Red: The Adventure Begins Page 4

  Russell spoke up for the first time.

  “I’m not sure I know what shenanigans are, Butch. But I’ll make sure there’s nothing shady in the fine print. Now, I’ll ask the same question Red did. Are you sure you want to do this?”

  “Why wouldn’t I want you guys living next door to me, you mean?”

  “Well… yeah.”

  “I don’t know. Maybe I’m a sucker for punishment. Or maybe I really am getting senile, like your new wife says.

  “Or maybe I can see a time in the not too distant future when I’m old and can’t get around very well. I’ll need you guys close by so you can help me put my teeth back in and change my diapers and stuff like that.”

  Red made a face.

  “Ugh. I could have done without that visual, thank you very much. But you said something about putting up a fence. If you want us here so much, why put up a fence?”

  “Because you’re also getting half the herd. I did a head count a couple of days ago and there are sixty four head. The fence is to keep your cattle on your land so they don’t come over here and eat up all my grass.

  “But I’m keeping Daisy. She and I have developed quite a relationship over the past few years.”

  “Yeah, but that’s only because you go out to the barn and massage her every morning in all the right places.”

  Red turned to Russell and explained.

  “Daisy is his milk cow.”

  “Oh.”

  “But Dad, We don’t make enough money to pay for a house.”

  “Wrong answer, my sweet and wonderful child. As I said, I told Savage what you make, and I included the raise I’m giving you when you come back to work in a couple of days.

  “I had to guess at Russell’s wages, because I’m not sure what McDonald’s is paying these days…”

  Red interrupted.

  “Dad, you know damn well Russell’s a law clerk.”

  Butch chuckled.

  “Oh, yeah. That’s what I meant. Anyway, I guessed at Russell’s pay, and Savage said that both salaries added together was on the low end of minimum for a twenty five hundred square foot ranch house. But he said he’d make it happen.

  “Of course, he may be hoping you can’t make the payments on it and he can foreclose on you, and maybe that’s why he’s being so agreeable. But if that’s what he’s banking on, it’ll never happen. I won’t let it happen. I’ve got enough set aside to keep you afloat if you have to miss an occasional payment. And after I have both a nurse and a lawyer in the family, the two of you will be making plenty of money to make the payments.”

  He looked at both of them.

  “No more questions?”

  Both shook their heads.

  “Good. Then it’s settled. This Saturday we’ll go into Austin and speak to a couple of builders and look at some floorplans.”

  Russell looked at Red and saw something he’d never seen before: a single tear rolling down her cheek.

  Even when they said their wedding vows, when nearly every other woman in the chapel was crying at Butch’s reluctance to give up his little girl, Russell had lifted her veil to find her eyes dry.

  It was part of Red’s persona, which she’d cultivated for many years. Since she was a young girl, really.

  “You can be tough. But remember you’re a lady at heart, and don’t ever let your toughness destroy your tender side.”

  It was one of the last things her mother ever told her.

  And Red herself had told Russell on their honeymoon, “You’re my husband now. You have a right to see two things that I’ve withheld from every other man. You now have the right to see me naked. And you now have the right to see me cry. Cherish them both. Because they are gifts that I will share with you and you alone.”

  But this one time, Red would shed a tear in her father’s presence.

  “Thank you, Daddy. I love you so very much.”

  Chapter 11

  Butch and Red were right about John Savage. He was a snake in the grass, and couldn’t have cared less about Red and Russell’s financial well-being.

  He was much too busy watching out for his own self-interests.

  As a young man, Savage had told his parents he expected to be a millionaire by the age of thirty.

  And a billionaire by the age of sixty.

  His father had scoffed. For young John was a mediocre student, an unmotivated worker, and somewhat less of a model citizen. He stole from his neighbors, skipped school whenever it fancied him, and lied with the best of them.

  John’s father secretly told his mother that John was more likely to end up in prison than in college, and he was right.

  John’s ill-fated efforts to counterfeit money a few months before his high school graduation caught the eye of the Secret Service.

  He was the first member of his graduating class to do time in a federal prison.

  They say that the prison system is a tool to help men learn to be better crooks. And to be sure, the two years Savage was locked up with other white collar criminals helped him to hone his criminal skills.

  By the time he got out at age twenty, he’d revised the plan for his future.

  Now he expected to make his first million by age twenty five, instead of thirty.

  And to get there, he set in motion a whole slew of shady activities.

  Savage made enough money selling worthless penny stocks to purchase his own bank in his tiny hometown of Blanco. Then he made a habit of loaning money to people he knew would be hard pressed to make their payments.

  And demanding unreasonable collateral in order to secure the loans.

  Over the years the tactic had served him well. He was now the wealthiest man in Blanco by far, and owned twelve percent of the land in the county.

  One section of land he’d likely never own, though, were the six thousand acres immediately west of Butch Poston’s ranch. For it was owned by the federal government, purchased decades before and sitting idle since.

  Every effort Savage had made to purchase the government land had been rebuffed, and word was the Department of Defense would someday build a huge Army base on the site.

  But those rumors had been flying for at least fifteen years and the government hadn’t done anything but send in the National Geological Survey to do a study.

  The team refueled their vehicles at the 7-Eleven in Blanco, and one of them got friendly with the attractive clerk.

  Friendly and a bit talkative.

  The attractive clerk happened to be John Savage’s girlfriend.

  That was how Savage learned that the team was surveying the government land.

  But not for any planned military base.

  They were surveying the land to determine its mineral and oil reserves.

  The prospect that there might be something valuable beneath the ground of the government’s land got Savage’s attention.

  It took a while, and several thousand dollars in bribes, but he eventually got the information he was looking for.

  The United States government was sitting on land that held over sixty million barrels of crude oil, just waiting for someone to drill wells to extract it.

  And according to the source who spoke off the record to Savage, the oil pool fourteen hundred feet underground encompassed not only a sizeable portion of the government tract.

  It also extended several hundred feet under Butch Poston’s land.

  It was a fact that Savage had no plans to share with Butch.

  Savage had other plans, though.

  He planned an all-out covert campaign to obtain Butch Poston’s land, regardless of the cost.

  And once he owned the land, he’d drill oil wells on it.

  Oil wells that would not only suck every barrel of oil from beneath Butch’s land.

  But which would also siphon off every drop under the government land as well.

  Chapter 12

  Savage was very good at being sneaky. He knew he was despised by most of the townspeople, and that in
cluded both Butch and Red Poston. Well, Red Benedict, now that she was married to Russell Benedict.

  And he knew that both of them would have their attorneys go over the contract with a fine toothed comb, to make sure Savage didn’t slip anything into it to make it easier to seize the land later on.

  So the contract was on the up and up.

  It contained no misleading language or fine print.

  But it did contain terms that were very favorable to the new Mr. and Mrs. Russell Benedict.

  Savage had to offer them an interest rate better than prime, to prevent them from going somewhere else.

  Because if they had gone somewhere else, it would have ruined Savage’s brilliant scheme.

  What Red, Russell, and Butch didn’t know… had no way of knowing, really, was that the paperwork filed by Savage’s bank at the county clerk’s office wasn’t the same paperwork they signed at the closing.

  No, not at all.

  The paperwork filed in the county clerk’s office was forged. Made up in Savage’s office the week after the closing. And it cost Savage a pretty penny to have one of the best forgers in the country affix Red’s and Russell’s signatures to the bottom of it.

  Oh, the documents were identical except for a couple of paragraphs.

  Those pertaining to the bank’s option of demanding collateral to secure the loan.

  In the copy Red and Russell signed, the First Bank of Blanco opted not to demand any collateral.

  “After all,” Savage had told them when sealing the deal, “If you can’t trust your friends and neighbors, who can you trust?”

  Savage’s statement at the time made the hairs on the back of Russell’s neck stand up.

  Or maybe it was the Cheshire cat smile on Savage’s face.

  But Russell had signed, and so had Red, knowing that their attorneys had reviewed all the paperwork and approved it.

  When Savage took the forged copy to the county clerk’s office, it was accompanied by a discrete white envelope containing twenty one hundred dollar bills.

  Savage was careful to go during the lunch hour. When he knew that the only clerk who wouldn’t have gone to lunch would be one he knew personally.

  One he’d already talked to several days before.

  Who was behind on his own mortgage payments and hurting for cash.

  Who was also in a sad position which made him very vulnerable to blackmail, in case Savage had to go to Plan B.

  Because Savage had done his homework. Savage knew that this particular clerk was a deacon in the Blanco Baptist Church, and a pillar of the community. Happily married, three kids, and a member of the city council.

  He was also very sloppy when he ventured into Austin occasionally to seek out and sleep with male prostitutes.

  Sloppy in that he let himself be followed and photographed.

  But Savage didn’t have to use that card to get his fake documents filed.

  The bribe had done the trick. He’d save the photographs for another time, when he needed something else done.

  Bribery and blackmail, to Savage, were merely tools of the trade. He never felt remorse about using either.

  And really, why should he? They were tools that had helped make him one of the richest and most powerful men in the county.

  The clerk was something else besides a scared little man with a lot of secrets.

  He was also very curious.

  So on the day Savage slipped into the county clerk’s office at ten past noon and handed over the envelope and stack of documents, the clerk slipped everything quickly beneath the counter.

  And after Savage left, he checked the clock to make sure he had time before his co-workers returned.

  And he pulled out the documents and started scanning through the legalese.

  He’d seen many such documents, of course, in the seventeen years he’d worked in the office.

  So it wasn’t hard to find the odd stipulation which Savage had inserted into the documents.

  Under the section “collateral,” it stipulated that in exchange for being given an extremely low interest rate on their loan, Red and Russell agreed to a very unusual clause. If they ever defaulted on their loan, the house they were building would belong to the First Bank of Blanco.

  And the land it was sitting on would as well.

  John Savage wasn’t stupid.

  He knew very well that in the event he foreclosed on the Benedicts’ property, all hell would break loose.

  He knew that the Benedicts would challenge the forfeiture in court.

  He knew they would produce their own copy of the loan paperwork.

  The real version.

  He knew they would raise up the real paperwork and cry foul.

  And tell the judge that the filed version was bogus.

  So Savage would take steps to prevent that from happening.

  John Savage met a lot of people during his two years in the federal penitentiary many years before.

  Most he lost contact with. But he still knew how to get ahold of a couple of them.

  Savage knew that the criminal network was not unlike social media. It was wide ranging. And if a man like him was looking for someone with a particular… talent, one of his friends was bound to know someone.

  Someone who could, for the right price, solve Savage’s other problem for him.

  Chapter 13

  Just before she got married Red had a change of heart and decided to further her education after all. She wished she had paid more attention in high school.

  All through high school she shied away from things like homework and studying. To her, a “C” grade was just as good as an “A.”

  “They’ll both get you exactly the same diploma,” she’d explain to her frustrated teachers and counselors. “Why pay for a whole hog when you just want a pound of bacon?”

  When she graduated and met Russell, her outlook on life changed somewhat. Russell had his whole career planned out. First law school, then a junior partnership in his uncle’s firm to gain some experience, then later on his own practice.

  And a comfortable retirement.

  It made Red look in the mirror and assess her own life’s ambitions.

  And she summed them up in just a few words: “Red, you’re a terrible slouch.”

  So she decided she’d go back to school after all.

  And not only that, but she chose a field that required a knowledge of a lot of the stuff she’d worked so hard to avoid in high school.

  One of her friends asked her why she chose nursing as a vocation.

  “I would have pictured you forming your own outlaw gang, riding into small towns on horseback and robbing them, like the Jesse James gang.”

  Red paused, as though thinking about the possibility.

  “Nope. For one, I may be many things, but I’m not a thief. And number two, I’ve always been fascinated by the human body and I think I’d like to learn more about how it works and stuff.”

  That, and she had a natural tendency to tinker with things. She could rebuild a carburetor and tune up a car, break down, clean and reassemble an AR-15 rifle with her eyes closed, and won the local fishing tournament for three years running.

  She needed a new challenge.

  But Red was way too impatient, and a bit too flighty, to spend many years becoming a registered nurse.

  So she decided to specialize.

  She found a junior college in Austin that offered an eighteen month course in surgical nursing. More commonly called “scrub nurses,” they were the angels of mercy who helped surgeons save patients’ lives in the operating room.

  “So what will you be doing, exactly?” asked another friend.

  “I’ll be the one handing the surgeon the scalpel, wiping up the blood, and carrying out the amputated limbs.”

  “Will you be happy doing that? Playing a support role, instead of diving in there and doing the surgery yourself?”

  “I think so. And in the process I’ll learn other thing
s, like first aid and wound care and how to care for the sick and injured.”

  And, to be sure, she dove into her classes with gusto.

  Even when she struggled with algebra and anatomy, and having to memorize every bone and muscle in the human body, she accepted the blame.

  “I should have worked harder in high school,” she told Russell. “Back then I figured I would go through my entire life without anyone asking me to solve an algebraic equation. Now I wish I’d have paid closer attention.”

  It was typical Red. She didn’t make a lot of mistakes. At least when it came to important things like her future.

  But when she did, she admitted it, accepted responsibility, and moved on.

  And she learned from those mistakes.

  That was why, when it came time for Red to walk across that stage, she held her head high. It took a lot of hard work for her to graduate at the head of her class.

  In the audience, Butch was blubbering again.

  And right beside him, Russell beamed.

  Chapter 14

  Red had a secret she was keeping. And it was driving her nuts.

  It wasn’t that she wanted to be deceitful to Russell. They’d been very good about being honest and open about everything to this point.

  No, it wasn’t that.

  She just had to find a good way to tell him.

  For she knew that it would mess up all the plans they’d so carefully cultivated.

  For many years, Red had dealt with stress by seeking solitude. It was just her way of coping and thinking things through.

  When she was a young girl and dealing with a sick mother who never left the bed, and who had to be rolled back and forth several times a day to keep from getting bed sores, her escape was an old apple tree in the back yard.

  She spent countless hours under that tree, softly sobbing to herself, and praying for her mom.

  Later, when she was a teenager, she took to sitting alone in the loft of the huge barn. She’d break apart a couple of bales of hay, and spread the flakes around to make a sleeping mat. Many nights Butch would stick his head in the barn door and ask if she was okay.