Chapter 9

Early Sunday morning, a little after 8 a.m., I received a surprise phone call on my normal cell phone from my mother in Palm Springs. Her little house was less than a mile away from Mr. DeLuca's house and she had heard a loud explosion right before dawn but didn't think anything about it until the radio news reports came in of a major explosion at the house of a famous former mobster.

Checking the local Palm Springs TV station websites, I found two that were running live TV reports from the scene and I grimly followed the news for the next couple of hours, also frantically calling everyone I could think of that still held their loyalty to The Boss. Rusty's body was the first one publically identified, but two other bodies were found in the burning wreckage, one an elderly man and the other a middle-aged very tall and muscular man and it was soon reported that the other victims were Mr. DeLuca and his bodyguard "Big Ben".

I was too numb to be angry, but I could feel the rage seething deep inside like a slowly boiling teapot not quite yet ready to whistle. My inner voice was working overtime to calm me, reminding me to stick with the plan and all would be well.

The plan for revenge. Oh, yes ... there was going to be revenge ... in spades!

I spent all Sunday and into early Monday morning at my little office/warehouse finalizing envelopes stuffed chock full of goodies and addressing them to the various interested parties with my able assistant. When I finished I was in plenty of time to get them all dropped off at Fed-Ex's main Vegas office in time for the first morning pickup. Most of my recipients would get their packages late this afternoon, but a few of the east coast folks would get morning delivery tomorrow. That was going to work out just fine.

Most of the packages were fairly identical. I had located most of the video blackmail victims and sent each of them a short letter along with a DVD disc of the evidence. The letters weren't too detailed and went generally like this:

"It has come to my attention that you might have received a disc of video evidence such as the one enclosed, along with certain indecent and reprehensible demands for payment in return for their silence. Please feel free to ignore any current or future requests for payment as the ladies and/or gentlemen involved in this project are currently being admonished for their improper behavior and will shortly be under FBI investigation. Your secrets are safe with me.

Your Friend, a Too-Wise Owl"

Notice I didn't bother to name any names of the guilty parties. While I was looking forward to quite a bit of victim outrage, I wanted this outrage to be rather carefully channeled. The FBI was going to be getting, in a few days, my complete collection and would provide all of the interesting detailed bits to the majority of the other victims later.

My little voice assured me that a small little group of just four carefully selected high profile victims would provide more than enough of the very special outrage that I wanted to create. My letters to these select victims was a bit more detailed and suggestive:

"You are being or have been blackmailed by a group of rogue individuals working out of a certain Vegas Casino Hotel. Would you like to know more?

Should you happen to be in Vegas, I would be delighted to offer some sage advice for arranging a suitable face-to-face meeting with these misguided individuals.

No meetings — no money. Just a friendly word or two of advice or two upon request.

toowiseowl@email.com"

I was positive that all four of these selected victims were more than anxious for an unfriendly visit with our enterprising blackmailers and wouldn't waste much time getting onto the stage. I might even have to keep a few of them dangling just a bit to keep them from acting a bit too soon. I had several other players who would want a seat at this gaming table and it would be much more fun to have everyone working more or less together rather than have dozens of separate seemingly random acts of chaos.

My next group of players was the zealot kooks of the New Celestial Covenant Church. I'd already primed the pump on their paranoia last week with our little visit, not to mention the kidnapping of several of their younger guards, and now it was time to heat up the pressure some more. The town had no land line telephone system and it was way out of any normal cell phone range, so we couldn't start making harassing phone calls, so we did the next best thing.

Using a secure Internet phone to call my two scouts satellite phone, I advised that I would be meeting them this evening with a few presents and to make plans for Phase B of our little harassment scheme. This would sting the cultists into action and hopefully drive the entire hive into the direction I wanted them. I figured that this group, once properly motivated, would gallop into action fast and probably without a whole lot of advance planning. It would be as subtle as a bull in a china shop, but it would be loud and very noisy ... perfect for covering over my more subtle parts of the plan.

My next group of major players were the Vegas loyal opposition. The other mobs that Wes was feuding with to gain a bigger slice of the underworld pie. None of them trusted Wes or his word about agreeing to a truce and with the help of a few phone calls and some disinformation into the right ears, the word started to get passed down the line that this was just another ploy by Wes to plan a sneak attack upon the mob leadership.

To cement this notion, I arranged a rather large payment to a local bunch of gang-bangers for them to perform a series of drive-by shootings the following evening at the personal residences of three of the larger (and more suspicious) independent bosses, including the big New York boss that I had gifted with the GPS'd bag of trash. The payment was made in a Casino envelope by my PI operative that looked like, and pretended to be, Carl Greenwood. If caught, and several of them were, they would confess until the end that they were under orders from Wes to perform the hit.

The Vegas truce was going to be over in a flash and the cold war was about to get very hot after tomorrow night indeed!

My next player in this complicated game was a ghost from the past, Mr. DeLuca's old 'expediter' and headhunter, Russell Graves, the same Russ that had joined me for my very first late night burial trip out in the desert.

Russ had disappeared under mysterious circumstances a few years ago right before Wes and his cronies took over the Casino. There had been speculation that there was a lot of bad blood between Russ and John Samuels and more than one person (quietly) assumed that John had arranged an accident for Russ to help speed the path for Wes's takeover.

The rumors were almost true. John had arranged a little accident for Russ and a sniper put three bullets into him and left him to die out in the desert. Russ, being as tough and ornery as they come, just refused to die and crawled his way out to safety. Russ was partially paralyzed and had trouble walking afterwards with a cane ... but he was alive and itching for revenge. Mr. DeLuca had left his phone number in the bank safety deposit for use in an emergency only. This looked like the right time.

Of course Mr. DeLuca put him out into retirement and he assumed a new identity to remain hidden and apparently dead, but Russ was still burning for the chance to get some payback. Now was the time for it, and I gave him one heck of a surprising phone call.

"Russ? Hello, this is your old friend Jonny ... how are you doing?"

"Jon! I'm doing okay; I suppose ... how did you get this number? Is it is safe?"

"Everything's secure. That idiot Wes and his buds have killed Mr. DeLuca. Blew up his house yesterday in Palm Springs. I've got the prick Marlon Simms bragging about it on tape if you want to hear it."

"Fuck. You know this means war?!"

"Abso-fucking-lutely. I assume, of course, that you've got an old grudge or two that you'd like to take care of? The timing couldn't be any better."

"Count me in — say when, say where!"

"Glad to hear it. Mr. DeLuca had approved a plan and we've got to follow it to the letter. If you can slightly postpone your surprise visit with John for a day or two, I'd be really grateful if you could handle one or two little smaller items first. In fact, I'll give you the honor of firing the first salvo of Mr. DeLuca's revenge. Game?"

"Game! Little Jonny from the garage, now Adrian DeLuca's top headhunter ... who would have thought it! Let's make the old man proud!"

And that was that. I gave Russ his first task and my new secure "Too Wise Owl" cell phone number so that he could contact me the moment he was ready to go.

The next group of players in this drama had pretty much finished all of their parts, but I did need them for one last bit of haydukery and secretive mayhem. Starting this morning, I had a small group of several young male PI's making harassing phone calls to the Casino with untraceable cell phones, pretending to be members of the New Celestial Covenant Church. We knew that the zealots didn't have phones, but Wes wouldn't know that until it was way too late. I reminded our would-be faux zealots to avoid specific threats, but make a bunch of very generic ones to Wes, John, Carl and Marlon by name.

"Keep the tone very Old Testament, and invoke the image of God smiting the wicked a lot!" I reminded them. This should raise the level of paranoia to the boiling point fairly soon, I hoped.

Otherwise, the private investigation firm I'd hired was now out of the game. I'd thought about giving them a full packet of the blackmail goodies too, but at the last minute I changed my mind. The FBI could handle things fine by that point and my little voice was murmuring that all of these hidden camera videos would all otherwise soon end up on the Internet for everyone to see, and I really didn't want that. There is always one fuckward in every organization that shouldn't be trusted with so much as a burned out match, and the more people that had access to this gold mine of pornography the worse it would probably end up.

Our last player, the FBI, was going to be the final racehorse out of the gate. I wanted the shooting and explosions well over before they overtly got involved. I had a big packet of appetizers for them and inside I'd included the address and padlock key of the storage warehouse I'd rented. This would give them access to everything and they could then fill out reports for years afterwards.

I wasn't quite sure who the best agent was to mail these to, so I just called the Vegas main FBI number and asked what special agent I should speak to for handling a large interstate blackmail case. The operator checked her directory and referred me to a Special Agent Ray Hammond, transferring me to his phone, which he answered. I confirmed his name and mailing address and told him to wait for a package from the Too Wise Owl later this week and hung up on him.