Chapter 80: More Trouble

We didn’t give the suspicious green car any more thought. Neither of us saw anything out of the ordinary. Nobody was driving past the house and stopping, nobody was following us around, nobody was watching us. At least, not that we could tell. All I knew about counter-surveillance was from reading spy novels and mystery novels, and who knows how correct those are. Marilyn would have been oblivious anyway. We never gave it any more thought.

At least not until a couple of weeks later. Mid-July, I got a panicked call at the office from Marilyn, who was at the grocery store with Charlie. I was in a meeting with Missy and John about a possible investment, when Grace knocked on the door and told me to pick up the phone, it was an important call. I looked at the other two, mystified, and shrugged my shoulders. I told them to stay seated and grabbed the phone. “Hello?”

“Carl? You have to come get us; we’re stuck at the mall!” It was Marilyn’s voice, sounding half exasperated and half scared.

“What do you mean, you’re stuck at the mall?” Across from me, Missy smiled over at John. I knew this sounded like Marilyn being crazy about something.

“It’s the car! All the tires are flat!”

Well, that made me sit up in my chair. All four tires flat? I’ve had flat tires before, who hasn’t, and back in a previous life I once lost two tires on a construction site. But all four? That pushed the odds way beyond anything to be expected. “Where are you at?”

“The Hunt Valley Mall.”

“Was there anything else disturbed on the car? Anything broken?”

“I don’t know. I didn’t look. Why?”

I didn’t answer directly. “Don’t worry. I’ll be along in a few minutes.” Marilyn told me where to find her in the mall, and I called the meeting short.

“Is everything all right?” asked Missy.

I made a waffling motion with my hand. “Eh. Marilyn’s car has four flat tires. She’s stuck at the mall, and I have to go pick her up. Can you get Grace to find a tow truck or a wrecker to go out there with some new tires? Maybe the Toyota place can do something.” I grabbed my jacket and headed towards the door.

John caught up to me and laid a hand on my shoulder. “Hold on a second, Carl. Something’s wrong here. Four flats isn’t an accident, it’s vandalism.” I opened my mouth to argue but couldn’t. He was right. It was way too unlikely to be an accident. “You should call the police.”

“Call the cops? For vandalism? They won’t be able to do anything.”

“Maybe, maybe not. Didn’t you say a few weeks ago that your babysitter saw a car at your house? How do you know it’s not the same thing?”

“John, that’s crazy!”

He pushed back. “You should call the cops. I’m your friend as well as your lawyer. Listen to me.” He turned me back to my desk and pointed at the phone.

I muttered, “This is nuts!” and then dialed 911. The Baltimore County Police said they would send somebody in about fifteen or twenty minutes, which would allow me some time to get over there and find my wife and Charlie.

I looked over at John, who was leaning against the doorframe and smiling. “Happy now?”

“Happy.”

“You know, I already had one mother. Look how that worked out!”

He laughed. “Get out of here. Go find Marilyn and take her out to lunch. She’s too good for you anyway.”

“Very true!”

I took off and drove to the mall. Fortunately, I had driven my Lincoln to the office that day. It was only about ten miles away, if that, and I found her and Charlie standing outside one of the entrances to the mall. Charlie was sitting in his stroller, and Marilyn was talking to one of the Rent-A-Cops at the entrance. I pulled up in front of the entrance, and Marilyn finished her chat and pushed the stroller and her purchases towards me. I climbed out and waved at Charlie, who waved back. The security guard took off.

“What’s up?” I asked.

“Well, it’s the car. The tires are flat, and the guard at the security office thought it looked weird. He said I should call the police. What do you think?” said Marilyn.

“I already did that. Come on, get in, and let’s go to the car. Where’d you park, anyway?” She pointed, just in time to see a Baltimore County patrol car come into the mall road. I flagged him down. He rolled down the window, and I asked, “Were you sent over to check on a vandalism complaint?”

He nodded. “You the one who called it in?”

“Yes, sir. I just got here. I’m loading my wife and son in the car, and then we’ll go over there, if that’s all right.”

“Yeah, sure.” He picked up the dashboard microphone and started mumbling into it, so I went back to the car and loaded Marilyn’s bags into the trunk, while she put Charlie in his car seat. Then we drove through the rows of parked cars to where Marilyn had left her Toyota.

The security guard was right, something did look weird. It didn’t look like anything random, and none of the other cars nearby were touched. Things got stranger when the cop knelt and touched the valve stem on the rear right tire. Then he moved forward to the front tire. He looked up at me and said, “Your valve stems have been cut. This isn’t just flat tires.”

“Cut?” I exclaimed. What the hell? I turned to stare at my wife in disbelief.

He checked all four tires, and then looked over the rest of the car. He stopped at the gas cap cover and looked at that carefully. He repeated the inspection at the trunk and hood latches. “Somebody was trying to get into your gas tank and trunk, too.” He went over to his patrol car. Before I knew what was happening, he had called back to his dispatcher and requested a crime scene investigator to come out. He made another call about five minutes later, after the wrecker from the Toyota dealership showed. It was decided to have the tow guy load the car on the flatbed and haul it to the Towson impound yard, which was close to the lab people.

All during this, he was peppering both Marilyn and me with questions. Did we have any enemies? Did we have any recent problems with neighbors? Were we involved in any lawsuits? What did I do for a living? What did Marilyn do? Did we have any other children? It was mostly background, but when Marilyn mentioned the problems the night of the reunion, you could see his ears pricking up, almost like a dog on a scent. That caused another call to headquarters, to talk to an investigator of some sort.

When the car was loaded on the flatbed, he released us, with instructions to follow the truck to Towson and go inside to ask for a Detective Lewis Carstans. Then he took off, to go back on patrol. I looked over at Marilyn. “What the hell is going on?”

“No idea!”

“One of your old boyfriends back in town?” I asked, jokingly.

She snorted. “It’s more likely to be one of your old girlfriends!”

That made me scratch my head. It made more sense than I wanted to think about. If this was related to the green car at the house, the night of the reunion, then it made more sense than anything else, which still wasn’t much. What if somebody at the reunion was trying to get back at me for something? What? Who? Why? None of this made any sense to me.

Detective Carstans asked us the same questions that the patrol officer had asked, and he asked for any details of the night of the reunion we could think of, which weren’t many at all. At least I knew the date, so he could go through their records and find the patrol officer who had come to the house. Then he took our fingerprints, both mine and Marilyn’s, to compare against anything they found on the car. I couldn’t believe they were taking this that seriously!

Marilyn fed Charlie some cereal she had in her bag; the kid went through Cheerios like I could go through salted cashews! It still wasn’t enough, and he was getting fussy by the time we were finished. It would take a couple of days to process the car (read that as thirty minutes to process it, fifteen minutes to figure it out that nothing was there, and two days of hurry up and wait while this happened. They would call us when we could pick it up. I wrote off the rest of the day and drove us all home. Marilyn could drive my Town Car for a few days, and I would drive the 380.

Let’s face it; the rest of the day was shot for us. We settled Charlie down by stuffing food into him. He was a bottomless pit. I was going to need to start a second corporation just to keep him fed. Then I made us a very late lunch, and we sat down in the living room to talk while our son napped. Neither of us could make any sense of this. Could it have been an ex-girlfriend? Everybody seemed happy the day of the reunion, and I hadn’t seen any of them for ten years. Hell, I hadn’t been involved with any of them since I was sixteen! That was a ridiculous amount of time to hold a grudge this serious.

Two days later we drove to Towson and picked up the car. Detective Carstans said the forensic report was inconclusive. The valve stems had definitely been cut, but they couldn’t tell by what. What was interesting was that there was a palm print, the same print, on the car body panels at each tire location. We looked blankly at him, and he demonstrated by kneeling and placing his left hand on the body panel while he mimed cutting the stem. Same print, same location, each tire. If we ever caught the guy doing something else, we could use his prints to tie him to this, too. Or her. Nobody knew if it was a guy or a girl.

Marilyn wanted to know if they could use computers to find who it was, by comparing fingerprints or something. I shook my head. That sort of thing would take massive computing power and databases of prints and wouldn’t be seen for another twenty years or more.

I was slower to forget about this incident, and I tried to stay more vigilant. Still, whoever it was, they weren’t targeting me. They were targeting Marilyn! Two weeks later Marilyn’s Toyota was vandalized again, this time while she was at the grocery store. A couple of witnesses reported that somebody had driven up to her car, while she was inside shopping with Charlie, and hopped out. Whoever it was, and the eyewitnesses couldn’t agree on anything other than that he or she was driving a green car, had taken a tire iron to Marilyn’s car, busting a headlight, driver’s side mirror, and a couple of windows and the windshield. Then he or she jumped back in the car and took off.

This was getting very serious! Whatever was going on was obviously directed at Marilyn, and the level of violence was escalating. The Toyota was put back through the wringer by the cops, and they found a few more prints, some of which matched the prints found earlier. Whoever was doing this, they weren’t being all that careful. Now we had two detectives questioning us, and they took down the name of every girl I had ever dated, if I could remember them, and quizzed Marilyn about everybody at the reunion she had talked to.

They also started asking me about my family, and that really set me back on my heels! The only person in my family who would do this was Hamilton, but I just couldn’t believe it. I went through my family history with them but didn’t have much to say. I hadn’t seen any of them since the wedding, except for the disastrous college graduation of Suzie’s and that was a month before the stalking started. I gave out the information I could, but it wasn’t much, and I never heard any more from the cops about my family.

Marilyn was very nervous when we left the police station that day. I drove over to the office, and we told what was going on to John, who immediately called a security company. I didn’t like it, but I liked Marilyn being threatened even less. Marilyn was going to get a bodyguard, at least during the day when I wasn’t around. The security guards were from a company John had used in the past, and the company was owned by a former Secret Service agent. We also had a guard posted at the office.

Marilyn wasn’t amused by any of this. Neither were some of my friends from high school, who suddenly found themselves being questioned by the cops about a guy they knew ten years before. Hell, I wasn’t amused!

After a couple of days at home with Marilyn, she decided to go shopping, so I called the security company and got somebody to come out. Once they left, I did something I didn’t think I would ever do again. I went into my den and unlocked the bottom drawer of my desk. Inside was a small case with my .45 Colt from the Army, along with my web belt holster. I didn’t know what was going on, but I just didn’t like it. I took it out to the kitchen and scrounged up some cleaning supplies and knocked the dust off it. I didn’t like the results, so I put it in a towel, and went out to my car, where I put it in the back of the 380, and then I drove into Parkton. I knew of a gun shop in the town and needed a cleaning kit and some ammo.

While I was there, I asked the guy behind the counter about a concealed carry permit. Maryland is a relatively liberal and Democratic state, which means they don’t just let you wander around carrying a loaded piece! In general, they would prefer that you didn’t, but they couldn’t get around that pesky Second Amendment and ban handguns completely. It sounded like all I needed to do was prove I was an upstanding citizen and have documented proof I was in danger, generally a police report of some form. By now I had this crap in spades! I added a shoulder holster for the Colt.

I took everything back home and cleaned the gun properly. Then I left Dum-Dum in the laundry room, while I took the gun and a box of ammo up into the woods on my property. I paced off a reasonable distance, and then pulled the gun from my pocket. I stared at it for a moment. I hadn’t fired it since Nicaragua, and when I got it back in Fayetteville, I had simply put it in a drawer. Now, cleaned and loaded, it was as deadly again as it had been when I had used it to kill the four narcos. Ancient history. I flicked off the safety and put seven rounds downrange, aiming at an oak tree.

Three hit. I reloaded and got another four in the X-ring, so to speak. I worked my way through the box of ammo until I was back to my old self, where I felt confident with the gun again. I would need to go to a shooting range to get better, but at least I wasn’t going to shoot myself in the foot. I went back into the house, released Dum-Dum from jail, put her on her tie-out, and then cleaned the gun again.

I let Dum-Dum back in and played with her for a few minutes, and then put her back in jail. Marilyn, Charlie, and the bodyguard came back at that point, and I had the guard stick around. Marilyn was curious, but I explained I needed to go out for a while. I tossed the Colt and the holster into a plastic bag, scrounged up some paperwork, and carried it all out to the Mercedes. I drove down to Towson and went to the police department.

Lew Carstans handed me the form to get a concealed carry permit, and then he talked to me about carrying a gun. It was a depressing conversation. “Carl, I sympathize with you, I really do, but forget it. You’ll never get a permit.”

“Why not? I can show all the ID, get the references, show my military separation papers, and you know there’s a threat. What’s the big deal?”

He shrugged. “Listen, it’s not up to me. The State Police and the State Attorney General simply aren’t in favor of the Second Amendment. Go ahead and fill out the paperwork. In ninety days, it will be turned down. Absent a documented threat to your life, like bullet holes in your car, and not your wife’s, or a job requirement like being a security guard, they simply won’t issue a permit.”

“Ninety days? Are you kidding me? We could be dead in ninety days!” This was insane!

He shrugged. “They just don’t care about that. Better that you be dead than they issue a carry permit, and I am not kidding you about that. There are even rules against deputies and corrections officers carrying weapons while off duty. They just don’t like it. In your case, since the threats are against Marilyn, she might - repeat, might - be able to get a permit. You, as her husband, don’t have a chance.”

“So, what am I supposed to do until we’re dead?” I asked sarcastically.

He lowered his voice. “You never heard me say this. If you were to carry a gun, and a cop stopped you and arrested you, you’ve got enough money and lawyers to get out of it.”