BREAKING POINT (Anonymous Justice Book 1) Page 3

“They are doing the work of Allah, cleansing the lands of the infidels,” the small guy rages.

  “And you people call me racist? You don’t get to come into our country and change who we are, or change our way of life. You’re delusional. You guys get your panties in a bunch every time somebody makes a crack about your prophet Mohammad, or who is a Christian, or is of the Jewish faith.”

  “You do not talk about the prophet Muhammad!”

  “Why? Can’t he stand up for himself? Fuck you, and fuck your prophet Muhammad,” I say. Then I realize that I should probably shut up, as the whole crowd moves in closer.

  The reporter's eyes gleam, shooting a look to her cameraman, who gives her a nod. I try to take a step back, but bump into somebody who gives me a shove forward. I hit the small guy with my shoulder as I stumble, and the wind leaves me as I’m sucker punched in the gut. I fall to my knees, fighting for breath. Then I feel something hit me in the head. Legs flash out, and soon the large circle of men has narrowed down to a few, who start kicking me.

  I cover my head with one arm, and curl into a ball to protect my vitals. Surely Mike or somebody will rush out to help me, or the cops will break it up. The cops are always near protests, aren’t they? All this is running through my head in a heartbeat, when a sudden savage kick snaps my head forward. Things start going hazy, and I roll onto my back as I feel somebody reaching for my side. I suffer another savage kick, this time in the kidneys, that drives the air from my lungs, but I’m able to work the strap of my pistol free.

  Somebody's nails scrape my hand as they try to wrench the gun from my grip. Half a heartbeat; that’s all it takes. I follow the arm with my aim and squeeze. The report is the loudest thing I’ve ever heard, and I suffer two more kicks before the body above me starts to fall. Since two of the men are still kicking me, I aim at one and pull the trigger, trying to aim high in case the buckshot goes through the man, so it doesn’t hit someone behind him. In another half a heartbeat, the thunder clap goes off again, and then I pull the trigger once more on the last one still kicking me.

  The first man I shot falls right on top of me. I try to push him off me, feeling the warm smear of the coppery smelling blood. The #7 birdshot had pretty much vaporized his face. I try to pull myself backwards and out of the way, but I’m hurt worse than I realized. I can only lay there, holding my gun close. After what feels like an hour, but is only about twenty seconds in reality, the front door of the gun shop bursts open, and Mike storms out holding one of the Tactical Mossberg 12 gauges, loudly racking the slide. Some people run, and some people scream and shout and point fingers at me.

  Even though I can see their lips moving, and can feel their spit hitting me, I can’t hear anything. My body spasms as both the pain and the reality of the situation hit me. I’ve just shot and killed three men at close range and, until the cops get here, I’m in the middle of a very hostile crowd who’d love nothing more than to blow me away. Until Mike pulls the dead man off me by one arm.

  I doubt it’s that that causes my hearing to come back in a flash, probably more like sensory overload, but when Mike speaks, I can hear him. He sounds far away, but at least I can hear him.

  “You ok?” he asks, offering me a hand.

  “Don’t know... was kicked... stomped... I killed them, Mike! I thought I was gonna die, so I killed them,” I say, knowing that I’m probably going into shock.

  “Back off!” Mike shouts at the crowd, bringing his shotgun up.

  They back off. They’d crept closer, the circle tightening around us again, when Mike’s attention had moved off of them. The weight of the pistol increases by the second, until it seems to weigh as much as Atlas’s burden. I realize even holding my head up is getting difficult. My vision blurs, my gun hand drops by my waist, and the whole world blacks out as I lose consciousness in a wave of pain and nausea.

  6

  Dharma Bednarski:

  Home in Hamtramck, MI

  4:00 p.m. Saturday, Dec 19th, 2015

  Jade comes in the house with me and sits with me, hugging me until I quit crying. I pick up the remote, and turn on the TV. The same news lady as last night, Marie Krantz, is covering something happening at Thor's gun shop, also right here in town. We watch and listen, trying to figure out what’s going on. Apparently, there’s some kind of protest going on, and it’s turned violent. “Dang! Can you believe this? There’s something big happening, like, almost every day now,” I say.

  She is saying, “...where a man coming out of the gun shop, with a large pistol on his waist, wearing a sweatshirt that said, “Jihawg Ammo” was attacked by angry pro-Islamic protestors. From the ground, while being kicked and stomped, that man shot three of his attackers, before another man came out of the shop with a long-gun and held attackers at bay until police arrived…”

  “Damn! It looks more like a whole bunch of angry Muslim men kicking the shit out of one white guy to me,” Jade says. “That guy had the right to defend himself! I’m SO tired of this! Our city is being overrun by them.”

  “...people protesting the fact that Thor’s Gun Shop sells a brand of ammunition called “Jihawg Ammo” that the manufacturer says is for use on Islamic terrorists, to put the fear of being sent to hell into jihadists’ hearts, because the bullets are pork covered...”

  We’re both totally engrossed in the TV. It’s kind of like a train-wreck. You know something terrible is going to happen, but you just can’t not look. Now, there is an interview playing that took place earlier in the week, where Marie Krantz asked the same two men about guns sales in general, and about the Jihawg ammunition specifically. The owner of the store, Mike Thor, mentioned that the President keeps talking about assault rifles, and that it should be illegal to sell guns to people that are on the no-fly list. He said, “Just because we gun shop owners have access to that type of information now, doesn't mean we know how to use it. I am NOT a computer guy. I send out for background checks from the authorities. They just tell me yay or nay on whether to sell the gun to the person or not. I wish they'd quit blaming us for their decisions.”

  Jade picks up her Galaxy Note 5 and starts tapping the screen at a furious pace. I’m sitting right next to her, but I might as well be a million miles away. I’m chasing an idea around in my head about what I just heard that man on the TV say about the no-fly list. It seems like such a waste to have all of that intel on people that have done something significant enough to get put on a terrorist watch list, and then just watch them, because of laws, rules and their rights. What about the rights and the lives of the people that they eventually hurt? The good guys’ lives matter too. Way more than those criminals’ do, as far as I’m concerned.

  “Look! Oh wait, do you have Bluetooth on your TV?” Jade asks.

  “Of course,” I answer.

  “Check this out,” she says. She flings the screen from her phone to my big screen TV, so we can both see it. There’s a YouTube video playing, that someone in the crowd at the gun shop parking lot had put up from their phone, just minutes ago. The people are talking in Arabic, shouting in fact, but I can’t understand a word. The video is of the beating they were giving the man on the ground, but from the crowd’s perspective.

  “Jade, are there any more with a timestamp just before that one?” I ask.

  “Yeah, there’s a whole frikkin’ bunch of them, actually.” She clicks one, and it shows the first man from the gun shop walking towards the camera. Then, that Marie Krantz lady enters the picture suddenly, shoving a microphone in his face.

  “Here’s the sweatshirt, and there’s the pistol,” I say pointing. “She practically attacked him herself! Did you see the look he gave her?” We watch to the end of that clip.

  “Well, it’s clear to me that that news lady started that whole circus,” Jade says, disgustedly. She plays another one, that was taken about five feet away from the guy that got beat up, where he’s arguing with some short guy. The crowd just happened to be silent for just a second, as sometimes happens, jus
t in time to hear the guy that got beat up yell, “fuck you, and fuck your prophet Mohammed!”

  “Oh, dude! Bad choice of words,” I say. I turn to Jade and look at her.

  “What?” she asks.

  “Turn that off. I think we need to have a talk,” I tell her. “I’m gonna trust you with my life here and, if at any point during what I’m about to tell you, you stop me, we’ll act like I never said a word. Ok?”

  “Dang, girl! Okay!”

  I fill her in on everything that I had done last night, malware and all, coming right to the idea I’m chasing in my head right now. “Hearing the owner of that gun shop talk has got me thinking about a couple of things. He said that he’s not a computer guy, which means he’d need help setting his in-store system up, right? So who does he hire? In almost every kind of business, there’s someone local who specializes in setting them up. We need to find out who a gun guy would turn to for this kind of job.”

  For now, I sat her down at my desktop, and I reach out to a phone from my list, and go out from there. I hand the keyboard over to her and ask her to find the answer to that question.

  “That’s the coolest thing I’ve seen in a long time Dharma!” she says, with a smile. “I’m on it! This is for sure dead-end, right?”

  “Absolutely,” I tell her. I let her do her thing at the desktop, while I pick up my laptop. As I moved by to sit on the couch, I saw her doing a ‘whois’ command at a Linux prompt, on thorsgunshop.com. The girl can burn up a keyboard!

  “Okay, alright, uh-huh… Hey! Where’d ya go? Get back here!” she says.

  I set mine down and walk back behind her. She’s inside a cPanel GUI for thorsgunshop looking around the server it’s on. I pull up a kitchen chair and sit down. “You’re scary dangerous Jade. You know that, right? How’d you crack their password so fast?”

  “Whoever set this up for them is a gun guy, and uses the same password on every one as default, then they’re supposed to change it to one of their own. I have high friends in low places, and one of them already knew that. The most popular gun sold in America right now is the AR-15, so that’s what he chose as his default password; assaultAR15. First try!” she giggles. “Boys and their guns.”

  From their cPanel interface, just like my cell phone hack, we have access all of their stuff on that server. Owner: Mike Thor it says. “Hello Mike Thor,” I say, you don’t mind if us girls look at your shit do you?” We both giggle at that. The security video cameras are DVR’d locally at the shop, and the DVR is set to dump their older video right onto Mr. Thor’s drive space on this host’s cloud. We do a lot of browsing around through video footage, just looking for anything. All of a sudden, from a camera pointed at the front door from someplace, I see the black SUV. Jade knew that I'd seen something, probably because of the way I jumped. She backs the video up a few frames, and right in front of our eyes is a clear shot of the license plate of the black SUV. It matches the partial that I got from the ATM camera last night. Bingo!

  We mess around and figure out how to get into the live cameras and the hard drive on the DVR in the shop as well, since they’re connected through Mike’s cPanel on the server side. We look at a ton of video in fast forward, before finally, a few days before the shooting, we see a Middle Eastern looking man actually shooting an assault rifle at their indoor range. After his half hour is up, the camera outside the front door shows him getting into a black SUV. The black SUV. The very next day, some Middle Eastern looking female gets out of the same SUV in the parking lot, and goes inside the shop. On the camera inside the shooting range, she takes out an identical looking assault rifle from her hard case, and spends the next half hour shooting it.

  That tells me that we have a male and a female that are probably living together and sharing the SUV. I got you, fuckers, I think to myself. “Now we just need to pick on the Department of Motor Vehicles and find out who owns that license plate.”

  “Piece of cake, give me five minutes,” Jade whispers.

  7

  William David:

  Hamtramck General Hospital

  8:00 p.m. Saturday, Dec 19th, 2015

  I wake up at the hospital because I’m throwing up. The hot greasy ball that had been working in my stomach started expelling itself while I was out, and I rolled to my side as somebody held a bedpan under me. I felt cold and, between bouts of nausea, I realized I had been stripped to my underwear and was laying on a bed.

  “Preliminary exam showed the subject has not been shot,” a voice says.

  “What’s up with the blood?” another voice askes, as one more wave of nausea rips through me.

  “Not his. Must be from the guy who lost his face,” the first voice answers.

  “Good one doc, you’re a real comedian,” I say. “Where’s Mike?” I croak, and open my eyes and sit up.

  I’m in a hospital room, with two men in suits standing next to a doctor who’s dressed in scrubs, with a white lab coat over.

  “Your friend is waiting out in the hallway,” the taller of the men in the suits says.

  He looks young and clean cut. Cops, I realize. Detectives even.

  “Is he ok? Did anyone else get hurt?” I ask.

  “You don’t remember what happened?” the second suit asks.

  “Gentlemen, we’ve only started our examination. It’s good news that Mr. David is awake, but this can wait until I can make sure he is fine. Now, please wait in the hallway.”

  Apparently it was an ongoing argument, but one that the Doctor finally won. The first suit gave him a scowl, but the second pulled on his shoulder and they turn as if marionettes on the same string and walk out.

  “Cops?” I ask him.

  “Yes. You look like shit,” the doctor says, surprising me with his frank language.

  “Got beat to shit,” I admit.

  I normally have really great eyesight but I squint to read the name on his lab coat. The doc notices and chuckles.

  “Doctor Frank Rasmussen at your service. What’s your full name?” he asks, pulling a tablet out.

  “William David.”

  “Age?”

  “Thirty.”

  “I already have your date of birth from your driver's license. Can you tell me who the President is?”

  With a start, I realize he already has my information and is giving me the basic verbal tests for memory and cognitive function. I spit out the President's name and gag as another wave of nausea hits me. A hand holding a bedpan appears, and I roll to my side and throw up.

  “Don’t worry,” a feminine voice says, “the nausea should pass soon.”

  With a start I realize there’s a nurse there. I hadn’t noticed during the shock of waking up mostly naked, and having two cops and a doctor hovering over me.

  “Thanks,” I say after a moment, wiping my mouth with the offered tissue from the doctor.

  “I don’t like the President either, but not as much as you apparently dislike him,” Rasmussen says with a chuckle.

  A sense of humor? Then it hits me. I shot and killed three men. The cops were waiting for me. I’ve no idea how long I was out for, but my life was about to get really, really ugly. I don’t feel bad though, maybe I should, but I’d been scared and one of my attackers was trying to take my gun. The fact their deaths didn’t bother me was the only part of that entire thing that was bugging me.

  “Did anyone else get hurt?” I ask again.

  “No, two of the men died, the third one is in surgery.”

  “Wait, I didn’t kill all of them?” I ask.

  “No, and I’d like to get back to your evaluation, but I’ll tell you this much… The first one was dead before he hit the ground, the second died within moments, and the third man you shot will have a difficult life if he survives. One of your bullets hit his spine,” the doctor says, waiting on my reaction.

  “I only shot him once,” I say.

  “Yes, but you had three bullets in that one shot. He’s very lucky and so are you,” the doctor sa
ys, and then refuses to answer any more questions until I finished getting poked, prodded and interrogated about my medical history.

  The worst of it is when he presses his hand to my ribs. They hurt worse than my head, and he says I need x-rays. The first cop pokes his head in, and the doctor quickly sends him away.

  “Why are the cops so hot to take my statement?” I ask.

  “The protest and the altercation was… uh… Broadcast on live TV. They cut the footage when you pulled the trigger,” he admits after a second.

  “Then they’re just here to close the books on it?”

  “If you’d like me to say you’re too tired to deal with them today, as your doctor, I can tell them to go away.”

  “No, I mean, it was self-defense, and if they saw everything I don’t have anything to worry about,” I insist.

  When he says nothing, the real fear kicks in.

  8

  Dharma Bednarski:

  Home in Hamtramck, MI

  9:00 a.m. Sunday, Dec 20th, 2015

  I get up, see that Jade is still sleeping on the couch, and get some coffee started.

  * * *

  Later, we do a drive-by on the address we got for the plate on the SUV. “Look! There it is, bigger than shit, right in the driveway. Argh… You bastards!” I growl.

  “Just drive normal Dharma, don’t draw attention to us,” Jade whispers.

  “Why are you whispering?”

  “Habit,” she giggles. “People tend to pay attention to what you’re saying if you whisper.”

  Later, reviewing the video we’d collected last night, I tell Jade, “Watch this part when Mike Thor comes out of the gun shop carrying that shotgun, and stops everybody from stomping William David.”

  “I know their last names sweetie, we’ve only seen these videos twenty seven times or so.”