Chapter 3

The next day, the news was full of the drug warehouse fire. It was pretty obvious that this was a big setback for the Carnoli family, but it would hardly be something that would drive them out of business. The Carnolis biggest income was from one form or another of the protection racket. That was going to be a lot harder than drugs to beat. With drugs, a destruction of tangible property would do the job, but with protection, it was necessary to break the will of hardened thugs. This could mean a one-on-one battle, and I was not sure of my ability to come out ahead in that.

I happened to be browsing the web one day when I ran across what I thought I needed. I had received some cursory training in fighting with the police baton, but I was a long way from being an expert with it, and an expert I needed to be.

I looked through the Sola Vista Yellow Pages and those for surrounding towns until I found a dojo that listed "stick fighting" as one of the skills they taught. That was the place I needed to look into. The next day, I showed up to look the dojo over.

Boy oh boy, was I impressed. The dojo was run by an ex-Special Forces man, Bill Wilson, who seemed to know everything I needed to know. I told him that I was an ex-cop and was familiar with the standard baton training, but I wanted more. I claimed that I had been mugged on two occasions, and I wanted a more effective means of self defense. I asked if Bill would teach me everything he knew if I was willing to pay for private lessons. Bill agreed, and I said that I would be there on Monday, Wednesday, and Friday for a two-hour class. Bill was a little dubious that I could managed that much physical stress, but I insisted that I wanted to try.

The classes started the next day, and Bill worked my ass off, but I advanced quickly. By the end of three weeks, I had surpassed my level with the baton while I was an active cop, and anything after that was new ground. I started carrying a stick with me at all times, whether or not I was wearing my ninja uniform. The stick was one inch in diameter and 24 inches long.

Around the training, I was trying to get a finger on the Carnoli family protection rackets. The first case I was able to touch was a department store that was paying $1,000 a week to stay away from vandalism. I tripped over this one through Dan Alsop. He knew of my vendetta against the Carnoli family and was wholly behind me. He had the Argent Department Store, Inc. as his client. Well, actually, it was Wayne Argent who was his client. One Saturday during a weekly golf outing, Argent complained about the fact that the police were not doing enough to protect the local businesses. Dan sympathetically listened and asked the right questions. The next thing he knew, he had all of the information I needed to make a trial run at the protection scam.

The payoff was to a courier who showed up every Thursday at 3:00 PM at Argent's office. The courier was an employee of a regular courier service and not employed directly by the Carnolis. All he knew was that he was to pick up a package and deliver it to another office in a different part of town.

I was ready to follow the courier when he left to deliver the package. Argent had no idea where the package went after it left his office, so I was going to have to tail the courier to find out. This was no problem because the courier had no idea that he was being followed, so he made no effort to hide his path. The delivery was to a small office in a strip mall. The office had this inscribed over the door: "Old World Investments—appointments only, please."

There was a receptionist in front of a partition that divided the office into two parts. There was a communicating door, and that was it. The courier went in and handed the package to the receptionist. She signed for it, and the courier left. The receptionist spoke into her intercom for a moment, then got up and walked to the door. She tapped in a peculiar sequence and the door was opened. She went into the room, and I could see through the partially opened door that there were at least two men in there sitting at a table and counting money.

The receptionist came back out after about five minutes and sat down at her desk. She picked up the newspaper, and I saw her working on the crossword puzzle. That went on for about 10 more minutes until another courier showed up. The routine was repeated, and the receptionist left the package in the back room. I watched this happen two more times and figured that I had seen enough.

I moved my car to park it as close to the office as I could get and got myself ready to act after the next courier showed up. He came and went, and I had my hood on and was entering the office through the front door just as the receptionist walked through the door to the back room. I hit that door with a stiff left arm just as they were closing it.

The door flew open and struck the woman in the back. She practically flew the few feet to the table where three men were sitting. The receptionist landed on the table and broke it badly enough that it collapsed onto the floor. There was a man standing against the wall to the right; he was holding a Uzi submachine gun. He pointed the Uzi at me, but I poked him in the gut with my stick and then hit him across the neck with it hard enough to collapse his windpipe. He forgot all about me as he struggled to breath.

Meanwhile, the woman was lying across the table and the men were so surprised that they were slow to move. I tapped each one in the side of the head with my stick and knocked them unconscious. As they fell to the floor, I turned my attention back to the woman. She was struggling to pull a gun from a thigh holster that she had been wearing under her dress. Anybody with a gun is a danger, so I did not pause to consider her gender. I popped her across her forearm just short of her wrist and broke both of the small bones in there. It was not a compound fracture, so, if she acted the least bit sensibly, she was in no immediate danger of bleeding to death. The woman screamed and fainted from the pain.

I quickly confiscated all of the guns, including the Uzi and the .357 revolver the man was carrying. Each of the other three men had short-barrel Police Specials in .38 caliber. The woman had a 9mm Beretta. I was now the proud possessor of five pistols and a submachine gun, all of which I was sure were not traceable through ordinary police means.

At that moment, I heard the door chime. It looked like it was safe to do so, so I went to the front reception area and signed for the package as John Doe. I scrawled the signature so much that it would take an expert 10 or 15 minutes to figure out what I had written. The courier looked puzzled, so I pointed to my mask and said, "Allergic to the sun, so I have to stay covered during the day to prevent cancer." The courier nodded sympathetically and left.

I went to the front door and mounted the CLOSED sign before locking the door. Following that, I went back into the rear office and tried to work out what was going on. It didn't take long to figure it out. The men were the receivers and counters, while the woman was just a cover figure to keep outsiders away from them. The guard was obvious.

It looked like one man counted the money, the second man verified the count, and the third man entered the receipt of the money into a ledger. There was a page for each victim, and the ledger kept account of the money collected each week from each account. The name of the victim was written at the top of the page, along with the expected amount, and the actual receipt was noted in a column along side the date the money came in. Judging from the sums recorded in the ledger, the take for a Thursday must be on the order of 25-35 thousand dollars just in this one office.

There was an open safe with over $20,000 lying in neat stacks on its shelves. I found a large briefcase that was currently empty and stuffed all of the money that I could find into it. I found five more ledgers in the safe, one for each day. I took those ledgers and the briefcase of money and dumped them in the trunk of my car along with the guns from the crooks. I went back into the office and broke a knee joint of the living people in there. That was to become my trademark.