Chapter 2

I admit it, in my day-to-day job I deal with some rather oddball characters on both sides of the law, some with a foot in each world. A few mired up to their necks! Such a character was one Denver D. Culpepper, aka DeeDee, a retired locksmith who had closed up shop and moved down to Palmetto Bay, putting up a new shingle advertising his availability as an 'experienced treasure hunter'. Probably because the sign 'Expert Burglar' would have attracted entirely the wrong sorts of customers, not to mention questing dwarves or even a wizard. I'd vaguely heard about him from a previous client and I probably burned a bridge with my old customer by pushing rather too forceful to get a contact phone number for him. It probably cost me another paying security job in the future, but for now I needed DeeDee more than I needed a career, or even a home left to live in.

DeeDee looked short, balding and dumpy, and of advanced middle-aged years ... but everyone said that he was the best local B&E (breaking and entering) man in South Florida. Theoretically retired after a long and apparently productive life in crime, he was now a part-time independent security specialist, sort of like me, and between jobs he combed the beaches with a metal detector hunting for pirate gold, Spanish silver or modern misplaced jewelry lost to the sands. He lived in the shadows now and liked it there, and he was extremely selective over the sort of work that he handled nowadays. My hard-won introduction earned me just three minutes of his time at a very public outdoor café to make my pitch.

"In a nutshell, I'm doing some private investigation in a matter concerning a possible serial killer that the Watters family might or might not be protecting. Together, they might or might not be smuggling drugs or running a sort of underground distribution railroad in tunnels under part of the city. I've got at least one very securely locked door between me and maybe finding a clue to possibly finding this killer ... perhaps. No stashed money – no hidden loot that I know of – no police involvement at this stage ... and if I don't get your help, I've got no hope. The whole job could be done in one to ten minutes, depending upon skills ... if you can't help, can you give me a name that could?"

"Watters ... oh my!" He exclaimed and then whistled in subtle amazement. "You've earned my interest, at least for another couple minutes. There's no artist here in Florida that would directly take on the Watters, including me ... except for perhaps The Foole, and he ain't local. Lives up north somewhere."

"Do I need to contact The Foole then? I'm really hoping that I won't actually have to directly get involved with the Watters either ... for now, I just need an entrance into an old locked-up building near the harbor."

"You can't find The Foole ... there are very few that can. He's a ghost, and likes it that way, but I think I can get a message to him. We have a friend in common but it would take awhile ... maybe a week or even two. He retired too and won't work for pay, but he does understand revenge. Only works jobs now involving stolen art and comes and goes like a phantom, no one ever sees him and he can crack any security. I'm very retired also these days, but I suppose this matter really can't wait."

"I'd like to say yes, that it could, but in another week or two another girl could be dead. Maybe more."

"That bad?"

I nodded. "Probably. Between you, me and this patio umbrella, we're talking about the 'Monroe Masher'. Heard that name?"

"I read the papers, and down on the beach I hear about a lot of things that don't make the papers or the evening news. Word is there is a prime USDA Choice suspect who's got too much money and political clout to ever be touched ... even if caught him red-handed with a smoking gun in his hand. And has all the friends in very high places that money can buy to make sure he's never caught ... and anyone else looking too hard gets burned themselves."

"Got it in one. If I can find him, my visit will be very private and personal and hopefully will never be featured on the ten o'clock news. I have zero delusions that this fucker would ever go to trial, or that the Mayor would shake my hand and give me a medal for bringing him in alive."

"Just one door? No guns, no gunsels, and no Watters associates or connections?"

I nodded. "Probably, but I won't know until I get inside. Might be another secure door downstairs in the cellar. That's really where I need to go to check on my information. It's got a very modern alarm system from the looks of it, but once I'm downstairs you're loose and can fly off before things get even remotely interesting."

"Too bad, these days I sometimes kind of miss it when things get 'interesting'. Ok, I'll look it over and give you my quick opinion, either yeah or nay. No cash ... I'm doing this one purely out of professional interest for a fairly pretty but very crazy young lunatic with absolutely no self-preservation skills, but you're going to owe me a favor. Maybe a big one ... and maybe for a friend, or a friend of a friend. Agreed?"

Sure. What choice did I have? I tried another offer at just cash but he just grinned and said that I could owe him. Just as well, twenty dollars wasn't much of a proper cash payment to a card-carrying master burglar, and besides, I'd need those last few dollars for tonight's dinner. Too bad I couldn't afford what he was worth, I just knew that this 'favor' would someday really end up costing me!

True to his word, at the dot of midnight my clever new friend DeeDee joined me at my car about a block away from the old abandoned cleaners, and together we took a stroll around the building. He agreed that the front entrance was too securely chained and barred to quickly, easily or quietly open and we then went to examine the rear entrance. This door didn't impress my larcenous friend quite so much as it had me.

"Late model McCormick deadbolt. Not too bad of a lock, but I've a master key that should open that one right up. The security system is a Gordon's ... not too bad either, kind of lower high-end tier stuff, good but not top of the line. I know the default reset code if we can find the alarm panel within one minute, or else I know what two wires to cut. There will probably be a cellular backup transmitter also hidden somewhere near the alarm panel, but I've got a cell-jammer that should prevent it from calling out, worst comes to worst. No worries – I'll have you inside in less than a minute!"

And he did. It took him longer to dig in his bag of locksmith tools to find the right master key, but it fit and opened the door at one. The default code shut off the alarm sequence at the alarm panel just inside the doorway but he cut a few wires anyway just on principle and then he set up the cell-jammer right next to the wall panel where the transmitter was hidden in case something had secretly gone wrong. All done in less than a minute. To all outward appearances the alarm system was still functional, but it now was incapable of sounding and transmitting an alarm.

"Easy-Squeazy!" DeeDee chirped. "Now if this were just me snooping about, I'd take just a fast look around here and downstairs real fast, and then duck back outside, shutting things up again neat and tidy for another hour or two, just in case the bastards had a backup system running off a motion detector, sending out a different sort of alarm elsewhere. The world is full of sneaky suspicious bastards! The cell-jammer might fix that too, but also this loss of signal might instead send out a message to someone that something unusual has just happened here. How lucky do you feel tonight?"

Actually, I wasn't feeling full to the brim with girlish glee or anything resembling eager enthusiasm either. Lady Luck had been dealing me short hands for a pretty long time now and I was getting rather averse to taking unnecessary risks. I'd been in tough scary places before in nasty unhealthy areas chock-full of unfriendly residents with more anger (and large supplies of firearms) than was safe to drive past, let alone hang-out at. This was just in Baltimore, not to mention non-tourist visits to shitholes like Iraq and Afghanistan.

"You're the expert. Let's find the downstairs door to the tunnels, if it still exists, take a quick look there if possible and then scoot. If we can find what I'm looking for there, there's almost no need to check the upstairs at all. In-out in under five minutes and then let's take a long coffee break down the street and watch for unfriendly visitors."

Finding the downstairs door to the basement wasn't hard and it wasn't even locked. The basement was certainly large enough to have hosted a brewery and there were even a few large boilers that were certainly large and old enough to be part of the original vintage beer brewing equipment. Otherwise it was dark, dry and empty. We found a fairly secure and locked steel door that we guessed lead into the tunnels; it was certainly larger and wider than most doors I've seen, but the lock was vintage too, easy for DeeDee to quickly pick open. Beyond it was a long gloomy concrete passageway that went for as far as our flashlights could shine. This was the old smugglers tunnel; no doubt about it but now our time here was definitely up.

I thought about just going onwards by myself, but I decided that our prior plan of caution was the wiser choice. Besides, now that I knew that the tunnel was here, I was quite curious to see exactly how much smuggling traffic ... and armed security it had. I'd also need quite a bit of time to map it properly or else my intrusion into this criminal underworld would probably be for nothing!

At the dot of five minutes after we had made our entry we now left, locking the steel doors behind us. While DeeDee was resetting the security system, reconnecting the pair of cut wires once more and then removing his cell jammer, I risked a quick look upstairs and found absolutely nothing of interest. There was a big open office full of long abandoned desks and files and enough dust to choke a prairie dog, and door leading to a pair of smaller, equally squalid officers further to the back. The aged grime was thick enough everywhere that I didn't leave the top of the stairs, so that I wouldn't create any clear and obvious footprints in the thick dust. No one had set foot up here in years, perhaps even decades!

From the vantage point inside my car would could see the front of the building and the side street leading to the alley behind the old cleaners. I had brought a thermos of coffee and we drank it, slowly, for a little over an hour. That was really the best thing about my cheap motel, it came with a ten-cup Mr. Coffee machine and I brewed up enough joe to fill my heavy 1-quart thermos every morning, and sometimes returned in the afternoon for refills. Drink enough coffee and sometimes you'll even forget that you don't quite have enough money for other trivial unnecessary things, like regular meals.

After an hour, we were pretty sure that DeeDee's alarm disabling had been successful and no one was the wiser concerning our previous entry. Nobody had come to check on the disabled alarms and we both breathed a sigh of relief as we took a last walk around the block to double-check for any new hidden watchers, parked at a distance to secretly observe the old building. There were none. In another five minutes we were safely back inside and now I was once again at the entrance to the underground. Oddly, DeeDee was showed no signs of making his own departure, now that his job was done.

"You don't have to come or follow me ... just leave me the deadbolt key and I'll lock up behind you. If I'm lucky, I won't even be exiting by this same passageway anyway!"

"That's the point exactly. I'm doing this job for a favor ... and out of personal curiosity. Now I'm curious to see just where this tunnel goes. Maybe this is information that I can use someday. Besides, if this tunnel is Watters property, then there will be more security doors along the way, no bets. If you get caught there, they might be asking you some unwelcome questions while pulling your fingernails out one by one, and I'd really hate for my name to get mentioned in the discussion. For now at least, you're safer if I go with you ... making me safer in the long term. Follow?"

I could see his point. Very definitely! He locked up the back door upstairs and made sure that everything was still disabled before he gathered up his cell-jammer and removed every other trace of our presence. Now locking the basement steel door behind us as well, we began our exploration of this new underground world.

The tunnel went for about thirty yards due north and then suddenly opened into a crossroads. I was getting a decent signal on my milspec GPS handheld, enough so that I could map out fairly precisely where each fork passageway was located, then I could add simple compass bearings for the exact direction of the hallways. At a glance, I was pretty sure that the right hand, east going passage lead straight to, or very nearby the Golden Grotto and the docks. That was where the booze had been unloaded from the rumrunners back in the day, and now where the drugs probably entered and perhaps exited as well. Since I was fairly sure what I'd find there ... and likely also a much higher level of security, I decided to skip doing down that direction, at least for now.

The northbound passage led to three similar old large steel doors, none of which looked to be used regularly, judging by the degree of rust on the hinges and slight dust down that hallway. With the GPS coordinates of the doors here, I hoped I could map out the three businesses up above ground that I thought these doors were connected to, all undoubtedly Watters owned properties, like the old cleaners. This left us nowhere to go really but further west.

Another forty yards, or about another city block upstairs on the surface, we found another north-south crossing pair of corridors, each with several similar sorts of vintage secured doorways. None of which seemed especially notable or significant, but I marked them all for further mapping research. Now the western passage continued onwards for another couple of hundred yards without interruption until we came to a large frequently used doorway to the south facing a long corridor to the north, as the western passage still continued onwards.

DeeDee took the time to examine this important southern door while I took a bit of stroll north. I thought I could see that passage end up ahead in another doorway, maybe about fifty yards ahead, but I couldn't be sure. This passageway north seemed to be regularly traveled and had little dust. The western passage looked to be rarely used now, and I guessed that this was the old freight passageway that the old reporter had mentioned, that lead to a warehouse next to the rail line. I didn't think their modern smuggling cargos went out much by rail anymore, so these north and southbound doors looked much more promising.

DeeDee thought similarly, and after a moment of inspection he dug out a small electronic box similar to a common electronics voltage meter and pressed its probes against various parts of the door, top and bottom.

"Another old but good lock here, but I think there's a motion sensor on the other side of that door. My meter says there's some electronics on the other side anyway. I can open it, but I think if we do it then we're going to make some noise."

"Then let's not." I whispered. Let's take a look up the north smaller passage first and then keep going west if that one's wired up as well."

It was. We first had a rather long walk, ten to fifteen minutes of rather fast shuffling in the gloom while listening for danger like a pair of frightened rabbits. We finally came to another security door and if anything, this one had even higher security. DeeDee took a five second look and just grabbed my arm and yanked me fast down the hallway just a few moments before some security lights by the doorway turned on, but by then we were far enough back down the hall and in a relative patch of gloom between lights.

"Alarm buzzer, motion-detector, video camera and speakerphone!" He whispered to me, "And that's just on this side! Door opens from the inside, can't force it. You'll need to announce yourself probably to the guard on the other side who'll then let you in if he knows you. I don't think they saw us on the camera unless the guard was right smack in front of the dark camera display before the motion sensor turned the lights on. With any luck he'll think it was a glitch or something like a rat or a flying bat in the tunnel. But walk quiet in case they open the door to listen. Sound carries a long way down here!"

It sure did! I could clearly hear the metal door opening but we were by then well out of sight further down the dark westbound passage with our flashlights off. We were both wearing soft soled shoes and I'd learned a thing or two about tip-toeing quietly in my time. By the time a flashlight shown down our side of the corridor, we were well out of sight. A minute late we heard the metal door open and close again. The guard might have heard something, but he probably didn't see anything worth reporting ... we hoped.

We returned to the westward passage and took it for at least another half-hour without seeing or hearing anything of interest. The old warehouse we eventually reached at the end of this several mile long passage was secured by a rusty locked door that hadn't been opened in years, and opening it gave DeeDee a good bit of trouble, getting the old tumblers unfrozen and unlocked. This in turn lead into an abandoned basement that clearly hadn't been used in at least twenty years.

This building had been otherwise entirely renovated recently and we discovered that the upstairs floors were now all large luxury urban condos. The old freight elevator shaft had been modified so that it no longer descended to the basement level but there was a mounted steel ladder that still went upstairs to what would have been the old loading dock. I think that this basement access panel on the main floor was supposed to have been bolted down securely, but the welding job had been done rather haphazardly. A little steady pressure released the hinges and the binding points and without making enough noise to alert the night guard at the front desk in the residential entrance area. At a glance, this area we were now in seemed to be the main security office for the building and the delivery area for the residents.

There was really nothing to see at all here. A quick rummage through the security office desks revealed a listing of residents and approved quests, none of the names of any familiarity to us. Probably with the underground passages securely locked, the freight elevator rerouted and the basement abandoned, and their own security offices next to the only entrance or exit, the Watters felt that this point of entry was adequately secured enough to protect the rest of their operations back toward the harbor.

Our serial killer was certainly not using this escape route; the doors were too rusted and dust in the basement was thick, not to mention the distinct layer of dust on the old steel ladder. Wally-boy had to be taking either of those two secure doorways further back. Now I needed to figure out where those two passages might lead to.

DeeDee was tired and the sense of fun had quite worn off as well. We double-checked to make sure that we hadn't damaged the floor hatch door to the basement ladder noticeably and also dusted off any obvious dirt that we had tracked into the hallway. To make our escape, he quietly picked the lock of an unused side door just inside the residential area reception room and we scampered off into the night while the getting was good. We had a very long walk on the dark night streets to get back to our cars, but this gave us both some quiet time to think.