Chapter Six

ROBIN HOOD TO THE RESCUE
The next day at their regular lunch meeting, they were sitting outside a hamburger drive-in, under a big white umbrella, when Aaron said, “look at the girl in the black Mercedes.”
“Ok, the angle is bad, I can only see a silhouette, what are you seeing?”
“I glanced over at her, it’s a natural reaction of mine, I take a look at every young woman. Anyway, I glanced at her and she slowly shaped the words “PLEASE HELP ME.” I did a double take and she looked at the guy driving. I looked at him and he was looking at me and flipped me off! I looked back at her and she was looking at the floor and I could see bruises on her neck and cheek.”
Cole looked at the driver and also received the standard attitude greeting, a middle finger salute. The driver then reached over and slapped the girl across the face, hard! Looks like another rabid dog to me. Shall we follow them and see what develops?”
“I’ll call my office and tell them I’ll be late.”
The Mercedes pulled out from the drive-in window and onto the street. They hurried to Cole’s truck and were able to get on the street in time to keep the black Mercedes in sight. They followed it down State Street. The Mercedes turned up a side street and pulled into the driveway of an old, remodeled house with a detached garage. The garage door went up, the Mercedes pulled inside and the door closed. Cole pulled up to the closed garage door and both he and Aaron jumped out.
“Maybe this would be a good time to put our gloves on, just in case” said Cole as he grabbed the tire iron from under his seat. They ran around the garage until they came to the door. There was a covered walkway that led to the house. The door from the garage was closed. They could hear screaming and yelling coming from inside. They heard a loud thump like a head hitting the side of the car and it went quiet.
“Let’s go inside and take care of this jerk!”
“Wait just a minute, the door is probably locked. When he opens the door, he’ll either be carrying the girl or at least dragging her, so he’ll have at most, one hand free, and if he’s carrying her we can grab him and disable him before he can do anything.” whispered Cole. “You grab his arms and I’ll hit him on the head. I’ll try to hit him hard enough to knock him out.”
“Click”, the door opened slowly as the slime bag, pushed the door open with his foot. He was carrying the girl and hanging onto the sack from the drive-in. The girl was unconscious. He saw Cole first and snarled, “What the hell are you doing here?” He tried to drop the girl in time to get his hands clear so he could grab the pistol in his belt, but Aaron grabbed his arms and pinned him against the wall. Cole stepped in and swung the tire iron. It hit slime bag on top of the head with a satisfying thunck and the slime bag was out cold.
“Did I hit him too hard,” asked Cole?
“That’s not possible, if he’s still alive, you didn’t hit him hard enough.” They looked closer and he wasn’t breathing. “Oh shoot, it looks like I killed him.”
“Let’s get out of here”, said Aaron.
“Let’s take her in the house first.” Cole pushed the dead guy off her and picked her up. The keys fell to the floor. Aaron picked up the keys and opened the door.
They went into the house and were shocked. On the kitchen table was an open briefcase full of money. Beside it were sacks of white stuff that they thought were cocaine, and other piles of little rock like things that they assumed was meth or crak. “It appears that this guy was a major drug supplier. Let’s go through the house quickly and see what else is up for grabs. I’ll meet you back here, said Cole.
Cole came into the kitchen carrying another brief case and Aaron had a duffle bag. “Another money bag, this one is full of 10s and 20s. What’s in the duffle bag,” asked Cole.
“It’s full of pistols, ammo, and knives.”
“This is going to look like a drug related robbery. I’m going to put her down beside the telephone, call 911 and whisper HELP ME. Then we’ll get out of here. Before I make the call, can you see anyone outside?”
“Not a soul, coast is clear.”
Cole called 911 and whispered “help me” in his sexiest, female impersonating voice. He put the phone in her hand and then picked up both brief cases while Aaron took the duffle bag and they went out to the truck. They put the contraband behind the front seat of the truck.
“Any traffic or neighbors watching us,” asked Cole as he got to the truck.
“All clear, as far as I can see, of course, who knows how many people are watching out their windows”, said Aaron.
They pulled back onto the street and drove back the way they had come. They reached State Street and drove 2 or 3 blocks before a South Salt Lake City Police cruiser went speeding by with its sirens and warning lights on. “It didn’t take them long to respond to the 911 call”, laughed Aaron.
“I’ll drop you off at the drive-in to get your truck and then let’s meet at the gym tonight, said Cole.
At the gym, in the sauna, Aaron asked “did you get a chance to count the money?”
“Yeah I had to know how much was there. I counted it before I got back to the office. There is $250,000 in that first briefcase in $100’s. In the second briefcase there is $25.000. There are three 9 MM semi-automatic pistols, 8 boxes of ammunition and some knifes.”
“Great Scott”, yelped Aaron. ”What do we do with it.”
“I don’t know; do you have any ideas? I thought that a little money would be a good idea in case some of the victims that we help need some financial help. It seems to me that we need to hide the money so that nobody, and I mean nobody, knows that we have it. Those briefcases tie us to a murder but worse, it ties us to a robbery from some really bad people. I wanted to make it look like a robbery gone bad, but I had no idea that there was that much money in the briefcase. Some bad people are going to be really pissed off losing that much money and then the drugs to the police. I wonder what the street value was of the drugs that were on the table.”
“I have no idea. Maybe the news will give us an idea. I think we should have taken the drugs as well or flushed them down the toilet, then maybe it would have looked like it was a rival drug dealer who had robbed them,” suggested Aaron.
“Right now the briefcases and the duffle bag are locked up tight in my storage unit. I had a big box full of stuff in the truck, so I put the briefcases inside a box and took the box in the storage unit. You never know who is watching through those cameras. It’s not the safest place to put it, but for now, is should be ok. The unit has 24 hour security with cameras and after-hour guard dogs that are turned loose in the complex after closing. I’ve never heard of anyone’s unit being robbed in that complex. I lost my key once and had a really hard time getting them to let me cut the old padlock off and put on a new one. The next time we get a chance, I going to take some more duffle bags to the unit, and cut the briefcases in little pieces with my handy dandy, all purpose; battery powered Sawzz All, and get rid of it. I’ll do it inside the storage unit out of sight of the cameras.”
The news story in the newspaper told about a major drug supplier found dead in South Salt Lake City. “Robbery appears to be the motive although $150,000 (street value) worth of drugs was found by the police in the home where he was found. A 911 call led to the discovery of the robbery and murder. If you have any information, please call your local police department. A reward is offered for any information that leads to the arrest and conviction of the perpetrator(s).

MANNY
Emmanuel Alverez, everybody called him Manny, was having a bad day. Not just a bad day but a horrible day. It started bad when he got a call from Rico. Rico was the trouble shooter; some called him the enforcer, for Harry Trong. Trong controlled the drug organization for Utah. Rico only called Manny when things were going bad. Rico told Manny that he had heard that one of Manny’s distributors had kidnapped a young girl. It was news to Manny and it surprised him. He knew that most of his distributors liked young girls. But it surprised him that any of them would kidnap a girl when all of the free sex was there for the asking. Ricardo liked to get kinky. He had almost killed a girl a few months ago. It had cost a lot of money to keep it quiet. Ricardo had promised to never do it again.
“In our line of work, the last thing that we need is publicity” Manny had told Ricardo. “If you do something stupid like this again, I’ll have to terminate you. Do you understand me?”
“Yeah Manny, no problem, it won’t happen again. You can depend on me.”
“I am depending on you. That’s why you’re still alive! Don’t disappoint me again! Go do your job!”
Rico said, “I hear that your man Ricardo took a student from the Community College. We understand that Ricardo grabbed her and threw her into his car. I knew that you would want to know as soon as possible. Manny, you must take care of this before the word gets back to Samboli. It will make us all look bad, especially you. Your organization has always been an example to the rest of us. If you don’t handle this quickly, you will lose face and it will be a hard road to climb back where you are now.”
“You can trust me to handle it. Consider the matter closed,” said Manny.
Manny sent a couple of his men over to see Ricardo. They were to bring Ricardo, all his money and inventory back to see Manny. “If there’s a girl there, bring her too.”
2 police cruisers were pulling up to Ricardo’s house as Manny’s hired muscle turned up the street. Another police car was parked in the drive way. The passenger in the car pulled out his cell phone, “Manny, 2 police cars just pulled up to Ricardo’s house and there’s another one parked in the driveway.”
“Is there any way for you to go into the house in front of them? We were supposed to pick up $250,000 from him this afternoon. Plus he has almost that much product. I don’t want to take a half million dollar hit.”
“I’m sorry Manny; they just went into the house.”
“I WANT MY MONEY AND THE INVENTORY!” GO IN THERE AND GET IT!
“Manny, an ambulance and one more police car just pulled up. There are too many of them! We can’t just go in there and start shooting! They’ll kill us!”
Manny was so mad that he was shaking, “Stay there and see if you can learn what happened to Ricardo. Don’t let the police know you’re there. When you find out what happened, get back here.” He thought to himself, ‘Business has been so good for so long, I guess a loss now and then should be expected. This is my first loss.’ He took a few deep breaths, then a walk outside the house, and then he felt better. The team that he had sent for Ricardo drove in.
“We did like you told us. The police were all over the place. They brought box after box out of the house. We didn’t see any brief cases or duffle bags. The ambulance people came out with a black plastic bag on a stretcher. They also brought out a girl on another stretcher to a 2nd ambulance. She looked kind of beat up. That’s when we came back.”
“Rico, it seems that the problem we spoke about has escalated,” calmly reported Manny, “it appears that it was a total loss. I would estimate our loss at half a million. I don’t know what happened to the money or drugs. I assume they all were recovered by the police. We won’t have any more problems with Ricardo, he’s dead.”
“Dead, did your people do it?”
“No, if my people had killed him, I would still have the money and the inventory? I don’t know what happened. You told me that he has kidnapped a girl, so I send a couple of my men over to bring him and the girl to me. When my men got there, the police are already there with ambulances. My men watched the police bring out boxes of stuff that we assume was the drugs. They didn’t bring out any briefcases or duffle bags. The money would have been in a briefcase and a duffle bag. They also brought out 2 stretchers, one was a stiff in a body bag, and the other was the girl who wasn’t moving. We believe the stiff was Ricardo.”
“My people are not going to be happy with this loss. What about the rest of this week’s receipts?”
“The balance of this week’s take should be normal. I expect approximately $2.5 million. I’ll notify you as soon as I have the exact numbers.










RIZZO
Detective Rizzo reviewed the case of the killed drug supplier. There was a young woman also found at the scene. This information was not given to the news media. The young woman had been kidnapped; it was assumed that she made the 911 call. However, she denies making the call. According to her sworn statement, she “was beaten and knocked out in the kidnapper’s garage and she woke up in an ambulance. The kidnapper had taken her to a hamburger drive-in and she said that she had the chance to mouth out a “PLEASE HELP ME” to a couple of men who were eating outside the drive-in. They appeared to understand what I said, the kidnaper became angry when he saw them looking at me. He slapped me hard and told me to shut up or he would kill me right there.” She had seen the name of the drive-In restaurant and told the police.
A canvas of the neighbors where the drug supplier was found turned up one person who reported that she had seen a truck pull into the driveway of the victims’ house. She had also noted 2 men getting out of the truck but didn’t notice anything else about them. She didn’t take note of the license number and couldn’t even remember the color. If any other neighbors have seen anything, they were not talking. The neighbors told them that there were lots of traffic coming and going to that house at all hours of the day and night. The bad guy had a nasty dent in the top of his head that appeared to be the cause of death. The medical examiner confirmed that suspicion. The crime scene investigators didn’t come up with any fingerprints other than the kidnapped girl and the victim. The murder weapon was not found. From the wound, the investigators figured it was a pipe or maybe a tire iron.
Underworld informants had told him that there was a lot of money in the house that was supposed to be picked up later that afternoon. Pressure was high to find the person who had stolen “their money.” Some known drug people had disappeared. Rizzo was in favor of drug wars. He felt that drug people shooting each other was a good thing. The only problem he could see was when innocent people sometimes got in the middle when drug people were shooting at each other.
The only clue to the murder that he had was 2 guys at the house getting out of a truck, and the 2 guys eating outside the drive-in restaurant. He assumed they were the same 2 people. How many people eat hamburgers and drive a truck! He talked to the employees who were working at that time in the drive-in restaurant. They all spoke broken English and couldn’t or wouldn’t help him. ‘Help me, hell, they were probably all illegal aliens and were scared to even talk to me! If they remembered anything they were sure not going to tell me!’
The kidnapped girl was returned to her family to the accompaniment of a joyous celebration. To the newspaper reporter she publicly thanked the Salt Lake City Police but most of all she was grateful to the wonderful Good Samaritans who she believes saved her life. She also told reporters that there was a lot of money on the table that her rescuers must have taken. Her parents echoed the thanks and said that perhaps instead of a Good Samaritan, it was in fact more like Robin Hood. The newspaper and TV reporters picked up on the Robin Hood idea, and for a few days everyone was talking about Robin Hood vs. the Kidnapper.
Rizzo thought, ‘I wonder what our good friend Cole was doing at the time all this happened?’ He cut out the newspaper story of the ROBIN HOOD VS THE KIDNAPPER incident, and put it in the unmarked file in the back of his file cabinet. ‘Officially I have no reason to connect Cole with this incident, and as happens quite often lately, the good guys win another battle. I don’t have time to spend trying to solve a murder that on the surface involves drug people killing each other, so CASE UNSOLVED-DEAD FILE. I am a little concerned about the newspaper stories glorifying the ROBIN HOOD angle, and not sure where that will lead.’





MARTIAL ARTS
“I don’t think that we should go to our favorite hamburger restaurant for awhile. That is the only connection that I can think of between us and the death of the rabid dog,” said Cole to Aaron. Cole had called Aaron at work after the news story about Robin Hood being alive and well in Salt Lake City. They agreed to meet at a different drive-in restaurant. After getting their order, they got in Jan’s car.
“Why are you driving Jan’s car,” asked Aaron?
“I’m probably getting paranoid. I just thought that I should leave my truck home for awhile. Someone could have seen it parked in that guy’s driveway. Maybe we should back off for awhile.”
“I guess we could do that. We haven’t been out looking for damsels in distress. We have just helped them when we had the opportunity. Did you listen to the radio today?”
“No, I don’t generally listen to anything except my music while I’m driving to work.”
Aaron continued, “It seems that a policeman was arrested for abusing his wife. He was beating her up. He locked her up and cut the telephone lines so that she couldn’t call for help. I don’t remember how the word got out, but the policeman is on paid leave until the department can sort it out.”
“I don’t know about you, but I think we had better stay away from that one. It just occurred to me that it would probably be a good idea if we took some self defense classes at the gym and maybe get a concealed weapon permit.”
“Are you serious”, Aaron questioned?
“Why not, I don’t know about you but I’ve never done much fighting and in our new part time job of being Robin Hood, it might come in handy if I knew more about how to fight and defend myself. I checked at the gym the other day and there is a beginning level class for some Korean martial arts classes called TAE KWON DO starting next week. I signed us up.”
“You signed me up too,” whined Aaron?
“You don’t have to go if you don’t want too; there’s no cost for the first 5 beginning lessons. Then it’s only $15 per lesson. The lessons are twice per week, on Monday and Thursday nights at 7 PM. First class is tomorrow night. Are you going to go?”
“I guess I could at least try it, especially if it’s free,” said Aaron.
Cole changed the subject, “any thoughts about the money in my storage unit?”
“We’ve only had the drug money for a couple of days, no, I haven’t really thought about it.”
“My family has a corporation. The corporation owns some stock that earns a little money and pays us some dividends each year. It’s just enough to pay the annual corporate registration and buy us dinner. I could put a little of the money each month in the corporation and put it to work. I know some really great investment strategies that could multiply the investment. If it doesn’t work, what have we lost?”
“It scares me to think of doing anything with that money.”
“Look at it this way; if the bad guys find us and the money, we are going to be just as dead whether they recover all of it, or none of it.”
“Well that’s a comforting thought,” snorted Aaron!
“It isn’t like we are going out and buying new cars, houses, or suddenly changing our standard of living. I’m talking about taking maybe $1,000 per month and putting it in the Corporation. That’s an amount that Jan and I could easily do now, especially since she has sold the house. We have some time to reinvest the money that we received in a new house to delay the income taxes, so in the meantime, a little slipped into the corporation shouldn’t raise any flags even if somebody was watching. But you’re probably right; I won’t pull any money out of the storage unit for now, does that make you feel better?”
“Completely, have you destroyed the briefcase yet?”
“I plan on going over there this weekend and making the switch. I have some duffle bags in storage already. So I’ll go in the storage unit, rip the briefcase up and come out with a box full of scraps. I’ll then burn the scraps in our back yard fireplace. When the fire has cooled, I’ll clean out the ashes, including the briefcase hardware, and drop them into a dumpster somewhere.”
“Sounds like a plan. Same time, same place tomorrow?”
The next 4 months were busy and flew by quickly. In that time both Cole and Aaron learned a lot in the TAE KWON DO classes. They graduated from the beginning class and started the next level. It was quickly apparent to both of them that their skill in attacking someone or defending themselves was almost non-existent. They were getting more confident each week. The bruises and sore muscles marked their progress. They each had also applied for a concealed weapon permit. They expected to receive the approval letter soon.
Detective Rizzo received a report of all concealed weapon permit applications. He noted the ones from Cole Taylor and Aaron Johnson. He laughed out loud but not loud enough to be heard outside his office, ‘Now you guys are getting a concealed weapon permit. You were doing pretty well without a concealed weapon! Hey there Cole Taylor and Aaron Johnson, I can hardly wait to see what happens next.’
More time passed with Cole and Aaron learning how to protect themselves with all kinds of weapons, but mostly with their hands and feet. They had not realized just how dangerous a person can be if that person understands what to do and how to do it.
They had received their concealed weapon permit. The bag of pistols and knives that they had liberated from the dead drug dealer contained three 9 MM Rugers. They each took one of the 9 MMs. In addition Aaron bought a 38 Smith & Wesson revolver for the girls to shoot. The girls thought it was great fun to go with them to practice shooting. They went through a lot of ammunition and made a lot of noise. Cole and Aaron were getting better, but still had a long way to go before they would be classified as expert. Just to be able to consistently hit a 4 inch circle was the immediate goal. The surprising thing was that of the 2 couples, Jan was the best shot. That statistic could change but for the time being, Cole and Aaron had to bow to the weaker sex. Jan consistently won 7 out of 10 times.
“It’s embarrassing, said Aaron to Cole. Your wife is a better shot than either of us.”
“I think it’s kind of cool, I’m going to help her get a permit and a smaller pistol. I’ll bet that she will be even better with a smaller caliber. How about Rachel, is she interested in having her own gun?”
“Probably, as long as we are all going shooting on a regular basis, she is going to want one. She will insist, especially if Jan gets one. Actually, I would feel better about her being at home alone if she had a gun handy.”