Free The Driver by Mark Dawson

Presbyterian pastor named Peter Rogers Casey had negotiated a seventy-year lease from the nearby town of Tiburon, which owned the land of Pine Shore. The original purpose was to build a retreat for sailors who had fallen upon hard times. Those plans grew and the months passed and, soon afterwards, the pastor’s flock constructed a community building that was sufficient to seat five-hundred people. Five years later and Tiburon was persuaded to grant a ten-year lease to the Pine Shore Residents’ Association. In return for two hundred dollars a year, they would be permitted to build houses on the land. The lease had been renewed throughout the years, each extension for another ten years and each, as it neared its expiry, carrying the threat that the townsfolk would exorcise their perpetual jealousy of the people who made their homes there and the city dwellers who made the place their summer retreat, and either inflate the rent to uneconomic amounts or refuse to renew it. That kind of tenuous year-to-year existence could only be tolerated by a small slice of the population and, as a result, you would only find a particular kind of person in Pine Shore: very rich, upper middle-class, usually white. It also generated something of a siege mentality.
    Milton turned off the coast road and continued to the gate. The radio was on and tuned in to a talk radio channel; the presenter was speaking to one of the candidates for the Republican nomination for the Presidential election. He sat for a moment, half listening to the conversation: immigration, how big government was wrong, taxation. The man had a deep, mellifluous voice, accented with a lazy West Coast drawl. Milton had heard of him before: the Governor of California, seen as a front-runner in the race. Milton had little time for politicians but this one was convincing enough.
    He counter-clockwised the dial to switch the radio off, lowered the window and entered the code that Madison had given him last night.
    2-0-1-1.
    The final number elicited a buzz and the gate remained closed.
    The code had been changed.
    Milton looked at the gate and the community beyond and thought. Why had it been changed? He tried the combination a second time and, as the keypad buzzed at him again, he noticed the dark black eye of a CCTV camera pointed at him from the gatehouse. He hadn’t noticed that being there last night.
    He put the car into reverse and the camera jerked up and swivelled as it tracked him. He turned around and drove slowly back down the drive until he was around the corner and out of sight. He killed the lights and then the engine and reached into the back for the black denim jacket he had stuffed into the footwell. He had a pair of leather gloves in the glove compartment and he put them into the pockets of the jacket. He took the S&W 9mm that he had confiscated from the guard outside the house and slipped it into the waistband of his jeans. He put the jacket on, opened the door and, keeping within the margin of the vegetation at the side of the road, made his way back towards the gate again.
    About fifteen yards from the gate, a wooden pole carried the high tension power cabling from the substation into the estate. Three large cylindrical transformers were rigged to the pole, twenty feet in the air, and the wire crossed over to a corresponding pole on the other side of the wall. From there, individual wires delivered the current to the houses. Milton took out the S&W and racked a bullet into the chamber. There were better ways to disable a power supply––Mylar balloons filled with helium would have shorted it out very nicely––but he was working on short notice and this would have to do. He took aim at the ceramic insulators that held the wire onto the pole. It was a difficult shot: the insulators were small targets at reasonable distance, it was dark and the fog was dense. He fired, once, but the shot missed. He re-sighted the target, braced his right wrist with his left