No one even found the bodies for three days.
One of the victims was a good friend of Frank’s. A boy named Ben.
The quadruple murder was never solved and was still listed as a cold case in Lynn County.
From that day on Frank knew he wasn’t going to continue his family tradition and be a farmer.
Heck, he had two brothers for that.
They both claimed to have farming in their blood. They both expressed an interest.
And somebody had to protect the good citizens of west Texas from being assaulted and murdered in their own homes.
Frank chose a path his father didn’t quite understand but supported nonetheless.
He first became a United States Marine, then went into law enforcement.
His dad thought both to be honorable professions and was extremely proud of him.
Frank didn’t grow up a farmer, but he was a fine and honorable man nonetheless.
Although he didn’t follow in the footsteps of his father and grandfather, he did inherit several things from them.
Their piercing blue eyes, for one.
A very high forehead for another.
Not quite as noticeable, but strong nonetheless, was his work ethic.
He used to drive Eva nuts because he never sat still. He wasn’t a “beer and a ballgame” kind of guy. He didn’t sit in front of the TV for hours at a time like many men did.
He was always out working on the cars, or planting new hedges or painting the upstairs bedroom. Or any one of a hundred other things.
He was a firm believer, it seemed, in the old adage about idle hands being the devil’s playthings.
Of course the Dykes family, excluding Josie, was terribly unmotivated.
They didn’t mind at all when Frank volunteered to shoulder way more than his share of the burden.
So when Frank volunteered to take on no less than three major projects concurrently, no one voiced any objections.
Not at all.
-33-
The Dykes were inherently lazy. They were raised in an environment where people who worked regular jobs were saps. They were suckers, because they thought slaving their lives away to earn a paycheck they could use to buy a few meager things was the noble and right thing to do.
They considered themselves smarter than most people because they knew there was a much faster way to get nice things.
All they had to do was steal them from others.
Sure, there were risks, they’d say.
But really, wasn’t living one’s life just one big risk anyway?
After all, no one knew when they crawled into bed at night whether they’d crawl out again in the morning, or whether they’d die in their sleep.
The Dykes lived in Plainview, on the west Texas plains.
Tornado country.
Hell, during tornado season, from April to June, a Plainview resident didn’t even know whether his house would still be there when the sun peeked over the horizon each morning.
People who’d never experienced a tornado in real life assumed they were very much like the one in The Wonderful Wizard of Oz. It would pick up a house, gently and quietly, while its occupants slept peacefully inside.
The house would fly hundreds of miles through the air, all the while spinning madly, yet not waking those sleeping occupants.
Finally, the tornado would set the house down in a field where the sleepers would finally wake up without a scratch or a clue regarding how they got to be where they were.
That’s the way New Yorkers and Oregonians viewed tornados.
Texans knew that real-life tornados crept up on unsuspecting towns and farms, then killed indiscriminately.
The sound of the twister was typically covered by thunder and lightning and pouring rain. So by the time it became obvious this was more than just a bad rainstorm there was not much folks could do.
Sure, they could try to make it to a storm shelter if they had one.
But most people didn’t.
People who lived in cities where storm shelters were prohibited were instructed beforehand to sit in their bathtubs with mattresses covering their heads.
That method worked for a few, but gave many others a false sense of security.
Many bodies were found miles away, after having been picked up by the same savage winds which carried away Auntie Em’s farmhouse.
It was a rough childhood for the Dykes kids, for a lot of different reasons.
And they had other things going against them too.
They were pretty much hated by the entire community.
Oh, it wasn’t the community’s fault. The reasons they were hated, the rotten reputations they all had, were their own fault.
Someone once said a pig is a pig, even when you put lipstick on it.
In simpler terms, you can’t cover up ugly, and you can’t make evil acceptable in polite company.
Everyone knew the Dykes were bad seeds, and nobody tried to like them.
They just wanted to be rid of them.
Everyone in Plainview who carried the Dykes name was a “usual suspect” when an armed robber got away and was sought by the police.
Same for an unidentified rapist or murderer or drunk driver.
The Dykes were directly responsible for a large number of those crimes, sure.
But in many others they merely played the role of scapegoats. If the Plainview Police Department had no other suspects they called several members of the Dykes family in and tried to coerce them into confessing. They implied there was fingerprint evidence even when they knew there wasn’t.
Or DNA evidence.
Or surveillance tape.
Now, one might scoff at such tactics. They might say there was no way a Dykes or anybody else would confess to a crime they didn’t commit just because they were being pressured by the police.
And they’d be wrong.
In 1963 Bud Dykes plead guilty to an armed robbery even though he was in a county jail in south Texas on a drunk and disorderly charge at the time the robbery was committed.
He didn’t even realize he was innocent until he’d served six months in prison and a new lawyer working his appeal finally did some research and determined he wasn’t in Plainview at the time.
Of course the lawyer asked him, “Bud, you couldn’t possibly have done that robbery. Why on earth did you confess?”
He said, well, hell. I was so drunk in 2005 I couldn’t remember where I was and when. The cops seemed convinced I did it so I just agreed with them. I figured they’re cops, they must know what happened.”
Present day Dykes men were sick and tired of being accused of every crime that came own the pike.
Plainview residents were tired of the Dykes.
It seemed a simple solution.
If everyone including the Dykes agreed it was a bad fit, maybe they should just leave.
And they were contemplating doing just that.
They were making plans to move whole cloth to Amarillo, a few dozen miles to the north.
Then Saris 7 happened. All relocation plans were off.
Their new plan was to take over the Food World Distribution Center, and that was surprisingly easy. Not because they were smarter than anyone else, but because they were the first ones to try it.
And they happened to try it while Food World security’s pants were down. It was a cakewalk.
So the Dykes would remain in Plainview despite all the animosity between the family and the town’s citizens.
They’d continue to be lazy, for they didn’t have to hustle to find food and fuel like the rest of the town did.
And they’d continue to think hard working people like Frank were suckers for doing things for others just because those others were too darned lazy to do for themselves.
-34-
Perhaps they were right about Frank being a sucker.
But they gave him no credit for his intellect.
And he was a very smart man.
And the Dykes, who considered themselves all smarter than Frank, were being played.
Big time.
By Frank’s estimation, building a four sided wall in the common area, around all the tents the Dykes family used for sleeping quarters, would aid him in hiding his activity while he moved around the warehouse, gathering the things he’d need for his escape.
It was Aunt Stacy who asked him rather pointedly (and perhaps rightfully), “Why do we need a damn wall? We’ve managed for twelve plus years without a damn wall.”
Frank was quick with a comeback, trying his level best to sound logical.
“Well, you don’t actually need a wall. Just like you don’t need a pair of shoes. You could go your entire life without once wearing a pair of shoes. You’d burn your feet in the summer and freeze your feet in the winter, and get stuck by grass burrs and stickers and tacks and nails and all manner of other things.
“And every time you did you’d say to yourself, ‘Damn! I wish somebody would invent something I could wear on my feet so I wouldn’t be so miserable.’”
Aunt Stacy wasn’t the smartest woman in Plainview.
Or in that particular room, for that matter.
“What do shoes have to do with the damn wall?”
“It’s the same principal,” Frank continued. “A wall, even if it had only half a ceiling, would help keep a lot of the heat from escaping from the burn barrels into the warehouse. It would keep more heat right here, in the common area, where it would help everybody be more comfortable. If I painted it white, more of the candle and lantern light would stay in the room instead of disappearing into the wide expanse of the warehouse.”
He wanted to say, “And with a wall, you dummies can’t see me crawling around the warehouse, gathering up the things I need to get the heck out of here and take Josie with me, right from under your stupid noses.”
But he didn’t.
It wouldn’t have been received well.
The truth was everything Frank told them was absolutely true. The enclosure would help retain heat from their burn barrels. With only half a ceiling most of it would escape. But some of it wouldn’t, and should raise the temperature in the enclosure by a good five degrees or so.
“It doesn’t sound like a lot,” Frank explained. “But five degrees can make the difference between a sleepless night and a sound sleep.”
His second project was an effort to inventory everything in the huge facility. All of the thousands of items stored on the high shelves of pallet racks, many in unmarked boxes thirty feet above the floor.
To do so required a lot of climbing, which of course brought with it the danger of a fall.
“I’ll log in everything as I go,” Frank told them. “When I’m done you’ll have a list of everything in the warehouse, in alphabetical order, in a log book.”
Stacy, the chief naysayer in the group, asked, “What good will that do us?”
“Well,” Frank said, “The next time you need a new sweater, you won’t have to just moan and groan and say, ‘I wish I had a new sweater.’
“You could just look in the logbook, under ‘sweaters’. You’d find out that there’s a box of sweaters on the storage rack in Aisle 7, Row 2, Location 23.
“Then you could just order Eddie to go look through them until he found a blue sweater, size triple extra large.”
The rest of the group stole snarky looks at one another and stifled laughter.
Not Stacy.
She snapped back, “I wear a size medium, thank you very much.”
Frank said, “I know. I just thought I’d give you another reason to hate me.”
Stacy offered no other arguments. Even she saw benefit in the knowledge of which items were stored where.
The third project was perhaps the most important, at least in Frank’s eyes.
For it to work he’d have to convince John it was necessary. For John was the patriarch of the Dykes clan. If John thought something was a good idea the others would support it wholeheartedly.
If John was against it, the measure was doomed to fail before it even got started.
“Now that I’m part of the family, I want to contribute more,” Frank told John when the two of them were alone.
“At the place I rode out the first freeze I was the security guy. I learned a lot of things about turning a place into a fortress that couldn’t be penetrated.”
“Exactly where did you ride out the first freeze, Frank? I don’t believe you ever told us.”
“It was an abandoned high school in Kerrville. The only people there during the long freeze were me and four other men who took the building and declared it as ours.
“But the cafeteria’s warehouse was stuffed with food. We ate only what we had to and managed to stretch it until the thaw came.”
It was a tall tale, and Frank knew it.
But John didn’t.
“Anyway, the machine shop had a portable welder. I used it to weld all the doors from the inside. As you can probably imagine, a high school has dozens of doors. Any one of them can be broken into. But once nearly all of them were welded shut, we were able to forget about them.
“The only ones we had to guard after that were the three doors we knew weren’t welded.”
“And you want to do the same thing here? Weld most of the doors shut and only have to guard a few?”
“Exactly. There’s a portable welder in the back. I learned as I went, and I’m pretty much an expert welder now. I’ll take care of it myself. All I need is your permission.”
John wasn’t any smarter than Stacy. But even he could see the benefit in only having to guard a couple of doors instead of ninety seven.
“And you’ll do all the work yourself? I won’t have to help?”
“Nope. I’ll do it all myself.”
“Well hell, Frank. If that’s the case, go ahead and do it.”
-35-
Frank did go ahead and do it.
Start welding the doors closed, that is.
He started on the side of the building where he’d left his Hummer, and spot-welded each door closed.
Crazy Eddie watched him do the first dozen doors or so, and bugged him as he went.
“I wanna learn how to do it, Mister Frank. Would you teach me how to learn so I can be a welderer too? Please, Mister Frank?”
“It’s welder, Eddie, not welderer. And not teach you how to learn, but just teach you.”
“Huh? I don’t understand, Mister Frank.”
“I’d love to teach you, Eddie. But we only have one welder’s mask. If you look at the weld without a mask it can destroy your eyes. Or you can get hit with sparks and burn your face.”
Eddie had to admit, the brilliant light and bright sparks did hurt his eyes. He watched the process even when Frank told him repeatedly to look away from it.
Eddie was a grown man, but in many ways he was a little boy.
Despite being told something wasn’t good for his health he did it anyway.
And like most little boys, he was easily distracted.
And easily bored.
After following Frank closely and watching him weld door after door for several days he decided there were many other things he could be doing with his time.
Like turning the warehouse into a jungle gym of sorts, climbing up and down the racks and pretending he was in a faraway place where he was king and could do whatever he wanted to do.
He pretty much lost interest in “Mister Frank” at that point and stopped following him around on his welding project.
That was fine with Frank.
It enabled him to weld every door on that side of the building closed, except for Door 32.
That one just looked like it was welded closed.
To give his ruse further credibility Frank continued to weld, sealing all the doors on the other side of the building as well
.
All except for Door 58.
Frank was a United States Marine, remember. And the Corps teaches its men to always have a backup plan.
Because something, they know, will always go wrong.
Frank never expected to actually use Door 58.
But he found comfort in the thought he could use it if he ever had to.
The inventory was the third and most time intensive of Frank’s three projects and would take the longest to complete.
For there were certainly a lot of items stored on the racks within Food World’s Distribution Center.
Of course, he never expected to finish.
He planned to stop as soon as he found the items he was looking for, and packed the Hummer full of them.
After that, he’d be biding time; waiting for the thaw to come back. Waiting for the snow pack to melt. Waiting for the roads to be passable again.
Waiting for “go time.”
A couple of days after Frank arrived, while he was still chained up and the brothers were still holding him at gunpoint, Frank came across a packaged tube of peanut butter in the common area.
It reminded him of the MREs he ate in the Corps while he was leading his men through poppy fields in Afghanistan, looking for insurgents to shoot or capture.
In the Marine Corps MREs are a dietary staple. They’re prepackaged meals in heavy plastic pouches which can be eaten hot or cold and which come in several varieties.
They’re chock full of extra calories on purpose, so that one MRE per day can actually sustain an active Marine.
Fewer meals served per day means more maneuverability, and Marines traveling on “rats,” or MREs, never have to stall their progress waiting for the food truck to catch up to them.
Frank found out in the Corps that it’s actually possible to get fat on MREs. They’re made to sustain an active man for twenty-four hours.
If a Marine isn’t very active, he isn’t burning calories, and the MRE will add to his body’s fat stores.
Frank’s solution to such a problem was to keep his men moving. If they weren’t going on patrol on any given day, they were hiking the perimeter, or busting rocks, or something strenuous.
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