Jaxon nodded. “Army. Major in the M.P.’s. Ten years, but I never saw battle. Got out before Desert Storm and was too young for Vietnam.”
Burt nodded. “Doesn’t mean you’re anything less than you are. It shaped all of us that have been in. One way or another. Good or bad.”
“What was the DFC for?” Jaxon asked.
“Chu Lai, Vietnam. Hill 488. I helped one of the war’s greatest heroes make it off that hell hole alive. His name was Gunnery Sergeant Jimmie Howard. He was Staff Sergeant at the time. He was awarded the Congressional Medal of Honor for that battle. He deserved a medal more than I.”
“What did you fly?” Jaxon asked, guessing at his occupation.
“A-4 Skyhawk. Best damn attack aircraft McDonell Douglas ever built. Tough too. Brought my ugly ass home every time, even when she had holes in her.” He looked dead serious and Jaxon believed every word. He looked at a picture of two A-4’s in formation over an aircraft carrier at sea. He assumed one of them was Burt.
“I didn’t bring you back here to reminisce about the past,” Burt said, getting down to business, “but if you want to come by another time, I’ll tell you the whole story. Deal?”
“Deal,” Jaxon said.
“Alright, let me show you what I found,” Burt said, sitting at his desk and logging on to his computer. “I have a motion sensing surveillance system in the front yard, and as I was reviewing the recordings from Christmas, so I could clean up disc space, I saw this…”
He hit play and they watched as a nighttime shot from a camera high up looked over the front yard toward the street. His mailbox was in plain view and Jaxon recognized the pool across the street. From the right came what Jaxon could only assume was an adult male, about six feet four inches tall, huge, wearing black and moving in a crouch around the cars in the driveway, past the mailbox, and into the neighbor’s yard where he stepped behind a hedge and crouched down out of sight. He turned toward the camera as he hid and they caught a brief glimpse of a bright white face.
“An albino?” Jaxon asked no one.
“A mask,” Sally said. “It looked like a Halloween mask.
“That’s what I thought too,” Burt said. “Now, here is the interesting part. If you look at the time stamp,” he pointed to the upper right of the computer screen where the time was displayed and a few other numbers Jaxon could not decipher, “you’ll see thirty three minutes have elapsed.” He paused the video and pointed to the time. “The system is set only to record when it senses movement and it will continue recording as long as an object is moving in front of the sensor. It stops after five minutes of inactivity.”
Jaxon nodded understanding. He had seen many systems use this feature, especially ones which recorded to computer hard drives. It saved precious space and allowed for much longer monitoring times if it wasn’t running the whole time the system was armed.
Burt hit play again and they watched as the camera caught a young male walking down the sidewalk coming from the same direction as the masked man in the bushes. As he got closer, Jaxon recognized the clothing, even in the greenish glow of the night vision.
“Oh shit,” Jaxon said unaware he had cursed.
“Yes,” Burt said. “Now watch.”
“Is that Paul Bannon?” Sally asked.
Jaxon nodded his head, but didn’t reply. Even though there was no sound with the recordings, he seemed to think he would miss something if he spoke or made a sound. He realized he was holding his breath and he exhaled trying to relieve some of the tension.
Paul casually walked past the mailbox and seemed to be talking or singing to himself. As he approached the boundary of Burt’s yard, the boy suddenly stopped and cocked his head. As they watched, he turned toward the hedge and seemed to be listening to something. He took a step into the yard and then stopped again as if unsure what to do. He stayed that way for a moment and then looked in both directions. He made a move to continue on his way and then jerked back toward the bushes as if surprised. He waited, and then took some steps toward the hedge again. He was bent over at the waist as if trying to hear something very faint. He kept edging closer to the bushes and when he was about a foot away, he was yanked into the hedge by some unseen force and disappeared from view. The recording stopped.
“I called you right away,” Burt said.
“Damn,” Jaxon murmured, his face tense at what he’d just witnessed.
“Is there more?” Sally asked.
“I don’t know,” Burt said. “I didn’t watch any more. I didn’t want to risk doing something stupid like erasing it by mistake. This is the boy they found in the pool, isn’t it?”
Sally nodded her head. “We’ve been at a standstill on the case for months. Not a clue as to who would do this.”
“Until now,” Jaxon said. “What do you need to do to see if it caught anymore?”
“Just hit play,” Burt said. “But it’s approaching the end of the disc space.” He pointed at a number which read 98. “It’s 98 % full now. That’s why I was going through stuff and deleting things. It will record over the oldest stuff first once it reaches max capacity, but sometimes it messes up. I lost some stuff for you guys last year when the kids vandalized my lights.”
“Lights?” Sally asked.
“Yeah. I run a pretty large animated Christmas Light show and I bought the surveillance system because kids were vandalizing some of the display. I put signs up too, warning them about the cameras, but sometimes they still ignore them. Maybe they’re just stupid.” He looked a little embarrassed but Jaxon thought it sounded pretty cool.
“I’ll trust you,” Jaxon said. “We need to see if there’s more.”
Burt nodded and pressed a key on the computer. He pointed at the time stamp and they saw it had advanced twenty minutes. The man emerged from the hedge in a crouch carrying Paul Bannon over his shoulders like a sack of potatoes. He walked straight to the street and then stopped. He turned toward the camera and seemed to look directly at it. His head was tilted up and he stood motionless for about twenty seconds.
“He’s mocking us,” Sally said. “He knows the cameras are there.”
“I’ll be damned…” Burt said.
They watched as the white masked man turned toward the street and crossed it heading for the pool. He stopped at the fence and pushed Paul Bannon up and over the top, letting him crash to the ground on the other side. The man then started climbing the fence, but before he reached the top the recording ended.
“That’s it,” Burt said.
Chapter 18
They waited in the woods for Jason and his friend to return from the pool. John was the lookout and would make some kind of animal noise as a signal. Laughable, Luke knew, but it was their only way of pulling the prank off without Jason and his friend being tipped off. By the time they figured it was some kid making the animal call, it would be too late.
Jimmy, Luke, and Ellie were upstream from the bridge, just behind a tree at a bend in the creek. Sitting in front of Jimmy was an Estes rocket launching system primed and ready for firing. They had taken some of Luke’s dad’s wire fishing line and strung it from the tree they were hiding behind to the base of the foot bridge, right at the midway point. A ‘D’ sized rocket engine was hanging from the line by a piece of soda straw super-glued to the engine’s body. When fired, the rocket engine would shoot toward the bridge, guided by the wire, and impact the large support beam the line was tied to. The rocket engine had a small charge that would ignite at the end of its firing run. This charge was supposed to expel the parachute most rockets carried. It was basically a firecracker that would explode with a loud bang right at the feet of whoever was crossing the bridge at the time.
Sometimes Luke couldn’t believe the stuff Jimmy came up with. He was trying hard not to laugh out loud as he imagined what would happen to the two kids when this loud whooshing noise came straight at them followed by
