Red Rock Island (Damian Green Book 1)

by Alec Peche

  When they got back, Damian planned to meet with Angus and Haley individually to talk about his new company and see if they had interest in joining him. He was for the first time in seven years excited for his future rather than merely existing. On those pleasant thoughts he drifted asleep.

  Rattling cans awoke him and he was instantly alert. By the time he reached Hermione and Ariana’s bedrooms, he had his water gun in one hand and purple smoke bombs in the other. He opened Ariana’s door and yelled, “Ariana! Wake up! Come into Hermione’s room!”

  In the dark, he saw motion and he heard curses near the front door. A house alarm was sounding as well. Ariana appeared out of the dark, with her own water gun in hand, and they backed into Hermione’s room. Hermione was awake, alert and scared, with Miguel guarding her.

  “Ariana! Quick, open the trap door in the ceiling closet!” Damian urged. He saw her do that as he listened for activity at the other end of the house. He heard at least three voices and one of them was in pain. Good, he thought! The man in pain got the bucket of pepper juice in his eyes.

  When he looked for a house to rent, in addition to having at least three bedrooms, and beach access, he looked for a house with a safe room. This house had a ladder that folded down in the closet of one of the bedrooms. The room above had a steel floor, so even if someone shot bullets through the ceiling, they would be safe. There was a house alarm connected to a private security force that guaranteed a seven minute response and backup from the local police department.

  The two women, he saw had the stairs down and were lifting the dog up to the attic, which was not easy given the dog’s size. Once he saw their feet disappear, he tossed a purple smoke bomb down the hallway and watched the corridor and living room quickly fill with purple smoke. Even in the dark, the hallway got darker. He ran to the stairs and was up in the attic in no time, pulling the stairway with him. When he viewed the mechanism upon arrival, he knew that below, a fake light slid into place covering where the access door was.

  “Everyone okay?” he whispered.

  Hermione had her arms around the dog and nodded ‘yes’ as did Ariana.

  Poor kid, this must have been a replay of the night at her parent’s house.

  “The alarm company should be responding within three minutes by my calculation. Until then we have steel underneath us and these weapons. I think we can just wait them out.”

  “What happened to the men at the door? I thought I heard one of them moaning.” Hermione asked in a whisper.

  Damian smiled at her and replied, “Each night after you went to bed, I strung aluminum cans with pebbles in them across all doors. If someone broke in, we had an early warning in addition to the house alarm. I also placed a bucket of pepper juice with red dye over the doors, so that if someone broke in their eyesight would be harmed and they would be covered in red dye.”

  “Good thing I didn’t go for a midnight swim,” Hermione said with a surprising sense of humor given their current situation.

  “I booby-trap every hotel or house we stay in, so you won’t want to be sneaking out,” Damian grinned.

  Then they all quieted as they heard conversation below them. It was in Spanish which neither Damian nor Ariana spoke.

  Hermione began translating in a whisper, “They said that Jose was unable to see as some substance fell in his eyes and he’s worried about being blind. The other guy said so what that it was fewer people to share their fee with. They’re looking for us wondering where we got to.”

  Then the color drained out of her face.

  Ariana said, “What? What did they just say?” seeing the kid’s distress.

  “They said that Michael told them they were not supposed to harm me.”

  “What’s wrong with that statement?” Damian asked puzzled with Ariana over the kid’s distress and the indecision written on her face.

  “That’s my father’s name,” Hermione said. “Are my parents trying to kidnap me back to them?”

  “I thought you told us your father’s name was Jason?” Damian said.

  “That was the name I was supposed to use when out in public. In private, his name was Michael and Mom was Laura,” Hermione replied.

  Damian and Ariana thought about the kid’s statement and the name Michael for a moment and both shook their head.

  “I think that it’s just a coincidence. Your own father wouldn’t terrify you like this. I know I wouldn’t have done that to my daughters. I would fetch them myself; I wouldn’t hire someone to scare them to death. I wouldn’t trust anyone with their lives,” Damian declared in a soft voice, adamant about the safety of his deceased children.

  Hermione relaxed a little with his comment and concentrated on listening, but they moved on to other rooms in the house and she couldn’t hear them.

  They heard sirens in the distance as the police were approaching. They continued to listen, then Damian received a text from the security company.

  ‘We are on site. We will clear the premises and let you know when it is safe to come out.’

  The sirens sounded when they arrived at the house and then were shut off. No sense in waking up the occupants of houses near where the three of them were staying.

  Damian relayed the information back to Ariana and Hermione then said, “When we get the all clear, I’ll leave this room, but I want the two of you to stay here until I contact you. Only listen for my voice or a text, ok? Is that clear?”

  The two of them were clearly worried about Damian, which was sweet, but he had loads of tricks he could launch at any perpetrator. They nodded and he waited for the text telling him it was clear to descend. Less than a minute later, the text arrived. Damian quickly descended from the attic area and closed up the safe room. There were lights on everywhere and he could see both the private security force and the local police gathered around a suspect lying on the floor. He was covered in red dye and moaning in Spanish.

  “Mr. Green, are you and your family okay? Do you need a doctor?” said a man wearing a security company logo.

  “My family’s fine. Did you catch any of the other men?” Damian asked.

  “No there was a car that was fleeing the scene but Officer Gonzales and I decided to come to your aid first,” said the security guy. Officer Gonzales appeared to wear the insignia of the Yucatan State police.

  Officer Gonzales spoke up in heavily accented English, “What happened to this man? What is this red substance on him?”

  Damian smiled and said, “Red food dye and chili pepper juice. I had it in a bucket in case someone broke through the front door. He must have been the first man inside. The dye will stay on him for about thirty days and he’ll be able to see again in a few hours after his eyes get washed out.”

  The officer had raised his brows at Damian’s explanation and he couldn’t tell if it was due to admiration, puzzlement, or if he was thinking of some law that Damian had broken.

  Damian added, “The security alarms sounded as they were supposed to, but the aluminum cans gave me a fifteen second jump on the alarm and then the bucket of dye and juice disabled one of the men and the others may still be suffering if they were splattered with the juice. Have you identified this man and his reason for breaking into my home?”

  “No. He has no identification on him and he hasn’t told us his name yet.”

  Damian had texted Ariana while they were talking and she and Hermione appeared in the doorway. It was probably bad for Hermione to see the one man in such distress, but he looked worse than he actually was. He met Ariana’s eyes and she seemed to read his mind as she said to Hermione, “It’s just dye and pepper juice, he’ll be fine in a few hours.”

  She looked to Damian for confirmation and he said, “I brought a gallon of the pepper juice with me and I added beet and pomegranate juice with vinegar to set the colors.”

  She nodded and relaxed with that explanation.

  “Why do you feel you need so much security Mr. Green?” asked Officer Gonzales.

&n
bsp; This guy was smart, thought Damian, “Mexico has a recent reputation of kidnapping of tourists and I wanted to protect my family; seems that I was right to take the precautions.”

  “Perhaps you had trouble at home in the United States and brought it with you to Mexico,” Gonzales observed.

  That comment, while likely true, set off Damian’s temper, “You think that if we were under threat that we would leave the United States and its police forces and safety and try our luck here? The answer is simply ‘no’.”

  Again, Gonzales had a way of expressing disbelief in his body language without saying the words out loud.

  Instead he said, “May I see some identification for my report? Passports please.”

  Damian again in silent communication with Ariana left the room to retrieve their passports from the wall safe. He was going to leave Hermione’s in the safe as he could think of no reason for the police to verify her identity.

  He handed the two passports to Officer Gonzales, who opened them up and wrote down their names, addresses, and birthdates. Then he handed them back and asked, “The child’s passport, please?”

  “I don’t believe you need that,” Damian said.

  “How do I know she’s your daughter if I don’t see any identification? She might have been kidnapped from your country.”

  “Her passport doesn’t state who her parents are, it merely gives her identity. Besides just ask her - she’s bilingual, we’re not.”

  Gonzales reeled off a few questions to Hermione in Spanish and she answered them in turn. Damian thought the cop asked her if she was with her parents and she said yes she was with her guardians and they had been scuba diving several times and she was happy and not threatened in any way.

  The cop was still puzzled as to why he wouldn’t show him Hermione’s passport and Damian’s only real reason was sheer stubbornness. He simply saw no reason that the cop needed to review her identity as she was a child of fourteen.

  “Have you put out a police alert for the car that left this house?” Damian asked.

  “Yes we have, but there are many places to hide especially in the dark of night. We may find the car in a few days or maybe not at all. It is the way with these kinds of searches.”

  Looking over at the security company guy Damian asked, “Do you have video footage of the two men?”

  “We should, I’ll get a copy,” the representative said as he stepped away to make that phone call. Most of his company’s security set-up had video cameras that were linked to a main switchboard, so he should be able to get a copy of the video quickly.

  “When will you have this guy identified?” Damian asked.

  “After we book him into jail,” Gonzales replied.

  “I’m going to throw some tap water on his face to wash out that pepper spray,” Ariana said, unable to stand the guy’s agony any longer.

  “Officer Gonzales, can you take the man outside so we can wash his eyes out? I don’t want any more mess on this floor,” Damian said.

  In short order, after multiple buckets of water the man’s pain was reduced. He still couldn’t see, but that would return in time.

  Before he was hauled away to jail by another state police officer, he was asked his name again. He knew he was screwed both by his ex-partners and by the fact he had red dye on him which meant he would be bullied in jail. He had nothing to lose by snitching on his former partners. He supplied his name and theirs as well. He’d never met the men before so he didn’t know if he had their real names.

  “Mi nombre es Ricardo Garcia Corona,” said the man in custody.

  Damian wrote the name down to do research on later. He hoped it was the guy’s real name. He said a little more to Gonzales, but Damian’s Spanish was so limited he couldn’t follow it. He looked over at Hermione to see if she was following the conversation. She nodded at him seeming to know his question.

  “Ask the man who or what was the target in this house? Was it one of us or were they looking for stuff to steal?”

  Damian listened to the questions and answers vowing when he returned to California to learn Spanish. It was a useful language and sheer laziness of brain had been the reason he hadn’t learned it by now. Hermione moved closer to him and translated in a low voice.

  “He says they were going to take all three of us and that there were four men assigned to the job,” Hermione translated.

  “Ask him how we were going to be transported out of here,” Damian said.

  “Why,” Hermione asked clearly puzzled by Damian’s question.

  “I don’t understand how seven of us would fit in a car. Were we going to be thrown in the trunk on top of each other or was another car going to arrive to assist in our transport? That tells us that more than the original four men are involved in this case.”

  “Okay,” Hermione said then she asked Damian’s question.

  The conversation went on longer than Damian expected, but then Hermione seemed satisfied with Mr. Corona’s response. Officer Gonzales was also taking notes on his responses.

  “He said he was unaware of a second car, but he wouldn’t be in the know if there was one. They were supposed to tie us and gag us but not hurt us.”

  “Does he know any of the names of the other people in on this job?”

  Hermione asked the question, but her response made him think they were fake names as one of them was Jose Garcia, likely the most common name in Mexico.

  The security dude re-entered the room with a tablet that he’d fetched from his car. “I have the footage of the attack on your house.”

  Damian and Officer Gonzales gathered around the tablet and they watched the four men arrive in a car. Three of them had hats on, and their faces were poorly captured by the video tape; the fourth man was the one under arrest. He must have been the sacrificial lamb as it was clear they sent him first into Damian’s house. His face had been clear on the tape as he had no hat on to block the view. One of the other three men picked the lock or had a key.

  “Can you send all the footage to my email address right now,” Damian demanded. “After you do that, let’s slow the video down at the front door and perhaps we can ask your suspect how they got into the house as it looks like they had a key.”

  The security company representative took a moment to forward the email he’d received from his command center to Damian and then they went back to watching the thugs’ entry into the house.

  “It appears as though they had a key,” Damian said. “Let’s ask our suspect that question and what kind of weapons they were carrying. It’s not like they could break into someone’s house and they would willingly allow themselves to be kidnapped.”

  Gonzales asked the suspect those questions and then Hermione followed with one of her own, “Who’s Michael?”

  Chapter Forty Two

  Damian and Ariana froze when they heard the kid ask the question as it told them she hoped perhaps her father had engineered this kidnapping. They waited for the man to answer holding their breaths. Then they both let the breath out when they realized the conversation was in Spanish and they would be unable to understand his answers.

  “I don’t know who hired us or who Michael is. I don’t recall hearing the men mention that name.”

  “They mentioned it when they were searching the house,” said Hermione firmly.

  “Look lady my eyes hurt so bad I didn’t hear anything and besides the alarm sounded. The only thing I heard was they were leaving without me.”

  “Who’s Michael?” asked Gonzales.

  “He’s a friend of ours that gets carried away with pranks, but this seems too elaborate even for him to pull off,” replied Damian. He could hardly admit that he was Hermione’s father.

  The Officer gave him an angry look and said, “I hope you do not plan to waste the resources of the Yucatan State Police on a prank.”

  “My family and I were terrified and hiding in our safe room. We certainly didn’t think this was a prank.”

 
Gonzales motioned to the other State officer that arrived to put Mr. Corona in the back of his vehicle and take him to jail. It appeared as though he was going to walk off without fingerprinting the scene or doing any other evidence collection. Wow, thought Damian. Okay then he’d make his own fingerprint kit and see if he could identify the suspects from his lab at home. Their vacation spoiled, he was going to cut it short by a day and head home now after he collected any evidence in the house. He’d study the video to locate the surfaces these guys might have touched.

  Four hours later but still mid-morning, they boarded the jet to return to California. Damian doubted he would ever hear from Officer Gonzales and so before he left he collected all of the forensic evidence he could think of. He didn’t own a DNA machine and he’d admit that he didn’t know good evidence processing techniques so he would have to send it out to a private lab and wait a week or so for results at a fairly high cost as he had about ten specimens.