The Ransom

Imagine you found out that the child you are raising is not yours, what would you do?

            Donald Southland got out of the cab and taking his bag headed for the check-in.  He had 45 minutes before his flight, but with all the security it could take him that long to get through it.  He smiled at the girl that checked him in and got his board pass.  Next came security, metal detectors, x-rays, and anything else the government thought was needed.  He checked his watch and grinned.  He would be in the air before he was missed before anybody realized he wasn’t paying the ransom.

            The plan had been so easy, and it worked flawlessly.  The brat wasn’t his, he had found out by pure chance, a simple test for a disease that ran in his family.  The lab had found that he shared no genetic marks with the kid he had raised for six years.  The spoiled brat was the result of an affair, and he could have used that to get a divorce, but then he would end up with nothing.   He had been poor, and he wasn’t going back if he could help it.  He had tried to forget after he learned the truth, but he couldn’t.  He had considered killing his wife, but he wasn’t sure he could do it and chances were good he would be caught.  No, he needed another way and it fell into his lap literally.  His wife, the dirty cheating w***e, had dropped a book in his lap as he was dozing in front of the TV.  He snatched it up and was about to throw it at her, but he controlled himself.  He read the blurb on the dust jacket and it gave him the idea.  A kidnapping, wasn’t easy, but he was determined.

            The first part had been easy, find somebody to kidnap the brat.  He considered what he needed in a kidnapper and came up with a list.  They would have to be smart, but not smart enough to try and find him.  They would have to be desperate enough to need the money and willing to follow the plan to get it.  Most importantly they couldn’t know him, even after he ran with the money he didn’t want anybody looking for him.  He was hoping that the b***h would end up thinking the kidnappers killed him and the brat and just took the money.

            He found his kidnappers easy enough, there was always somebody willing to do anything for a couple million.  A husband and wife, he spent some time checking them out.  It would all look like he had just been doing his job as a loan officer when he had done it.  Next came making contact, he did it through the mail.  A little taste of the money he claimed they would make and simple instruction on how to prove they were willing to do it.  They followed the first letter to the letter and he was set.  He didn’t trust them to plan the kidnapping, only to pull it off so he planned it out down to the smallest detail.

            When the first call came in he was so nervous they would go off script, but that worked to his advantage.  The b***h never suspected he wasn’t surprised and she was in a panic, which gave him the excuse to take charge.  He knew exactly how long it would take her to pull together 5 million dollars and that was exactly how much time he had told the kidnappers to give.  She had wanted to go to the police or the FBI, but he talked her out of it.  He convinced her that the brat had a better chance if they just paid the ransom and informed the cops afterward.

            He had gathered what he needed for his new life before putting the plan into effect, nothing could be missing from the house or his office to make the cops suspect he wasn’t dead.  The money was a problem, he could not just load it into a suitcase and fly to another country.  But he came up with the perfect solution, he would mail it to himself.  A little work online at the local library found the perfect place to start his new life and even a rental property there.  He moved the money around and rented it.

            Everything worked perfectly, in three days the package would arrive with five million dollars and be free of that cheating w***e.  He didn’t even feel bad that the brat might be killed, it wasn’t his kid after all.

 

***

 

            Sitting down at his computer Donald pulled up the web page for his old home town’s newspaper.  He took a sip of his coffee as it loaded, the only thing he really hated about this country was their slow internet service.  The page opened, and the lead story was about the kidnapping.  He began to read, and his stomach knotted up.  The kidnappers had tried to contact the b***h the day after he had disappeared to threaten the kid since the ransom was never paid.  By this time the b***h had called in the police who had tapped the phones.  The call was traced, and the kidnappers were caught, and the brat rescued.  The big mystery was now what happened to him.  He sat back and wondered if this country had any good plastic surgeons.