Free Dirty Deeds by Armand Rosamilia Page A

disguise was an overweight blind woman who was in the neighborhood wandering around all day. When the stripper – I’ll call her a woman so no one gets offended for whatever reason – walked by and into her apartment I followed. I was like a ghost. Just a poor blind soul out in the big, bad world.
    I held the stripper, uh, woman up with a knife and took the kid.
    The worst part of it? She barely put up a fight.  I think she knew what the real deal was. Her small-time crook boyfriend was the baby daddy, and he paid a pretty penny to get rid of the kid before his wife found out.
    Marisa, smiling, had told me three months later he was found dead in the back of the strip club he frequented. It seems he’d knocked up another stripper. . . ugh. . . woman, and this time her big-time crook husband took care of the guy.
    Payback was a bitch, as they say.
    The best part for me was the surveillance footage from the convenience store across the street. It clearly showed the blind woman entering the building behind the stripper and a few minutes later she didn’t look all that blind, carrying a baby in her arms and walking quickly around the corner and out of sight.
    Marisa loved it. Now, she asked a million questions after each job.
    “I’m in position,” I said as I parked the van down the street.
    In case you were wondering, I was wearing my old man disguise I’d used before, mostly for California and the Pacific Northwest jobs over the years: a graying hair wig with matching moustache, thick Coke bottle glasses and a small red rose in my faded jacket pocket.
    The rose was a nice touch and could tie this serial kidnapper into a few crimes and keep the FBI and local cops busy. You’d think putting them together would be bad for business, but I learned from my predecessor the best thing to do would be to give your fake evildoer some personality. Let the media run with it, and it would only hinder the investigations.
    I was the Red Rose Kidnapper. Wanted in three States and I was about to add Nevada to the list. As long as I kept doing these jobs in this area of the country, no one would tie any of it into any of my other jobs.
    The bogus tips would come pouring into the tip lines tonight, most of which would be whack jobs looking for their fifteen minutes of fame or the ones who believed an alien had taken over the children. The flood of bad tips would bury the one or two real ones until it was too late. I figured the FBI and local cops were still wading through the rivers of calls from years ago. I didn’t have an ego so a letter mailed to the newspaper calling out law enforcement wasn’t going to happen. All I wanted was to get this done and over with and move on so I could get back to the jazz club.
    I saw the first cheerleader exiting the side gym door but it wasn’t the target. She got into a waiting Hummer and drove off just as another two came out.
    This wasn’t like the high school I went to. It was clean and bright. The rich kids went here and these were the kids I despised growing up because I wanted to be them. I guess I am one of the rich kids now, just twice their age. Or more.
    I glanced again at her picture on my phone. Heck, I could glance at four hundred of her pictures if I wanted to. Her Facebook page was wide open and her entire life, down to the fact she had sushi with her friend Dee two nights ago, she really thought one of the football players was hot, and she’d smoked more than a few joints since high school started.
    I smiled, thinking of the word joint. I knew Marisa didn’t have this experience in school. I’d watched her from a distance until she dropped out in ninth grade and started doing the wrong thing. Someday I was going to convince her to get her GED, but she didn’t think it meant anything. Maybe she was right. She had enough street smarts for both of us combined, and I grew up in a rough neighborhood.
    There she was. When I was doing a job I never used the target’s name in my