I went inside and called Glenn Fontaine. We had thirty-six quarters of documentation. We had federal wire fraud, utility theft, and a paper trail of cash payments from Spencer Roxborough to Garrick Voss that Glenn’s private investigator had finally cracked open the previous month. The trap was fully constructed. It just needed to be sprung.
"Glenn," I said. "Are the warrants signed?" "Signed, sealed, and sitting on the desk of a Texas Ranger who really doesn't like developer fraud," Glenn replied. "Good. Have them ready for Saturday."
I hung up and walked out to the substation. I patted the side of the secondary distribution panel. It had done good work for nine years. It was about to take a well-deserved rest.
It was 7:05 on a Saturday morning in August. The temperature outside was already 91 degrees and climbing. The Labor Day weekend pool party was scheduled for 10:00.
I walked into the substation I had built with my own hands in 1988. I checked the secondary distribution panel one last time. The draw from the Sunset Mesa tap was humming steadily, pulling heavy amperage to cool down 124 oversized houses before the heat of the day truly set in.
I reached up and flipped one breaker.
The heavy clack echoed in the quiet morning air. In the same second, one hundred twenty-four luxury homes in the subdivision next door went dark. The humming stopped. The silence over the live oaks was absolute.
The HOA president was likely waking up in a Lululemon bikini cover-up. Her house now had no air conditioning, no working refrigerator, and no margarita machine. Most importantly, she had no idea yet that her husband had been stealing electricity from my ranch for nine years.
She would learn that in the next forty-five minutes. Her husband would learn it from a Texas Ranger knocking on their custom mahogany front door, holding a stack of federal indictments. The contractor in Atlanta would learn it at roughly the same time.
The 124 homes would learn it together. The Texas Hill Country has a particular way of teaching people what infrastructure means, and what happens when you mistake rural patience for rural ignorance.
I have spent thirty-two years watching the land teach those lessons. This Saturday, it was finally my turn to teach one. I walked out of the substation, locked the heavy chain-link gate behind me, and went back inside to drink my coffee with Lynette.