I donned my disguise, minus the Cobain wig, and grabbed a piece of rope out of the garage, which I placed through my belt loops to act as a makeshift belt. I’d lost a bit of weight since I had initially purchased the jeans, so they were a bit loose in the waist. This turned out to be perfect, though; since many of the street people I’d seen around Dallas seemed to have similarly ill-fitting clothes and their pants ended up sagging down their asses as if they were prison yard homebos. I also grabbed some crappy, scratched up sunglasses that I found in a drawer in the kitchen. I thought this stuff would be an adequate disguise for my initial recon mission, so I jumped in the car and headed to the city.
As I drove on the I-30 bridge crossing Lake Ray Hubbard, which separated Rockwall from the Dallas metroplex, I felt a bit guilty about cancelling my schedule for the day. I hated to inconvenience my patients and I knew calling in sick at the last minute would be a huge pain in the ass to my office staff. I also knew, however, it was time to get started on figuring out the details of what needed to be done. After my early morning experience at the hospital, I felt an urgency to protect my daughter. When I had arrived home from the hospital, Mandy had been in the kitchen making lunches for Emma and Corey to take to school. When I’d explained my intentions to skip work and spend the day working on my plan, she had initially argued with me. She asked what the urgency was and suggested that there was no reason to take the day off when I could just as easily spend the coming Saturday doing my recon. However, after I told her about my patient’s injuries at the hand of her violent baby-daddy and I explained how shaken up it had made me, she understood and let the issue go.
“Just figure it out and get rid of that motherfucker. And remember, I’m not going to wait for you if you go to prison. I’m still a young woman and I’ll find myself another sugar daddy as your sorry ass rots in jail, so you and Hank better come up with something brilliant,” she said with a smile.
Chapter 35
I needed to find a place to park somewhere near, but not too close, to Buffalo Wild Wings. I didn’t want my car on any surveillance videos. I pulled onto a side street three blocks down Lemmon where curb parking was allowed and there were no businesses with obvious cameras facing the street. I pulled my Kurt Cobain wig over my bald head and checked my look in the rearview mirror as I made the appropriate adjustments. Next came the dark sunglasses. I was wearing a hoodie style sweat jacket, so I pulled the hood up and cinched it up around my face. I made sure that I had some blonde wig hairs pulled through the open front of my hood on the sides and across my eyes. After exiting the car, I examined my reflection as I pushed the lock button on the driver’s side door. I barely recognized myself.
I added one final detail to my disguise by slipping a cigarette out of a pack of Camel Menthols I had picked up at a gas station on my way into Dallas. I don’t habitually smoke, but often have a cigarette, or two, if I’m out drinking with friends. I lit it up and took a drag. As I exhaled a plume of tobacco smoke, I felt comfortable no one was going to see me and think to themselves, did I just see Doctor Bishop dressed like a bum, smoking a cigarette, and wandering aimlessly down the street?
Over the course of the next two hours, I scouted the entire area. At several points, as I wandered through the parking garage, people noticed me and deliberately avoided crossing my path. Apparently, my ‘homeless loser’ outfit was convincing enough to give people the impression that I might become a source of potential danger or nuisance to them. As I wandered, I snapped photos of all of the security cameras that I passed as well as the area within the parking garage where Hank and I would lie in wait for Brandon. I wanted Hank to be able to visualize the scene as we conceptualized and drilled the details of our game plan. When I arrived back at my car, I made sure no one witnessed me climbing into the driver’s seat. It would definitely have seemed peculiar, and memorable, that a bum was jumping into a Lexus SUV and driving off.
Once in the vehicle, I removed the dark glasses and dirty blonde wig. I pulled the oversized hoodie over my head and untied the rope that I’d been using as a makeshift belt. I replaced the rope and my dirty high-top sneakers with a black leather belt and a pair of dock siders I’d brought along. Having ditched the derelict drifter outfit, I once again looked like someone who would be driving a high-end automobile. I drove to a Starbucks in the uptown area of Dallas to reflect on my findings and organize my thoughts in my head while sipping on a Frappuccino.
*****
I’d been giving some thought to the aspect of timing. Mandy and I had been planning to go to New Orleans the coming week for a Thursday through Sunday four-day weekend. We’d had a total blast on our only previous trip there, which had been limited to two days because we had young children at home, and we hadn’t yet become comfortable leaving them with caregivers for longer than that. This time, we were excited that we’d have ample opportunity to dine on N’awlins-style Franco American cuisine, drink to excess on Bourbon Street, and chill out in the French Quarter.
I recalled Hank had buzzed down to The Big Easy on multiple occasions in his twin- engine Cessna 340A to engage in some gambling and debauchery at one of the Hotel Casinos. Flying a date in your private plane for an overnight getaway was, according to him, a great way to get her to, I think he said, ‘drop her panties.’ He may have even mentioned a midflight blowjob, which I can neither confirm nor refute. However, I assured him he would get no such treatment from me when I was in the number two seat. He had said that the flight took him about an hour and forty-five minutes. “Definitely enough time to get a nut off,” he’d dutifully reported.
“What’s up, studly?” I asked, when Hank answered his phone. I was still sitting in the coffee house and enjoying my calorie laden coffee creation. “You off today, or are you just standing around the control desk flexing your guns and making the nurses cream their scrubs?” It was around noon on a weekday and I knew that Hank would not be answering his cell phone if he was in the middle of a case.
“Already made the girls cream for the day,” he said. “I’m in my office working on paperwork. You know, being ‘large and in charge’ is cool and everything, but you do have to put up with a lot more bullshit paper pushing.”
“Pencil pushing,” I interjected.
“Huh?” he said.
“The term is pencil pushing, dipshit. You don’t push the paper, you push the pencil. Jesus, dude, talking to you is like talking to a moron!” I goaded him.
“Fuck you, asshole! You know what I meant,” he shot back.
“Obviously,” I replied. “Anyway, I’m just fuckin’ with ya’. Sorry you’re stuck in your dreary, old office with your leather couch and your sixty-five-inch flat screen. Quick tip, by the way —turn off the porn and your paperwork will get done a lot faster. Not to mention the money you’ll save on paper towels.”
“Good thinking. I knew I liked you for some reason, even if you are an annoying little fucker.”
“Well, I think we can put the salutation phase of our conversation behind us now. Let me get down to business. You got a minute to talk strategy?”
“Absolutely. We gonna get this done, or what?” he asked. “I’ve been wondering when I was gonna hear from you. Every time I think about that fucker, I—well, suffice it to say it will be poetic justice for him to pass at such an early age.”
“Glad to hear you’re still motivated to help out. Now, let me go over some things I think I’ve figured out. I’m pretty sure you’ll like what I’ve got,” I said.
I filled Hank in on my thoughts about how the parking garage under the gym where Brandon worked out three days a week in the early morning hours would be the perfect setting for our staged robbery-turned-homicide. I explained that the robbery angle would be seen as the obvious motive for his murder. We knew he had something on him worth stealing, if one was inclined to steal expensive jewelry. Because the area of town we were talking about was a bit seedy, it was also very believable there would be individuals in the area—perhaps stree
t people—who may be prone to committing violent crimes.
I went on to explain that I thought we could take care of the timing and our alibi if we were to put our plan into action the following week, when Mandy and I had already been scheduled to be traveling. As I’d hoped, Hank told me he had some flexibility in his schedule and said he could easily be out Thursday and Friday the following week as well. As I went on to explain, the specifics of my plan to him, he was happy to agree to the use of his plane and his services as a pilot in order for us to be able to create the illusion of being on vacation in New Orleans while we were actually committing a violent crime in Dallas.
Hank told me that one question remained in his mind. How were we going to actually kill Brandon? Following our initial meeting at the Black Boar, we had both thought a lot about this issue. Obviously, we needed to draw as little attention to ourselves as possible prior to, during, and immediately after our attack. With this in mind, we needed to make sure we were alone in the parking garage with him. We would not be able to count on a very long period of time before another member of the boxing gym would exit the elevator or otherwise enter the garage. In order to avoid detection and get away clean, it would be essential that we immobilize him relatively silently and then, after confirming that the coast was still clear, perform an effective coup de grace. The trickiest part, in my mind, was to perform our mission in such a way that the resulting crime scene would be consistent with a robbery turned murder rather than a premeditated assassination. If we were to do a drive by shooting, for instance, the police would be inclined to investigate Brandon’s life extensively in order to determine who had a motive for planning his execution. In the end, it turned out that we had both come up with very similar ideas of how to bring about Brandon’s death quickly, relatively silently, and in such a way that the crime would likely be attributed to random ‘street’ violence.
Over the next week, I spoke with Hank frequently. I also returned to the parking garage on both Wednesday and Friday mornings, wearing my ‘hood’ disguise and taking precautions similar to my first casing mission. I couldn’t cover my eyes with the dark glasses I initially wore, because it was dark on my second and third scouting sorties. Instead, I had purchased some brown colored contacts to hide my distinctively blue irises. I further disguised my face by wearing a Sonny Bono style false mustache that I had worn several years previously to a costume party during which Mandy and I, dressed as Sonny and Cher, of course, performed a karaoke version of I’ve Got You Babe. Each time, I left home around 5:30am so I could check out the activity level in and around the parking garage at the time of morning Brandon would be finishing up his workout and leaving the gym.
We were both aware of the possibility, unlikely that it may be, that our cell phone communications could be intercepted either inadvertently or on purpose. After all, it was no secret the NSA was constantly scanning communications for evidence of terrorist chatter. Who knew who else could be listening at times and what they would do with any information regarding possible criminal activities being discussed over the telephone. We therefore took all of the appropriate precautions to not use language that suggested a crime was being planned. Better to be safe than sorry.
During our conversations, we laid out the exact sequence of events as we anticipated them to unfold. As we would force them to unfold. We were in agreement that we would only continue on and actually carry out the crime if things were going as planned. The best way to get ourselves busted would be to deviate from the course of action that we had laid out and be forced to make decisions on the fly without the benefit of circumspect analysis. Fortunately, the week leading up to our proverbial D-day went smoothly at work for both of us. We had plenty of time to prepare our disguises and other supplies and to plan the mission down to the most minute details. It was hard to focus on work as I anticipated what would be one of the most important endeavors of my life. I never swayed from my firm belief that the heinous act that Hank and I would perform was necessary and, ultimately, just. However, during the week leading up to the event, I felt an increasing sorrow that anyone, including Brandon, would waste the opportunity he’d been given to experience a loving relationship with a wonderful soul mate. Rather than spending his life giving and receiving adoration to and from his bride, he had chosen to torture her physically and emotionally. He had to know, somewhere within his mind, that his violent behavior would come to light and I couldn’t imagine how he had allowed himself to believe that he would get away with terrorizing my innocent daughter. “Well,” I concluded time and time again in my own mind, “he’ll soon find out there are consequences for his actions. Consequences that are terrible and eternal.”
Section Eight:
The Mission
Chapter 36
After rounds on Thursday morning, I talked to my partner, Johnnie, who had agreed to see my remaining hospitalized patients the following morning and get them discharged home. He knew I’d be out until the following Monday and had agreed to take care of any of my laboring patients who might show up while I was out. It was time to switch modes in my head. I mentally flipped the switch from ‘Dr. Mark Bishop, OB/GYN’ to the off position and toggled on the ‘father, husband, protector’ mode. It was time to implement the plan that would eliminate the shroud of danger named Brandon that haunted my daughter Ryan and threatened her safety and happiness. I felt a wave of nausea hit me as an image of my impending violent activities entered my consciousness.
It was not easy to change my mindset from that of a healer and comforter to that of a punisher and killer. As the time approached when Hank and I would execute our plan, I tried not to dwell on the violence of the act we would commit, but rather on the justice and the necessity of protecting my sweet daughter from her abuser. With the latter thought in mind, I steeled myself for the next twenty-four hours, during which time the problem of Brandon would cease to exist, and, if all went as planned, I would have rejoined Mandy on our weekend getaway to North America’s southern capital of drunkenness and depravity—New Orleans. I had already planned my first three toasts. With Mandy at my side, the three of us would drink first to the elimination of an evil motherfucker from this earth; second, to a bright and safe future for my daughter; and third, to commitment to our oath and the fact that we possessed the strength and fortitude to honor it.
*****
The sun was directly overhead as Mandy and I approached New Orleans in our Lexus. The sky was devoid of clouds and the glare coming off the approaching vehicles was nearly blinding at times. It was one of those drives during which, without the protection offered by my Ray Bans, I feared that my retinas would have been literally scorched by even the tiny amount of solar radiation entering the apertures of my eyeballs. Otherwise, however, the ride had been pleasant. Mandy had played DJ as I drove and a constant stream of rock and roll had poured out of the vehicle’s premium sound system, which was blue toothed to her iPhone.
We had deliberately avoided discussing the events which would unfold over the next day. I had assured her prior to leaving home that Hank and I had thoroughly planned the operation and that we were both willing to abort if there were significant deviations from the carefully planned road map we had established. Instead of rehashing the details of our plan or the reason that Hank and I were exposing ourselves to both danger and the potential of being charged for a capital offense, we let our favorite music pump through our veins and simply enjoyed being in each other’s presence. I knew Mandy was at least as nervous as I was, but I also knew she appreciated what I was willing to do to protect our family.
“What time are our dinner reservations?” I asked, as I rotated the volume knob counterclockwise, so that my voice could be heard over the vocals of Sammy Hagar.
“I told you earlier,” she scolded, “I made reservations at Morton’s Steakhouse for 8pm, so we’ll need to call our Uber at around 7:30pm. There’s no way I’m walking ten blocks in high heels—especially in this heat. I figured that if we get t
here early, we can have a martini at the bar. Is Hank meeting us at the hotel, or is he just going to come directly to the restaurant?”
“I told him to meet us at Morton’s. He should be landing around six thirty, so he’ll have just enough time to stow the plane, pick up his rental car, and drive to the public parking lot near the restaurant.”
“Well, we’ll have plenty of time to enjoy a good meal, so let’s just chill this evening and enjoy some delicious food,” she said.
“Absolutely,” I agreed. “Let’s plan to head back to the hotel bar around ten. I need to be seen there for a couple of hours and Hank and I need to stumble out of the place at around twelve thirty. I’ll be playing the part of ‘mister friendly drunk guy’ while we’re there, so that no one has any trouble remembering me or the condition I left in. After that, we are taking off—literally. Next time you see me after that, your daughter will be a widow.”
“I don’t want to talk about that. I just want it all over with,” she said.
“I agree and it will be soon,” was all that I replied. Then I turned the volume back up and started harmonizing with Dave Grohl from the Foo Fighters.
Fatal Flaws Page 21