The Boy Who Couldn’t Miss
(Blind Spot #2)
By
Laurence E Dahners
Copyright 2017 Laurence E Dahners
Kindle Edition
Author’s Note
Though this book can “stand alone” it’ll be much easier to understand if read as part of the series beginning with The Girl They Couldn’t See (Blind Spot #1).
I’ve minimized the repetition of explanations that would be redundant to the first book in order to provide a better reading experience for those who are reading the series.
However, if you’d like a little updating, here’s a brief blurb about what happened in the first book:
Roni Buchry’s blue eyes are striking in contrast to her dark skin. She’s discovered she can telepathically make people ignore her so that she’s effectively invisible, though her form of telepathy doesn’t let her communicate by transferring any information to a recipient. When he reached adolescence, her brother Hax inherited a change from clumsy bumbler to incredible coordination. He has unbelievable aim when he’s throwing and shooting. Last year, they used their combined abilities to fight back against a mob’s protection racket.
This e book is licensed for your personal enjoyment only.
Table of Contents
Prologue
Chapter 1
Chapter 2
Chapter 3
Chapter 4
Chapter 5
Chapter 6
Chapter 7
Chapter 8
Chapter 9
Epilogue
The End
Author’s Afterword
Acknowledgements
Prologue
Rasmussen rubbed his temples in frustration. He liked coaching high school baseball, but sometimes working out a strategy for the season could be pretty frustrating. When he’d first found the Buchry kid he’d been incredibly excited that, for the first time in his career, he had a phenomenal pitcher for his team.
But then reality came crashing down. There was no doubt that Buchry was an amazing pitcher. He’d thrown a perfect game and three no-hitters so far in the season! That wasn’t as amazing as it would’ve been in the major leagues because he was pitching to high school kids, but it was still pretty unprecedented. Two games in the regular season he’d struck out 25 of 27 batters! He’d struck out at least sixteen batters in every game he’d pitched. Since it took a minimum of eighty-one pitches to strike out 27 batters even if you never threw a “ball,” Buchry came close to the 105 pitch per day limit most games.
But, so far, Buchry’d never actually gone over the pitch limit and had to be relieved.
When batters did hit one of Buchry’s pitches, they weren’t solid hits. Foul balls and tips were often caught for an out which saved Buchry throwing three pitches to that particular batter anyway. Sometimes someone did get on base, but it usually didn’t do much good. The batters behind them in the order didn’t get hits to advance them and, if they tried to steal a base, Buchry threw them out.
Almost every time.
They’d learned not to try to steal bases while he was pitching.
Rasmussen would swear Buchry never threw a pitch that should’ve been called a ball, but the umpires—simply finding it impossible to believe that the boy was getting every pitch into the strike zone—would sometimes call a ball when it wasn’t deserved. Well, Rasmussen thought, that isn’t exactly true. When I was trying to get him to throw curve balls, some of those were out of the strike zone. Buchry could throw a pitch that looked like it was going to be in the strike zone, but curved out. What he wasn’t good at was throwing a pitch that looked like it was going to be out, but then curved back into the strike zone.
After a while, Rasmussen had given up on trying to have Buchry throw the curve. The kid had a smoking fastball and could place off-speed change-up pitches with great precision. His high or low pitches to the inside corner were almost impossible to hit and, when the batter did get a hit, they came off so close to the handle that they just didn’t go very far.
Buchry only lost one game in the regular season. But he couldn’t pitch every game because of the high school pitching rules. If his pitch count for a day was over 76, he had to have four days of rest before he could pitch again. They typically played two games a week so the rule kept Buchry from pitching more than one of the two games each week.
Hayes, the football coach, showed up to watch a lot of the games when Buchry was pitching though he never watched any of the others.
Rasmussen swapped around the rest of his pitchers for the other games each week, having them relieve each other and trying every other strategy he could think of. Nonetheless, they weren’t even close to Buchry’s class and they gave up a lot of hits. So, if Rasmussen’s batters didn’t make a lot of runs the team lost.
However, with Buchry winning half the games and the other pitchers winning some of their games, they were serious contenders for the state championship. Unfortunately, the championship playoffs were a series of “best two out of three” playoff games, one game on Friday night and two on Saturday. A pitcher couldn’t exceed a count of 120 pitches over those three games. For the life of him, Rasmussen couldn’t figure out how best to use his pitchers over those three games.
It seemed obvious that Buchry should pitch Friday nights to get them ahead of the count, but Rasmussen wondered if he should pull Buchry out if they were winning Friday. That way he could save some of Buchry’s pitch count for the first game Saturday? Or would the other team maybe catch up once Buchry stopped pitching on Friday, thus wasting all the pitches Buchry’d already thrown?
Rasmussen looked up. Coach Hayes was sitting on the bench next to Buchry and giving him an earful. Rasmussen rolled his eyes. He also thought Buchry might make a great quarterback, but Hayes should have the decency to wait until baseball season was over before he started pushing his recruitment.
***
Ravinder looked up from his chicken vindaloo and said, “Tansey, this is really good!”
She smiled at him, “Are you sure it isn’t just because it’s been so long since we had vindaloo with meat in it?”
He snorted, “Might have something to do with it.” He shook his head a little disconsolately, “I hope some other mobster doesn’t take over the Castanos’ empire and send us back to the vegetarian life.”
Roni and Hax gave Ravinder a dismayed but angry look as if they hadn’t even considered the possibility that some other criminal might fill that void. Ravinder shrugged at them, “Get used to the possibility. Don’t just assume things’ll stay good.”
Roni narrowed her eyes, “If someone takes over, the same thing’ll happen to the new guy.”
“What,” Ravinder said with a sad laugh, “you think the new guy’ll get in a fight with a drug cartel too?” He shook his head, “You know those kinds of battles are actually pretty uncommon? Sure, they’re always fighting with each other in the movies, but in real life they mostly get along. That way they can all stay in business. If they really fought with each other all the time, the police could just wait for them to take each other out instead of having to arrest ’em.”
Roni took a breath as if she were about to disagree, but then subsided.
Ravinder turned to Hax, “I got a call today from Mr. Hayes, the high school’s football coach?”
Hax gave him an uncertain look, but said nothing.
“He’s very excited about how well you throw and thinks you should go out for quarterback next fall.” Ravinder paused for a response, but, not getting one, he continued, “Hayes thinks you’d have a great chance for a college scholarship if you’re as good as he thinks you could be.”
Hax merely
shrugged but Tansey broke in, “I thought he was going to get a baseball scholarship?”
“Well,” Ravinder began, “if he excels in two sports…”
“And when he gets hurt playing football?!” Tansey interrupted, “Then there won’t be any scholarships!”
“He could throw out his shoulder pitching baseba…” Ravinder started, then ran down when he realized that talking about a different kind of injury to her son probably wasn’t the best way to win this argument. He took a different tack that leaned on Tansey’s intense desire that her daughter attend college, “If Hax could get a scholarship for baseball or football, the money we have for college will go a lot farther for Roni.”
Roni said, “I’ve got a scholarship.”
Tansey, who’d just opened her mouth to comment on the proposed athletic scholarship, suddenly turned to stare at her daughter, “You got a scholarship?!”
Roni nodded.
“Why didn’t you tell us?”
She shrugged.
“What kind? Is it a full ride?”
“No, just tuition.”
Tansey said, “That’s great honey, but room, board and books are still a lot of money.”
Roni got a stubborn look and said, “I’ll be fine. You guys worry about Hax.”
Ravinder wished Tansey would have made a bigger deal over Roni’s scholarship, but, by the time he’d opened his mouth to say something himself, Tansey’d turned back on him, saying, “I’m pretty sure the likelihood he’ll throw out his shoulder is a lot lower than the possibility that he’ll get hurt playing football, right?”
Ravinder raised his palms, “Yes, but the chances he’ll get a scholarship would be better if he could be recruited for either of the two sports.”
Tansey shook her head, “Sports, sports, sports. Seems like that’s all you think about. What about academic scholarships?” She turned to Hax, “Are you getting all A’s this semester too?”
Looking intimidated by the sudden attention, Hax shrugged, “Maybe?”
Ravinder looked over at Roni, but she’d gotten up and left the table while he wasn’t paying attention. Deciding it was good she was gone because he wouldn’t hurt her feelings he said, “Even with Roni’s grades she’s only getting tuition with the academic scholarship.”
Irritatingly, Tansey took the other side of her previous argument, “Don’t say ‘only getting tuition,’ tuition’s pretty damned good. We’re talking thousands of dollars. Besides, we’d be paying for her room and board even if she was living here.”
“If she was living here, she’d be earning that room and board.”
Roni surprised Ravinder by speaking from her usual seat. He hadn’t seen her return to it. She said, “We have plenty of money for room and board.”
Indignantly, Ravinder said, “Just because nobody’s stealing our money every month, doesn’t mean we have enough left over to pay for your dorm and your food. We should be reinvesting money in the business and putting money away into savings!”
Roni nodded down at the table, and repeated herself, “We have plenty.”
Ravinder looked down at the table where Roni’s eyes had briefly focused. His eyes widened and his breath caught in his throat. In front of Roni there lay a long row of bundled money. Ravinder stood with an oath, “Where did that come from?!”
Tansey let out a little shriek as Roni calmly said to her parents, “It came from my closet upstairs. I need your help getting it into a bank.”
“Have you been taking money from the Castanos again?” Tansey asked plaintively.
Ravinder softly said, “There aren’t any Castanos left to take money from.” His eyes rose to Roni’s and he said, “Who did you take that from?”
She nodded, “The Castanos. But not recently. I took it back on the night they got in the big fight with the Garcias. I’d gone down to the warehouse they used as their headquarters and slipped into the room where they kept all their drugs and their drug money. I took a couple of bags full of money thinking it would put a serious cramp in their operations. When they got killed later that night, the loss of the money became the least of their problems.”
Looking shocked, Tansey said, “I told you to stay away from them!”
Roni gave her a dispassionate look, “I found it pretty hard to stay away from them with what they were doing, not just to us, but to every other business in town.”
“You should have just sent your records of their extortion to the FBI and waited!”
“Mom,” Roni said fiercely, “they were dealing drugs. They had a young girl chained to a bed in that warehouse! They weren’t just hurting businesses. Every day that passed would’ve further destroyed that girl’s soul.”
Ravinder saw Tansey swallow and knew that Roni’d just crushed any further objections from his wife. Tansey’s grandmother had spent some time as a sex slave and her whole family had a deep-seated horror of such activities. Resigning himself to the fact that Roni’d done the right thing despite his fears for her, he cleared his throat and said quietly, “How much money is that?”
“These are $10,000 bundles of hundred dollar bills,” she said. “Nineteen of them… More than enough for room and board at college.”
“Maybe we should be giving some money back to all the businesses that were extorted…” Ravinder said wistfully, staring at the cash and thinking about all the problems it could solve for them, not just college.
Evenly, Roni picked up one of the stacks of money in front of her and said, “I gave a bundle like this to each business I’d recorded the Castanos extorting.”
“You just walked in and said, ‘Sorry about what the Castanos did to you; here’s some cash?!’”
“No Dad,” Roni said as if she were speaking to someone who wasn’t particularly bright.
“Oh,” Ravinder said, as his brain caught up to the situation, “you did it invisibly.”
Roni nodded. “I put the bundle in an envelope with a slip of paper telling them it was partial repayment for what the Castanos had taken from them.”
Staring at the stacks of money that remained, Ravinder reluctantly said, “Maybe we should be returning even more of the money to them?”
Roni sighed then shrugged, “I’ve thought a lot about that. There must be a lot of businesses around town that the Castanos extorted, but where I didn’t record it. They didn’t extort every business. They skipped over some of the big chain stores. We could just go around randomly giving away money to businesses that aren’t parts of chains? I’m not sure who to give it to, or how much…?” When no one else said anything, she continued, “You may well be right. Some other crime boss may try to move in and fill the vacuum the Castanos left behind. It might be nice to have some capital available for that battle when it comes.”
Mind whirling, Ravinder looked over at Tansey expecting her to say something about how the next crime boss wasn’t their problem and that Roni should definitely stay away. However, Tansey was staring sightlessly at the table in front of her with a shocked and horrified expression on her face. He realized that, though she’d probably figured the Castanos were involved in other forms of crime, she hadn’t considered the possibility they’d stooped to sex trafficking. The trafficking issue had completely derailed Tansey. Turning back to Roni, he said, “Okay…” He wasn’t quite sure exactly what he was saying okay to. Perhaps he was just acknowledging that she’d given it a lot more thought than he had and that they should go with whatever she’d decided.
Brightly, Roni said, “But we still need to launder this money.”
Picturing the money in the washing machine, Ravinder said with some confusion, “What?”
“You do know I can’t walk into college next fall with a bundle of hundred dollar bills and start peeling them off for tuition, room, and board, don’t you?”
“Oh,” Ravinder said in sudden understanding, “I guess that would seem a little… suspicious.” He looked up at her, “How does washing it fix that?”
“Not
washing it, laundering it. It’s a term used for when criminals take dirty money and make it look like the receipts of a legal business. Most of the big crime operations have several legitimate looking businesses that they use to launder the money they get through their criminal activities. The Castanos owned a bunch of nightclubs, but any cash business will do.” She lifted an eyebrow at Ravinder, “Convenience stores are used to launder money all the time.”
Ravinder drew back, “How would we use our store to clean up money?”
She shrugged, “No one has any way of knowing exactly how much cash the store brings in. You just add some of this money into your daily take every day and put it on the books as various sales, especially sales of services. Use cash to pay for inventory from any suppliers that’ll take it. Once you deposit cash in the bank as if it’s the legitimate receipt of your business it’ll be clean. You shouldn’t make deposits over $10,000 very often because the bank has to report those. You should make your deposits often enough that they’re almost always smaller than that.” She tilted her head, “But if they’re always just under $10,000, that looks pretty suspicious too.
Ravinder stared at her, “How do you know all this?!”
She gave him an even look, “I looked it up on the Internet like anyone else.”
***
Louis Romano and Julio walked past the line waiting to get into the Petroglyph nightclub. When the bouncer tried to stop him, Louis hooked a thumb over his shoulder and said, “We’ve got an invitation. My man Julio will show it to you.” Then Louis walked through the door, knowing that Julio was showing the bouncer the hilt of his gun and telling the man just who Louis Romano was.
Julio wouldn’t be surprised if the bouncer hadn’t suddenly developed a need to change his underwear. Romano’s reputation was pretty scary. Julio followed his boss through the night club. Romano seemed to wander aimlessly, a fairly common behavior for him when he was looking over a business. Eventually a nervous looking balding young man appeared. “Mr. Romano, welcome to Petroglyph. Can I get you a VIP table? A drink?”
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