Injustice III
Chapter 8

Copyright© 2017 by Uncle Jim

Friday night we made love and then had sex after Paddy and Maureen left for his Daughter’s apartment, following another fine home cooked meal. We hugged, kissed, massaged, and rolled around in the bed for a long time before we got to the sex, which was long and passionate. It was a good thing that I had cast the privacy spell and the noise suppression spell before we started, because Jill was very noisy tonight. We went over the cliff nearly together, and Jill was left unable to move by her final orgasm. We were both breathing heavily for many minutes afterwards, as we cooled down and revived. I pulled the covers up over us, as the room had definitely cooled down while we were busy. I thought about showering again, but by the time both of us had revived, we went to sleep instead. We awoke rather late on Saturday morning, the 23rd of January.

“We need to shower,” Jill told me on sitting up. The room was warm now, as the heat had come on early that morning. We showered and took care of our morning business before Jill went to make breakfast and I shaved. We had both donned our traveling clothes.

Following a breakfast of pancakes, eggs, and bacon with orange juice, toast, and some fair Apple Butter that I had found in a store here, we checked that we had packed everything that we would need in Salem before transferring it to Jill’s SUV and us to Paddy’s shop. I had also checked my wards around the apartment and made sure that everything that needed to be turned off was.

We found Paddy and Maureen both at his shop. Maureen’s Mother was working today as were Paddy’s electricians. Maureen was surprised to see the way we were dressed.

“You’re leaving!” she said in a startled but sad voice.

“We’re just going to Salem for a few days, dear. There are some nasty people there that we need to do something about,” Jill told her, as she pulled her close and held her.

“Will you be back then?” the small girl asked.

“Yes, we’ll be back then, dear,” Jill assured her.

This was when I brought up something that had been bothering me, since we had interrogated ‘the Fish’.

“If these guys are as poor as ‘the Fish’ made them out to be, how are they financing all of the Magic Hater’s operations? There has to be a source of money somewhere,” I finished.

“Are they still smuggling stuff in?” Jill asked. “And if so what?”

“Drugs,” Paddy instantly answered. “They can be moved in small batches and are worth a lot,” he added.

“I don’t know. Their ancestors did that, but the author of the tunnel book wasn’t all that convinced that the tunnels were still passable in many places, plus he had seen that many of the entrances had been sealed to prevent their use,” I reminded them.

“To move drugs they wouldn’t need to access many of the places on the tunnels, only just a few,” Paddy reminded us.

“There was supposed to be a tunnel under the old Custom House, which was built on the site of the even older Crowninshield house. He was one of the major smugglers,” Jill told us before remembering something else.

“A number of those robber barons also served as the Salem Custom Collector during the period the tunnels were being built and were in heavy use,” she reminded us.

“So they could still be smuggling things in,” I added.

“But Salem is no longer a major port. There isn’t even an active Customs office there,” Paddy told us.

“Still, it’s on the ocean, and I am sure that some ships stop there even if they are only fishing boats or private yachts. The maps we have of the city still show several piers, and there are supposed to be cruse ships stopping there from what I read in one of the articles that Jill downloaded,” I told him.

“If that’s so, then perhaps they have a Customs Inspector there now,” Paddy agreed.

“Let’s look up that Custom House on the internet and see what they have to say about it. It wasn’t covered that extensively in the tunnel book,” I suggested, so Jill fired up the computer, and we spent some time going over the various sites that discussed the Custom House, a number of which had pictures of the building and the displays inside it. This was little of real value to us until we happened onto a brochure about Nathaniel Bowditch, which provided some additional information and another map that indicated the traffic flow of a number of streets around downtown Salem.

It was nearly 1030 by the time we were ready to leave, so we stopped to pick up some fast food to eat on the way to Salem. We had decided earlier to backtrack to where we had exited I-93 on Sunday rather than trying to get on it from the north side of Southie. It required a bit over a-half hour to reach the outskirts of Salem where we left the highway at the exit for Essex Street and drove into Salem proper.

By the time we found a parking place in the Museum Place Garage, it was well past noon. Since it was still too early to check into the Hawthorne Hotel, we decided to do a bit of sightseeing, as I had seen a number of people with pamphlets, brochures, and books walking around doing just that as we had worked our way through Salem to the parking garage. We took the tunnel book and the Bowditch brochure, which we had printed out, and set out to recon the areas where we suspected the tunnels were still in passable shape, which was along Essex Street.

We paid particular attention to the exterior chimneys on the historic houses and buildings along that street and several streets that intersected it. We also noted a number of local restaurants and other food locations while doing this. I made mental notes about the things that we had seen. One thing that we had seen was the unusually large number of police out on foot patrol who were keeping an eye on the tourists, especially those who appeared interested in the tunnel locations.

By 1630 that afternoon, we’d had a snack and returned to the Parking Garage to retrieve some of our luggage from the SUV. On reaching the front desk of the Hawthorne to check in, they wanted a credit card to cover the cost of the room. Using a spell, I persuaded the clerk to take cash for the four nights of our reservation. The woman accepted that, and we signed in. We were using phony names, and it required a compliance spell to convince her that she had seen those names on our driver’s licenses. Our room was on the third floor, and we took the elevator up.

The room wasn’t that bad as we had gotten a Superior room with a single queen size bed, but for an expensive hotel, one could expect a bit more room. We weren’t worried about that, as we had other things on our minds. I immediately sat on the floor and cast my wards in the floor, walls, and the ceiling of the room before we returned to the garage, which charged for parking, to move our SUV from there to take advantage of the free parking that the hotel provided. On returning to our room following that, I called the rest of our luggage and other things to me from the SUV.

Since we couldn’t start on our more detailed reconnaissance until well after dark when there would be fewer people out and about, we took a nap until a bit after 1900 that evening. After changing our clothes, we went out to have dinner at one of the restaurants that we had seen during our earlier explorations. Over a fine dinner, we discussed what we would be doing tonight, but in Gaelic, as few here would speak or understand it. We did get some peculiar looks from other customers because of this.

Following dinner, we returned to our room once again to change into our black recon and working outfits, before setting out to check for the rooms that ‘the Fish’ had told us the young group of Magic Haters had here on the sixth floor of the hotel. We took the stairs, as taking the elevator could result in others seeing us.

A quick search of the sixth floor revealed that only a few of the rooms there were occupied. We had used a listening spell on several of those rooms. We wondered if so few rooms on this floor were occupied because the floor was supposed to be haunted, or if it was just the January lull. We continued checking rooms until we came to two doors without numbers on them, All of the other doors had numbers.

“Does this seem unusual or suspicious?” I asked Jill in a whisper.

“Yes, use the listening spell,” she told me. I cast the spell again drawing its glyph on the door of the first room. All that we heard was some muttering.

“It’s coming from the other room. Let’s transfer inside and see what we can learn,” I told her before casting the transfer spell, and then the invisibility spell around us once we were in the room. We had appeared in a room that was obviously a bedroom. The connecting door to the other room was open, and we moved up to it to listen to what was being said, and to see who was there.

We could see four men sitting around a table drinking and talking. They were young men who appeared to be between twenty-eight and thirty-two years of age with typical Boston accents. It appeared that a question had been asked just before we arrived.

“The delivery is scheduled for tomorrow afternoon, Ben,” the first man closest to us answered.

“How far out will they make contact and then transfer the goods, George?” another man asked.

“The launch will leave at 4:30 and meet the merchant ship three and a-half miles or so off the coast, Joe,” the first man who was named George told the second man.

“What time is the meeting scheduled for?” a third man asked.

“It’s scheduled for 5:10 and the delivery should be completed by 5:30 or so, Nate,” George told the third man, meaning the fourth man was Ben, the original questioner.

“That’s good. That will be after sunset, but it will still be light enough to see without the use of additional lights, plus high tide is at around 3:30 so it will have gone down some by the time they return,” Nate told them.

“Also the moon sets at around 3:30 that afternoon and won’t rise again until around 1:00 in the morning,” the one who we believed to be Ben added. “That means it will be a dark night when they return to Darby Wharf to unload the Heroin. The tide should be favorable for them to unload and to use the tunnel entrance going from the wharf and under the old Custom House to Essex Street,” he added.

“Yes, George, it was really brilliant of you to get the job of local Customs Inspector when those cruise ships proposed to begin stopping here,” Nate said.

“And getting that launch with just the right crew was a real piece of luck,” Joe added.

“So just how much Heroin is coming in on this shipment?” Ben asked.

“There will be eleven hundred pounds, 500 kilograms, split between two pallets, so it should be easy to move through the tunnels. It took every cent that I could beg, borrow, or steal in the Society’s name to arrange this,” George told them. There were whistles when the others heard that.

“The sale of that much Heroin should fund our activities for some time,” several of them said with smiles.

“When will the buyers be here?” Ben asked in a stern voice, not sharing in the others merriment.

“On Wednesday afternoon at around 1:30 or so. We’ll load the trucks around noon time at the back of the museum,” Joe told him.

“Good,” Ben replied. “Everyone check your part in this. We can store the product under the museum until Wednesday morning. It will be safe there. We’ll meet here on Tuesday night with the others and inform them of this. A successful sale will be a big boost for our activities, and we may even be able to take down that criminal Hardtrick,” he finished, as they all raised their glasses in a toast before finishing their contents and preparing to leave.

“Remember,” George cautioned them, “use different entrances to leave by. A couple of you can go to the museum to leave.” They were all gone in a few minutes, leaving the empty glasses on the table.

“Well, isn’t that interesting,” I asked Jill after they had been gone for several minutes.

“Shouldn’t we follow them to see what tunnel entrances they use?” Jill asked.

“All in due time, my dear,” I told her. “We don’t want anyone to see the elevator going from the sixth floor to the basement. Let’s go down to the fifth floor and ride the elevator to the second floor. We can take the stairs to the basement from there.” She looked at me strangely on hearing this.

“Never do anything obvious, even if you think no one is watching, because you never know who may be watching,” I added.

We quickly learned that not all of the stairs led to the basement, but discovered the one that did after several tries. Naturally the metal door between the bottom of the stair well and the basement was locked, but that was no impediment to us, and we transferred to the other side of it. Jill had called a flashlight to us before we did that, but it turned out that we didn’t need it initially.

Do I need to mention that the basement of the hotel was huge and filled with various types of working machinery. There were pumps to supply water to all of the areas of the buildings, and sewage pumps to empty it out. Huge electrical panels handled distribution of electricity to the various floors and special equipment like the elevators and the kitchen equipment. There were huge water heaters and boilers to supply hot water for washing and steam for heating the building. In other parts of the basement there was the laundry for cleaning all of the bed linen and other things, plus there was the trash collection and disposal area. It could be quite noisy down here when everything was running, but presently it wasn’t overly noisy.

From the entry we moved toward the south and west sides of the basement, as that was where we expected to find entrances to the tunnel that ran along the south side of Essex Street and another that crossed Washington Square West to the houses in the historic Essex Institute District. On checking the west wall, we found an arched entrance that had been filled in with concrete blocks, but that had a steel door in the middle of it. This appeared to be what we were looking for as it was located where we would expect to find a tunnel to the north side of Essex Street. The historic houses located there were known as the Gardner Pingree House, the Tucker Daland House, the Essex Institute, the Armory, and the Andrew Safford House. All of these buildings were now under the care of the Peabody Essex Museum.

We found the steel door locked, but easily transferred to the other side of it after turning off our flashlight. The book had shown a picture of the sidewalk in front of the hotel with an area where glass bricks still remained to light the entrance of the tunnel. We could see dim light coming through the glass even though it was night. After moving well past this area, we turned our flashlight back on so we were able to see where we were going. We followed the tunnel for some distance even though it wasn’t in very good condition. We stopped after reaching the fourth entrance off of it, as they had all been blocked off, but two of them had doors in the new construction. We quickly back tracked to the basement of the Hawthorne, having learned little.

“I would say that no one used that tunnel tonight,” I said to Jill when we had returned to the basement.

“No, it doesn’t appear to be used much, as it needs a good bit of repair,” she acknowledged before we turned to the south wall of the basement to look for an entrance there.

 
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