Lillian and I made our way back to the house. She was happy again after having her morning ‘coffee.’ and she was eager to start the walk to compliment her treat with fresh smells on the sidewalk. My house was in a small gated neighborhood and it was maybe a half mile from the coffee shop. It was a beautiful, quiet neighborhood and that’s why I chose to move there. I was able to save up most of my money from deployments and contract work. Add that to the benefits and retirement I got after over 20 years of service and I was able to afford a pretty nice home. Most of the houses in this neighborhood started at $1M, but I was able to get a smaller, newly renovated home at a great deal. Right place, right time.

Snobby rich people may not be the nicest, but they had their perks. Besides a passing wave they pretty much stuck to themselves. My neighbors came over to introduce themselves when I moved in and I learned their names; Jonathan and Patricia Carmichael. But after they shook my hand and welcomed me to the neighborhood, they hadn’t tried to make any more contact with me. Patricia will greet me with a smile and a “good afternoon,” when we see each other, but that’s about it. That’s exactly why I wanted to move here. I don’t need or want neighbors who try to become friends and invite me to all the gatherings at their house.

I sat down in my study and logged onto my computer. From the license plate number on Susan’s Lexus I was able to locate her full name, address and phone number. From there I was able to locate her employment and criminal history. Susan West Livingston was her full name and I was surprised to find that she lived in a condo less than two miles from my address. She was an account executive at a local law firm which explained her professional attire and choice of car. Besides two speeding tickets she had never been in trouble with the law.

She had been divorced after three years of being married. She was currently single and thanks to all of her social media accounts I was able to figure out that she didn’t have a boyfriend either. If she did, she preferred to keep it hidden. But I didn’t think that was likely because she shared more information online than I ever thought someone would. There were pictures of her car, house and place of work throughout her accounts. She had pictures of her friends and family also.

I know most people don’t think about the dangers of what they post on social media, but this information can make it very easy for bad people to find out exactly what they wanted to know, if ever they desired. What concerned me most was her Twitter account. A lot of people use Twitter as a constant update of their days. What they’re doing and when they’re doing it, usually as it’s happening. Susan was no exception. She had pictures of her getting coffee in the morning multiple times and a typed announcement of it at least once a week. There were even a couple of pictures she had taken of Lillian and a recent one updated last week she took from inside of her car. It was me sitting down at my usual table with Lillian. The caption read, “This guy is here every morning when I stop by before work. Basically my BFF even though I don’t know anything about him. Oh and his dog Lillian is the best!”

That pissed me off. I worked hard to keep myself off any online records. I had never even made a Facebook account. Now here I was, on display for her almost 5,000 followers to see me less than a mile from where I live. And they now knew that I was there every morning before she went to work. They could easily cross reference that picture with the other pictures of her at the coffee shop to pinpoint exactly what time that would be.

It became a lot more likely in my head that something was actually going on now. I was able to find out all of this information about her and connect myself into her daily routine within a matter of minutes. Granted, not everyone had access to the government files and search engines I did, but it still wouldn’t be hard to track it all down. There were people in the world who wanted me dead. More than I’d care to imagine. You don’t get into this line of work and not expect to make enemies. If people were waiting on me to surface, now they had their invitation. Susan, unknowingly, became the open door they’ve been searching for.

I didn’t rush to any conclusions, I was trained better than that. But a good portion of my training was always preparing for the absolute worst. And in my line of work, the worst situation tended to be the outcome you were faced with. Susan being taken as a hostage or possibly killed so that some group of assholes could find me was probably the worst situation that could come from this. So that’s what I planned for.

The best reaction is acting before you need to react. If Susan was in trouble, then I needed to act first rather than wait and see what they were planning to do. More than that, it did me no good to wait and have them show up and kill me in my sleep. There’s no telling how much they knew about me if they were able to track me down at the coffee shop. I walked the same path home every day, almost anyone could figure that out.

It became increasingly obvious that the man from earlier was a threat. I knew there seemed to be something off about him. He resembled almost every ex-military contractor I worked with. The hair style that we jokingly called “the combat combover,” the fit build, the darkened skin from spending years in deserts across the world. From his basic appearance down to the way he carried himself, it was painstakingly obvious now. His walk was full of confidence. A confidence you tend to only get after you’ve walked away from a kill or be killed situation.

I was losing my touch; I don’t know how I didn’t piece all these things together before. I guess I just got too comfortable in my happy little suburban world. I wonder what other things I’d missed in the past year.  

I decided I’d take a drive down to Susan’s house and see if anything looked wrong. I got in my daily driver and set off. I had a few vehicles; my favorites were the Power Wagon and my ‘71 Chevelle. These were collectors’ items sure, but they also were more enjoyable for me to work on and drive. I wasn’t a fan of all the technology being put in every vehicle nowadays. I know a lot of them were convenient and could make for a more pleasurable driving experience. But, there was something special about hearing your giant American made engine roar as you pushed on the accelerator. More than that you had no distractions in the vehicle. You could really focus on the car and the way it drives.

My daily driver on the other hand was a Honda Accord. It was two years old and had about every upgrade on the interior as I could get. I didn’t choose all those options, the one I wanted just came that way. I picked the most basic looking one at the dealership. It was silver and had basic alloy wheels and nothing fancy on the outside. I picked it out specifically because it wouldn’t turn heads or be noticed. In situations like this, where I was going to drive around someone’s neighborhood who could possibly have people watching the roads who wanted to kill me, I wanted to be in a car that no one would notice.

I drove the long way there, crossing through smaller neighborhood roads instead of the busier main roadways. Susan’s condo was pretty easy to spot, it sat right in the middle of a long street full of large two-story homes. Hers was the only one-story on the entire street and it was also the only house with two driveways. Her car was pulled into her drive, parked straight and right in front of the garage. The garage door seemed more than large enough to accommodate the vehicle so she either used that for storage or someone wanted me to see that her car was there.

As I was driving by I noticed a few things about the house that made it appear nothing seemed out of the ordinary. The garage door was closed and so was the gate leading into the back yard. She had blinds on all the windows, but the big window that went to her living room had the blinds pulled up so that you could see inside. There was a large sectional couch and a big flat screen television. I couldn’t see any people inside. The lights were on and everything seemed tidy through the window. It didn’t appear that a struggle happened inside.

I was two houses further down the street when I spotted it. There was a black BMW 5 series parked on the side of the roadway, three more houses down from me. There were two males sitting in the front seats of the car. Both wearing sunglasses and button-down shirts with solid print ties. I had been a part of stakeouts before and these guys were doing just that. The front of their car was facing Susan’s house and they were both scanning the street. One of them was average looking. The other, even though only his head and shoulders were visible, was obviously a mountain of a man. And he was staring right at me as I approached their car.

Another reason I chose this vehicle was because it had the darkest tint the dealership offered. It was actually illegal in Texas, but I figured I could talk myself out of the ticket if I ever got pulled over for it. I had tested it myself and I knew that even in broad daylight, you could not see into my vehicle if all the windows were up. I was confident these guys weren’t going to be able to see that it was me driving the vehicle. I also knew that the route I chose put me turning off a road deeper in the neighborhood and this road let out into a main through street. So, to them, I appeared to be someone who lived in the area who was exiting the neighborhood. At least I hoped that’s what it looked like.  

What I didn’t like seeing is the laptop they had set up on the center console. I could see the bigger guy mouthing something and the second one was typing on the keyboard. They were running my plates. They probably had a software similar to what I used, which was pulled directly from a police server. They were looking up who the vehicle was registered to.

Thankfully for me I had a lot of connections. I was able to have my vehicle registered to Damian Grey. Damian showed to be a 54-year-old white male who had an address in South Dallas. I could tell before I passed them that the cover worked. They watched the laptop screen for a second then closed it. After that, they both lost interest and started the scanning the street again.

        If these guys were staking the place out, then I could be certain something was actually going on. Susan seemed pretty successful but I don’t think she was at the status to need private security monitoring her condo yet. I needed to act immediately.