Total pages in book: 85
Estimated words: 82077 (not accurate)
Estimated Reading Time in minutes: 410(@200wpm)___ 328(@250wpm)___ 274(@300wpm)
Estimated words: 82077 (not accurate)
Estimated Reading Time in minutes: 410(@200wpm)___ 328(@250wpm)___ 274(@300wpm)
“I’m sorry, you put three men on the ground?” one of the FBI agents asked.
“Five men,” she corrected him. “But three at the beginning.”
“How?” he asked her.
“Well, I’m a fifth dan black belt in Tae Kwon Do,” Hannah informed him. “They weren’t trained, and they attacked me, so I had the upper hand.”
I watched Agent Thompson smile and all the men, other than Sam and Duncan, take a small step back. I doubted that they even realized they were doing it.
“And one of the guys had an asp baton, and my bodyguard trained me how to use that, and he’s a black ops sniper, so, you know, once I had that,” she said with a shrug, “I was pretty much good to go.”
There was a lot of nodding.
“So I had the puppy, and when I went to see what was in the truck, I saw one open crate and lots of others, but the open one had three RPGs in it.” Before anyone could say anything, Hannah added, “I play a lot of Call of Duty.”
More nodding from everyone.
“There was also a lot of cash on one side, wrapped up in plastic like in the movies, and I thought, I can’t leave this here. It’s probably to buy drugs or guns, and since neither of those is a good thing, I need to get this to my dad because he’ll know where it should go.”
Everyone wanted to ask her individual questions, and she sat and graciously answered each and every one. She sat for an hour, holding court, and a very nice man from animal control showed up and checked the microchip on Opie, and he belonged to a woman who lived in Brookfield, so he was a long way from home.
“Maybe he was taken as a bait dog,” one of the ATF agents suggested.
“That’s horrible,” Kola assured him, hugging Opie to his chest.
The guy from animal control was going to take the dog from Kola, but he said no and told the man, who was not much older than him, to give Opie’s owner his number. We could drop him off on the way home.
“Are you sure?”
“Oh yes,” Hannah assured the man. “Everyone goes home tonight.”
Needless to say, everyone standing with Sam Kage was immensely impressed with our daughter the superhero. The FBI agent gave Hannah his card in case she wanted to start as a trainee in Quantico come the fall.
Sam had to stay, there was no way around it, so I got behind the wheel of his SUV and drove to Brookfield to return Opie to his mommy after she’d called and talked to Kola, sobbing with happiness over the phone.
Her name was Mandy Romero, and her husband, Yair, was out looking for their puppy, who had gotten out of their yard earlier in the evening during her little sister’s graduation party.
“Oh, I had my party tonight too,” Hannah told the woman, who took her dog from Kola, hugged him, shoved him at her husband, and then hugged Hannah really hard.
“Thank you for saving my baby,” she said with tears clogging her voice.
“I think someone took him as a bait dog,” Yair told us as Mandy continued to squeeze Hannah. “I’m not letting him go anywhere without me from now on. I mean, he goes to work with me every day on the train as it is.”
We all watched Mandy nodding and crying and Hannah talking to her.
“Your daughter saved our marriage,” he told me.
“No,” I assured him.
“Oh, you have no idea,” he whimpered. “I mean, if we didn’t find Opie—you get that he got out of the yard when she went to the store to get more ice and I was on puppy duty.”
“I see,” I said sympathetically.
“She would have never forgiven me.”
I understood. I used to feel the same way about my kids. God help Sam if he had not taken care of them or lost either kid. But it turned out that my husband loved our offspring just as much as I did and was exactly as vigilant.
We didn’t get home until after two in the morning, and I was surprised that everyone was hungry.
“We’ll sleep in tomorrow,” Hannah announced. “Let’s eat now.”
As we were going through the refrigerator for leftovers and pie and brownies, Kola took potato salad out of my hands and faced me. Since we were so close, I had to look up, as I’d been doing now for years. My son was not quite as tall as his father, stopping at six-two, but still taller than me, making me have to tip my head back to meet his gaze.
“That was crap before,” he assured me. “We will both always need you, so never say that you have to start figuring out the rest of your life, all right?”
I nodded, unable to say a word, afraid my voice would crack and I’d start sobbing. They were simple words, but they touched me deeply.