PART I COLD CASE #3
I said, ‘A lot of the young men who go to the Hooters off Kirby Drive ask for Millie-Mae’s phone number.’
Dr Lucy asked, ‘Do you think Millie-Mae might have special feelings for you, Sam? Do you think by calling you handsome, she might be showing she has a crush on you?’
‘That would be very unlikely,’ I said. ‘Women have never really taken a liking to me, especially pretty ones. I mean, none of the girls at my high school would go to prom with me and I asked five of them to go.’
‘Oh,’ Dr Lucy said a little sadly.
‘And Millie-Mae is much more beautiful than they were. She’s applied to get into the Hooters Annual Calendar, you know. It’s her life goal to appear in it.’
‘Is that so?’
I paused.
‘You know, I’ve never had a girlfriend.’
‘Oh,’ Dr Lucy said, again a little sadly.
‘Although . . .’
‘Yes?’
‘Lately, I’ve been thinking about getting a girlfriend.’
This made Dr Lucy sit bolt upright. She didn’t do that often.
‘Why do you say that, Sam?’
‘I’ve always been, well, kinda solitary. I work on my own, except for my intern, Heidi, of course. And I live on my own. But, lately, well, I don’t so much feel solitary as lonely.’
Dr Lucy swallowed as she looked at me. I think I saw a tear trickle out of her left eye, but she wiped it away quickly.
‘I think you’d make a great boyfriend to some lucky girl,’ she said.
Then I remembered something.
‘Of course, maybe Millie-Mae calls me handsome and gives me special treatment at Hooters because of the time I helped her out with her stalker.’
That had been a year ago.
One of the players on the University of Houston’s football team—a defensive end named Leroy Hertzenberger who many thought would play in the NFL—had taken a liking to Millie-Mae.
Leroy sent her flowers.
He’d loiter in the Hooters parking lot at closing time.
Then he started following Millie-Mae home late at night after work.
The cops didn’t do anything because Leroy was on the team and the team was doing great.
He was, they said, ‘just a good young buck with excitable hormones’.
Even when he whispered in Millie-Mae’s ear one evening that he’d come by her house in the next few days and ‘pound her in the ass till you beg me to stop’, the cops did nothing.
In fact, they said until he was caught in the act of performing an ‘openly aggressive action’ toward her, there was legally nothing they could do.
This was, unfortunately, technically correct.
A good young buck? Leroy Hertzenberger was six feet eight and 290 pounds and he threatened backup cheerleaders.
Upon learning that I was a detective, Millie-Mae asked me if there was anything I could do.
Well, long story short, it ended a few nights later when Leroy broke into Millie-Mae’s house at 2:30 a.m. carrying a hunting knife, a roll of duct tape, a mouth gag and a tube of lube.
I was there waiting for him.
I’d stayed at her house for the previous two nights, keeping watch in a chair in the corner of her bedroom with my Sig Sauer P226 on my lap.
As I did this, I’d dip my hand into my backpack on the floor beside me to grab a sultana.
Gotta keep your sugars up on stake-outs.
A word about my backpack.
Made by the Maxpedition corporation, it’s grey, medium-sized and, honestly, really quite ordinary.
But it’s not ordinary.
It’s a CCW pack—a ‘carry concealed weapon’ pack—which means it has many compartments including a quick-draw pocket in which I keep my Sig Sauer pistol.
Oh, and it has padded shoulder straps which are very comfortable.
Aside from my Sig, I keep various other tools of my trade in my backpack.
Laptop, spare glasses, the aforementioned sultanas, four prepaid cell phones, two AirTags, spare ammo clip, handcuffs, two small quadcopter aerial drones (cheap ones so I can ditch them if required), Swiss Army knife, hypodermic syringe (you’d be -surprised), a blowtorch (for padlocks and fence-cutting) and a water bottle.
As I said, I like to be prepared.
During the second evening, as we’d waited in her house, Millie-Mae had asked me if I was scared.
‘No.’
‘But he’s out there and he’s gonna come for me. He said he would.’
‘There’s no point being frightened of possibilities,’ I said. ‘Either he comes or he doesn’t. If he comes, then we have an issue. Till then, being frightened is just your imagination running wild. It’s like being scared of the dark and that’s no help to anyone.’
(Don’t get me wrong. I’m not saying I don’t get scared of things. Gosh, no. I have several quite debilitating fears, like, for example, flying in helicopters.
I’m fine with heights and I’m cool on planes, but travelling in a chopper scares the crap out of me. If your engines fail on a plane, at least you can try to glide in. With a chopper, if your engine cuts out and autorotation doesn’t work, you’re done for, and I don’t like the idea of that at all.
Being afraid of the dark is your imagination. Being afraid of gravity, that’s something else entirely.
When I told Dr Lucy about this, she suggested that in addition to trying new things, maybe I should face my fears, and learn to fly a helicopter.
After much deliberation, I decided to do just that, but on a simulator (see above, re: gravity).
I’ve logged sixteen hours of flight time on my desktop simulator since then but, to be honest, it hasn’t lessened my fear of flying in helicopters at all.)
But back to Leroy.
Of course, if he did turn up, I would have to fight him.
I was prepared for that. At least, I hoped I was.
See, when you fight a big guy, you’ve got to end it fast, because if you don’t, no matter what kind of fighter he is, he’ll eventually beat you with brawn alone.
And then you’re screwed.
Losing a fight to a big man isn’t pleasant.
At 2:30 a.m. on the third night, we heard the front door of Millie-Mae’s little cottage crunch open, followed by the clink of a beer bottle and a rough voice cooing, ‘Hey, babycakes. Where are youuuu?’
Heavy footsteps in the hall.
Then the bedroom door was flung inward and there stood Leroy Hertzenberger, filling the doorway, gripping his duct tape, knife, mouth gag and lube.
I stood up, positioning myself between him and the terrified Millie-Mae on her bed, pistol in my hand.
All five foot seven and 160 pounds of me up against all six foot eight and 290 pounds of him.
(At six-eight, Leroy was in the top one percent of males in America when measured by height.
At 290 pounds, he was in the top four percent when measured by weight.
My 160 pounds put me in the 25th percentile.
Americans are very overweight. This, though, is another thing that Dr Lucy has suggested I put on my list of Things I Shouldn’t Talk About With People.)
In the gloom of Millie-Mae’s bedroom, Leroy towered over me.
‘Who the fuck are you?’
‘Sam Speedman,’ I said. ‘I’m here to stop you.’
‘The fuck you are. Maybe after I lay you out cold and fuck her senseless, I’ll put the gag on you and fuck you in the ass, too.’
Hmmm.
Losing here was going to be more unpleasant than usual.
He eyed my gun and took a step backwards.
‘You gonna shoot me, little guy?’ he growled.
‘If I have to.’
The attack came from my left.
There was no warning.
A second football player rushed in from the bathroom.
I had assumed the stomping footfalls had just been Leroy’s. But he’d brought a buddy along.
The second huge man thudded into me, tackling me football-style.
My gun went flying and I fell against the bed.
The second man tumbled off me and rose to one knee.
I sprang up and hit him with a quick thumb-strike to the trachea.
A thumb-strike is many times stronger than a web-strike because it targets a smaller area. And the trachea is weaker than other parts of the throat.
He gagged.
I’d cut off his air.
Then I kicked him in the knee, breaking it.
But then Leroy Hertzenberger attacked.
He scooped me off the floor with one giant hand and slammed me bodily against the wall.
My feet dangled a foot above the floorboards.
Leroy shoved his nose right up to mine. His breath stank of beer.
‘Thought you were pretty smart, huh? Whatcha gonna do now, little guy?’
Blam!
I fired my second Sig pistol—which I kept in a holster in the small of my back—into his left thigh.
(Again, prepared.)
He roared in pain and released me.
I dropped to the floor, landing in a crouch.
‘You fucking shot me!’ he yelled.
Blam!
I shot him again. This time in the right knee.
He crumpled, whimpering.
I hog-tied both him and his buddy with their duct tape and called the cops.
The police came and took them away.
They didn’t bother Millie-Mae again.
Leroy never played in the NFL.
They both ended up getting seven years in Beaumont.
Don’t tell the Hooters corporation—they’ve been battling bankruptcy for a while—but after that night Millie-Mae always gave me free coffee whenever I ate at the Hooters off Kirby Drive, which (if I wasn’t on a stake-out or a surveillance case) was most days at noon sharp.
After that night, the other waitresses were also even nicer to me.
For instance, Darla, who was doing a fashion major at Rice, took me shopping at the mall and got me a whole new wardrobe.
‘Darlin’,’ she’d said. ‘You’re a cute little man. We gotta spruce you up. Get you some nicer clothes.’
I told her I liked my clothes.
My closet was neatly lined with seven polo shirts that I’d bought at Target (one for each day of the week and I always wore them buttoned up to the top); blue Target jeans; and three pairs of Target-brand sneakers.
Darla said, ‘Just come with me, shut your mouth, and buy what I tell you to buy.’
‘Okay.’