Hello again everyone
So many positive replies! Thank you, I haven't smiled in months, and you're definitely all making my days easier. I love how almost every notification has given me a count down every couple hours: "!RemindMe 8 hours." Thank you for making me laugh, seriously. I needed it. I had a close call and David almost found me today. I caught a bus out of town, which is where I wrote this.
Now we continue.
"Hello Zander," he growled. "Out for a walk?"
"Fuck you," I spat, my cheek jammed against the table edge.
"Why so hostile?"
"You know why, jackass!"
"Not so loud. We're having a nice, quiet conversation."
I struggled to push my head off the table, but he was so much stronger than me.
"Stop struggling and listen. I want to clarify the rules of the game, since you've finally caught on that we're playing."
"This isn't a game! You ruined my credit, stole my money, hacked my accounts, and stole my shit! I'm going to kill you!"
"But I'm not going to kill you. That's the rule. I will not kill you, Zander. That would put an end to your ruined life, and that's not the goal. Now, you haven't put any effort into ruining MY life. Why not?"
"Because I'm not a sick psychopath," I hissed.
"Clearly not," he said coolly. "But this is boring for me. I'm doing all the work making you fight for life, while you're doing nothing to improve me. Not that I haven't learned anything, but it would be more fun if you'd fight back. I'll even let Clark help you. But I think you need motivation."
"You think I need motivation to hurt you? As if."
"Yes, you do need it. Because despite everything that's happened to you, your only attempt to fight back was pathetic. I need you to up your game and fight harder. So, that's where some motivation kicks in."
He reached his left hand into his pants pocket and pulled out a smartphone. He tapped on it a few times before holding it up to his ear.
"It's me," he said when the other line picked up. "Put her on." Then he held the phone to my ear. Someone was crying.
"Say hello," a gruff voice said.
"H-hello?" Katie. Jesus Christ, he'd kidnapped Katie.
"YOU MOTHER FUCKER!" I yelled.
"Easy on the language, Zander," David smiled, talking as if he'd asked me to eat my vegetables.
"Katie, where are you?" I said desperately into the phone. David took the phone away and hung up, sticking it back in his pocket.
"Do you understand the rules now, Zander? Are you motivated?"
"I'm going to kill you, you son of a bitch. You'll burn in hell!"
"Now, now, this isn't a theological discussion," David tutted. "You and Clark do your best to ruin my life. Do whatever you want. But if you kill me, I kill Katie."
"Can't kill her if you're dead," I growled.
"No, but my friend will. It's amazing the kind of people you can meet online. He's just as excited to play as I am. Do you have any questions before the game really starts?"
"What the hell happened to you?" I asked. "We were best friends!"
"Things change," he said. "I'd been dreaming of this game for years now. You were my only real friend I could do this with. One day I decided to just... go for it."
"You've ruined your own life by trying to ruin mine," I spat. "Once you're convicted of identity theft and kidnapping, your life is over."
"That's part of the game. Can't ruin me if you can't convict me. I've been preparing for years," he grinned. His eyes were dark and menacing.
"Don't you think that's unfair to me? How am I supposed to put in a good effort if you've been preparing for years?"
"I'll consider giving you some advice," he admitted, looking thoughtful. "In the meantime, do your best. And tell Clark to play along because I'll have some motivation for him too."
The sound of scrambling on the back fence alerted us to someone's presence. I shouted for help, and David slapped me, but lightly. I tried to see who it was from my limited movement. Clark's face appeared over the fence.
"That's my cue to leave," David said with a smile. "It's been good catching up with you, Zander."
Clark shot across the yard, yelling for David to piss off. David just stood there, looking at me and... waiting. That's when Clark caught up and punched him square in the face. David flew to the ground, releasing my head. I stood up and rubbed my sore face. David started to get up, but Clark kicked him in the side.
"Stay down!" He shouted.
A light went on in the house behind us. We both turned to look. I had the thought to hold David here until the police arrived. When we turned back around, David was halfway down the street. Clark started to take off, but I grabbed his arm.
"Stop, let him go," I said in defeat. "I have something to tell you."
We made a quiet decision to avoid the cops tonight. We wanted to file a report with them on our terms, not having to explain what we were doing trespassing in the middle of the night. We jogged back to his car and went home.
We sat on the living room couch as I told Clark about David's conversation. Clark was staring dumbfounded at me.
"I thought you said he used to be a friend?" He said.
"He did."
"And he never acted like this?"
"No, not to me."
"This is insane," Clark said, standing from the couch. "He's kidnapped Katie just so you'll try to ruin his life and follow along with some stupid dare? Is he crazy? He's going to be caught!"
"Let's hope so," I said. "But we should start planning. I'm not taking any chances while he has Katie."
"Okay, man. I want nothing to do with this at all, but I also want to help you. If it was anyone else, I'd nope the fuck out."
"Then let's get started," I said.
I don't know how much detail I want to put here because it'll likely get slow and boring for you. We stayed up all night long mapping out events, people, weaknesses, strengths, everything we could think of. We filled half a notebook with all our notes.
These were the weaknesses we could come up with that we could potentially use against David:
Boredom with life - so we could make the game too boring to continue.
His mom - if she knew what was going on, she might be able to get him to stop. I know some of you commented that we should kidnap Mrs. K and use her, but we were still very green and had no desire to do the kind of shit David was using.
Work - get him fired and make sure no one would hire him again.
Online accounts - do the same things to him that he'd done to me.
Police - if we could come up with hard evidence to get him convicted, the problem would be solved.
Katie - since he had kidnapped Katie, the police would definately get involved. I could easily report my suspicions about David and they'd search him for the tiniest evidence.
Then we looked at his strengths and things to look out for:
Prepared - he obviously had a timeline he was following and knew what he was doing.
Time - the junk mail and credit fraud incidents had all began long before I felt the effects. This meant that there could be other traps David had set up that would go off like a time bomb sometime in the future.
Physical body - it was clear from tonight that he'd been working out a ton and practicing. Possibly training for his job as a security guard.
Money - he had a lot of money now from what he stole from me and used fraud to receive.
Friends - if he'd made a friend who was willing to get involved in a kidnapping, then there were two or possibly more psychopaths to worry about now.
Knowledge - he knew how to use fraud without being caught (yet) and hack computers or at least hire someone to do it for him. We had no idea what other dangerous knowledge he might have, so we made a list of things he could know that we should learn how to counter. I won't list it here because it was pretty long.
Willingness to break the law - it was clear that the law was not part of the rules of the game for him. He was either unafraid to be caught, or confident that he never would be.
After we looked at David, we looked at ourselves. First, our weaknesses:
Knowledge - we didn't have nearly the amount of knowledge David had. Not just knowledge about how to do things like fix a pipe, but also knowledge about David: who is friends were, where he worked, who he talked to, etc. We'd have to start learning like crazy to try and catch up.
Money - I had no money left. Clark was limited because he'd just spent a ton on that plasma tv that was just stolen.
Home and car - David knew where we lived. We planned to sell our lease ASAP. He also knew our cars, but there was nothing we could do about that until we moved and had some money to buy a junker car we could use when necessary. No matter where we moved, if he could find our car, he could follow us home.
Katie - if David decided to change the rules and use Katie as motivation, we might have to rethink everything.
Fear - Clark and I knew that deep down David terrified us MORE than he angered us. I would have rather walked away than exact revenge. We were also afraid and unwilling to do a lot of the things David had already done.
These were our strengths:
Law - the law was on our side so long as we kept things legal.
Clark's Credit - so far, David hadn't targeted Clark like he'd targeted me, so we could take precautionary measures to protect him.
Jobs - we had jobs and could therefore earn more money. Unless David found a way to get us fired from them. We needed to come up with a way to protect our jobs from David.
FTC, Police Force, Government - these government bodies with all their vast resources, were working for us on my identity theft. We thought it was likely that they'd be able to link David to my identity theft.
Looking at all the strengths and weaknesses of both parties side-by-side, it looked like an even match-up on paper. But just thinking about trying to fight David made us feel like we were up against an impossible enemy.
We sat down to eat breakfast and continued talking over what we would do. Both of us called in sick to work so we could start preparing.
"Alright, I posted our leases up for sale on Craigslist," I said, putting my phone down. Clark was sniffing the air with a confused expression. He leaned over and smelled his cereal.
"Does this smell bad to you?" He asked. I sniffed.
"Smells like cereal to me," I said.
"Huh. Smells bad to me." He dumped the cereal in the sink.
Clark pulled out his phone and called Equifax, letting them know that he wanted a freeze on his credit for 90 days. When those 90 days were up, he would call again and again until this matter was resolved to protect his credit. His credit card with a $3,000 limit was still accessible to us, but no new credit could be applied for.
He then went on every account he had online and changed every password to be random gibberish. He signed up for an online password manager and put his passwords in there. The password manager worked by only storing an encrypted file on their server. He would download his encrypted file from the password manager website, read or write to the file, re-encrypt it, and then send it back to the server. The server only held the encrypted file, no passwords. Even if this company got hacked, the hackers would only have a bunch of useless, encrypted files. They could crack the files with time, sure, but it was the best we could do.
The only account he didn't put into the password manager was his bank account information. He wrote down half of the username on one small scrap of paper, and the other half on another. He did the same with the password. He intended to hide them in safe places around town. If David got ahold of Clark's bank information, we were dead in the water.
While he did that, I finished both of our inventory's to hand over to the police as soon as they opened for the day. Once the station opened, we were going to head over, hand in our inventories, file a police report for the burglary, and recommend David as a possible suspect. I also planned to point them to my identity theft police report and state that I suspected David to be guilty of that as well.
Once we had the police report, we would go to our landlord and request for the locks to be changed, using the police report as evidence of the breakin. The tech had told us that the door had been opened regularly and not forced. That meant David had somehow made a copy of our key.
As it got close to 9 AM, we got into Clark's car and drove around town. He got out at four locations and hid his scraps of paper somewhere. He knew it had to be somewhere people didn't touch for months at a time and wouldn't be damaged or moved by sprinklers, storms, etc. I don't know where he hid them, but he assured me they were safe.
After they were hidden, we drove to the police station to file our report.
We waited patiently for an officer to see us. Once we were called over, we took a seat and told him about the break in and that a police report had been started and we were now turning in an inventory of our stolen things.
"We have a suspect for the burglary," I said at last.
"Okay, who?" He asked.
"His name is David King. He used to be a friend of mine, but not anymore."
"What happened?" He asked, writing the name down.
"Recently, I had my identity stolen," I said. "I suspect he was also behind that, so if he stole my identity, it's likely that he broke in too. He hates me."
"Okay, but what actually happened that made you not be friends anymore?"
I hesitated. I didn't know how to explain the situation. If anyone can think of a better way to explain the situation to a cop, let me know. I only said, "we had a major fight and he threatened to ruin my life."
"When was this fight?"
"About a year ago."
"And you think he's just now stealing your identity and breaking into your home..." the cop said dubiously. "Were you friends with him?" He asked, gesturing to Clark.
"No, I'm his roommate," he replied, pointing to me.
"Okay, boys," the officer sighed, scooting forward. "Thank you for the tip and your inventories. We'll investigate this just like any other crime and give it our best effort. Can I get copies of your drivers licenses and phone numbers so I can contact you if I have questions?"
We handed him our licenses and wrote down our phone numbers in the file.
"I'll be right back," he said, taking the licenses to make copies.
We looked at each other for a minute, taking a deep breath.
"He doesn't believe us," I said in resignation.
"We'll find evidence," he encouraged me.
Five minutes passed. Then ten. Then the officer came back, two others at his side.
"Clark Ulysses?" He asked.
"Yes?" Clark said, confused.
"You're under arrest for vandalism and trespassing on private property."
The officers flanked him and pulled him to his feet. I stared at the cops in bewilderment. Clark's eyes were wide.
"When I went to copy your license," the cop said, holding it up. "I checked it against our records. Last night, someone called in a report that you'd been to their home and sprayed "THIEF" on their house and then attacked him when he came out to stop you."
My mouth dropped open. Son of a bitch.
"David King, the one you just recommended as a suspect, was the one who called it in. Seems to me like you're trying to discredit him before he reported you. Guess he beat you to it. Read him his rights," he said to the other officers.
"Wait," I said, standing up. "Hold on, I was there too, it wasn't just him!" Clark shook his head at me ever so slightly. No! I wasn't going to let him take the fall for this!
"Mr. King explicitly stated that there was only one vandal and that he watched Mr. Ulysses sneak up to the house and spray it by himself. I know you're trying to protect your friend, but don't throw your life away, kid."
One of the officers started reading Clark his Miranda Rights while they cuffed him and walked him toward the door leading to inmate processing.
"Call my mom for bail! I'll be out soon!" Clark shouted behind him. "Don't let him win!"
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