by Mark Graham
After he finished his breakfast he checked out of the motel and took his time getting to his car. When he left he kind of wandered into the general direction of where the hotel was. He didn’t have to get too close to see most of the block in flames with the hotel and auto parts store being completely blown down except for some brick still standing somehow on the opposite side of where he dropped the bomb into the window well. He found the expressway and got on, heading to Nashville.
Ice never under estimated his targets but felt the small group of Iranian terrorists in Nashville could very well be an easy one. When he got there he found that the group of five of them worked at a body shop with the garage doors right off the street. During business hours most if not all the doors were wide open with big fans running inside. It didn’t take him long to find a small alley down the street, and that by standing next to the building a person could see right into the shop. He watched from several locations and learned there wasn’t very much traffic on the street and the same with the streets around the location. Evidently it had once been a small industrial area, with some shops. Most were empty, but there were some open for one thing or another. One was a large Army surplus store. They probably all paid cheap rent, and didn’t get hassled.
After watching the shop from several directions he could see they closed shop about seven in the evening. Checking the front door he saw they were open at nine every morning except for Sunday and closed at seven every night except for Saturday. Saturdays they closed at two in the afternoon.
Steve/Ice found another motel and checked in. He tried not to go someplace that was too nice with too many people getting their nose into his business. On the other hand he wanted it nice enough to be clean, have a decent morning buffet at least, and a room around the back with easy entry and exit. This particular motel had a back entrance from another street. He liked these kinds because he could randomly go and leave in several directions.
After checking in and waiting for it to get dark he went out and got into the trunk and got himself a grenade launcher and three percussion shells. Of course he always had a handgun with him. He felt that a rifle would be way to noticeable, as if the rocket launcher wasn’t. He placed them under the front seat where no one could accidently find them. He had a secure box to put them in, which could not be removed from the car unless someone took the time to hoist the car and come through the bottom of the car having to tear out a bunch of stuff to be able to do so.
Ice had his coffee and buffet breakfast in a nice little room in the motel which he shared with two, what appeared to be married couples and two men that reeked of gayness. He didn’t care. People were people and he let them do whatever it was they did. The only exception of course was when one of them appeared on his list. If he witnessed a crime he would do nothing unless it was a threat to life of someone. Interesting philosophy he continued to think about.
At about nine in the morning he drove to the adjacent street to the street the body shop was on. He got out, taking the launcher with him; kind of hiding it between his arm and body. Before getting out of the car he looked to see if anyone was around. He felt safe in a way because the entire block had the businesses closed on both of the streets.
Ice walked slowly down the alley and kneeled down on one knee to look around the corner so he can see the garage. He thought it funny. Although the doors were open there were five guys of middle-eastern decent sitting on two benches that were kind across from each other. Some were drinking something out of styrofoam cups and one was drinking a beer. Ice smiled and backed off a little, taking the launcher out of hiding. He put one shell in the chamber and quietly latched the thing shut. He really loved these launchers. His dad told him that for awhile he would walk perimeter in Vietnam with one just like this and use it when needed. He said it was amazing what one of these things could do to a gook.
He slowly turned and aimed at the spot between the two benchs, hoping he could get a good hit by bouncing off the side walk. He stood to get a little better downward aim. He pulled the trigger and could actually see the shell as it traveled and didn’t explode until it hit one of the posts at the entry of one of the bays. It was close enough to the group to send body parts all over the place. Somebody’s arm fell half way between him and where the group was, and as he turned could hear cement and human parts hit the pavement. He took a quick glance and saw part of the front of the garage gone with a good size fire going on the opposite wall. He thought, “hell, they must have had some gasoline back there,” as he quickly returned to his car. He quickly put the launcher and shells into the metal box and left the scene. He drove to a local McDonalds that didn’t have much traffic and pulled around back. He took the launcher and the two shells out and brought them back to the trunk and hid them away until the next time he would use them. Whenever he returned to his home he would take all the stuff out and clean it, insuring replacement of anything used. His garage had a false back that was like a small warehouse with all the stuff he might have to use. More stuff than a platoon would carry into a combat situation.
He couldn’t believe it when a police car came down the street behind him, turned it’s over head lights on and caused the siren to sqawk a few times. He pulled over wondering what the hell was going on.
Both cops walked up to his car with the one on the passenger side staying back near the trunk. The driver walked up and asked Steve for his driver’s license, registration, and proof of insurance. Steve carefully got his license out that said he was Sam Kingston from Alabama, along with his registration and insurance card. He also made sure he had ID and other stuff that matched the same name.
“The reason I stopped you Mr. Kingston is because you kind of rolled through that stop sign back there. You in a hurry?” the cop asked.
“No sir, just got kind of lost and trying to find my way back to the expressway,” Steve said meekly.
The cop returned in about five minutes. “Well, you have no wants and warrants on you Mr. Kingston. My advice is to follow this street to the second traffic light, turn left and you’ll find the expressway about two miles down that street.”
“Thanks Officer! I’ll try to get there without carelessly breaking any laws,” Steve answered politely.
He was totally relieved that the cops didn’t push any farther. He didn’t care if he got a ticket because although his ID was good they would have a hard time to find this particular Sam Kingston. When ever they got a ticket or court order they would contact headquarters, tell what happened, and as they destroyed the cards, ID and such, head-quarters would delete the complete file. After a few months the agent would get another ID card or license. They always had at least six or seven ID’s hidden in different places. If they used a rental car they left the extra stuff in their own car.
Onward to New Orleans. Ice liked New Orleans, especially when the Jazz Festival occurred every year. It wasn’t that time but he would enjoy some time down on the strip. When getting there Steve found a motel he had stayed at before near the airport. It was far away enough from downtown that he didn’t have to put up with all the drunks and party’ers. It didn’t matter when you were down there because there was always fun to be had. His targets didn’t live too far from the bar district, so he would probably take it all in before and after his mission. His next assignment would take him to Houston, but he didn’t need to be in any hurry to get there. He loved his job most of the time.
Ice’s target was a supposedly married couple in their late thirties. They had lived in New Orleans all their lives and had some things going on that they found themselves being very successful. Their names were Bill and Ann Copeland. They went by the names of “Big Bill and Sister Ann.” Bill’s dad was a Vietnam Army veteran. He never saw any action but was assigned to the postal department in Da Nang. While there he met several big drug pushers that were more than happy to get an arrangement going to enable them to sell to Americans.
Big Bill’s dad went by the name of Big Larry. He turne
d the drug trafficking into a very profitable enterprise, specializing first in heroin then several forms of cocaine. Big Larry died of blood poisoning when Big Bill was twenty-two. By then Big Bill knew the business in side and out. With dear old dad dying, Big Bill grew the business even bigger. He ended up owning a trucking company and supplied all his drivers with top notch Peterbilts. And of course, all his drivers he had known for most of their lives. They were trusted and loyal. Generally, most if not all loads went out carrying some amount of drugs. They were usually hidden behind a false wall or boxed in the same kind of containers they were hauling.
Then Big Bill got involved with some trafficking of Mexicans. The trucks he used for that were not of the semi truck type but usually a large one piece truck. He also bought the decent rental trucks that were offered for sale from time to time. He didn’t care if he lost any of these trucks. They were just an expense of the business. Since there was no tax on his business there was no over head. He did have some people die on him from being in close cramped quarters without enough food or water. He was kind of a mean guy and thought that when they transported the slaves over here they ended up with a bunch dead too. It really wasn’t that hard to get rid of a body or two, or ever twelve or thirteen.
Bill’s business got bigger with the trafficking of humans, so his income went up proportionately. He had some very questionable persons he dealt with on either end, but figured that’s what he had to put up with. He insured that his was always three or four levels away from the suppliers. That way he could control what happened after an arrest. More than likely someone would end up dead. His business was worse than the Mafia or Columbians ever thought.
Bill had one route that went from Montana to New York and back indirectly to other cities. White and black American girls from wide area of the north and west were brought to Montana and in turn shipped to Chicago, Pittsburg, Philidephia, and some to New York. Not many to New York because there were a lot of girls taken to New York by other suppliers. He would have Russians, and eastern European people delivered to him in Boston and he would bring them west in order of supply and demand. The law found they could never ever pin anything on him. The only arrest he had in his life was for drunk driving when he was twenty-one and an attorney got him off with ‘driving while intoxicated’, a lesser crime.
Different agencies tried but were never successful. Big Bill did as much as he thought he could possibly get away with. His downfall was when he got into kiddy porn and selling little boys and girls. He had kind of a corner on the market so to speak. Sometime he would have his wife go with him and catch kids. Other times just his wife, and other times others he had trained and controlled their lives. He found nothing wrong with killing an entire family if one of his kidnappers tried to turn him in. Again, the more levels he could get between himself and the doers were better.
He made a major mistake when a politician in Wisconsin found out his college daughter had been kidnapped. It took him months to find her and almost didn’t. When he did she was found in a low priced whore house in New Orleans with several diseases, and her face and body disfigured. Add a business man who was the CEO of a large top 500 company having his two daughters kidnapped, and never seeing them again. He did send out a private investigator who found and took pictures of the girls in Miami. They were killed several days later. It was inevitable that Big Bill would make the Director’s list at some time or another. He had the misfortune to have Ice be their sentence coordinator and executor. Ice could complete torture to a degree even the Japanese, Chinese and Syrians would be jealous of. Ice knew how to keep someone alive if need be for quite awhile. He hated to waste time so the longest torture he accomplished was short of a week. The person died only because he had heart failure before Ice could do everything he had planned. Ice rather referred getting the job done in hours and no longer than a day. He never put himself in the place of the person being tortured, but he actually had some heart and soul left. Many times when torturing he ended up mercy killing them. He would expect the same.
Ice checked out the area well and learned where the Copelands lived and their daily habits. It appeared to him that hey didn’t have any children and there was nobody else living in the house with them. Their house was a very nice house in one of the better neighborhoods. It was on a big lot and looked kind of like an old plantation house. Along the driveway were beautiful plants and bushes and there were two pillars about twelve feet apart and about the same distance from the house with the front door being framed by them. He saw that instead of a garage they had an old ‘carriage house’ that looked like it had been finished on the upper level.
Big Bill drove an Expedition and his wife drove quite a nice and new white Cadillac. However, other than that, nothing reflected them as being people with a lot of money. Ice figured they were smart enough not to draw too much attention.
The Director had sent him a coded e-mail giving him information on the couple. Ann was involved in a book club and another society that helped the needy in Brazil. She also had a college degree and loved Yorkshire Terriers of which she had six of them. Not to raise, just to have for pets. Big Bill was like his name. He was a full six foot-seven inches and weighed three hundred and thirty pounds. He’d wrestled in both high school and college and made the first string on the colleges football team. At the time he was a tackle and could do both offensive and defensive positions successfully which made him kind of a local hero. He was also involved in several organizations, and the chairman of one. They went to church every Sunday and were known to give a lot to a variety of organizations.
One of the important things Ice learned was about the Yorkshire Terriers. He knew from experience that they were yappy little things and would bite your ankles while going crazy. He had a friend who went on a job without knowing there would be a Yorkshire Terrier and it jumped up so high it bit him in the belly. The guy still had scars to prove it. He ended up shooting the dog and the owners who were in their living room at the time. As a front he went in as a salesman and was only going to place listening and video devices. He kind of had to worry about his ass when he reported the killings to the Director. From the incident the agent was on the Director’s shit list until someone else royally screwed up. However, Ice knew he would have to do something to put the dogs out of business. He always felt worse about hurting dogs more than he did in killing people. Strange but it went along with the job supposedly.
He learned by studying the two adults and dogs, that the dogs would always be put out after dark to do their business and spend an hour there in the fenced in back yard. At dark they were called in. Big Bill and Ann usually went to bed between eleven and midnight. He learned from the Director that they had a ‘wave’ machine in their bedroom which gave off a very calming sea water wave sound. The two didn’t have very many visitors and their social life was usually somewhere else or somebody else’s house.
Ice got into one of his computer programs and learned there was a substance that would not take affect immediately but would be very effective by the end of an hour. He figured out how much it would take to put out six little tiny dogs, doubled in went out and bought some hamburgers from Burger Chef. He would some how insure that each dog would get a burger. He doubled the amount in case one or two of them were greedy causing one of the others not to have enough. Unless he used a whole lot of the stuff it wouldn’t hurt the dogs. He didn’t know if dogs got a headache but he learned when using it on humans a severe headache would be a part of the next days experiences. He brought enough of the chemical with him to inject into the Bill and Ann so he could set up the kill room in proper fashion.
The houses on the Copeland’s street and those within several square blocks were on big enough lots that he could sneak through a lot from the rear of the Copelands house and go from there.
After dark he arrived at Copeland’s back fence. He got himself in a position where he could see all of the dogs. He was hidden from view of both the Copeland house
and the house behind them which he was glad to see nobody was home. They had three days of papers sitting in their front door area. He saw the dogs being released coming out of the house and they all started barking like they usually did when going out. Ice felt good about it because if they saw or smelled him they would probably start barking anyway. He hunkered down and made himself visible while holding several hunks of hamburger in his hand. As he expected four of the six dogs slowly came up to him and as he supplied the meat the dogs came up and snatched the meat right out of his hand. The other two sat back and just barked. He started throwing meat at them and they couldn’t resist eating it. Ice decided to feed the dogs piece by piece insuring that each got about enough. When done he walked out of the hedge row and hid between the garage and woodpile of the house behind the Copelands.
Ice felt comfortable enough to take some of the wood that had been split and laid it flat side up. He put one log the other way up to make kind of a pillow and put his jacket on top of that. He figured he might as well rest before he went to work. He fell into a shallow sleep remaining aware if anything was to go on around him in any way. He woke up once with a cat looking at him and when he moved, it ran away.
At about two in the morning he woke up with a start and immediately remembered where he was. He immediately got up and put his jacket on. Then he picked all the logs up and put them back on the pile. Then he took his foot and roughed up the area again so prints wouldn’t be left. He expected that within twelve hours the cops would be covering this area. More than likely though it would take them longer to find out about the dead couple which would do away with any evidence Ice might leave. He wore very thin leather gloves that were so sensitive that he could pick up a dime off a flat surface with no problem.