Recurrence

by Dave Norem

  A voice of authority from above, around, and within him, stated without inflection, “You are going back.”

  Before he could respond in any manner, or determine the source, he was slammed brutally into the body and was aware of the body—his body—jarring with the impact. He felt the canvas stretch and the wooden-X supports strain. Veins raised on the hands securing him to the canvas, from the additional effort required.

  “Got it!” cried the man with the forceps. A solid clang of heavy metal against lighter metal followed.

  He felt a great relief from removal of both the impairment in his airway and the blocks from his jaws. The respite was only momentary, as the cloth was now applied with renewed vigor, and over both nose and mouth.

  “Not over his mouth. He may choke to death on his own blood,” said the now-gentler voice.

  He again succumbed to the suffocation of the anesthesia, but with less resistance—aware that it was not yet his time.

  Later he told the surgeon and his assistant exactly what all had transpired. He described everything in minute detail, including specific words and actions of each of them—and of others beyond the walls.

  The surgeon, the man with alternating voices, blanched and turned away. His knees buckled.

  Then he recovered his equilibrium and strode rapidly away without a word.

  The anesthetist stood, staring at him wide-eyed. “That cannot be,” he stated, shaking his head no. Then he too was gone.

  John awoke and sat up with a start, gasping for air and trembling. He could still feel the violence of slamming into the body. His body? He shook his head to clear it, questioning his own sanity. The words not real, cannot believe and impossible coursed through his mind in repetition. He didn’t recognize any of the faces and did not want to acknowledge the man on the cot as himself, but knew that it was... It may have been the man from the recurring nightmare, but then again it just as well might not have been. He hadn’t had that particular nightmare in over a year.

  He knew he wouldn’t be able to discuss this one with anyone, not even Julie—at least not for a long time.

  Before Julie’s school season ended, they began visiting the beaches near Monticello at Lake Shafer, Indiana and northeast to Lake Maxinkuckee at Culver. There they visited the Culver Military Academy and swam from its piers and boathouses. Later they attended a live polo match held in a large indoor arena, where Culver Academy’s Black Horse Troop defeated a prestigious rival academy from out of state.

  When her summer break began, they visited the beach at Michigan City and more of them at New Buffalo and Sawyer, in Michigan. They loved the sand dunes and continued touring north up through the Michigan resort towns of St. Joseph, South Haven, Douglas and Saugatuck. They marveled at the immense quantity and diversity of boats -useable only in the summer months- and the huge amounts of money invested in them. Continuing north, they caught the tail end of the Tulip Festival at Holland in its entire colored splendor.

  John and Julie traveled for another week, driving north past old highway M-50 which led to the area of the one room schools. The journey continued on to Ludington where they crossed Lake Michigan on a ferry, disembarking at Manitowoc, Wisconsin.

  From there, they passed through Green Bay and on up into Michigan’s Upper Peninsula and east along US-2. They stopped at a little roadside stand along the highway and ate delicious, steaming-hot meat-and-vegetable pies called pasties. Farther on, Julie sunbathed topless at more than one of the long, isolated beaches.

  “You almost caused a wreck, Busty.” John laughed. Two cars had nearly collided while their drivers eyed her exposed bosom.

  She waved her top at him. “You’re the wreck. Let’s see what happens when you expose yourself in public?”

  He patted her thigh, “If I do we’ll both go to jail, Sweetheart.”

  They continued their trek down across the Mackinac Bridge and through Mackinac City, continuing on southward through Petoskey and Cadillac.

  At Big Rapids, they visited the Wolverine Shoe factory, which also made Hush Puppies. There they were told that the wolverine was never an animal native to Michigan­­­­—The Wolverine State.

  At Grand Rapids, they visited the John Ball Park zoo and gazed at beautiful Bengal tigers, eye-to-eye, through two-inch-thick glass. John felt a strange but undefined sensation while looking at them.

  Detouring to Battle Creek, they visited the Kellogg’s and Post cereal factories where they ate unique cereal dishes and drank Postum. They learned that plant tours of both were soon to be discontinued.

  It was an idyllic summer trip, but it was not the fulfillment John’s thirst for a highly adventurous life required. His attempts at a meaningful and self-rewarding career were stymied by his inherent longing for an adrenaline-filled course of action. They had become so close during the past few months that Julie knew she could no longer keep him in his domestic role. She loved him enough to stop trying. From this realization, John became the happier of the two.

  CHAPTER 19

  John and Cramer were back together and on a new mission. They decided to follow up on the Go Mart job in Greensboro that Wimpy had suggested. Go Mart was up-and-coming as a major retailer with a larger variety of merchandise than Sears.

  John sent the message, and Wimpy’s share of money, to Horace Ivins in Dayton, the contact Cramer provided as Wimpy’s next-of-kin. He turned out to be a first cousin and only living relative. Once he was convinced that John and Cramer were legitimate, and the ones who had sent the money, he was anxious to talk with them. Horace had a wife, two kids, and a full-time job, but that didn’t keep him from dreaming about a wilder side of life.

  Hearing first-hand that Wimpy had been shot to death from ambush drove all thoughts of wanting to be in on the action from his mind. He had loved hearing Wimpy’s wild stories, and remembered details from some of them. John wasn’t about to tell him the specifics of Wimpy’s death, though.

  Horace also had details of Wimpy’s plan for the Go Mart in Greensboro. John and Cramer exchanged looks when they heard this. Both were glad that Wimpy hadn’t been able to reveal their true identities or home bases. They didn’t visit or correspond at their own home bases anyway, and John wasn’t even sure Cleveland was Cramer’s home base. He suspected that Cramer knew more about him but wasn’t concerned. Horace seemed to pick up on their looks and silence and never asked where they were from, or how to get in touch with them.

  The Go Mart chain was spreading across the South with stores similar to K-Mart’s and had a variety of merchandise with a healthy cash flow. Major highways ran in several directions from the location in Greensboro and there were other sizable cities nearby.

  A former employee provided inside information about the job. She also supplied a duplicate key to the rear emergency-exit alarm. In addition, she gave Wimpy a detailed sketch of the floor layout and photographs of the outside of the building and the roof.

  The photos showed false walls rising above the slightly arched roof on the sides. Wimpy had purchased all of this from her six months before, and had written copious details of the money handling.

  Cash registers in the store were updated every two hours on an alternating basis at the quarter-hour. The number of registers open during store hours varied with demand and store policy, ‘never more than three buggies in line.’ Cramer and company were already aware that shopping carts are buggies in the South.

  Transfers were made through a front-corner office so that there wouldn’t be a constant or obvious flow of cash through the main aisles. Register counting and balancing was done in the front-corner office. Bills and checks were separated and placed in small cardboard boxes that were culled from shelf-stock, based on size. Coins were dumped into canvas bags and then boxed too.

  Every two hours, employees placed closed boxes of coins, checks and bills in a buggy and casually wheeled them through the store. T
hey pushed them down a short main aisle to the left-rear corner. This aisle ended at a connecting aisle to the right, which ran part of the way across the rear of the store—abutting against a solid wall.

  To the left at the end of the main aisle were ladies and men’s restrooms. To the right, about thirty feet along the left side of the back aisle, was an emergency exit with a keyed alarm box. The door had a hydraulic closer and a spring return latch that could only be opened from the inside. Only three managers had a key to the alarm box.

  On the right side of the back aisle were management and accounting offices, followed by a receiving office. Inside this office, and perpendicular to the entry door, a door led into a counting room.

  Perpendicular to the counting room door was a door to the main vault. The vault was situated in a corner, surrounded by two solid walls on the inside and two concrete-block walls on the outside. Shipping and receiving offices and loading docks were in the back part of the other half of the building.

  Checks were dropped off at the accounting office first, where they were totaled, banded and labeled before going to the receiving office. Coins and bills went there directly.

  Currency and coins were removed from the boxes and carted into the counting room. Coins were poured through a sorting machine, wrapped, counted, and placed in larger canvas bags before going into the vault. Bills were sorted, wrapped, counted and placed in stackable trays; then moved to the vault.

  Once a day, after the morning rush hour, an armored car stopped behind the emergency exit. Before its arrival, bills and checks were packed in reusable aluminum-framed cases. Coins were left in their bags.

  The armored car supervisor and a store manager inventoried the contents of the cases in the receiving room, before moving them out through the back hall and emergency door.

  A night cleaning crew came in after 10:00PM when the store closed, but management locked them out of the money rooms. There were no inside security men or private patrols. The cleaning crew usually left before midnight.

  Horace had the documents and a small roll of personal cash stashed in a section of hollow pipe. It was an integral part of the structure of an old machine table, which he was using as a workbench. He had an intricate way of accessing this space under the massive bench with a fabricated a cylinder that fit inside the pipe. He could push it in with a flexible shaft, but it had to be blown back out from the other end with a high-pressure air nozzle.

  The inside of the section he was using could only be seen by using a mirror and a strong light. With the cylinder in place, there was nothing visible in the pipe, and it was highly unlikely that anyone would have the foresight to look.

  He patted the bench and said, “Only Wimpy and I knew about this. With him gone, it’s just the three of us. If I hadn’t shown you and something happened to me, it would all be wasted, and my family wouldn’t get the money.”

  Cramer was looking at the machined cylinder and under the table. “Can you get more of these in there, or in the pipes at the back or sides?”

  “Sure, but it costs me about fifty bucks to make one and another month to get the job done in my spare time.”

  Cramer nodded at John. “Let’s each double the fifty for him to make us one,” he said.

  Horace grinned and rubbed his hands together. “All right, for that you’ll each get your own pipe under there.”

  “You’ll be our banker in this area and get paid for it whenever we need access,” Cramer stated. “We’ll be the only ones to ever know about this too, Right?”

  Horace stuck out his hand, “Yes, it’s a done deal.”

  They both shook hands with him to seal the bargain.

  Later, in a different city, Cramer and John went over the plans, photographs and procedures.

  “A knowledgeable woman; is there any way of contacting her?” Cramer asked while scanning the documents.

  John shook his head no. “Horace said Wimpy never told him her name or where she lived, but did say that he had something going with her.”

  “Wimpy never talked much, but he did mention dating a married woman once, but that was well over a year ago,” Cramer said.

  They were both looking at everything for flaws in the store’s system; there were always some somewhere. They both noticed one flaw right away. The back of the building where the armored car picked up the money extended beyond the other half of the building. Truck docks behind the other half created a blind spot the car would have to drive out of or into. It wasn’t noted which way the armored car traveled during a pickup, or if there was an escort.

  “Maybe she didn’t know,” John said.

  Cramer shrugged, “if we need to know we’ll find out easy enough at the time. Either way that armored car could be blocked off before they knew what was happening.”

  Another flaw they noticed was that the emergency door alarm, and all of the other alarms, shared a control panel with a remote ac voltage source with battery backup. Both sources of power reached the panel from a single line. The junction box for this was just above the ceiling of the ladies’ room and the telephone line to the panel ran through the same area.

  “They do have a solid system with their vault though,” Cramer noted. “The only way to breach it is through the receiving room. The counting room people could lock the vault before you reached it.”

  John nodded in agreement, “They’d probably lock themselves in there too, assuming it’s vented.”

  “Bet on it,” Cramer said. “This would be easy if we were willing to take someone’s family hostage or blow the place open, but we’re not going to do that.”

  John shook his head no. “I’ve had too much of violence for this lifetime already.”

  They went back to studying the plans, looking for anything they could use to make the job simple and safe. They decided that reconnaissance was necessary, and a man would have to go inside. He should be able to find access and a place to hide above the ceiling over the restrooms. The one elected could then tap into the phone and alarm power lines after hours, then feed a patch-wire cable to the outside of the building.

  There were spaced vents where the almost-flat roof joined the wall, to let rainwater drain into gutters. The vents would let them feed their cable through the roof and down through the gutter and drainpipe, where it would be concealed but accessible.

  Looking at the floor layout again, John said, “It’s just too damned bad we can’t get the combination or see into the inside of that vault door.”

  “Damn ___ it just came to me! I’ve got a business acquaintance in Rockville, Maryland who can get me a miniature closed-circuit TV camera; really tiny compared to what we used in Cincinnati.”

  “OK,” said John, skeptically. “It isn’t Harner is it?”

  Cramer looked surprised. “No, but he owns the building; any problem with him?”

  “No, no, I just met him once on business, he’s OK.”

  Knowing what the nature of the business would likely be, Cramer commented, “No shit, useful information.” He resumed his spiel. “Those government guys over in Arlington and DC have things most people never even dream exists. Half the business and industry over there are supplying them with something.”

  “Go for it, but we’re going to be low on funds if we’re not careful.”

  “My man owes me, so I’ll get us a cut rate,” Cramer grinned.

  They decided to drive over to Greensboro, and if it looked right, make a surveillance entry. The alarm equipment consisted of low-cost switches and cable purchased in a Radio Shack along the way. It would be taken into account too. It would be used no matter how they accomplished the rest.

  When they looked the store over, things were better than they thought likely. The rear of the building faced a steep wooded bluff with an unfinished housing development on the other side. One end of the paved access behind the building led into
a store parking lot and then straight out to a through street, with three ways to go. One of the ways was onto or across the main highway fronting the store.

  The other end went out into a strip-mall parking lot with a theatre that had extra parking beside it. From the strip-mall lot several side streets and the main highway could be accessed.

  They confirmed the building features and visited the parking lots several times over the next few days. They also noted that the armored car did have an escort and that a police cruiser was always around within a few minutes before or after the pickup.

  In their favor, they noted that trucks came in at all hours and parked at the shipping and receiving docks even when the store was closed. Despite this, the docks were never completely full at night and the area was poorly lighted.

  Police patrolled twice a night, right after midnight and again early in the morning, just before or after dawn. They paid no attention to the trucks.

  Once John watched a trucker walk back from the theatre just after midnight. He was behind the building with a paper bag cradled in one arm when the patrol car passed through. The truck driver raised his other arm in greeting and a hand waved from the window of the patrol car as it rolled past without slowing down.

  Because he was smaller and wiry, Cramer volunteered to be first to try accessing the counting room through the men’s room ceiling. John went into the store in the afternoon and secreted a few long gutter-nails and a hammer in the small storage closet in the men’s room. The nails had been picked up from the housing construction site, but the hammer was supplied by the store itself.

  Later in the evening Cramer spent a few minutes in the store checking out their lackadaisical security and poor maintenance practices, before entering the men’s room at the rear. He ducked in when both aisles were clear. Using the toilet as a step to get above the two-foot by four-foot ceiling tile was easy.