Tahoe Hijack

by Todd Borg

  “And if I stay? I can only be prepared for certain, narrow situations. When the man came in my room, I had an escape plan. But out in the world, there’s not much I can do.”

  “Yes, there is. Not in the same sense as escaping from a bedroom. But you can be ready for something unexpected.”

  “How?”

  “Notice your surroundings. Look around before you go to your car or get out of your car. Look out the windows before you leave any building. Keep your doors locked. Stay in at night. Never go anyplace alone.”

  “Well, that last one is impossible. I came up here alone. And Lacy is in Reno shopping today and then meeting a friend for dinner. She said she wouldn’t be back until ten or eleven. So I’ll be alone until then.”

  “You could stay with me,” I said.

  “What, like a babysitter? You must be kidding.”

  “No, I’m not.”

  “I’m sure staying with you would be an overreaction,” she said.

  “Then be ready at all times.”

  Anna was shaking her head. “Look, I’ll be careful. I’m naturally cautious. But if someone runs up and grabs me, there’s not much I can do. Besides, I’m a runner. I run away from any little thing. Like when the man came into my bedroom. A regular timid mouse. If someone grabbed me, I’d die of a heart attack.”

  “There’re lots of things you can do. Scream for one. You’d be amazed at how many women don’t scream when they’re attacked. One of the things they teach you in self-defense class is how to yell and shout at a potential attacker and, if he touches you, to scream. They have you practice it. Most women can’t even do it in class at first. The natural tendency is to not call attention to yourself. It requires practice.”

  “It’s not like I can go around practicing screaming.”

  “You can role-play it in your mind. Like an actor mentally reciting her lines without actually speaking. You envision someone acting threatening, and you envision shouting at him, STOP! DON’T COME CLOSER. I’LL SCREAM! Then you envision screaming if he grabs you.”

  Anna looked doubtful. “And what then? What if someone grabs me and I scream and he tries to stuff me in the trunk of his car or something?”

  “Then you physically attack him.”

  “That’s ridiculous. You don’t understand. I’m not a fighter. I’d die of fear. I go limp in the knees at the thought. And even though I’m not a small woman, any man is going to be a lot stronger than me.”

  “Even a small woman has a good chance of stopping an attacker if she is focused and practiced.”

  “Mental practice,” Anna said. She didn’t roll her eyes, but her tone of voice suggested as much.

  “Yes. Of course, physical practice is always best. But mental practice is better than nothing.”

  Anna leaned back in her chair, radiating skepticism. “Okay. What do I do?”

  “First thing to remember is this: if a man grabs you, assume that he plans to kill you. He may not, but you have to assume it. It doesn’t matter if he has a gun or a knife. Always fight back. It may save your life.”

  “But I’ve heard of women getting raped at gunpoint and then being let go. If they’d fought, they might have gotten killed.”

  “Hypothetically, that’s true. But you can’t know who is planning to pull the trigger and who is just using an unloaded gun for show. Fighting might prevent the rape in the first place.”

  “So how could someone like me fight? Even if the man didn’t pull the trigger, he would still overpower me.”

  “Not if you don’t give him the chance. Men might be stronger, but a woman can kill with her hands and feet if she has the presence of mind. Remember the most vulnerable areas on a man. If he’s at a bit of a distance, your best weapon is a kick. Women have strong legs. Here, stand up and let me show you how to do a front snap kick.”

  “Give me a break.” Her tone was dismissive. “You want to make me try karate in this office?” She sounded repulsed by my suggestion.

  I walked over. “Come on. Stand up.”

  She remained sitting, Spot’s head still on her thigh. “I’m a grown woman. Thirty-five years old. I’ve never done anything athletic in my life. I’m hardly going to start now, here in this little room.”

  I reached for her hand, lifted it off Spot’s head, pulled. “Up.”

  “Owen, this is embarrassing me. I’m the bookish type. I could no more kick a person than I could do a handspring.”

  “If your life is ever in danger, you’ll be glad I showed you.”

  She looked at the ceiling and sighed.

  I pulled Spot off her and lifted her up.

  “I don’t believe I’m doing this,” she said as she stood. “I can barely ride a bicycle. I will never be a karate person.”

  “Don’t think of it like karate. Think of it like saving your life.”

  She breathed heavily.

  I moved next to her, standing at her side a foot away, facing the same direction.

  “Are you right-handed?”

  She nodded.

  “Okay. A front snap is exactly as it sounds,” I said. “There’s no wind up, no telegraphing intent. You just raise your right knee up waist-high and snap your foot up and out in one smooth motion. Aim for his groin.” I bent, grabbed her right knee, and lifted. “Up to waist level. That’s right. Now snap your foot out.”

  “You must be kidding.”

  I was still holding her knee. “Snap your foot out,” I repeated.

  She made a limp snap, lost her balance, and fell to the left, away from me. I caught her, but just barely.

  “That was good,” I said. “Now let’s do it again.”

  She made another weak effort, lost her balance again and had to hop backward a couple of steps to keep from falling.

  I kept working with her, and she practiced kicking the air in front of us. She stopped.

  “Okay, I get it,” she said.

  “No, you don’t. Keep kicking.”

  With a big breath of frustration, she kicked again.

  “It is important to keep your balance, and it is very important to lift your toes up so you make contact with the underside, the ball of your foot. If not, you can break your toes.”

  She kept stopping, and I kept making her go on.

  Ten times. Fifteen times. Twenty times.

  “You can practice this any time,” I said. “The more familiar it becomes, the more effective it will be.”

  “Like Grace said,” Anna said. “Be prepared.”

  “Exactly. Now if your kick doesn’t stop him and he grabs you, you can still stomp down on the top of his foot, up high where the bones rise up toward his ankle.”

  I took off my shoe, and we practiced the foot-stomping move with my shoe as a stand-in for my foot. Twenty times.

  I continued. “Most men expect that you will cave when they grab you. They tend not to control your hands the way they should. In most situations, you will have a good chance of reaching their face.”

  Anna scoffed, “Like scratching them is going to stop an attack.”

  “No, you don’t scratch. You take your thumbs to their eyes.”

  She scrunched up her face. “That’s disgusting.”

  “Not as disgusting as what they are planning to do to you.”

  “I just push my thumbs into their eyes?”

  “No. Don’t think of it like pushing. Think more explosive. You jab your thumbs and rip and gouge. You’re not trying to apply pressure. You’re trying to take their eyeballs out. Most women have the thumb strength to remove a man’s eyeball, and no man will continue an attack if you do that.”

  Anna shuddered.

  “If you can’t get to their eyes, you may be able to punch their throat. Let me show you how to do an elbow punch.”

  I lifted her arm, bent it, then had her swing her elbow in an upward arch, forward and backward. We practiced until she could make it an explosive move.

  “An elbow to the Adam’s apple will traumatize you
r attacker. If the blow is hard enough, it can crush the larynx and be life-threatening. You can also strike the throat with the edge of your hand. Or you can make a fist with your knuckles extended and punch him in the throat. And if your attacker ever gives you the opportunity, never pass up the chance to kick him in the throat or face or temple. A woman’s kick is a formidable weapon.”

  “And you don’t think any of these moves will cause an attacker to shoot me.”

  “They will absolutely cause some attackers to shoot you, the same attackers who will shoot you anyway after they rape you.”

  Anna spent some time thinking.

  “Let me see if I have this straight,” she said. “Even if an attacker has a weapon, I ignore it. If he gets too close but hasn’t grabbed me yet, I yell STOP! DON’T COME ANY CLOSER! If he does come closer, I kick him in the groin or the knee. If he grabs me, I scream as I try to gouge out his eyes. Then I chop him in the throat or stomp the top of his foot.”

  “You are a good student,” I grinned.

  “I have some thinking to do,” she said. “I think I’ll go now. And yes, I’ll be careful and watchful.” She walked to the door, then stopped and came back.

  “Owen?”

  “Yeah?”

  “I know I’m a difficult student. But you are doing an amazing job of hanging in there with me. Thanks.” She raised up on her toes, kissed my cheek, then left.

  TWENTY-FIVE

  I found the condo where Captain Frank Richards lived on the North Shore near Carnelian Bay. It was part of two six-unit buildings on a hill set back from the expensive waterfront houses. The developer had designed it with the entrance road and guest parking area on the lake side of the condos so that no trees would ever grow up and obscure the view.

  The address that Ford Georges had written down said that Richards’s unit number was B-2.

  I pulled into an entrance road that made a few nice but unnecessary curves around a couple of artificial mounds covered in thick sod. I parked in a spaced labeled B-2 Guest. I walked up a path made of terra cotta pavers. It wound around some boulders that had been stacked up in an unlikely pile. Then it wound around some raised flower beds built of stacking landscape stones. As I got close to the buildings, the path curved this way and that between some small trees that had been put in where, probably, some big trees had been taken out.

  I paused to appreciate the spectacular view of the blue lake with Freel Peak, Tahoe’s highest mountain, looming 4600 feet over the South Shore, 28 miles distant.

  The condo Richards lived in was the second from the left on the right building. The man who answered my knock was gaunt and grizzled, tall and skinny, with large, brown, scratchy-looking sideburns. He looked vaguely like a large bottle brush.

  “Captain Richards?” I asked.

  He nodded. “Frank,” he said.

  “Owen McKenna.” We shook. “I was the man who…”

  “Not like I’m ever gonna forget your name,” he interrupted. “Worst day of my life. The WORST. And it was all about getting you out to my boat. You figure out what really happened, yet?”

  “Working on it,” I said. I handed him my card.

  Frank motioned me in, and we sat in two chairs that faced the view.

  Frank pointed to his beer. “Get you something to drink?”

  “No thanks.”

  “My day off,” he said, taking a sip. “This helps me.” He set the beer down. “Two guys down. One of them murdered. Your girlfriend almost murdered. I still get shaky when I think about it. Can’t sleep.” He took another sip. “All on my watch.”

  “Not your fault,” I said.

  “The guy told me to cut my engines. I was so shocked, I froze. Couldn’t think. Next thing I know, he’s yelling at me on the phone. I finally came to my senses and pulled back the throttles. But it was too late. The hijacker threw that guy overboard just to teach me a lesson. A man died all because I was too slow to think.”

  I shook my head. “You weren’t the reason he tossed his helper into the lake. He planned to do it.”

  Frank looked at me. “You really think so?” His eyes were the kind of red and swollen you get from hours of misery. His lower lip twitched.

  “I know so. The hijacker brought two chains. He planned for two victims. You can let yourself off the hook.”

  Frank turned and looked out the window. “What do I do now? How do I get past this?”

  “Give it time.”

  He didn’t move. In time he said, “I’ll try.”

  “Do you recall seeing this man before?” I handed him the photo of Nick O’Connell.

  Frank studied the photo, then shook his head. “I’ve thought about it in the time since. Like, what if he’d once been a passenger on a previous cruise. The thing is, you start wondering that, pretty soon you’re thinking that the guy was wearing a wig and a fake beard and if you take them off in your mind, he could be practically anybody.” He looked at it some more, then handed the photo back.

  “Did you notice anything unusual in the days before the hijacking?”

  “How do you mean?”

  “Anything. Maybe you found some passenger poking around where he shouldn’t be. It could be someone else, nothing like the hijacker. A woman. A boy.”

  “An accomplice,” he said.

  “Yeah.”

  He thought about it. “No. Every day was the same. But Teri Georges – she and her husband Ford are the owners – she did ask me if I’d come on the boat one morning when we didn’t have a cruise scheduled. I guess she’d left the boat to run some errands, and when she came back, the gangway gate was unlatched.”

  “Had you?”

  “No. I had run down to Reno to get some stuff you can’t get up at the lake.”

  “What about your deckhands? What kind of guys are they?”

  Frank made a little shrug. “Regular, I guess. Andy and Warren Wellesley are twin brothers who graduated high school last spring and are taking a year off before college. After we close up shop for the winter, they plan to work at one of the ski resorts.”

  “Where are they from?”

  “Bay Area. Somewhere on the peninsula.” Frank held my card by the edges, flipped it over, flipped it over again.

  “Good guys?” I said.

  “Straight as arrows. I heard them talking to Joshua once. He’s our other deckhand. Joshua Tolman. He’s more of a normal kid. Been in a little trouble, I guess, but nothing more than I was when I was a kid. Anyway, Andy and Warren were telling him that they’d never drunk alcohol and never smoked pot. It fits with their personalities. They’re the kind of guys that future mothers-in-law dream of.”

  “Could you imagine them giving information about the boat to anyone?”

  “You mean, if someone approached them and started asking questions?”

  “Yeah,” I said.

  Frank shook his head. “If someone tried to compromise Andy and Warren, they’re the kind of kids who would come right to me about it. If I wasn’t around, they’d tell Ford and Teri. Of that, I’m sure.”

  “What about the third deckhand, Joshua?”

  “Well, he’s not the straight-up kid that the other two are. But still, he lives with his parents, and all he cares about is girls and skiing and skateboarding.”

  “What if someone offered him money for information about the boat? Which doors are kept locked. How many people are on the bridge when you sail. Stuff like that?”

  Frank shook his head. “I can’t see Joshua for it. He even drinks milk at lunch. You ever seen a bad person drink milk at lunch? Honest to God, I’ve noticed that over the years. Joshua may have gotten some driving tickets and been cited for smoking weed, but people of questionable morality always drink something other than milk.”

  “One last question. Your Chief Mate Allen Paul. Do you know him well?”

  Frank thought about it. “Absolutely. We never met before we started working together, but our working time has been close. Not to put too fine a point
on it, but a captain and his chief mate are like a surgeon and his chief operating room nurse. You have to totally rely on your second in command. Total trust. Total understanding. You know what the other person wants and you give it to them before they even ask the question.”

  “Then you would probably know if Allen saw or noticed anything unusual in the last week or two as well?”

  “Probably,” Frank said. “I would say that until the hijacker, it was life-as-normal for all of us. Look, Owen. Let me tell you something. Of our entire crew, I’m probably the one who’s less rock-solid than the others. I’m not saying I’m a bad guy. I’m a good guy. I’m just saying that it’s human nature to try different things. More than the others, my life has been kind of messy. Broken relationships with women. A string of different jobs, not much common ground to them. I’ve always been a bit of a drifter. This job working for Ford and Teri is the best job I’ve ever had. I’m really lucky that I got it. I’d had some time on a tugboat on the Bay, and I happened to meet Ford and Teri after they’d bought this boat but before they shipped it up from SoCal. The timing was perfect and, frankly, they didn’t know anyone else who knew something about running a large boat. Pure serendipity.

  “Anyway,” Frank continued. “While I’ve had a bit of a checkered past, I’m reliable and trustworthy. What I’m saying is that our other crew members are probably even more reliable and trustworthy than I am.”

  I thanked Frank and left.

  Over the course of the next two hours I found and met Chief Mate Allen Paul at his house. I also caught Joshua Tolman and Warren Wellesley together just as they were leaving the Tolman house on their way to pick up Andy Wellesley at the Sierra Nevada College Library where Andy was looking up employment information for the various ski resorts.

  After talking to all of them except Andy, I discovered that they were exactly as Captain Frank had described them, seemingly solid and trustworthy. All were forthcoming, and not one of them was able to add anything to my investigation.

  I was back to my starting point.

  TWENTY-SIX