Un-Connected

by Noah Rea

  Most of the people there agreed. A tear came to Otis’s eye. I don’t think anyone saw it but me, and I didn’t say anything yet. Tilly told everyone they were getting too noisy and should take the conversation to the waiting room. Nearly the whole crowd moved out still talking loudly and talking over each other in their excitement. They were yelling they could do this and they could do that.

  “Otis, why did I see that tear in your eye?” I asked.

  At that Tilly and Deb were right beside him. They hadn’t seen it. He didn’t answer right away.

  “I saw it Otis. What is going on?”

  He held up one finger asking me to give him a minute. He was choked up. Tilly put her hand on his arm.

  Finally, he said, “I have always wanted to run the business so the young ones would want to be part of it. To do that I knew it needed to make enough money to pay a number of them a good wage and be interesting enough that they would enjoy the work and successful enough that the business had a future. Will, Barbara, and I have talked about this for years. We have been so afraid they would all move off to places where they made more money. We didn’t want to be left here by ourselves. To see one of the young ones get excited about the future and want to be part of the new design made me cry. And several of the others got into the ideas. I haven’t cried in a long time.”

  “Not since your dad died,” Tilly said.

  “Well if they are excited about it at this low point then they seem to be here to stay.” Otis said.

  “There were a number of them wanting to put their ideas in.” Deb said.

  “I hate to ask you right now but I need to. The FBI needs that black box really bad.” I said.

  He asked me what I thought we should do. I told him I could make the delivery and collect the money since I would be dealing with the FBI guy I already knew, but I didn’t want to interfere with his business.

  “I don’t think you should sell it to anyone else. Any other buyers probably are fronts for the black SUV guys.”

  “I agree,” Otis said. “We have one buyer other than the FBI who’s been really aggressive. The others don’t believe us when we tell them they’ve been outbid, but this one buyer doesn’t bat an eye. He doesn’t argue or haggle. He just raises his bid.”

  “I just feel the FBI needs it, and you shouldn’t any longer.”

  He agreed and told a couple of the young guys to go get it. “We need to get rid of it and tell all bidders that it’s sold for our own safety.”

  “The FBI would probably like to have that one bidder’s phone number.”

  “No doubt and it will be part of the package. I have recorded every conversation with him and will hand that over with the two phone numbers he has used to call me. They should be very interested in that and feel like they got a little extra something. That usually makes people feel like they got a good deal.”

  As was his thoughtful way, he asked about us and our land search. Tilly had given the truck keys back to us and whispered to ask if we wanted our briefcase back yet. We agreed not yet.

  We went to find the truck, and it looked clean and ready to go. We decided I should get some old clothes on and do a maintenance check on it while Deb found a driver and a load. I adjusted the brakes on one axle, topped off some of the engine fluids, and replaced one short piece of rubber air line. It started right up without any problems, and I declared it road ready as much as I could tell.

  I bought extra light bulbs and fuses. The safety triangles and fire extinguishers were there, but no flares, so I got some of those. The auto parts place had a sale on heavy-duty jumper cables, so I got them. I didn’t ever want to have to jump a semi, but sometimes you have to. I thought the truck was ready.

  The next morning we had breakfast with our new prospective driver, who was our driver after about five minutes. We gave him a full set of keys, the remote, and an extra door key. We also gave him a cash card and asked if he had active truck-stop rewards cards. He had enough points with Loves and the Pilot Flying J Chains to get all the free showers he wanted. So he was good to go. Deb knew him a little from way back and had told him to bring his clothes. I agreed with her intuition, and we put him on the road. We made sure he had both our phone numbers and we had his. He turned out to be a good driver.

  As soon as he was rolling, I told Deb we needed to decide who his boss was going to be, because it wouldn’t work well for him to have two bosses. She agreed and said if we voted she was sure I would vote for her to be the boss, and she was right.

  Life was good, and the stress of the recent past was fading a little. There would always be things in our lives to bug us like the Internet people telling us they couldn’t get us online for ten days. But we were together, and that was worth more than all the money in the world. We were rich.

  I called Jim. “I have the deal worked out on the black box. How do you intend to pay?”

  He laughed. “My boss prefers we pay by check, but I convinced him to handle this as undercover support. I signed for cash, and you will sign a receipt.”

  “Would it bite me to sign my name or do I need an alias?”

  “Don’t worry, I’ll take care of it,” Jim said. “Can you meet me at the Phoenix airport in the morning?”

  “Yes.”

  I told Otis the deal was set, and he said there were three guys who had the box with them. They were well armed and out of sight. They’d pick me up and deliver me to the airport. He thought Deb shouldn’t go. This shouldn’t be a big deal, but we needed to be safe. I couldn’t have agreed more.

  The next morning Jim called at seven. “I’m arriving in about an hour. Ask for a TSA supervisor named Eugene who will take you to a secure room, and I’ll meet you there.”

  “Will I be in trouble for having that box?”

  He laughed. “No, but that’s a great question. I could have you arrested for possession of stolen merchandise, but I won’t, of course.”

  “You know I’m doing you a favor, don’t you?”

  “I know,” Jim said. “But I’ll be doing you a favor after I get the box because it will help solve the riddle of Rebecca’s murder. Besides, that whole family is in danger until that box is gone.”

  “You have an extra bonus with this deal. The seller sent along an audio recording of conversations with the buyer who was most interested in the box. This buyer never batted an eye at raising his bid. He should be very interesting to you. Also included are the two phone numbers he used. The seller’s voice is disguised in case you get a little extra curious about him so please don’t even try to figure that one out.”

  “We know it was someone close to Otis, but we aren’t interested in the seller now. That is, except to hope he is alive and well.”

  “I will tell him you said that.”

  “Do you have anyone with you to make sure it doesn’t get stolen?” I asked.

  “I’ll have agents with me at both ends who’ll see me on and off the plane. And should the plane have to make an emergency stop somewhere, we’ll have agents on the ground there as well. We are on alert the whole flight path. We aren’t taking many risks with this thing.”

  Jim asked if I ever thought of Rebecca.

  “I do. Not as much now as I did, but I still love her. I was quick to add, though, that I didn’t love her more than Deb, nor did it affect my love for Deb.”

  “I understand. My first wife died of breast cancer. She went downhill for three years. It was awful to lose someone that way. Back then, I couldn’t talk about how hard it was on me, but now I can. She was suffering.”

  “Did you remarry?”

  “Yes, about two years later to a lady that was one of my wife’s best friends. Her husband had died about five years earlier from a heart attack. When my wife was sick, she said, ‘Marry her, and you’ll take care of each other.’”

  Jim paused. “I didn’t want to hear that, and for over a year, I didn’t date. When I started, I didn’t date this friend for several months. No one I dated was intere
sting enough for a second date, though. Finally, I took out my wife’s friend, and that was the end of dating different people. We got married two months later. That always shocks people, but we had known each other forever, and besides, how can a guy get in trouble for doing what his first wife told him to do?”

  He said that she had one black-sheep son, who was wearing them out, but other than that, it was a great marriage.

  When I got to the house, Deb was singing and cleaning. Tilly and Betty had called. They each had some furniture they wanted us to see that they’d loan or give us. They’d be out late this afternoon if it worked for us, and it did.

  Chapter 13

  The Black Box

  Jim couldn’t have been in his office more than a couple of hours when he called again. He said their lab had pulled the data off the black box. Then they ran comparisons with landing locations for the bird and a list of suspicious deaths.

  “There are a lot of correlations. You should have gotten it to me sooner.”

  I agreed.

  “We’ll take most of the next few days to pull info together, but we have at least thirteen deaths over half a dozen states that we think we can link to that bird. Ask everyone out there to please not talk about the box. And if anyone asks about it, say it was sold to an anonymous buyer.”

  “I’ll relay the message. I’m sure you can count on them and I think they have already done pretty much what you suggested.”

  “Why did the seller want information off the black box anyway? What good is it to them?”

  “They had helicopter parts to sell. Speed, climb, radio capability, weather performance, telecom performance, stealth, and all kinds of data were on that box that they could cut and paste to tell a story about the capability of the parts.”

  “They seem to be thorough.”

  “Yep!”

  When we got in Tilly’s car, we told her what Jim had asked. I advised that it would probably be better not to tell Otis over the phone. She said she was sure I was right, and that would be the first thing she talked to Otis about in the morning.

  Deb and I were not hard to please, and we took all the furniture they offered. Different pieces had different rules, so we put tape on the back of each piece and wrote either given or loaned.

  When they saw what we’d done, they were very pleased we were so careful to honor their wishes.

  “This is a business contract, and you are defining the terms of the possession. We just want to stick with our part of the deal,” I said.

  They ordered some young guys to deliver the furniture for us and asked when we wanted it. We were ready to go home as soon as we saw the last piece so Tilly took us home and it wasn’t long until we had our “new” old furniture. Life was good.

  The guys that brought the furniture were telling us about ideas they had been talking about for the truck stop.

  “How many do you think are talking about the new designs and are interested in what happens next?”

  They looked at each other and then slowly answered. “Oh, I would guess maybe twelve to fifteen. There are several of us.”

  “Have you told Otis about this?”

  “No but we intend to. He has been… well you know and we have been busy.”

  “You need to talk to him.”

  They said they would and left.

  Before we went to bed that night, Deb and I walked around the house talking about different furniture arrangements. We might want to buy other pieces, but we agreed we had all we needed. We would add a few pieces if we saw something we really liked, but we were set.

  I told her how amazingly beautiful she was and that really paid off. I will try that more often. How often can you tell the obvious truth and get that kind of reward?

  The next day we went grocery shopping together. At the checkout counter, there were some condoms in our cart. I looked at Deb.

  She hugged my arm real tight and leaned close to my ear. “That rhythm thing isn’t working all that well for me, and I want to try something new if you are OK with it.”

  “I’m your man,” I replied.

  Dave, the driver, was doing a good job. He was a little slower than Deb had been, but we never told him. He was reliable and steady. Telling him a girl was faster than he was might not motivate him.

  “You mean a woman,” Deb said.

  Jim called. “The real Seth had a breakthrough. Leon, the guy Rebecca had been checking on, didn’t have any family, and he had named Rebecca as executor. But the will was not recorded, and there was no copy of it in the house or in a lockbox he kept.

  “Rebecca would have had a copy somewhere, but the FBI didn’t find it in the house because they cleaned the house out. Leon’s was under some carpet in the trunk of his car. The guy who bought the car found the papers and tried to get it to Leon’s family. The FBI’s radio scanners and text search engines picked up his advertisement.

  “Leon had done well and was worth almost a million dollars with house, stock, cash, and all his stuff. When he died, the estate didn’t go where Leon wanted, but the IRS took it all. For that to happen, the will had to be taken out of the way, or they had to get it all cleaned out before the estate went to probate. Rebecca messed up their plans somehow and was making enough noise someone was sure to get in trouble.

  “We’re finding almost none of the suspicious deaths involved a person with family or a recorded will,” Jim said. “And nearly all of the deceased had estates that went to the IRS or an IRS agent instead of where they had willed them to go.”

  This was really weird. If someone was going to steal money from an estate, they wouldn’t want the IRS to get it.

  “We don’t understand either, but right now we are connecting dots and don’t really care about implications. We want to establish comprehensive facts first and then see where they lead us.”

  Jim then told us the black box indicated that the bird was still owned by the IRS, meaning it wasn’t sold or leased to anyone but was again inventory shrinkage.

  “Now that is serious shrinkage,” Jim said. “Someone just flies off with a very expensive bird and no one notices? This is too strange. That is, unless someone in the IRS was using it for unapproved projects. It also tells us that there was a “clean up” element reporting to someone high in authority and connection.

  “Also,” Jim went on, “remember the buyer who didn’t mind bidding higher? We have traced the phone numbers to the IRS in Washington DC. We don’t have the person identified yet because we don’t normally have information on IRS agents. But we know what he sounds like. He is very anxious to keep anyone from knowing the helicopters travels. We are working on selling to him now.”

  “We have a redneck militia lined up that is large and has a few policemen in it and they are willing to help with the sale. They have contacted the buyer. We are waiting for notice when he wants to pick up the box. The selling individual is great. He is an old guy who never finished high school and has never had a computer. He has never sent or received an email. He has an old flip phone and has never sent or received a text message. He wouldn’t know how to get data off a black box if he even knows what electronic data is. The IRS will be able to verify that he isn’t an electronic wizard. He has told them he found this box on the side of the road and he is surprised how curious people are when he gives them the dimensions and the numbers off the box.”

  “He is nobody’s dummy because he owns the local Ford Dealership and is doing quite well, but he believes he can convince them that he didn’t hook that box up to a computer.”

  “Where will he make the delivery? Those guys would rather kill him than pay so he will need to be careful!”

  “We don’t have everything worked out yet but we think we can get them to come to his dealership pretending to be car buyers. Then they can go to an office to make payment on their “car”. When they walk out with the box we should be able to take them without too much resistance. We want them to be out of the office and away from people as
much as possible in case there is a gun fight. We told the dealer we would be off his lot and he said don’t worry about it. All the cars are insured. Just get away from all the shoppers. He said he would give up several cars to get killers or IRS either one off the street.”

  Jim paused. “Later.” He said and was gone.

  We called Otis to see how they were doing. He said Jack had refused to stay after he found he could live without the tubes. He demanded release and was headed out the front door with a cane when they caught him and put him in a wheelchair to get him to the car.

  Will was doing much better. His lung was back in shape pretty much. It wasn’t totally right, and he was still not well, but he would be OK. Otis’s leg was going to need an additional surgery, but he was going to keep his leg. He said he might go home in a wheelchair next week.

  “Tilly will take better care of me than these people once they get over the disappointment of knowing I’m going to live.” He said chuckling.

  I told him the nurses were afraid it would happen.

  “What?” he asked. “That I would live?” He laughed a big one. They said he wouldn’t be walking for a long time, but he could get around in a wheelchair just fine.

  I told him he couldn’t let Tilly lift him, though, and ought to stay there a little longer. He told me they had a lift at home that would put him in the tub and back into the wheelchair. Tilly could manage it just fine. He’d have to have a sponge bath for a few more days anyway because his leg wasn’t healed up enough to be underwater yet.

  We’d been praying for him and told him so. He was glad and said God was the biggest reason he’s getting to keep his leg.

  Otis put out a call for another family meeting at the closed up truck stop. Everyone was there except Will. Jack was the center of attention. Otis said he was limping worse than usual to get attention.

  “Okay, let this family meeting come to order.” Otis yelled. “Will won’t be here today but Barbara is so Will can get the full story of what we decide. I have heard there are opinions about what to do with the truck stop and I called this meeting so we could talk about it. Who has an opinion about what should be done?”