Page 103 of Hunter's Hidden Camera
“His aim is like a sniper, yo,” says Carlos.
Nikolai, who isn’t armed (Tate isn’t either), raises his palms in the air. “Everybody calm down. You go through all this trouble to save this little boy? Why go through all this trouble? Leave him to us.”
“That’s not going to happen, bro,” Manny says, taking a few steps forward.
“Fine,” says Nikolai. “We let him go tonight. But you know this is not over. We will just come to get him again tomorrow or the next day or the next. You get in our way, we hurt you. We hurt everyone you love. We keep coming back again and again. We will not stop until this boy is dead. And you can shoot us all down now. Kill us all. But we die, there are so many more who will come in our place. We are not the only ones. You think it’s just us. You are actually fighting a whole army. You will lose. So leave us the boy.”
“Get up, Oscar,” Manny commands. “Get over here.”
Oscar manages to get onto his hands and knees.
Nash says to me, “Hunter, Nikolai is not shitting you. You may buy another night. You’re safe now. But this is far from over. We’re coming after you.”
“No, you’re not,” I say. “You, Nikolai, Nikolai’s people. You’re not going to touch Oscar or me or anyone we know. This ends tonight.”
Nikolai laughs. “I like little brother. He is very funny.”
I pull out Carlos’s cell phone from my pocket. I look at Patricia’s response to my earlier text to her. She writes: “It’s all done. I followed your instructions exactly.”
I exhale, relieved.
“You’re not going to beat Nikolai,” says Nash. “Nikolai doesn’t get beat.”
I stand up. “Nikolai has already been beat. All of you have.”
I remove the glasses from my face.
Nash cocks his head. He knows something’s not right. “When did you start wearing glasses?”
“Before I started playing around with spy cams in our bathroom and in your bedroom,” I say, “I played around with different types of spy cams. Like the one hidden in this pair of glasses. I’ve been recording tonight. When I was at your kitchen window, my camera caught everything on video. I recorded Tate talking about how he kidnapped Oscar and handcuffed him. I recorded you talking about dealing and smuggling drugs. But best of all, I recorded Nikolai talking about how he shot that cop in Riverside. That’s been a big news story. Everybody wantsjustice. And I’m recording all of you right now, every threat you’ve made out here.”
Nash lunges for the glasses—but he doesn’t get far because Carlos throws the dish like a Frisbee and Blanca chucks the wine bottle. The dish slams into Nash’s stomach, where his stab wound is, and the bottle hits his forehead. He falls hard on the ground. He writhes around.
“You want these glasses?” I toss the glasses at Nash. “I don’t need them any more. You can have them. The camera in those glasses is connected to the internet using a Wi-Fi hotspot on Carlos’s phone. So the camera was able to upload all that footage to an old cloud storage account of mine. I had someone make sure it was still working, and it was, and they took tonight’s video footage and duplicated it on several cloud storage accounts and also put it on multiple flash drives that a couple of other people have hidden in physical locations all over.”
(Patricia, Darin, and Henry have helped me do all of this.)
I send a partial video clip to Nash’s phone. “Take a look if you don’t believe me.”
Nash crawls toward Nikolai. Nikolai kneels down. The two of them watch the video.
Nikolai looks at me and nods. “Impressive, little brother.”
I say, “You touch Oscar, those flash drives go to the police. You touch me, those flash drives go to the police. You touch anyone here or any of our friends or families or acquaintances, those flash drives go to the police. You can come after me and you can try to torture me to tell you where all those drives are,but the moment anyone detects that something’s happened to me those flash drives go to the police. If you leave us alone, we leave you alone.”
I savor the look on both Nikolai and Nash’s faces. They know I’ve gotten the best of them.
I grab hold of Oscar and pull him onto his feet. We back away from the house, until we’re surrounded by Blanca, Carlos, and Manny.
Nash, Nikolai, and Tate look small against all those Christmas lights and decorations.
Within seconds, Oscar, the siblings, and I are all piled in my car. Oscar is lying across Blanca’s and Carlos’s laps in the backseat, moaning in pain. Blanca and Carlos use their hands to press down on Oscar’s stomach. There’s so much blood.
I’m heading to the hospital as fast as I can.
“Thank you,” I say to the three siblings. “You saved our lives.”
“That’s why we came,” says Manny.
