by Lisa Ferrari
Uzi says no.
“Okay,” Kellan says, hanging up and turning to me, “so the guy flying the drone was probably down the hill and flew it up to spy on us and he got lucky. Cocksucker.”
“So, what are we going to do?”
“I don’t know. Any ideas?”
I think for a second. I’m disturbed that someone could get video of us so easily. But I’m also pissed. Mostly I’m pissed.
“Let’s fight fire with fire,” I say.
“What do you mean?”
“I mean he used a drone on us. So let’s use a drone on him.”
“How?”
“Get a drone, have Uzi or somebody fly it, and when his drone shows up, use our drone to follow his drone back to its point of origin. I mean, battery life on those things isn’t very long, right? Ten minutes, maybe? So, he has to fly up here, spy on us, and then fly the drone back to him. When he does, we’ll follow him with our drone. Uzi can have one or two teams of people tracking our drone with GPS. When it gets to wherever he is, they can nail his ass. Or, at the very least, I bet we could get some video of him or his vehicle or his license plate. I mean, there is an APB out for this guy, right? Assuming it’s the same piece of shit who broke in here, stole my panties and trashed our house, pointed a gun at me and then chased me through traffic, endangering thousands of lives. So, all we need is a really good drone and someone to operate it. As long it’s better than his and has a longer battery life and greater range, we can get him.”
“Caliree, that’s genius.”
I love it when he calls me Caliree. “It’s what I would do if I were writing a book.”
THE NEXT DAY, the video is everywhere.
Bret is successful in getting YouTube to remove the video. He hires someone to do nothing but scour the internet every hour, looking for copies of it, and then if our names are associated with it, he sends them a cease-and-desist citing invasion of privacy laws, defamation of character, libel, slander, and a bunch of other legalese I’m not able to follow. He says the full weight of our vast resources will be brought to bear if the posters fail to comply. It seems to work; every time a video pops up, it is usually down within the hour.
I talk to Sheila and she is not happy. But she says no one has pulled the plug yet, though there was some grumbling about family-friendly fare and whatnot.
So it seems, for now, I still have a job.
AROUND NOON, UZI shows up with half a dozen guys. He did some checking and these guys are the founders of Angel Drones, a custom drone manufacturer and drone enthusiast club. They have a lot of contracts with motion picture companies, real estate agents, and city offices in need of survey work. It turns out that one of the founders served in the army with Uzi, so Uzi says we can trust them. I make coffee for everyone and we sit in the kitchen and talk and I decide they’re good guys and I can trust them.
They explain that they’re always looking for investors. Kellan says if this goes well and they succeed in nailing the dick who embarrassed me and jeopardized my career, he’ll be their silent partner and will give them a $1-million cash infusion to help them expand their business.
They get excited.
They show us their hardware, which they haul in from their van parked out front.
Their plan is to use three teams in three cars flying three drones. They’re all networked and linked so everyone knows where everyone is flying and driving at all times.
The drones also have LIDAR, which is a special radar that helps them avoid obstacles, and TCAS just like on a 747, whatever that does. The secret, though, is that their system is able to identify the frequency the suspect drone is using, then hack it’s GPS in order to find its point of origin. Most quality drones have a Return to Home function. All they do is follow the drone, use the other two drones to fly to its home location, and find the operator.
All they need is some bait.
Kellan and I decide to be the cheese.
We get dressed, go out for lunch and then do some shopping, making sure people see us and talk to us and get selfies that are of course put up online so that the panties-thief will know we’re out and about.
I post of a pic of our lunch and say we’re heading home for a workout followed by a late-night swim. Just the two of us. Smiley face. Hashtag SkinnyDipping. Hashtag CityLights.
We figure this ought to get his attention and draw him out. His drone, too.
WE FOLLOW OUR plan by heading home, working out (or trying to, given what we’re about to do), and making our way out to the pool. Night has fallen but Kellan has the pool lights on.
We’re still wearing our workout clothes. I’m hoping we don’t have to get naked. Now that I know that knicker-sniffing prick is out there, trying to spy on us, I’m less enthusiastic about our P.D.A., our Poolside Display of Affection.
Uzi is out front in his van with the drone guys standing by in the courtyard, up the street, and down the street.
Kellan and I both have Bluetooth earpieces they gave us so we can listen to the conversation.
After about an hour, there’s no sign of him.
By ten o’clock, still nothing.
I suspect our trap is too obvious. I mean, duh! It totally is. But hopefully that sicko won’t be able to resist.
By eleven, we’re still waiting.
“Maybe we should get naked,” I say.
Kellan shrugs.
I grab Kellan and lead him over to the side of the pool. I whisper in his ear, “Pretend you’re doing what you did yesterday.”
Kellan whispers back, “Maybe I don’t want to pretend.”
Despite the circumstances, this gives me butterflies. I swear my clit quivers. I kiss him.
We put a towel on the deck and I get down on my hands and knees. Kellan gets on his knees behind me and pretends to pound my brains out.
“Ooh la-la,” someone mumbles over the radio.
“Quiet,” says Dov, Uzi’s friend from the army, the founder of Angel Drones.
In spite of myself, feeling Kellan’s hands gripping my hips and his pelvis pressing against my butt through my bathing suit, I want him. I reach back and caress his testicles through his black swim trunks. I’m thinking about sliding my bottoms to one side and pulling his cock out and taking it inside me when a buzzing sound fills the air. The biggest bee or wasp or hornet I’ve ever heard.
A drone flies down out of the night and hovers a foot off the ground right beside us.
“It’s just me,” Dov says on the radio, “coming to say hi.”
The drone has a white body with a group of gold lights that look like a halo. Dov explained earlier that the halo effect is good for visibility, especially at night to locate your drone in the dark sky. It’s also a reminder to the operator and the other drone enthusiasts to use their drones for good, to be conscientious with their use, and not to spy on people.
The drone flies straight up and disappears from view when the lights switch off as Dov puts it into Stealth Mode, a feature not available on their commercially-available drones.
Kellan and I resume our pretend sex act. I still have the surge of adrenaline in my body.
All is quiet.
I wonder how long we’re going to have to wait.
“Contact,” Dov says. “Bogey, inbound, six o’clock low.”
“Roger, got him.”
“Roger, eyes on.”
Holy crap. It’s happening.
I whisper to Kellan, “Do you see anything?”
“No.”
We remain in doggy-style position by the side of the pool. My knees are starting to hurt.
Kellan whispers in my ear, “Let’s give him a show, so he sticks around long enough for them to get him.”
We go back to simulating sex.
We listen to the guys on the radio communicating the incoming drone’s position and altitude and time to target.
I assume we are the target.
In a moment of reckless, fearful, self-indulgent pity I am tempted to say screw it and have sex with Kellan for real right here right now for everyone to see. He can come all over my face. He can give me a facial. Like in a porno. Let all the trolls jerk off to that one. Because to hell with them.
Kellan whispers in my ear, “It’s okay.”
Again Kellan has used his powers of Lover’s E.S.P. and taps into my inner thoughts in time to rescue me from my own self-destructive tendencies. I don’t know how he does it. But he always saves me.
“Time to target, thirty seconds,” says Dov. His voice is very calm in my ear.
“Roger that,” someone says.
There’s no way to know if this incoming drone is the same one as last night. It could be that someone saw the video and was inspired to send their drone up here, in the hopes of seeing me naked.
But man I hope it’s the same drone.
And I hope the person operating it is sitting in a black SUV.
With my panties in his pocket.
Fucker.
Hopefully the cops kill his panty-stealing ass.
Hopefully my panties don’t have his disgusting crusty Clorox jizz all over them.
“Claire, Kellan, heads up,” Dov says, “it’s headed your way.”
Just like before, a drone descends from the night sky like some intelligent, self-aware killing machine from a science fiction movie in which humans are fighting for their survival against a horde of machines. I feel like I’m Sarah Connor.
At first I’m terrified; the drone is loud. It’s making a mean buzzing sound. It’s entirely black. Its plastic body and landing gear and propeller struts make it look like a weird, very large insect. A camera hangs underneath it. I see the camera swivel on a multi-axis gimbal. The camera lens is shiny.
Like an eye.
Spying on us.
Stealing from us.
My instinct is to lash out at it and punch it. But the thing is bigger than I expected. It has four propellers. They could probably cut my fingers off.
Before I can do anything, the flying insect machine climbs into the sky.
Kellan throws his tee shirt at it but just misses.
Kellan gets up and runs into the house. He comes back with his tablet and we watch the video feed from one of the Angel drones as it’s looking down at our house. There we are, by the side of the pool.
The other two drones are on the move.
One of them is following the black drone I just saw.
The other is already flying down the hill, over some houses.
“Approaching bogey’s home,” someone says. “Lock.”
The drone comes to a hover about thirty feet in the hair. A red box appears on the screen atop a vehicle… a black SUV. It gets the license plate as clearly as if I were standing there looking at it with my own two eyes.
I hear someone say, “L.A.P.D. en route. Everyone hold.”
Holy crap. We might actually nail this loser. I picture him in his van, sniffing my panties and jerking off while he controls his drone with one hand.
“L.A.P.D. on scene,” someone murmurs. “They’re approaching his vehicle. Jesus, they’ve got their guns out.”
Red and blue police strobes flash, painting the scene like a disco.
One of the uniformed officers jerks the SUV door open and drags the man out of it. There’s a scramble and the two men wrestle.
In the distance, I hear firecrackers.
But they’re not firecrackers.
“Shots fired, shots fired. Officer down.”
Holy Jesus.
The SUV driver is on the ground near his open passenger door. His white tee shirt is bloody. There is blood in the street. It’s coming from him. A lot of it. He’s not moving.
“Is he dead?” I ask.
“Don’t know,” says Kellan.
A uniformed officer kneels beside the other one, with his hands on the cop’s stomach. He’s bleeding, too.
Oh, God, please don’t let him die because of me.
Seconds later, another patrol car shows up, then an ambulance, then two more patrol cars, and two unmarked cars with red and blue and white strobe lights flashing from hidden places all over the car. I recognize the detective who came to our house after the break-in.
There is a lot of scurrying about. Paramedics swarm the cop. They press white bandages to his stomach. The bandages immediately turn red.
“Oh my god…”
They put him on a stretcher and into the ambulance and leave quickly.
Yellow police tape is immediately put up around the scene.
The detective pulls out his phone and makes a call. He looks up at the drone, up at us. He approaches the dead man. He pulls a pen out of his pocket and kneels over the body.
Kellan’s phone rings.
Kellan answers it and puts it on speakerphone.
“Claire, this is Detective Sharpe. Is this the guy?”
“I don’t know. He had a skull bandana over his face and was wearing sunglasses.”
“Like this?” Detective Sharpe asks. With his pen, he holds up a skull bandana. It looks the same. Detective Sharp holds up a pair of blue-and-black panties.
“Are these are yours?”
“Does it say ‘Walmart’ on the tag?”
“Yes.”
“I’d say those are mine.”
“Looks like we’ve got our guy.”
THE NEXT TWO weeks are madness.
Kellan and I are asked to come to the police station several times to give statements for the detective’s report. His job is 90% paperwork and 10% running around driving fast and chasing people and drawing his weapon, which he says he’s only done once, and he’s never fired it.
Kellan and I also take a trip to the hospital to visit the police officer who was shot. He’s going to make a full recovery, thank God.
Kellan and I fly all over the country doing radio and television interviews to talk about the story.
The video from Angel Drones is cut together, documenting the whole thing.
The cops visit the stalker’s house and seize his computer. They find lots of disturbing stuff about me. Every video and IG post I ever did, every tweet I ever tweeted, and printed screenshots from all the times I was ever shown on TV. They’re tacked all over his wall like a giant shrine. I don’t go there and see it, although part of me kinda does want to actually see it for myself. But Detective Sharpe shows me some pics of it. It’s like Silence of the Lambs. I’m glad I didn’t end up in this guy’s basement, being forced to rub lotion on my skin in order to avoid getting the hose again.
The man is identified and his name released. Turns out he was a computer programmer who’d gotten laid off from a big company after he’d had some issues at work with a female coworker. He’d been working as a cook in a Mexican restaurant for the past 18 months until he became my stalker.
Calista comes over for dinner one night when Kellan and I get back from New York. She congratulates me on my first stalker.
While the three of us are enjoying some incredibly delicious salmon Kellan sautéed in lemon juice and garlic powder, I get a text from Nate saying he saw me on local morning TV and asking why I didn’t let him know I was in town because he would’ve liked to take me to lunch.
I immediately text him back:
I told you
I don’t want
to do business
with you.
Who said anything about business???
Not appropriate.
That was a JOKE.
I like the authors
in my stable
to have a sense of humor.
I’m not in your stable.
No, but you should be.
A pretty little filly like you.
I don’t wish to do business with you.
I am not interested in
business, romance, or friendship
i
n any way, shape, or form.
PLEASE DO NOT
CONTACT ME FURTHER.
WE HAVE NOTHING LEFT TO
DISCUSS. DO YOU UNDERSTAND?
Okay, okay no need to SHOUT.
This, I hope, is the end of this.
I show the texts to Kellan. He says I just got rid of one stalker, now I’m creating another.
Not funny.
He shows me his phone. There is a text.
From Stacy.
I immediately want to regurgitate my salmon.
It reads:
OMG, u guyz!!!
Saw the lols on the boobtoob
SO not funny!!!
Iz Clare cool??????????
“Am I ‘cool’?”
Kellan shrugs in uncomfortable inability to explain or justify Stacy’s text.
“What’s with the spelling?” I ask. “And the… ten question marks?”
Kellan sighs. “What should I even say?”
“I guess it’s sweet that she bothered to ask.”
“That’s true.”
“Who is it?” Clarista asks.
I give her the quick rundown, how Stacy and Kellan were business partners who had a brief, shallow romantic relationship which ended before I came along but she’s still in love with him. And is known to send risqué, wholly inappropriate pics of herself to him from time to time. (This, I am certain, will resume in short order.)
“It’s tough being adored, isn’t it?” Calista asks, rhetorically and with just the right combination of self-deprecating mockery and sincerity. It makes me like her even more.
It figures Stacy would mention boobs, even though she spelled ‘tube’ wrong.
It’s on the tip of my tongue to ask Kellan if I should get mine done, like Stacy did, and if we should visit the surgeon who did Stacy’s. I’ve lost so much weight and my body composition has shifted to the point that my body-fat percentage has pretty much made my breasts shrink. I’m wearing a B-cup but only kinda sorta filling it out. I wonder sometimes if Kellan misses the girls being the way they were when he met me, which was quite large. My back feels better now (everything feels better now) and it’s better or at least easier for running, but still kinda weird when I look down in the shower and can see my feet, and when I buy clothes or climb on top of Kellan and ride him like Debra Winger rode the mechanical bull at Gilley’s in Urban Cowboy before John Travolta beat the snot out of Scott Glenn. I decide not to mention it in front of Calista.