Chapter 10

There had been a shift change for the guards, and no warehouse workers had shown up to punch in, so this was a good time for Billy and me to hit them. I was sure that the quiet day would lull the guards into a false sense of tranquility. With that, we probably would not have to kill any of them.

Billy and I went back into the warehouse the same way we had gone in last night. By this time, all four guards were lolling away the last few hours of their shift by relaxing in the air conditioned comfort of the office. We dropped through the roof hatch onto that same marijuana bale and slid down its side to the floor. Unfortunately, I had not been able to spot any surveillance cameras, so I did not know if the guards could see us from the office.

Well, if they could, they didn't. The walls of the office were opaque up for the first 3-4 feet and glass above that. We kept low as we got close to the office and were still not spotted. There were two doors, one at each end of the office, and Billy took a position at one while I took the other. I warned him to wait until I opened the door before he entered the office.

When I was ready, I threw open the door, and Billy followed my lead only moments later. Each one of us rushed at the nearest guard to hit him in the solar plexus. Of course, that resulted in a loss of air and a loss of coffee at the same time. We were able to move so fast that we caught the other two guards before they could react, and they were treated the same way.

Billy's pockets were full of plastic cable ties, so we were able to bind the guards' hands and feet before they had fully recovered from our initial attack. We left them sitting in the chairs while we attacked the filing cabinets. There were six filing cabinets with four drawers in each, so we had to work fast before we were forced to leave because of arriving workers.

Papers flew everywhere as we searched as quickly as we could for correspondence. All of the bills and invoices were from this location, so they were of no help, but we finally came across a folder containing some letters with names and addresses on them. We were running out of time, so we bundled up the letters and stuffed them in our shirts for later examination.

We decided to make this raid look like an attack from a rival gang, so we threw the guards out of the building and started the largest fire that we could manage with only the materials at hand for the job. We pushed all of the papers we were not interested in into one great pile on the office floor and set fire to them. Hopefully, the fire department would arrive in time to save the building because we did not know who was the owner. Once the fire was going well, we ran from the building and grabbed our SMs for the ride home.

Once we got home and had supper, all four of us dove in to go over the papers we had found in the warehouse office. We spent some time reading a paper and passing it along to next person to read. The idea was to try to spot something special in the text.

It was Mary who found the first item of note. "Who is this John Moran that I keep seeing references to?"

None of us recognized the name, but Mary continued, "I have been watching the local cable news network fairly closely, and they occasionally mention a 'John Moran;' do you suppose it could be the same guy? The 'John Moran' they talk about is reputed to be engaged in criminal activities, but he has not been arrested. The FBI has been looking for him for about a month."

My comment was, "I can't believe that it is the same guy. The John Moran you mention must be too smart to let his name show up in a business letter."

"Well, Dad, you are probably right, but this guy might just be too arrogant for his own good."

Now that was something that I had not considered. Suppose John Moran was so arrogant that he believed that he would never be caught, or even spotted, so he did not care where his name was used. If that were the case, the FBI should be able to pick him up, even with all of the legal safeguards that abounded throughout the laws that the FBI had to contend with. On the other hand, maybe there was a "mole" in the system who was confusing the FBI search for John Moran.

Unlikely as it seemed, that could be what was keeping the FBI from coming us with their man. Oh, well, we were not bound by such laws, and we could do anything we felt was morally justified. Okay, so we had a name, we still did not have a location. At the moment, all we could do was to keep looking through the papers for other names that stuck out.

Liz was the next one to spot a promising name. "Mary, have you heard anything about a Sam Watson? His name has shown up in two of the letters."

"No, I don't think so ... Wait a minute! A Sam 'Squeaky' Watson was picked up by the FBI in connection with the John Moran search, but he was released the next day for lack of anything to hold him on. It's beginning to sound like I should spend even more time paying attention to the news reports."

"Yes, Honey, it sure does. Keep it up, and you may spot a clue that we can use." Mary grinned in pleasure at the praise and the instructions to watch even more TV. Uh-oh, had we created a monster in our own midst?

There were several other names mentioned in the papers, but they were used only once. That meant that we didn't know who was important enough to try to follow up on. Hopefully, we would get a hint as our investigation continued.

The other thing we realized was that we had a source of supplier names for the drug business. Many of the letters contained addresses where payment should be delivered. It was interesting that none of the letters mentioned a check, implying that all payments were to be made in cash. Perhaps we could pick up some of that loose cash. We had all of the money we needed at the moment, but there might come a time when more money would be a big help.

Aha! Billy found a reference to a very recent sale amounting to $475,000 to be transferred to Lawson Enterprises at 1343 Hamilton Rd. The date was so recent that the money might still be there, so Billy and I planned to take a look tonight. Meanwhile, the two women were going to continue to try to find out where we could visit John Moran and Squeaky Watson.

That evening, we loaded our SMs into my SUV and I drove to within a mile of 1343 Hamilton Rd. I parked in a well-lit parking lot, and we left the SUV on our SMs. We moved into the shadows and hurried to our target. Lawson Enterprises occupied an office in a building housing three other offices of companies we did not recognize.

We hid our SMs and used the fire escape to reach the roof of the three-story building. It turned out that Lawson Enterprises occupied all of the second floor, so we expected to have a long search ahead of us unless we got very lucky. We entered the building through the roof hatch and had no trouble getting to the second floor.

There we found a long corridor with only one door available. This had to be the main entrance to our target, so I had Billy pick the lock while I stood guard. There was no sign of an alarm on the door, so we immediately looked for a laser beam-style alarm. Billy sprayed a mist directly away from the entry door and a beam showed up in the mist. It was red and easy to spot, so we simple ducked under it and began to search the room.

We didn't expect to find anything useful in the current room, but we were looking for doors leading to offices of company managers. The first office we entered appeared to be that of a purchasing agent, and we found a mass of evidence of the purchase of tropical fruit from Central America. Okay, now we knew what Lawson Enterprises did as a front, and we wanted to look elsewhere for evidence of criminal activity.

We looked into a couple of other offices with similar results, but we were rewarded when we got to the office at the end of the aisle. Here we found an outsized safe. Why in the hell would a company have such a large safe in a business office. Well, there was one way to find out—we looked.

Another of the toys that Billy had talked me into carrying was a device that could be used to pick a fancy combination lock by listening for the sound made by the internal mechanism as the dial was turned. I had practiced enough with the gadget that I could use it quite well, and it only took me approximately two minutes to know the combination to open the lock. I worked the combination and opened the door of the safe.

Inside were the expected ledgers, but there were also several money bags. As a concession to the youngster's curiosity, I had him count the cash in the money bags while I looked through the ledgers. I am no accountant, but I could interpret the columns of figures without too much trouble. In one of the ledgers, I found a listing for Moran and Associates. The figures noted were always within the range of $200,000 to $800,000, and they dated back almost 11 years. I decided to take this ledger with me while Billy smiled from ear to ear as he picked up the three money bags holding a total of $1,125,000! That was enough to make me smile, also.