Chapter 15

DeeDee had been monitoring the local police and fire department channels and he suspected that they were both concerned enough about the loud explosions and the fireball exploding into the sky to get send some units our way, notification of scheduled demolitions or not. That had been one seriously huge bonfire that consumed the ambush house and now with all of our business here more or less completed, it was really time to get our asses far away from here.

The idea of torching the Marauder to give Norman's already rather crispy corpse some additional cremation was laughable. Even the internal hydrogen fires hadn't breached most of the integrity of the interior cabin. Maybe a few large doses of the Foole's rather singular napalm might have done the trick eventually, but to what end? There couldn't be all that many South African built Marauders in public hands locally and I didn't particularly care if the investigators eventually indentified Norman's rather flame broiled corpse. They'd certainly have an interesting time figuring out how he was killed and only a lunatic could declare it as murder. It looked exactly like what it was ... an extremely weird freak accident.

Given a week, we could have completely policed up the grounds of our private little battleground, but we didn't have another hour or anything close to it. We settled for quickly napalming all of the corpses we'd stuffed into wrecked SUV's and tossing onto the numerous cremation bonfires any body part we could hastily find that was larger than a thumb, but we had no chance to find and destroy everything. As far as I was concerned, it was quite safe to leave all of Norman's military hardware lying around. All of his guns had their serial numbers removed anyway, just on principle. Sure, investigators might be able to trace these weapons as belong to Norman and his organization, eventually, but that wasn't any sort of a risk to us. None of this particularly pointed in any way towards me!

I'd left a lot of expended .45 ACP brass all over the landscape, but I'd worn gloves when loading my magazines, and no prints or DNA should be on any of them. No worries there. As for the lead bullets where I'd had misses, those could probably traced with a little luck to a vintage grease gun, but I always believed it was just good operational security to destroy or dump any weapon compromised during a mission. It had been a fun toy to use today, but soon it would be in one of the Foole's secure containers heading for very deep water. For temporary use I'd grabbed a couple of guns from the battlefield, but nothing I considered keeping for long-term use. Before I left Florida for good I'd have to raid Pete's weapons bunker at least one more time to get some hardware that was 99.9% safe to use in the future.

As for my HushPuppy, I'd policed all of my spent brass and didn't have any misses. The bodies of those victims were now smoking ash and the heat was intense enough that I hoped the lead bullets would have melted or distorted enough to make forensic match-up impossible. Untraceable to my rare and very silenced gun. It and I were destined for a long happy relationship together, but I'd still replace the barrel and the firing pin, just in case some lab tech got lucky.

So, we quickly did what limited clean-up we could do until DeeDee gave us the warning that we'd be having visitors soon, so we called it 'enough' and drove off. Local police and fire radio dispatch indicated that they were both on the way and we needed to get gone! When safely on the nearbyy county roads we started to see flashing lights and the sounds of incoming sirens off in the distance, but at a far enough of a distance that they likely never even caught a glimpse of the Foole's big rental car. Naturally, it was another casualty of this expedition that would also soon spend the rest of its material life down in stygian depths underwater.

Sometimes, as the Foole remarked, getting justice, or even revenge can be both expensive and wasteful ... especially if done properly!

We didn't return back to Pete's beach house up north. The next big operation was going to happen in or near the Watters estate house on the beach near Coral Gables, as the suspiciously cautious crime lord would be packing up his collection of stolen goodies about now and preparing to ship them off to safety. The Foole did have two of his employees watching things there, but we needed to move ourselves relatively close at hand, to be ready to move at little or no notice to either intercept the movers in transit (the easiest and least dangerous plan) or to assault the new hidden storage place, which we hoped wouldn't have too much security.

Hopefully we wouldn't have to do either for another day or even two. Besides, I'd already killed enough people for one day. Not to mention that I had two minor bullet holes in myself!

We didn't know whether the stolen art was going to go north or south, so we compromised and found a cheap hotel right next to the University of Miami. The Foole had lots of absolutely flawless fake IDs and he loved showing them off anyway, but to my considerable relief he just paid cash for the night. As I mentioned, he was blessed with an absolutely forgettable face and as for myself, once I was back in athletic shorts and a tank top I looked just like all of the other coeds bouncing about the area.

As for DeeDee, he'd had more than enough fun over the last few days and he and the Foole settled up accounts quietly in our hotel room before we had a late dinner. The Foole paid top wages but I tossed in a couple of bundles of Franklins from my gym bag of petty cash, just out of my own personal gratitude. Besides, there was nothing but more gunplay expected in the days ahead, and while the old white-haired retired thief made an excellent rear guard, none of us wanted to see him get accidentally hurt. Besides, this wasn't his war.

Pete on the other hand, now had a perfectly willing medical patient, and while the Foole was gone getting some updates from his field team of assistants in person, my rather skilled medic cleaned, patched and stitched me up to nearly as good as new. The shoulder wound would hurt for awhile, but it was my left, non-shooting one, and it would heal up nicely once given time to rest. Once all of the medical supplies were put away, my strong and mostly silent companion then managed to find my nude form suitably distracting and we rather indulged ourselves for a few fun (and orifice) filled a brief but satisfying hour until the Foole returned and we discussed plans in the privacy of the hotel room.

"Watters is clearing everything out tonight!" The Foole announced. "He didn't waste any time at all and the trucks are already there loading. Two big ones with one SUV out in front of them that will probably have armed security guards. No definite idea yet where it's all heading for though. My watchers have been trying to listen in to the petty chit-chat with some big parabolic microphones but they're a bit too far off to eavesdrop well. They did hear something about getting everything 'chilled down'."

"What sort of trucks out of curiosity?" I wondered out of exhausted curiosity. Knowing by now a few of the Watters family subsidiary enterprises, I thought if they used some of their own trucks, instead of spending the extra time to get generic rentals, I might have something of an idea where they'd come from ... and if they just might be returning there too. I'd hoped for some sleep tonight, since I'd had none last night while getting the house ready for the ambush party for Norman.

"Some big local produce company, they think. They saw some big pictures of lettuce and carrots but didn't get a good look at the smaller writing on the sides. They still don't have a good view of the trucks from that angle even now. Just the cabs are in sight at the moment."

"Produce ... Ha! Wally-boy and his party and their gunsel friends used the tunnels under the area to move unseen. There are a lot of local secret entrances and exits, mostly all dating back to Prohibition and liquor smuggling, but they run dope and guns the same way now. One of those tunnels, one of the furthest ones out running west, ran right under a family owned produce distribution warehouse. It's a big place with halfway decent security inside, but several handy crawlspaces for getting under the security fence. I visited there once not too long ago."

"How much internal security?" The Foole enquired, clearly interested in making the seizure there, instead of via roadside banditry. Sure that was the simple way to do it, but any extra security would make the likelihood of success via a direct assault somewhat uncertain ... and a far greater chance of innocent bystanders incurring some accidental casualties. None of us wanted that!

"Not much more than the usual. Inside, the distribution center is pretty much an above-board business, that is ... most of the employees are real ones, and not gangsters. Watters won't want to change the routine too much, to avoid drawing attention to the place, since this seems to be a favorite family place to hide things more or less in plain sight."

"So, maybe an extra guard at the gate and another one or two patrolling the fence line, and a few more guys with guns hidden in their pockets inside?"

"If even that." I proclaimed. "My bet, and you can put me down for $100 right now, is that they won't move any of the art by those trucks. They're just for show, like a shell-game except that the barker has already palmed the pea in his palm first. They'll make a big show tonight of apparently secretly moving out the trucks, each them going someplace safe and harmless, while immediately afterwards they'll move out all of the art via the underground tunnels to the warehouse early this morning. Probably once at the distribution center they'll load everything right onto one of the dozens of produce trucks at the normal loading dock and leave them parked and locked up until they're safe to be moved again to a new more permanent location. They wouldn't look at all out of place ... nothing to be seen or heard, and definitely no need to unload them in front of thirty or so potential witnesses, most of whom aren't on the family payroll except for their mundane jobs. They'd just put a fairly normal looking security guard or two outside near the loading dock and maybe a supervisor deeper into the family business to keep watch inside. It will all be very quiet, very normal and hopefully boring."

"I won't take that bet ... my instincts are telling me that you're probably right. Give me that address - I think I'd like to get one of my watchers over there right now to start watching. That will give us some backstop help, just in case. Devious ... it's just what I'd do in this circumstance!"

"There's one easy way to make certain. We should go back into the tunnel system from the abandoned dry cleaner entrance that DeeDee and I explored, and see if Watters' gang is now running dollies up and down the tunnels from the entrance we thought led straight to the estate. We might not be able to get close enough to see, but the sounds would be unmistakable ... and pretty loud."

He, or rather we, were both quite right. The remaining watcher covering the main entrance to the Watters estate in Coral Gables soon reported two more produce distribution trucks arriving, and also more importantly, quite a few arriving cars of young men arriving at both the estate and the produce distribution center. Probably a collection of Watters foot-soldiers now urgently needed for more menial porting duties, to help move the art through the tunnels to the produce warehouse. This more or less confirmed that if we attempted to just follow the trucks, that none of them would lead us anywhere. The Foole had brought down only limited support with him, just a few assistants, and there was no way we could shadow all four of the trucks anyway.

The convincing factor for me was the increased activity at the produce facility, a mundane operation that should require the number of obviously armed guards it suddenly now possessed, with additional numbers still arriving.

"Ready to put all of our eggs into just one underground basket?" I asked.

"It would be quite foolish to do so, but I feel confident of success! Besides, if we really screw this one up we can still track all of the art down later." He replied, but I didn't quite share his complete optimism. Already I was worried about how I'd quietly get the Foole past all of the new guards without having to start a loud shooting war that we probably couldn't win.

Yeah, let's just hope we didn't fuck this up enough so that there wouldn't ever be a next time to try!

Just to make things interesting, the Foole made a series of quick phone calls and rustled into position at the last moment a quartet of private investigators hired from every agency in the phone book that could send a man in a car to perform an urgent tailing job and arrive within an hour. Naturally we didn't trust any of the hired private investigators with our secret concerning the produce distribution center, but we wanted to make some public appearance of tailing each of those four trucks leaving the Watters estate. We were fairly sure that all of them were empty and bound to lead their tails on a wild goose chase, but that was exactly the point! We wanted Watters to think that his ploy had worked and that any observers (including our team) would take the false trail, and for our part we wanted our tail to be noticeable, but utterly blatant. Always a delicate balancing act.

Besides, of the six private investigators we'd hired on short notice, at least or two would probably try to double their payday the moment they discovered that the Watters were involved. In fact we hoped they would try and rat us out ... more confirmation that his sneaky plan was bound to work! Each of the six would deal with one of the Foole's assistants, who would display false identification from a New England PI firm and drop a few hints that they would be directly helping the feds for an upcoming immanent investigation.

As for appearance, all four of the produce trucks were identical full-sized 48' reefers, or refrigerated produce trucks, and it didn't take long at all for members of the convoy to start detaching themselves for what would be long trips in four separate directions, much as we'd figured. Our hired tails followed the second truck as far away as Jacksonville and the third one even to Pensacola, where each parked themselves inside secure warehouse facilities where they were then more or less ignored by the warehouse staff at each place. Our PI's could rat on us all they wanted to, by then we were sure that all of them had been empty anyway, but our goal of giving the appearance of being fooled by these decoys remained.

If it had taken DeeDee a minute or two to bypass all of the security systems at the abandoned shop we'd entered the tunnels through last week, it instead only took the Foole a few seconds. He seemed to only caress the doorknob for a moment before it obligingly popped open for him and the backup cellular alarm system went obligingly off-line with another casual touch. No need to cut or bypass wires ... the Foole just briefly caressed the circuit box and everything went right to standby!

I'd never seen anyone half as good as the Foole at the art of B&E, or breaking and entering, and it certainly didn't involve any 'breaking' whatsoever. No mistake about it, DeeDee was pretty good, but the Foole was in a class all by himself. Maybe, as DeeDee had said, my partner really had been the world's greatest art thief before he'd joined the good guys. From what he'd insinuated, the stolen art recollection business was pretty lucrative! Probably the Foole had his milspec electronic jammer still hidden in his pocket, but from my viewpoint he might as well have been using magic!

Soon underground, lurking in the near total darkness (albeit with both of us wearing night-vision goggles, we could clearly hear the sounds of squeaking and squealing wheels and the shuffling footsteps in the distance of grunting laborers off in the distance down the main passageway. Risking a peek around the corner and down the main corridor to the left, I could just see a few armed guards and workers wheeling crates or carrying boxes off into the distance. We couldn't risk getting too close, but the moving men appeared to originate right from the passage that I'd suspected led to the Watters oceanfront estate and the trail of porters and their guards headed off into the right direction leading to the branching corridor to the right that led to the produce warehouse.

So far, so good!

In a quick whispered conference held back inside the abandoned shop, we quickly decided that our guesses and assumptions so far had been dead-on, and that the stolen art (at least for now) was in fact heading towards the distribution center ... which was where we needed to be ourselves!

Re-securing everything behind us, as if we'd never been there just took a few moments. and less than twenty minutes later we were sitting in the darkened car on a unlit side-street without streetlights about a block and a half away from the warehouse facility, preparing for the next phase ... the fun part, the actual recovery of the art. It was going to take the underground army of workers a few hours yet to complete their slow portage through the tunnels, so we'd have more than enough time to evaluate the security situation and make our own plans well before morning.

Since I'd slunk in and out of the warehouse grounds before and knew the lay of the land quite well from my earlier stake-out of Wally-Boy's car, I was the logical person to go in first, on point. Besides, the Foole didn't do wet-work, and probably I couldn't pull off seizing the omelet here without breaking more than a few egg shells. Pete was with us, for reasons that I couldn't entirely quite fathom, but he was currently sound asleep in the back seat and neither of us considered waking him. Nothing was likely to happen for several hours anyway but now with an operation immanent I was suddenly too wired to nap, despite my earlier exhaustion.

"How surgical do I need to make this?" I enquired. "Already I can see that security has been at least doubled since I was last here and there are going to be Watters stooges inside and out. With luck, they're loading up one of the trucks at the loading dock on the left side, so maybe I'll only need to take out a few guards when entering on the right, but if they're stashing things inside in a secure cold-room, this could get really wet and messy. Give me some parameters for just how much collateral damage will be acceptable to you?"

The Foole just shrugged, as if the whole thought of 'armed acquisition' wasn't entirely a comfortable one for him, but he indicated otherwise. "If they're armed, then they're Watters gunmen and accordingly they're enemy combatants. Do whatever you need to do then. Unarmed ... use your best judgment but avoid lethal force if possible."

"Sounds fair to me." I agreed. I was angry with Watters, and his seemingly endless crew of gunsel killers, but I had a new-found sense of proportion that I wanted to stick morally to. Killing criminals and armed gangsters, sure ... line them all up, I'm ready for them! Unarmed usually meant civilians in the wrong place at the wrong time. Maybe they were just as evil and nasty pieces of shit as their crime organization associates, but perhaps not. Better to disable them rather than kill them, unless they gave me trouble. Besides, I wasn't always real good at always telling the good guys from the bad ones without a scorecard.

At this point in my moral recovery I decided that I'd rather let one or two assholes live, rather than 'off' some decent chap that might have a wife and kids, who was just a hired employee that made the mistake of crossing my path. I'd came a little too close to doing that during my years with Norman, but that was one mistake I hadn't made yet ... and hoped to never have to!

Dressed for sneaking success in my black jeans, long-sleeved black top and balaclava covering my face and hair, I worked my way around to the far right hand side of the fence line and stopped for awhile behind some good cover to watch the guard patrol routine for the next hour or so. To my annoyance, their routine patrol pattern was disturbingly random and far from just a normal casual patrol. To anyone familiar with the normal activities of the produce distribution center, this new very high level of security was quite a noticeable departure from the usual. This made me think, as I quietly reported to the Foole over the secure scrambled radio, that the art was indeed here and probably being loaded somewhere over at the loading dock.

I circled around the back of the exterior fence line staying well out of sight of the numerous guards there, but couldn't really detect which of the six trucks currently parked along the loading docks on the left side of the facility was the one being loaded. The security there was even heavier with several obvious armed guards standing in front of the trucks, and probably several more were just inside the warehouse. From the sounds, it was quite busy inside there, but with all of the service doors closed other than the truck or trucks being loaded, there just wasn't anything yet to be seen within. Reporting this, I reluctantly circled back quietly to the right side to watch the perimeter guards there some more.

Like it or not, the only good entrance inside and under the wire was still by the drainage ditch, where heavy water runoff had created a few small gaps under the fence. The very place I'd used last time was still the deepest and the best, especially since I was now armed, but the new outside guards had noticed this danger and always gave it careful and close attention whenever they passed by. One guard even always came to a complete and full stop here to better scan the outside perimeter near this spot. He was also clever enough not to use his large flashlight much, the frequent use of which would hurt his night vision, and I suspected that he'd see me if I came too close to this ditch or even nearby in the relatively open field on the other side.

This was going to be rather annoying! Clearly someone at least as bright as me had figured out that this right-side approach was clearly the weakest security-wise ... and they were right. There was only one guard covering the other three fence approaches, but none of these sides possessed a quick or easy entry onto the grounds. Sure, I could cut the wire there, making a new entrance, but it would take longer to do than would be safe, given the heightened security.

Still, it was only just early morning, just after 2 a.m. and from the sounds of interior activity the transportation and loading process was still continuing, so I had time to observe and wait. If nothing else, eventually one of the two roaming guards here would have to stop and take a piss. When they did, then maybe I'd have time to squirm under the wire and move to a lurking spot along the side of the warehouse, where old broken pallets and broken crates were scattered in piles everywhere, and these would make a good temporary hiding place, once inside.

Fortunately, I can be extremely patient when I need to be. Sometimes I think that is the only real difference between a good operator and a great one ... the ability to lurk and stay hidden for hours or even days if necessary, and know instinctively when the perfect moment is there to act.

At just a little bit after 4 a.m., my moment of opportunity came at last. Bonzo, the more suspicious and active of the two guards on this side, parked himself for a moment up at the furthest upper corner of the perimeter and unzipped himself to take a leak up against the side of the building, and his slightly more passive buddy (Bozo) more or less froze in place to keep watch while his buddy pissed, or perhaps they were just catching up on gossip, but it gave me the minute I needed to scamper across the dangerously open ground to the drainage ditch.

Being a skinny little bitch, I can slink with the best of them, and gliding like a shadow in the thin moonlight I made it into the rain gully unseen. Then slithered on my stomach to the gap under the fence and trusting entirely in luck I crawled under it and rolled myself flat and slowly across the twenty or so feet of open ground until I was up against a pile of old wooden pallets. Lying still in the darkness, I hoped to be mistaken for just another pile of junk, especially since the guards had shown much more interest in what was outside the fence than what was already inside!

I'd also sort of baited the trap a bit by leaving my bigger gun, an M-4 assault rifle I'd rescued from the field of death earlier right in the ditch just outside the gap in the fence. I hadn't wanted to use this gun anyway, as it wasn't silenced. This was no time or place for a loud firefight! Still, I had to prepare myself for the worst! Bonzo, being both suspicious and observant, would be sure to notice this on his next pass by, and this would more than adequately get his attention so that I could attend to him properly.

My worst concern was that Bozo, for reasons of his own, might decide to accompany or worse, shadow Bonzo by ten yards or more during their next perimeter pass, and this was pretty much just what happened! Bonzo remained out in front, and quite at his paranoid best, stopped short about ten yards away from the gap in the fence and shouted out something to the trailing Bozo. Then he did me the unmistakable favor of even turning on his flashlight to better look at the gift rifle I'd left for them just outside the fence!

With their night vision now gone, I only had to stand-up right behind them and after taking just a few quiet steps forward I gave each of them in quick turn an introduction to my HushPuppy. Quietly, like a pair of rustling autumn leaves, the pair of guards slumped to the ground without too much rattling of their assault rifles and gear as they fell. A pair of whispered insurance shots, made their continued non-interference and permanent silence a certainty. Now I had some free range to move about here on the opposite side of the building from the loading docks and I did so, after pausing to police up my four spent shell casings from the ground and moving the pair of bodies under the cover of some of the broken pallets, to hide them from all but a deliberate search.

Bonzo had a rather nice submachine gun, a H&K MP-5, a considerably better than average and rather compact weapon, and I grabbed it, along with a quartet of spare loaded magazines for it. Not 9mm ammo from my quick look at it, but not my beloved .45 ACP either. Something in-between, and probably more than adequate, especially since I hoped to never have to fire it this morning! This wasn't the time or the place to fondle freshly fallen fruit or quibble over spoils of war, so I slung it over my shoulder and quickly reloaded four fresh 9mm HushPuppy rounds into its magazine, to again give me the full nine available rounds.

I didn't have all that many of the special reduced powder load rounds left, but they were my best and safest path in and out of danger here, so I didn't begrudge their use. Even if I had to use them all, it would be more than worth it. When things got quiet later on I could make some more, but for now they were my best tool for self-preservation.

Oddly, it was the front of the facility that seemed to offer the best (quietest and safest) route around to the left where the loading docks were. I'd have just one guard out in front to deal with, instead of two at the very back rear, then I could slink once more right through the employee parking lot nearly all the way right up to the front door, if I wanted to sneak a peek inside there ... and I did.

Even crunching the gravel slightly behind him didn't alarm the guard as I walked up to him rather deliberately. He must have assumed that I was one of the fence guards behind him and the only thing that passed through his mind as he died was a 9mm HushPuppy round. I didn't even bother with an insurance round from my pistol but used my knife instead. It was nicely dark and quiet where I was and with a little hushed shuffling of gravel that mostly hid the bloodstains, I rolled the body of the guard underneath one of the employee's parked cars. Out of sight, now very out of mind!

With the usual shift change for the morning produce handlers still over an hour away, I risked a quick shuffle over to the main entrance to peek inside the door but didn't see anything much other than an armed guard that was too bored to notice my fast peek inside. The noise inside had diminished considerably, giving me the impression that the transporting and loading of the artwork had been mostly completed. A further quick look around the corner towards the loading dock rather confirmed this, as I noted several unarmed men now standing around outside enjoying a smoke break, near but mostly not mixing with the armed guards. Two at my quick count, but another one or two more could easily have passed casual notice inside the docking bays or otherwise just out of view, but nearby.