelled at the guard who was visibly angry, upset and confused.

“NOW!” Gran yelled again, hopping off the bed and turning around with her arms toward him.

“OKAY, Bitch! Hold still!” He grabbed a flip-knife from his pocket and slit the zip tie free.

“My legs, too!” she added. “I can’t hop without falling over. Are you afraid of an old woman? YOU, big brave man with the gun and the knife?”

He was visibly rattled by Bug’s high-pitched shrieking and yelling and her wild hopping back and forth, screeching “I gotta go! Please, bad man, I gotta go!” The spreading wet stain down both legs of her pants showed she wasn’t lying. The little girl was losing it.

“All right! Sit on the edge of the bed. Lift your damned legs!” He reached in and slit the zip tie at her ankles.

Gran jumped up and in one swift grab she scooped up Bug and rushed to the toilet. Dropping the girl’s pants and panties, she lifted her onto the toilet seat. A visible sound of relief followed.