Porch Pirate

By Lillian Baker O'Malley

Jayson Wilde was a hockey superstar and was in the middle of his successful hockey career. Everything changed when his father, who was a policeman, was murdered in the car park outside the hockey arena where Jayson Wilde had just led his team to victory. Jayson Wilde is determined to honor his father's memory by joining the R.O.P.E. Squad, a division of the police force that apprehends fugitive parolees. R.O.P.E. stands for Repeat Offenders Parole Enforcement. Changing careers is not easy for a wealthy superstar. Friendships and loyalties and lifestyle are all in jeopardy as Jayson begins his training as a rookie on The R.O.P.E. Squad and now the people in his life realize that he is not the same person anymore. The changes in Jayson's personal life and his acceptance as a police officer are unsettling to him as friendships fall away and the new career is not turning out as he imagined it would. His Field Training Officer is Detective Tasha Avery, a veteran officer of the R.O.P.E. Squad who guides Jayson through the first weeks of his training. They pursue Billy Edwards, a fugitive parolee who seems to be able to slip away each time they come close to capturing him. Gang wars and rivalries complicate the search for Billy Edwards. The new people in his life are not always a welcome addition to it.   

This is the sixth book in the R.O.P.E. Squad series. 

• Language: English
• Publisher: Lillian Baker O'Malley
• Release date: Apr 8, 2021
• ISBN: 9781393111559

Book preview

Porch Pirate

An Imaginary Friend’s Tale

© December 2020 by Lillian Baker O’Malley

All Rights Reserved 

Prologue

Jayson Wilde, Star hockey player;

Jayson Wilde sat in the church pew and tried to concentrate on what the pastor was saying. Eventually, he stopped trying to follow the service. He just sat and stared at his father’s coffin resting in front of the altar. At first he felt guilty when his mind wandered off the pastor’s speech and went back to his boyhood when his father was alive and teaching Jayson how to skate on the backyard rink his father had built.

Come on Jayson. You can do it. His father had held out both arms and motioned for Jayson to try to skate towards him.

Jayson had tried and tried to skate. He loved the look of the skaters that competed in the Olympics. They were so graceful, twirling and flying in the air with impossible height and graceful dance moves that seemed like they were floating above the ice. But most of all Jayson loved the hockey players. He watched the hockey games with his father, imagined he was there flying down the ice, shooting the puck into the goal and raising his stick in triumph as his team mates crowded around him in victory. That’s what he wanted to do.

With determined drive and persistence, Jayson fell over and over again, until he remembered what his Father had shown him hundreds of times. He stood up, determined to try again, and surprised himself and his Father by gliding over the ice right into his Father’s outstretched arms.

Jayson was deep into the daydream and he felt the warmth of his Father’s embrace and he could even smell the crisp outdoor smell of the big bulky knitted sweater coat that his father had on. Jayson felt the thrill of victory. He had done it. He had skated. He had done it. He had made his Father proud.

Now he skated in real hockey arenas around the world. Now his Father and Mother came to those arenas whenever they could to watch their son Jayson Wilde skate down the arena ice at break neck speed and shoot the puck into the goal and raise his hockey stick in the air in triumph as his team mates piled onto him in victory.

Jayson could look up into the front row of the arena seats and see his Father and Mother raise up with the rest of the roar of the crowd as they watched their son become the top scorer in the league for the last two seasons. Top scorer and top earner. He was very rich and had just finished his newest two year contract as the top salaried hockey player in the league.

People said it was his drive and determination that got him where he was, the darling of the hockey world and of the sports reporters. And also the darling of the hockey fans who hated him and loved him as the ups and downs of the hockey season unfolded.

Jayson knew it was his Father and Mother getting up at 5 o’clock in the morning, driving all over the state and then out of state in all kinds of weather, delivering him safe and sound at the arenas and then sitting in the cold stands, clutching their hot coffees to keep their hands warm while they watched their son play through the different levels of the hockey leagues until he became a star.

His Father was a Deputy Chief in the local police force. But when Jayson was born, his father was a police officer and worked shifts and weekends and often worked holidays. His Mother had become a pediatric nurse on the second floor of the local hospital, then became head nurse of the unit. She worked shifts and weekends and some holidays too.

As Jayson grew up and started to join the local hockey divisions according to his age, his parents enrolled him every year. They paid and paid for the hockey gear, gas, lodging, and meals, and membership fees, when he was just starting out in the junior and minor leagues. A lot of times they put aside their own plans, especially when they were younger and their salaries were low and the costs to join the different hockey divisions rose every year.

Jayson had thought that he might become a policeman like his Father. When Jayson was little, he would watch his Father get dressed in his uniform. To the young Jayson, his Father looked like a superhero. He wanted to be like his Father. Eventually, the love of skating and hockey came first in his ambitions. His Father had never been disappointed in Jayson about the career path Jayson had taken.

But now his Father was lying there in a casket in front of the altar, with bullet holes in his body. His life had been taken in the arena parking lot across town by three fugitive parolees who had robbed his Father after his Father had given them the keys to his car and the money in his wallet. There was a fourth person who fled the scene and hadn’t been caught. The last thing his Father would have seen in the darkness was the huge hockey stadium as he was looking up in the darkness towards the lighted up arena where he had just watched his son Jayson win another game. The hockey arena was where Jayson Wilde was getting dressed after changing out of his hockey gear and showering and dressing in his suit to meet his Mother and Father for a late dinner. The hockey game that Jayson had scored three goals to take his team into the finals of the hockey season.

Jayson was startled when his Mother stood up beside him and started singing the first hymn of the service with the rest of the crowd in the church. Jayson shook himself out of his reverie and stood up with the rest of the congregation.

He had to do something to honor his Father.

That was the first time since he was little that he thought of becoming a police officer. It was too late to save his own Father.

Maybe he could save someone else’s father or parent or child or loved one.

Chapter Two 

Billy Edwards, fugitive Parolee;

Ron Helmer, import/export entrepreneur and Billy’s’ boss and Gang Boss;

Billy Edwards was starting to get bored. His boss was in Spain or Italy or maybe even South America and Billy was running out of money. This job had been the perfect set up for him, at first. Billy was a fugitive parolee and one of the main reasons why he hadn’t been caught after he robbed the house of the Mayor’s mother by mistake, was because Ron Helmer owed him a whole bunch of favors. Ron Helmer ran a lucrative import/export business and he hired Billy Edwards after Billy left his parole jurisdiction because the police wanted to put him back in prison again and there was no way that Billy was ever going to serve out his full prison term if he could help it. Billy liked freedom too much.

He hated prison.

So Billy approached Ron and demanded that Ron hire him and hide him until the whole robbing the Mayor’s mother house mistake was ancient history and the police search for Billy had cooled off. Billy figured it wouldn’t take long. The police usually only had the funds and the staff resources to keep a case active for a limited time.

There were so many other new criminal cases piled onto their case load that Billy was pretty sure that the police would stop looking for him soon.

If only there was a way to make some quick cash. Some way to steal some valuables without being caught.

The job that Ron Helmer had given Billy was just as a general driver, mechanic, take phone messages, and house sit while Ron Helmer was away. He was away a lot. Ron Helmer often took trips to different countries. He had an import/export business that took him to many countries and Ron Helmer often came back in a terrific mood because his business was booming.

Billy was paid for the job with room and board and use of the cars that Ron Helmer owned. Ron did pay Billy a small weekly wage but he gave Billy cash and now that Ron was out of the country for such a long time, Billy’s cash supply was dwindling.  Billy didn’t dare steal from Ron Helmer. The guy was dangerous, he could be smiling at you and giving you a warm hug and knife you in the back before he let go. That’s how Billy got the job working for Ron Helmer. Billy knew where the bodies were buried. And he knew there were a lot of bodies. Billy had driven Ron often when there was a special pick up and delivery out into the desert or into a huge forest.

That part of the job was easy and paid well and all Billy had to do was drive. He never even had to get out of the car when they had to bury a body.

Ron Helmer would wait in his car with Billy and his other employees would show up and those employees would take the body that was scheduled for disposal and take it a little farther into the desert or the forest and they would be gone for a couple of hours. They would come back to where Ron Helmer and Billy were parked and Ron Helmer would hand over a couple of small duffel bags stuffed with cash, all small bills.

Ron Helmer loved to control people. One of his ways to make his employees happy was to pull out extra cash and hand a wad of bills to whoever had done the hiding of the body that Ron Helmer wanted buried. Sometimes the extra pay was a wad of bills plus tickets for a weekend vacation at a resort. Or sometimes the wad of bills had box seats to a sold out baseball game. Sometimes there was an expensive watch from Ron Helmer’s import/export business included with the rest of the payoff. Ron knew that the extra bonus was like a gift for a job well done and the employees would feel appreciated that the boss was acknowledging their hard work. Ron Helmer just considered the money and extra gifts as the cost of doing business. His accountant could hide it in Ron’s business overhead and claim a lot of it back in tax refunds or in deductible expenses.

The biggest advantage to Ron Helmer was that he never knew where the bodies were buried exactly. Only his employees could be identified if the bodies were found and if there was DNA or other evidence on the body or the burial site, it led back to Ron’s employees, not to Ron himself.

Ron Helmer never thought of himself as the boss of a criminal gang. He thought of himself as a legitimate business man. As an entrepreneur.

Billy knew where the bodies were buried. He had a map and a letter locked away in a safe deposit box. Billy was a people person. He knew how to hit buttons to get people to spill what Billy wanted to know. He got Ron’s other employees drunk and would act sympathetic that they had to do the dirty work and the other employees almost always told their woeful tale of having to dig a deep grave in the pitch black darkness of a forest.

Sometimes the drunk employees would draw a map to show how difficult the job had been to pull off. Disposing of a body was hard work. Plus you could get the heebie-jeebies from imagining in the darkness that the corpse was still half alive or would grab you around the neck and pull you into the blackness of the grave with him like some scene in a horror movie. Or that someone was watching and they would call the police. Or that there were cougars or bears attracted by the smell of blood that were waiting to pounce on them as they worked. The darkness held every imagined menace that their overactive brains could imagine as they dug.  And the fact that they had to handle a dead person added to the eerie scene and just intensified the horror as they sweated to finish their job.

Anyway, Billy was a con man and a good one. Ron Helmer’s other employees trusted him. They saw Billy as not being a threat. No one of consequence. To them it was a relief to be able to talk to someone they thought was safe. Wives or girlfriends or personal friends were not safe to talk to about criminal activities that could get you thrown into the penitentiary for life. Other people couldn’t be trusted to keep secrets. They trusted Billy. He was one of them.

The idea for getting easy money came to him one day when he had Ron Helmer’s car out on the driveway, hosing it down to get rid of some of the desert dirt and dust that had clung to it after they had driven deep into the desert on one of those trips to get rid of a body. He was letting the water from the hose spray the car before he washed it and so he stood there idly watching what was going on in the neighborhood while he sprayed the car with water from back to front.

Billy was watching as some young woman in a bikini and flip flops came around the corner of the house across the street. She waved at him and smiled. He waved back. He didn’t know her well but had met her at the community Fourth of July barbecues for the subdivision residents, but people often waved at each other in this gated community. It was large with a gate and a guard house at the entrance and the residents were all very wealthy and even though sometimes they didn’t actually know each other well, if they saw you a couple of times they assumed you belonged there and were like them. They would never have thought that a fugitive parolee was standing in the driveway of the mansion washing a Mercedes. Billy looked like the grownup son of the owner of the mansion. He looked like he had a right to be there.

When Billy put the hose on the ground and started washing the Mercedes with the special sponge, he lost sight of the girl in the bikini because a big parcel delivery truck had pulled up to her driveway. She must have been waiting for a parcel delivery.

Billy had often seen delivery vehicles of all kinds in the gated community. There was a constant stream of deliveries and nannies and house cleaners and cooks and repairmen who catered to the needs of the community residents. A laundry service pulled into the driveway a few houses further down the street.

Billy had never really noticed all the activity early in the morning. It just seemed normal to him and he doubted if anyone else paid attention to the people coming and going at all hours. There were still many hours of the day and night when the whole community was absolutely still as if someone had sounded an alarm or given a signal that no one was to be on the street. That usually happened on weekdays when the majority of the homeowners piled into their high priced chauffeur driven cars and left for a long day in the city or a trip overseas. No one would call this gated community a suburb but if the houses were less expensive modest homes, it would be thought of as a suburb of the city. It functioned like a suburb. People went to work for long hours in the city during the week. Some of them even owned apartments in the high rise buildings of the city that they used if they were too tired to commute or wanted to entertain away from home. Sometimes people went to another country or a country house or a villa on a beach for a long summer vacation.

Billy became more aware of his surroundings. He started to notice the patterns of life in the community.

Billy watched as the parcel delivery truck stopped at several houses on both sides of the street. He watched as the driver offloaded box after box onto the front porches of the houses. One house had at least five smaller boxes and one big cardboard carton that the delivery driver dumped on the porch as fast as he could.

From the Billy’s side of the Mercedes there was the perfect view of the one box that was clearly marked with the logo of a gaming manufacturer, an expensive model of gaming gear that Billy had been lusting after, but couldn’t afford. Scalpers often bought up dozens of the game consoles and then resold them for outrageous prices. Materials to manufacture the consoles were often in short supply so that limited the number of game consoles that could be produced. There was also an artificial shortage, an advertising ploy that the company used as they maneuvered their customers into a buying frenzy for fear of missing out.

Billy had never heard of FOMO until one of the online players that he played against told him about the newest game system to hit the market and everyone wanted it so badly but there was a short supply so everyone absolutely had to be the lucky one to get that game, no matter what the cost. Fear Of Missing Out.

Billy watched the porch of the house while he did an extra special job of washing and waxing the Mercedes. No one came to the door to take the packages inside. The house looked deserted.

After Billy finished washing the Mercedes, he took a little stroll down to the center parkette. He looked for the security cameras on the street as he walked. He had not paid any attention to them before. He knew most people forgot there were security cameras everywhere. Other people hardly ever looked for them deliberately. He brought along a book and a soft drink and lazed on one of the parkette benches in the late afternoon sun. Sometimes he would put the book down and sip on the soft drink and watch the fountain in the center of the parkette as it lifted sparkling sprays of water into the air in a syncopated rhythm. He moved his gaze from the dancing water and observed the porches of the surrounding mansions where the deliveries still languished. Only one house had someone come out the front door to retrieve the package that the delivery driver had left there. As it was getting towards dusk and the shadows started deepening, Billy walked back to Ron Helmer’s mansion. He went inside the mansion to his own room and dressed in a hoodie and dark clothes with no identifying marks on them. He changed into black running shoes.

Billy found a box of motor oil in the garage that hadn’t been opened and he grabbed the box because it was roughly the same size and had logos on it similar to the logos on the gaming system. He sneaked up to the house that had the parcels on the porch. He left the box of motor oil and picked up the box with the gaming system and the smaller boxes too. He was back at Ron Helmer’s mansion in a few seconds.

He wasn’t going to sell the gaming system. He wanted that for himself. But now he knew how to get the extra cash he wanted.

He hooked the game console up and the smaller boxes held an extra game controller and some extra games besides the ones that came in the original box for the system.

He went online and was soon battling dragons and monsters and giant warriors that threatened to doom him.

While he played he hatched his own plan for continuing his newly found way to steal the things that he could fence easily.

Not in this gated community though. It was too close to home.

After he finished playing the new game for a few hours, he got out his old laptop and pulled up the street maps of the city. There were lots of rich neighborhoods. He felt a rush of excitement that he hadn’t felt since he was forced on the run from the police. He was back in action.

Easy pickings.

Chapter Three

Rita Perry;

When Billy was busy collecting the game system from the front porch of the neighbor’s house, the girl in the bikini was in her upstairs bedroom trying to decide which dress would be appropriate to wear for the dinner with her boyfriend of the hour. She chose a dark navy blue dress and picked out the jewellery to go with it.

Her name was Rita Perry and she liked to think of herself as a serial dater. Her boyfriend of the day was expecting her to be sexy, but demure and classy, because they were going to be dining at Rain, a high end restaurant that catered to wealthy men and their arm candy.

When she was satisfied with her outfit, she turned off the light in her bedroom and went over to close the curtains. The light from the open door of the bathroom cast the room in shadows. She reached for the curtain to draw it across the windows and she saw Billy sneaking out of his back yard and cutting through a back laneway.

He was dressed in all black, but she saw his face just before he went up the steps to his neighbor’s mansion. He was carrying a box. He put that box down and picked up all the other boxes on the neighbor’s porch that had been delivered that morning. She held her breath because from her second story bedroom window she could see the neighbour’s car up the street. It was slowly approaching the house where Billy was stealing the boxes on the porch.

Billy made it back to his own place just as the neighbor’s car entered the street and pulled into his driveway. After the neighbor picked up the box that Billy had left there, the neighbor unlocked his front door and went inside.

She smiled. Billy Edwards was a porch pirate. Finally she saw someone who thought the same as she did. She had seen the expensive game system box too. She gave up the idea of stealing it because it was too close to home.

She had met Billy casually at the street barbecues that the Home Owner’s Association had sponsored for the Fourth of July weekend. They had talked briefly. She didn’t really associate or socialize with her neighbors. Rita was friendly but distant. Her home was her private retreat.

She was going to wait and see what else Billy was capable of before she got involved with him.

No one in this community would ever guess what she did for a living.

She decided to rent a car and follow Billy when he went out.

Knowledge was power in her business.

Chapter Four

Rita Perry;

Her billionaire friend and mentor;

Rita Perry was the mistress to a few rich older men who kept her in the style that she had felt entitled to in her previous life, like this mansion she owned in the gated community. She had grown up in a wealthy family, but had been banished when a scandal that involved her and an elderly judge made the rounds of the country club where her parents had a membership.

She was allowed to take her personal