Beer, Bait, and Ammo

by Harper, Chap

  “We’ll work on all this tomorrow and then hold tight until we hear from Hank in New Orleans. Look for another conference call tomorrow afternoon. The next one will be early Tuesday with a go or no go. Thanks for being on the call,” Jim said.

  Lester put down the phone and walked in where Debi was watching TV. She patted the couch so he would sit next to her.

  “You guys putting the final part of the plan together?” She tried to sound unaffected by another armed conflict about to take place, but it wasn’t working. She started getting upset. “When you go, I want you in the ‘Get behind everyone else battalion.’ Can’t have you dying. I want to see what our kids look like. I want—you alive!” Debi said, tears flowing down her face as the stark reality of the raid was actually materializing.

  “Hey! Hey, Debi, I’m not even going to be a part of the big raid on the warehouse. Little Rich, Becca, Mike, and about ten of our other officers are going to take out the bait store. ATF will take the lead there. If we get done in time we might go help with the clean-up,” Lester said as he pulled her next to him and hugged her. “Please don’t worry about me. I’ll be fine.”

  “Things go wrong—they always do!”

  “I’ll have on body armor, Kevlar helmet, and metal ballistic inserts. So if I’m hit—less of a problem,” Lester said. He ran his hand through her hair and kissed her softly. “Debi, it’s my job and you know it.”

  “I don’t have to like it,” she said and kissed him back.

  “Why don’t we go to the movies? I’ll even sit through a chick flick for you.”

  “I guess. Let me go online and check the times. Do you want to eat first or afterwards?” Debi asked as she opened her laptop and typed in “movies Hot Springs AR,” and then hit Enter. They picked a movie for around seven and decided to fix a salad and eat first. She was emotionally calmer but inside was a festering pain. There was no guarantee Lester would make it through the upcoming action. Deep down inside, she questioned whether she could handle living with someone who might not come home someday. Debi understood one reason the divorce rate was so high with policemen. It might not be the life for her and their children. Her feelings and thoughts were not positive.

  After the movie and when they went to bed, Lester said he would feel better if he could go to his church on Monday and asked if she wanted to go with him. They planned it for after work on Monday.

  Spider had a great visit with her son Frankie, her old boyfriend Nicky Martorana, and his daughter Gina at dinner on Saturday night. It was a good feeling to be with someone she had really cared for in the past. However, the same problem existed as it did during college. Nicky was clean and legal; Angel wasn’t. During dinner, he read into their conversation her businesses were not ones he could condone or be a partner in. His law practice had grown, and like his father, the representation of organized crime figures was still was a part of his practice. But that was as far as he dwelled in criminal activities.

  Gina and Frankie got along fine. He overcame his shyness and asked her to an upcoming dance at his school. She accepted and asked about watching him play football when she found out he was on the team. At this point she was a little taller than him, but as they walked together they made an attractive couple. Spider thought to herself, “These two good looking kids are both clean and could have a life together if it worked out that way.”

  Spider had a lot of money put back in accounts placed carefully in the Cayman Islands. There was a will and trust and an attorney in New Orleans primed to take care of Frankie if she were taken out of the picture. She wanted Nick to handle it. After pulling him to the side as the young couple walked ahead of them in Central Park, Spider confided that if they couldn’t get together romantically, she wanted him to handle all her legal issues, which were numerous. And to make sure Frankie was taken care of as well. Nick pulled a notebook from his coat and wrote out a contract while he propped the pad on a rock. Angel signed it and agreed to sign a more formal contract later. She also gave him a card and a check on the off-shore account, which she signed and left the amount blank. This was her ultimate demonstration of faith. Nick accepted it and told her he wished things could be different. She leaned over and kissed him softly and then harder. He looked surprised.

  “I have always loved you, Nick, but I am trouble—I wish I wasn’t, but I know what will happen in the future—it’s inevitable. Please take care of Frankie if anything happens to me,” she said, with the first tears that had crept into her eyes since Richie died.

  The next day Angel boarded a plane back to Arkansas. She didn’t know why but her trip back seemed sad, dark, and foreboding—it was an inexplicable, malevolent feeling. She smiled when she remembered Frankie and Gina together and she pulled out her iPhone. Tapping on the camera setting, she thumbed through her pictures and found one of Frankie and Gina posing next to each other at dinner. Both were so attractive and innocent. She smiled even more and tried to push the bad feeling away. She went back to those pictures many times on the flight.

  Chapter Twenty-Nine

  It was late when Stick picked up Spider at the airport in Little Rock. There weren’t a lot of direct flights to any major cities out of Clinton National Airport, which was called “National” to signal an apology to all would-be passengers that it didn’t accommodate international flights. She was in a good mood since she had gotten to visit with Frankie for a while. Stick, on the other hand, wasn’t smiling, yet didn’t want to dampen his boss’s good feelings. He sure as hell wasn’t going to tell her about the hooker he slapped and choked, and how he didn’t at first pay Spider’s cut for the transaction. The part about him being followed needed to be discussed but not now. He let her rattle on about the trip and her old boyfriend and bask in the warmth of her good time.

  After a while she wanted to know how everything was going at all her operations. He went over what had happened since she had been gone, which was only a few days. She wanted a report on Lester and the police looking into their operations. Stick finally told her about following them on a fishing trip and believing he had been watched as well. Then he told her about the explosive device near his tree stand. Spider wanted the guards at the warehouse doubled and told him to get another car, a rental, and switch out so he would be harder to follow. She would do the same.

  Spider then did the unimaginable. She invited Stick to spend the night. He was shocked but guessed that it had something to do with her visit or her old boyfriend or maybe the feeling that everything was closing in. He accepted, and on this night he saw another side of Angel Gambini. She kissed him and held him tight after they had sex. They slept together in each other’s arms. She woke him in the morning, kissing him and wanting to make love. It was all strange to Stick, but he knew it wasn’t likely to continue.

  Stick had a lot to do that day, including tree stand work. He left for S.G. Crystals without stopping at his apartment, where a door was being installed at his expense. Before he left Spider’s place, he had a rental car delivered to a nearby restaurant where he took delivery and gave the man a ride back to his agency. There he told them he wanted a different car and switched to a minivan that was parked to the rear of the Agency Rent-a-Car office. He took back streets and hoped he had shaken off his tail.

  At S.G. Crystals, he put people on alert and ordered the guards doubled but found that required hiring one more since the late shift extra guard was on vacation. He put out calls for people to interview for the job and got one of the limo drivers to fill in. The deer stand wasn’t hard to move to the tree line right behind the rear fence. Height was important for a sniper so he added a long ladder so he could reach the steps on his stand. After adding some camouflage and tree branches around his “hide,” he was confident about the views he could get. It was actually better than the one he abandoned.

  Just after he installed it, a call came in that applicants were coming in for the guard position. He called the front guard post and asked for the electricity to be turned off s
o he could use a gate at the rear of the compound. A red light at the top of the gate turned green. He tentatively grabbed the handle of the gate and walked in front of the car garage and into the warehouse. Flexible hoses hung down from the ceilings and connected to the vents formerly hidden under the tool boxes. The meth operation was going at full capacity this morning. Stick crossed the warehouse floor and entered his office where applications for two individuals in the reception area sat on his desk He was in his element and felt good. Spider had also asked him to spend the night again. It was mysterious, and he liked it.

  Larry and Doug Thacker had only one job, and it was to fill the orders for automatic weapons which came through their small office in the back of the Beer, Bait and Ammo store on Highway 270 in Garland County. Rarely did they work in the bait and liquor store that faced the highway, so there were long periods of time where very little happened. To make matters worse, they lived there as well. Two bored redneck ex-cons in a roomful of automatic weapons was a formula for disaster. There was one weapon among them all they handled—maybe even fondled—every day.

  Neither Larry nor Doug was particularly large, but both brothers were strong and had large arms and muscular upper bodies. Even given their strength, it was all they could do to pick up all the required hardware required to fire a General Electric XM214 Minigun. It was introduced on screen in 1987 in the movie Predator, starring Jessie Ventura. The real star of the movie was a hand-held electric Gatlin gun nicknamed “Painless.” This weapon had an electric-powered rotating set of barrels that allowed for firepower that approached 10,000 rounds a minute. One thousand rounds, and the feeding belt weighed thirty-five pounds. The gun itself was thirty pounds. New lithium batteries weighed another seven pounds, good for one series of thousand-round bursts, then a change of batteries was needed or a wait of three hours to recharge them. This was only part of the problem. The multiple recoil force was so strong that even a very large individual would be spun to the right and could easily spray his own forces with .223 ammo, cutting their bodies into small pieces. The brothers would soon learn a lesson about the recoil issue in real-life.

  It was Monday, and they didn’t anticipate any orders to be filled since the work orders and invoices usually came a few days ahead of the UPS truck pick up, giving them time to box them for shipment. It was a perfect day to try out the Minigun. The Thacker boys had spent their own money on 2,000 rounds of ammunition so that each would have the pleasure of burning up over $100 each to pull the trigger for a few seconds. They drove the jeep up a dirt road into the nearby Ouachita National Forrest and found a clearing backed by a sloping hill next to the road.

  Larry decided he would fire first. He put on the thirty-five pound backpack loaded with coils of ammo, strapped on the battery pack, connected the electric barrel spinner and then picked up the weapon and spun the barrels to see if it was functioning. It whizzed and buzzed as the multiple barrels spun around. The huge belt-fed magazine running out of the backpack was slid into place and the safety clicked off, exposing a red firing dot. Holding the heavy contraption at his waist, he prepared to fire. Several bottles and cans were set up as targets at the bottom of the hill. Larry looked at his brother, smiled, looked back at the target and pulled the trigger. Red tracer fire shot out the barrels and lit up the entire area in front of them. Bullets ripped up the soil at the base of the hill above the targets and immediately started trailing to the right. The torque of the recoil pulled him to his right and downward exactly in the direction of his Jeep—he was unable to stop firing. The hood flew off first as the bullets tore through the body of the Jeep right above the doors and traveled to the rear of the vehicle. For all practical purposes, it was cut in half. The barrels were still spinning and buzzing as the roof of the jeep collapsed onto the bullet-ridden car body. Doug elected not to shoot. They called a tow truck to haul what was left of the Jeep to a wrecking yard. Not a single round out of the thousand came close to any of the targets.

  Debi was waiting outside her office as Lester pulled up. He got out and opened her door. While helping her into his car, he pinched her right butt cheek, but only lightly.

  “You must always get a reward for your good deeds,” she said, leaning over and kissing him.

  “Me get big reward later. Tarzan want Jane in tree house. Boy and Cheetah go play with crocodiles. Tarzan and Jane get naked,” Lester said, trying to sound like Johnny Weissmuller, even though he wasn’t sure Debi had watched the old films.

  “Jane want big screen TV, better tree house, nicer neighborhood, less wild animals, and real name for Boy. Then Jane get naked. Oh, yeah…lose the monkey.”

  “Jane much trouble!”

  “Jane worth it. Jane much fun naked!”

  Lester and Debi laughed at their little skit and talked about Lester receiving his first correspondence course in the mail. He had ordered it a few weeks back, even though he wasn’t sure of his school funding yet. It was criminal justice studies at a junior level, which now was being paid for by the Sheriff’s office. Even though he did his assignments at his desk at work, he was able to complete ten out of thirty chapters, along with the chapter tests. The final required a proctor at a local exam center at National Park College. He would be ready for it in a few days.

  “Lester, are we going to your church tonight because you’re afraid you might be killed tomorrow?” Debi asked point-blank.

  “It might keep me from getting killed. Going there and listening to people handling the broken pieces of their lives and trying to put them back together again helps me. I just need the feeling of humans coming together. They sit at tables around food and refuel with both internal and external energy against a world that might rip them apart. They usually don’t realize they are uniting with the people at their tables and near them to fight against everyday problems and sometimes very evil forces. There is love and there is hate. I can feel that energy. I soak it up and it’s calming, sort of like taking a tranquilizer.”

  “If you just took a tranquilizer, it would save you on gas in your big SUV,” Debi said.

  “It wouldn’t be the same. You just listen when we get there and don’t talk.”

  “I’m hungry. Why can’t I eat something?” Debi whined.

  “I’m not taking you to my church anymore if you are going to be fussy. I’ll take you anyplace you want afterwards, so be thinking about who might be open on Monday night.”

  The cafe in Kirby was crowded for some reason, and it was difficult to find a place to park.

  “Looks like a lot of people think they’re going to die tomorrow,” Debi said sarcastically.

  “You’re being particularly obnoxious today,” Lester said.

  They entered the cafe to find every table taken except for Lester’s favorite table next to the window. The waitress who waited on them before smiled at Lester and led them to the small table with the checkered tablecloth.

  Debi was astonished. “How did they know you needed this table tonight?”

  “It’s a sign—it’s a sign!” Lester said with a grin.

  Chapter Thirty

  Lester had listened to a couple conversations and was just getting into the spirit of his church visit when his cell phone went off. It was Jim Webb. He knew it would be a long call, so he handed Debi a twenty-dollar bill and asked her to pay for the coffee. He went outside with the call, and when Debi joined him, he handed over the keys. She took the hint and drove them from Kirby back towards Hot Springs. She tried to piece together the conversation by listening to Lester’s responses, but a lot was lost in translation.

  “What time for the bait store raid? Parameds will be parked where? Helicopters with swat members are landing where? What time in the morning will we know for sure? Okay. Okay. Holy shit! Okay.” Lester clicked off his phone to find Debi pulling into Red Lobster in Hot Springs.

  “Have I been on the phone that long?”

  “Just tell me what the ‘Holy Shit’ part was about.”

  “We’ll ha
ve two ten-man SWAT teams from the state police. Each one has two five-man elements that work different assignments. The Arkansas National Guard will have two helicopters in the area. One is an Apache attack helicopter with a front-mounted 30mm chain gun and Hellfire missiles with thermobaric explosives. The number of people involved now is closer to one hundred. Isn’t that worthy of a ‘Holy Shit’?”

  “My God! You guys will be shooting at each other.”

  “Friendly fire is always a problem, especially if the teams have never worked together before,” Lester said as he opened the restaurant door for Debi.

  “Let’s eat up tonight. I don’t want my baby going off to war on an empty stomach,” Debi said.

  “Good idea. Tarzan hungry. Jane play with Tarzan later?”

  “Jane play with Tarzan long time.”

  Over fifty men from several different agencies were in strategic areas around the Louisiana Sportsman’s Super Store in Chalmette. No one knew for sure if it would be a go, but the command center was waiting by the TV monitors ready to start an operation that would incorporate hundreds of men in two states. If it happened, people would die—probably on both sides of the law.

  “Screen’s still dark,” the technician said as several senior officers stood up in the van.

  The ATF was taking the lead. Hank Campanella was supervising and was in the van waiting to give the word to move out. It had been a long investigation. Long before Lester McFarlin got involved, Hank had tried to catch Tony Evola selling illegal guns and was about to move in on him. He had someone inside the operation, but Katrina and the subsequent flooding stopped the clandestine operation. When the flooding took place, Tony sold most of his legal gun inventory to Cabela’s and hid his automatics in a truck in an abandoned warehouse. Hank’s informant died in a suspicious drowning incident during the flooding—suspicious since when he was found his hands were tied behind him. One piece of evidence that Hank still held, though, was the identity of the recipients of automatic weapons shipped by Tony Evola to the crime bosses in New Orleans. He hoped this raid would come next. Hank believed he could put away many of the crime bosses for possession of automatic weapons, much like Al Capone’s tax evasion conviction in the thirties. It was a long shot, but arresting them for murder, drug smuggling, prostitution and other crimes was close to impossible because of the levels of under-bosses and contract employees. He was sure, though, the gangsters would always have their own personal automatic weapons handy. Many of them were felons, and combining the two offenses would put them away for quite a while.