Operation Whiplash (10 page)

“Drive back out onto the boulevard,” I told Hazel when we came to the end of the block. Once there, I had her turn away from the direction of Deakin’s warehouse, back in the direction we’d come, until a lighted restaurant appeared in the thickening fog. “Okay,” I said, and Hazel stopped the car. “I’ll get out here. Give me two hours, and I don’t mean a hundred twenty-one minutes. If I’m not back, you call Jed and the pair of you make tracks out of Hudson.”

“You’ll be back,” she said confidently, and leaned over to kiss me. “But be careful, y’hear?”

“That’s my intention on both counts,” I said, and climbed out of the Ford.

I started back toward the warehouse. The looks of the neighborhood made me glad I’d brought Hazel along. Even Kaiser might have had difficulty protecting the Ford from the wharfside street gangs who could strip a car down to the chassis in minutes. With the pair of them in the Ford, I was assured of transportation back to Hudson other than walking.

If I made it back to the Ford.

A black-and-white, mist-bedewed police cruiser rolled through a lighted intersection ahead of me, and I stepped into a shadowed doorway. It was no time for me to be answering police questions directed at people who had no business in the area. I was overqualified in that category.

The cruiser disappeared, and I turned corners until I was again approaching the warehouse, this time from the side next to the automobile wrecking yard. Just beyond the alley, facing the street, an overhead garage door was raised suddenly, and a strong glare of light illuminated the street. The building wasn’t unoccupied as I’d hoped.

The door remained open, and I moved toward it slowly. The front of the warehouse looked as though it should have been the rear. A loading dock stretched along two-thirds of the front, and a series of large sliding doors, all closed, led from the platform to the building’s interior. At the far end of the dock was a glassed-in cubicle that appeared to be either a dispatcher’s office or a sheltered employee’s entrance.

I crept silently along the building wall until I was able to see partway into the illuminated area in the otherwise darkened building. One look was enough to disclose that this was the warehouse’s tractor-and-trailer maintenance shop. In the huge space beyond the opened door, it seemed there was at least one of every kind of truck in the world: low-boys and cattle rigs, reefers, open-tops, and tankers, five-axle jobs, screw-tractors, cab-over-engines, Whites, Macks, and Kenworths. And a night maintenance crew was busily working on some of them.

Close to the door, the bottom half of a man stuck out from under the differential housing of a double-wheel drive tractor. Another man was up on its running board next to the forward-tilted cab, peering down at its massive diesel engine. A third man with a welding mask was at a workbench along the wall where he was using an acetylene torch to cut through a piece of metal. Golden sparks flowed away from the blue-hot cutting point as the flame burned through sheet steel. I realized now that the outer door had probably been raised to provide additional circulation of air.

With the working trio inside, the garage didn’t look promising as an entranceway. The alley hadn’t looked any better. Four rungs of a straight ladder extended down from the fire escape platform I’d noticed previously, stopping at the second floor level. I’d need as much spring as an Olympic high-jumper to reach the lowest rung that was easily six feet above my extended reach. The way it sagged away from the building, the whole fire escape structure didn’t seem too safe, anyway.

Swirling blobs of heavier fog were blowing along the street. There was no foot traffic at all, and the occasional passing car or truck was merely a misty-looking set of headlights going by. Inside the garage, there was the hiss and sizzle of the cutting torch, the clanking of tools on concrete, and a background sound of raucously-pitched radio music. Everyone seemed busy.

I crouched low and sprinted past the door opening to the other side where I could survey the working area in more detail. The music came from a grease-smeared, once-white plastic radio perched on a shelf above the workbench where the welder was at work. The volume was turned up so high that, combined with the other maintenance shop noise, a metal-tracked M-551 tank could have been driven into the garage unheard.

I moved along the building wall to the outer door of the dispatcher’s office. It had a simple lock that yielded to a few seconds’ persuasion from my little mother’s helper. I closed the door from the inside. Six steps led upward to the warehouse first floor level. I was standing in a wide corridor, flanked on the right by a wall containing a row of waist-high windows that looked down upon the lighted maintenance shop. On the left was a row of offices, also with glass-topped partitions. All were dark, but enough light streamed inward from the shop so I could see the interiors.

The office nearest to me had an opening where a serving counter projected. It looked like the place where freight bills and load manifests were prepared. The next office in line displayed manually-operated desk-top adding machines and comptometers. The type of machines made it plain that, despite its size, the Deakin Trucking Company was a long way from computer automation.

The last office in the row was fitted out with much less furniture that was of much higher quality. It looked like the executive office for the head honcho who ran the operation. I picked the door-lock. On the desk was a framed picture of Mario Rubelli and a pretty girl in wedding dress.

Anything about Rubelli’s business interested me. The quality of the office furniture didn’t extend to the plunger locks on the pair of four drawer files that stood against the far wall. Office furniture manufacturers will use heavy steel construction, fire-resistant insulation, silent-running nylon rollers, and expensive wood-grain or decorator-color finishes on their products, yet use the cheapest locks to safeguard a file’s contents.

I tilted back a file cabinet and propped up a front corner with a heavy glass ashtray I took from Rubelli’s desk. I applied pull-pressure on the top drawer next to the plunger lock with one hand, then drove the butt of my fist against the file about two inches below the point where the plunger rested flush against the outer file frame. The drawer popped out with just a slight click when the thud of my fist jarred the file.

A quick search revealed nothing except ordinary-looking business papers. I did no better with the other drawers in the file. I turned to the second one and opened it with the same simple pull-pressure-and-impact technique. In the third drawer I found a lockbox, and I went for it like a homing pigeon heading for the roost.

It took me three tries to pick the strongbox lock which was almost secure enough to justify its salesmen’s claims. Inside were bundles of canceled checks and a dozen file folders. I wished I had a Minox as I eyed the checks, but even if I had one I didn’t have the time. I riffled through the file folders. I pulled two of them, one that had a tab-heading saying
espada
and another with a bright-red tab saying
Andrews
. I moved to a corner of the office where I was least likely to be visible to anyone outside, yet an area where there was still light enough for me to read.

The
espada
file I disposed of quickly. Nothing in it was dated more recently than three years ago. The
Andrews
file was considerably different. It seemed to prove that the Andrews Trading Company, Hazel Andrews, President, was actively engaged in shipping unregistered arms to Central and South America. It wasn’t hard to figure that this was the club Colisimo intended to use to whip Hazel into line until Rubelli’s goons overdid it by killing Nate Pepperman, whose signature was on many of the papers in the folder. Once again I had the feeling that Colisimo almost had to have developed a feeling of irritation lately toward Mario Rubelli.

I wondered if there were any arms in the warehouse now. I had no doubt they were being shipped from this very location. I took the two folders and shoved them up under my sweater, tucking the bottom halves into the waistband of my pants to hold them securely while leaving my hands free.

I left the office and moved across the corridor. I stood in shadow about five feet back from the windows on the shop side so I could look down into the work area. The torch man had finished his job and was entering a washroom near the rear of the maintenance area. It was located next to a heavy-duty freight elevator. The elevator’s picket-fencelike door was raised, exposing its wide, scarred platform. It was designed to accept loads either from inside or through a door that led out onto the alley over which the rotting fire escape hung. I saw now why the final descent ladder of the fire escape was so short; it had been cut off to allow present-day high trailer bodies to pass beneath it and reach the elevator in the rear.

The other two mechanics were still busily engaged with the partially dismantled tractor rig. I felt sure I would have no interference from these three workmen while I inspected the rest of the warehouse. I moved beyond the row of offices, out onto the warehouse floor. The first thing I noticed was that the vast storage area was relatively neat compared to the building’s dingy exterior.

Huge strapped crates, cartons, and boxes were arranged in painted, coded squares on this first floor, leaving wide aisles to permit pallets to be moved about. The open area between the rear of the offices and the first stacks of merchandise was as large as a tennis court. An array of fork-lifts and nested handtrucks were clustered around one of the large support columns that were regularly spaced about every twenty feet.

There was nothing for me here. This was transient goods. I was looking for something stored more permanently, and certainly not as openly exposed as this material awaiting reshipment. I walked noiselessly on my crepe-soled shoes to the rear of the building where broad concrete stairs adjacent to the freight elevator led to the upper floors in switchback fashion. The concrete flooring on the second floor was gritty underfoot. Years of use had worn off its once-smooth surface.

The second floor was darker, but I could see well enough. Paralleling the back wall stood three long rows of metal lockers of the type normally found in school gymnasium dressing-rooms. Each had a padlock affixed to it. Nearby lay a large quantity of four-inch, black plastic pipe, each section at least sixteen feet long. Isolated in an area I judged to be right over the maintenance shop was a considerable quantity of used restaurant equipment.

I climbed another flight of steel-capped concrete stairs to the third floor. It smelled musty and unused, despite the damp, chill breeze with wisps of fog seeping in through the ill-fitting windows. This floor was wooden, and it felt warped and splintered under my feet. The ceiling was no more than ten feet high, so the sills of the still-intact windows along the front of the building were at chest level. I started toward them, and then my toe kicked something on the floor that skittered away with a metallic clatter.

I froze, then stood still for a full thirty seconds, listening. All I could hear were the woeful strains of a Smoky Mountain ballad floating up the elevator shaft. I crouched and felt around for the object I had kicked. It was rectangular, made of sheet metal, and my questing fingers found on its outside a thick-feeling, oxidation-resistant paint. For anyone who had fired as many guns as I have, the shape, size, and construction of the metal box were a dead giveaway: it was the protective liner from a small-caliber ammunition container. Scattered around it on the floor were the cigarette butts, burned matches, and crushed paper cups it had contained before I kicked it over.

Where there’s ammo there’s bound to be guns. I hadn’t found them because Colisimo was too clever to keep them in an unlicensed, unbonded warehouse in their original, easily-identifiable packaging. The second and third floors contained little that was large enough for the purpose, except the gymnasium lockers on the second floor. The rows of innocent-looking lockers could very well fill Colisimo’s need for concealment.

I eased down the stairs and approached the louver-doored lockers. I opened the first padlock with Ruby Hernandez’ pick and torque wrench in shorter time than a high-school student could have done it with the proper key. Standing up on end inside the locker was a long, narrow wooden box that barely fitted inside the tall, narrow locker. I wrestled it out onto the cement floor, then attacked the wing nuts clamping the lid to the body of the box. Again the overall shape and weight was a giveaway: even before I had the cover off I knew the box was fitted with a built-in rack containing arms ready for shipment. When I removed the lid, the light filtering upward from the ground floor disclosed an even dozen M-16 U.S. Army rifles, each in its own individual airtight plastic bag.

I opened three more randomly-selected lockers and inspected the boxes each contained. The arsenal appeared to be evenly divided between the M-16s and Browning.50 caliber machine-guns. I found no ammunition. It was even money the ammo was already wending its way southward in the hold of a tramp steamer or an innocuous-looking shrimp boat, and that the weapons were next.

It was time to leave.

I moved to the front of the building and went from window to window until I found one where the missile-shielding slats nailed to the outer frame had a gap between them wide enough for me to reconnoiter the street. The fog had become even more dense, obscuring visibility for any distance. An approaching pair of automobile headlights burned a path through the mist on my right, and for a moment I thought it might be the police cruiser I’d seen previously, making another loop on its appointed rounds.

But it wasn’t the cruiser. The car, a dark sedan, passed underneath my window, slowed abruptly, and swung into the alleyway between the warehouse and the wrecking yard fence. The turn was made with a dexterity and speed indicating the driver had made it many times before.

I left the window and ran to the alley side of the building. It was a solid brick wall interrupted only by the necessary thick metal fire door that slid sideways on tracks and provided access to the fire escape. It was secured from the inside by an ordinary drop-lock sliding bolt.