Chapter 12

The next night, we revisited Gutierrez and McMichael Export and Import to try to get a better picture of what was going on. We returned to James Boniface's office and gave it a thorough going over. The other filing cabinet in his office was full of small plastic bags of a white powder; we were sure it had to be drugs.

OK, now we knew where the courier was picking up his merchandise, but we didn't know how it was getting to Boniface's office. We went through the papers in Boniface's desk, but could not find anything implicating any other member of the firm. This could mean one of two things: either Boniface was operating alone, or he was doing a damned good job of covering for other people. There was no question about it—this investigation was out of our league! We did not have the resources to follow up, so we had to suffer through the red tape of the DEA to do anything about stopping the drugs. We tidied up from our search and left for home before the cleaning crew arrived.

Chris wrote a letter detailing everything we knew to his contact in Washington, DC, and sent a copy to the local man, then we washed our hands of the project. All we could do now was to wait for the gears of a government agency to grind to a conclusion. As it turned out, it was almost six months later that we heard via TV of a big drug bust in downtown Boston, but there were no more news releases on it. We guessed that the bust was against Boniface, but we never heard any more about it. We were damned disgusted, but we did note that drugs disappeared from that particular apartment complex for a few weeks.

We decided that, except for special cases, we were no longer going to get involved in big cases where we needed federal help. We decided that they were too busy making themselves look good to be bothered with small potatoes like us.

We focused our attention on the small timers who were not hurting enough people to warrant the local police pushing to get rid of them. Yet, the small time crooks were hurting a lot of defenseless people when you added up the harm that they did. Since nobody in authority seemed to care, we made a point to be the ones to care.

Our first target was the small gangs of hoodlums who roamed the low-income neighborhoods picking on the homeless, the go-it-alone prostitutes, and the working people who had to be out after dark. We got a map of the Boston metropolitan area and marked out the endangered areas from the crime statistics. These we gleaned from the internet; it's surprising what you can find published there if you just dig for it.

Obviously, our first target neighborhood was the one with the worst crime. We could always work our way down from there. We found that our best strategy was our oldest: I dressed in my African-American woman disguise and Phobos shadowed me as I walked the streets.

Martha dropped us off and went home. We were afraid for her to try parking in such a high-crime neighborhood. We planned to phone her for a pickup when we were ready to call it a night. We thought to make it easy on ourselves to break in on the neighborhood by starting in the middle of the week, when crime was at its lowest. Ha! I had hardly gone half a block before I was accosted by my first gang members.

This gang was rather small, only six members, but they would have all qualified for a college wrestling team in the unlimited weight class. This was an integrated gang with both White and Black members, so I guess there was some social progress, even here.

The leader was Black, and he approached me while the others formed a loose ring around me. "Hello, Cunt, what are you doing out here on our turf? No hookers work this street without our permission and paying us a cut. So, how many tricks have you turned so far, tonight?"

"That's none of your business. I warn you, and this is your only chance, back off and you won't get hurt too bad. Keep pushing, and you will wind up in the hospital with some major hurt. Now, break off, you piss-ant."

I know that I was antagonizing him, and that was the idea. I wanted him to make the first hostile move. That was just a quirk of mine, but I was kind of stuck with it. The fact that he was over a foot taller than me gave him all of the courage he needed. He grabbed my left arm to pull me toward him. My right arm and hand were free and holding my baton where it was not obvious to him. As usual, I didn't want to kill him because I wanted him to experience the maximum in pain.

I broke his wrist so that he was forced to release me. This was followed by a poke in the solar plexus with the end of the baton. When he reflexively leaned over, I popped him under the jaw with the baton in an effort to break his lower jaw, and his upper jaw if I was lucky. I was lucky.

He dropped to the sidewalk, out cold, so I was able to turn my attention to the remainder of the gang. My initial attack had been so fast, essentially one continuous motion of my baton, that the other five members of the gang had not fully realized what had happened. I laid into them with my swinging baton so that all five were down before Phobos had a chance to intervene. He chided me for being so selfish and not leaving something for him to do. I replied that he should be more alert and not so lazy about joining the party. That way, he would not be left out.

Each person was wakened with smelling salts and both of his elbows were broken. He also had one testicle crushed, since they had not actually tried to rape me. Of course, that may have simply been because they had not had time. Anyway, each man was warned individually that we would not be so gentle, next time. We distributed our cards, and I called 911 for EMTs. We did not wait around, but went on about our business.

Ah, this was more like it. We were both having fun doing what we seemed to do best, so we were very happy. Apparently, the arrival of EMTs and cops scared off the gangs around there, so it was five blocks later before we met any more interesting people.

This time, two assailants rushed out of an alley and grabbed my arms so that I could not use my baton as freely as I would like. I was forced to resort to the spikes in my boots to disable them. A titanium spike in the tibia does a lot to discourage a person, so they turned me loose and dropped to the ground. There was a light in the alley, so that I was able to see my attackers at last. They were all GIRLS! There were seven of them, and they all carried a section of pipe as their weapon of choice.

Phobos showed up quickly this time, but was somewhat taken aback by the fact that he had to attack females. However, he had no trouble recovering and laying into them with his baton while I defended myself from attack with my own baton. I did not need to use my spikes again, but I was prepared to do so if the need arose.

As with the previous gang, each of the girls were laid out cold in only about 90 seconds. None escaped because it was a dead-end alley. You'd think that they would be smarter than that. Now, the question arose as to how we were going to treat female hooligans. A part of the question was easy to answer, we just broke their elbows. Unfortunately, they had no balls to crush, so we debated what would be appropriate.

We settled on cropping off the tip of each nose. The results were ghastly, and the girls would regret ever running into us for the rest of their lives. We also warned them that they were now easy to recognize, and if we ever encountered them again in such a situation, we would cut off their ears and tits. That made an impression! More cards were distributed and I made the call to 911. It was getting so that I could recognize the voice of the various operators, and they greeted me by name. It was nice to recognize a friendly voice at the other end of the line.