Chapter 7

Gambling was not a big deal in Sola Vista, what with Las Vegas being so nearby, but there were some slot machines and poker parlors in operation. As expected, the Carnoli family took a piece from the pie. I think that it was not a big deal for them—more of the principle of the thing. Nevertheless, such places were illegal, so the cops were supposed to take notice of them.

The point of my remarks was visible standing under a streetlight. Wherever there is gambling, there must be prostitution not far away. This may not be true 100% of the time, but it's close enough in my experience. What grabbed our attention as we rolled by was that the woman in question under the streetlight had just been grabbed by the arm and jerked into a van without windows, and the van sped off long before any negotiations could possibly have been conducted.

So many prostitutes are raped and murdered in California that we felt compelled to investigate. I killed the headlights and depended on FLIR to guide me safely as we followed the van. It was pretty late at night, but the van was still noticeable because it was not making any effort to obey the speed limit. This looked bad no matter how you sliced it, so it seemed to behoove us to follow the van unless some other information surfaced.

We figured that the van must hold at least three people, the prostitute and two original occupants of the van. Of course, there may even be more than that in the vehicle, but we would not know until we stopped it. The van did not try to leave town, it just headed for a large park which it entered. We followed far enough to be lost among the trees and decorative bushes. At this point, the van stopped and the back doors opened.

Even without a lot of light, it was obvious that a rape was going on in the van. We all jumped out and ran to the van. There we found a woman lying on a mess of a mattress on the van floor. She was being held down by two men while a third man was actively raping her. There was a fourth man in the van standing to one side, but holding a vicious looking knife with a five or six-inch-long blade.

Bill and I were holding our Glocks and Gail had her Uzi at the ready as we arrived. I did the usual cop thing and ordered the men to back off and let the woman get up. They were so intent on the rape that they had not noticed us until I spoke. She screamed, "PLEASE HELP ME!" as we prepared for action.

The answer for my order was something in the nature of "FUCK OFF!" Well, it was obvious that this was not a voluntary trick by the prostitute, so we went into action. We holstered our guns and waded in with our sticks. In only a few seconds, we had laid out the four men, and Gail was trying to comfort the prostitute.

The woman had already been taken by one of the men and the second one was having fun when we got there. We couldn't be sure if they planned to kill the whore after they had finished their fun, and we couldn't assume it. So we just took all of the money the four creeps had on them and gave the money to the woman. She looked at it and said, "My God! Thank you. That's more than I usually make in a week."

We were really upset with the four bastards, so we broke all of their knees and elbows before calling 911 for EMTs. The operator said that she was kind of surprised, since a call from Paladin usually meant at least one gunshot wound.

We offered the prostitute a ride to wherever she wanted to go, and she decided that she wanted to go home. Her kids would worry about her if she was gone too long. Bill gave her one of our cards as a souvenir, and she was happy with that when we dropped her off at her apartment.

That was all of the action that we could find that night, but we agreed that it was worth the effort. Carol got a rundown on our adventure the next morning at breakfast. She said that she wanted to make a run with us pretty soon, since it sounded like we had so much fun. Gail, Bill, and I agreed that she could come along if she wore the uniform and took the training. Carol thought about it for all of two seconds before she jumped up and said, "When do I start?"

Carol was in reasonable shape for a woman of 52, but that wasn't good enough for Gail. That morning, Gail started Carol on a training program to toughen her up and to get her ready for the stick fighting training. Bill would take care of that training, and I would handle the shooting. We concentrated on the Uzi until Gail could get her ready for the .45 caliber recoil. Meanwhile, we ordered her guns and uniform. If she was going with us, Carol was going first class!

Dan came around that evening and was pleased to meet Bill and Gail. After dinner, we took him to the attic and showed off our loot from the previous raid. Dan was flabbergasted at the amount of money involved. He said that the only thing that he could think of to do on short notice was to move it to an off-shore bank. However, he would have to work on the details. He went home that night shaking his head in awe.

We ran our regular patrols at night while Carol was doing her training. Also, we wanted to hit the Carnoli family in the pocket book again, so we started looking for more protection racket couriers. With two of us to follow couriers (Gail was training Carol), we managed to find three more collection centers. This time, we just concentrated on the after-hours collection where we could get a lot of their money all at once. This took a while, even with occasional tips from Dan Alsop, but we finally worked out other collection routes. One was our target for tonight.

Carol begged to come with us on this raid. She was nearly finished with her "classroom" training, and she had all of her equipment, so we let her tag along. She was supposed to stick like glue to Gail, and Carol promised to follow orders to the letter, so we figured that she was ready for this. We followed an SUV making collections until it drove to another warehouse. This one was outside of the corporate limits of Sola Vista and did not have a metal sheath to mess up cellphone calls.

OK, we were prepared for trouble on this one because of them being able to call for help, but we decided to go with the raid, in spite of the danger. This time, we knew nothing about the building, other than it looked like a typical warehouse. I was not very happy about our lack of knowledge, but I figured our training could carry us through.

We found a door that looked promising, so Gail opened it for us and swung the door open. This time, there was no gunfire, so there must not have been an alarm for us to trip. The four of us entered without being noticed. The reason was that the SUV was still being unloaded. My God, there was a lot of cash involved. The slow operation was because each packet of bills had to be counted and compared to the tally sheet from the briefcase. There were so many packets of bills, many of them as $20s, that the count was going very slowly.

The guards were standing around watching all of that money coming in and not doing the guarding job they had been assigned. This was a big break for us, and we took advantage of it. Gail positioned us so that we had all of the crooks in a crossfire before shouting to them to surrender.

Of course, as we had expected, none of them wanted to surrender. They started shooting at us, and the SUV driver jumped into the vehicle and tried to escape. We had been expecting that, so I emptied one of my .45 caliber Glocks into the engine compartment. I don't know what I hit, but it must have been something important, because the SUV never got started. I did take the time to replace the clip in my Glock before switching to my Uzi to join in the general mayhem.

By this time, the bullets were flying everywhere, and I mean that almost literally. The bad guys were still using the "spray and pray" technique, while we, including Carol, were taking the time to aim. Sure, we did take a few hits in our body armor, but the 9mm Uzi slug never had a chance of penetrating. As before, the crooks did not have body armor, and they were paying for the oversight.