by Alex Wilson
Dana had long since outgrown her childhood nickname of ‘Dimps’ that had referred to the deep dimples she had as a child. There is still a visage of those dimples of yore in her adult face but the nickname is long gone. Besides, the crew has enormous affection for her and respect for her accomplishments. They have no interest in diminishing her in any way.
Dana’s dad, Rudy Ward, had been a ‘good guy’ to the kids of Dana’s circle and had been given the ‘Pops’ moniker which he gladly accepted. It is exactly how he wants to be considered by these youngsters-transformed-into-solid-citizens. He is proud of them all and grateful that they continued to keep him as a father figure, a role he relishes. Rudy is well past his nominal retirement age with the Department of Highways, but has been kept on under contract so the Department can continue to access his prodigious knowledge of Maine transportation issues.
‘Dearly beloved, we are gathered together…’
‘Did someone die, Dana?’
‘Throw a bag over it, Harold, or we’ll never get through this.’
‘Did you say ‘wheel’? He’s right here…’
‘Don’t start or I’ll shut down this front you have been running to cover your numerous nefarious deeds. We’re on to you, pal.’
‘Pop, can you bring some semblance of adult gravitas to this ménage?’
‘If I knew what those fancy words meant, I might try. I assume you’re suggesting something requiring a whip and chair.’
‘Enough, ruffians! We have serious business and what do I get? The Three Stooges. Just can the act until we have some…’
‘Yeah, but…’
‘Hairy, for God sake. Have you no control over your mouth? Let us tell you what we need to tell you. No talk for a while. I mean it! We want you to get a briefing. Josh will tell you what we’ve stumbled upon. Although you’ve just met Josh, we’ve become friends and research associates and have uncovered something that should concern all of us. Josh…’
Josh proceeded to build the case with Dana occasionally interjecting details of local reference and history. Despite the adolescent beginning, the group listened intently with only questions of clarification. As the body of evidence unfolded, the members of the group shot glances to one another signifying that this is, in fact, an issue that concerns them. When the briefing was concluded, neatly, there was a time of reflection, of thoughtiness fraught with mental churning and absorption that lasted for about a minute,.
Finally, Wendel speaks, ‘Sounds like a police matter.’
‘From Dana’s briefing to me about each of you, I would expect you to say that, Wendel, being the conscientious officer of the law that you are. In all respect to that, I suggest that we don’t have adequate intel yet to make a compelling case. This may be big…bigger than local law enforcement, no matter how diligent or forceful. This may involve the DEA and Coast Guard and perhaps even the FBI. To be sure what we’re looking at here, Dana and I need more eyes, boots and brains than we can muster by ourselves.’
‘I can give you eyes and boots, if you keep your eyes on my daughter’s safety. With this group, brains are debatable.’
Once the team all grasped the potential harm the suspected drug path could do to their beloved Maine coast – not to mention to society in general and New York in particular – foolishness ceased and the varied and complimentary minds began to mesh on how to approach the problem.
Two thoughts emerged; one from Pop and one from Hairy. First, the trucks. If they could get a look at the contents of one of the trucks, they would know whether their suspicions of drug running were grounded. That would address the ‘output’ end of the equation, i.e., the flow of the product from the warehouse. Pop applied his feel for and knowledge of the road system to devise how the truck could be intercepted and searched enroute. Wendel was up for bending his code of propriety to assist in the interception as long as more senior law enforcement – like the DEA or FBI – signed on.
Of equal importance was to zero in on how the drugs entered the warehouse, the ‘input’ part of the equation. That could lead to the source, Canadian or otherwise. Hairy had ideas of how to observe incoming water craft if that be the ‘input’ method.
* * * * * * *
The house was magnificent. Not like a Bel Air mansion, but more of the Hamptons second home theme; large, but without the pretention of columns or two-story entryway. But of more interest was the setting. There’s an ample yard with a sloping plunge to the rocky edge of the ‘Fox Island Thoroughfare’, a boating passage between Vinalhaven and North Haven islands. Evidently the ‘fox’ reference came from the indigenous foxes that used to populate the islands. From the vantage of the house, the passageway can be observed with weather protection, an important feature for this wintery season. Josh and Dana took the ferry to Vinalhaven and drove the deserted snow tracked roads to the area of prosperous summer estates. There were no fresh tire tracks in the snow in the area of ‘winterized’ vacation mansions. Josh parks his truck in the woods and they lug their backpacks the hundred yards to the darkened house. In the afternoon gloom, they approach the main doorway. Dana had not thought of what they would do once they arrived at the house, but Josh had. While she looked at the house as if it were a solid block of stone, Josh whips out a small box with wires hanging off it and gets on his knees in front of the door. She turned to look down the drive to see if anyone was there to see them. When she turns back to see what he was doing, he wasn’t there and the front door was standing open. Before she could even digest this, he reappeared and motioned her inside.
‘How did you do that?’
‘The door was not the challenge. The alarm system was my worry. I’d hacked the plans and circuitry of the system and had a jumper box ready. But I had to find the control panel and do the hookup in time. Worked out fine. The place is now ours without an alarm being sent.’
‘How did you do that?’
‘You’re repeating yourself. Come on, let’s get upstairs and in place before it gets totally dark.’
They bound up the stairs in the rapidly failing light and find the master bedroom that has a perfect overview of the water passage. They draw up chairs and settle in for an all night vigil, if necessary. Josh withdraws all sorts of goodies from his duffle; a small flameless stove, food, night vision goggles and small flashlights with adjustable brightness. Illogically, they tend to talk in the low, whisper-near tones of burglars.
‘I imagine you and Grant had similar training. He didn’t tell me the full story of the skills he acquired, but they must have been sneaky and lethal, right?’
‘He didn’t want to alarm you. My ex was simply not interested so I never had the chance to hold back. Most of the special ops guys know and do stuff they won’t share with their loved ones. Too naughty.’
‘Naughty? Naughty? I’ll bet they’re naughty. That’s like the Brits speaking of the Blitz as ‘a spot of bother’. Stiff upper lip, what?’
The night wore on. Snow flurries came and went with varying degrees of opacity. Darkness descended. Cold got worse. The camp stove did precious little. She shared some stories of people she had encountered and funny incidences and tried, with some success, to draw him out to do the same.
Around 3:30 am, the low thrumming of a powerful marine motor is barely heard. Josh puts on his night vision goggles, but to no avail. The snow had thickened, defeating the high-tech device. The boat went through unobserved visually.
‘Rats!’
‘Rats? Come on, Marine. You can do better than that. Didn’t your drill instructor teach you to swear like a manly man?’
‘Well, it’s not a total loss. At least we know that a powerful boat slipped through here when nothing else was moving or should be moving. We know the time and day of the week and the month. It’s a start. Let’s pack up and think about Plan B.’
* * * * * * *
The rag-tag team reassembled at the yacht club for
catch up and to refine Plan B. First, the road team reports.
‘I have to admit, it’s exciting being on the wrong side’ said Wendel, a bit embarrassed by his guilty pleasure.
Hairy, never missing an opportunity for a wise crack, ‘You talk as if it’s a first, Wheels. Your hair cuts have been on the wrong side since I’ve known you.’
‘Ever the clown. Just report.’
‘My road crew was great’, said Pop proudly. ‘I just told them we had someone to take down. They asked who, what, when, where, why and how. I just told them when, where and how. We made the road problem and our panel truck driver ran right into it. Then, the ‘early responders’, including my out-of-uniform Wheel Man here, hustled the driver to the front of the truck to be sure he was ‘okay’. We made sure he could see his truck the whole time. Meanwhile, the break-in crew from the DEA approached the back of the truck from the blind side, picked the lock, inspected the contents and locked it back up without the driver any the wiser. And, my guys held off traffic flow on that road for the time we needed the road vacant and we got the truck back on its way with the driver none the wiser.’
‘Impressive, guys.’
‘So, what was in the van?’
‘Just what we thought; cocaine, and lots of it.’
‘Well, that puts the lid on the main question,’ offered Hairy. ‘We now know that we’re not imagining things. This is a bad guy operation working out of the Murphy Lane warehouse. What about your stakeout?’
‘It was a bust,’ Josh admitted. ‘My brilliant idea of using my night vision glasses was not so brilliant. I overlooked the fact that the goggles won’t penetrate snowfall. At least we heard a boat and, assuming it was not innocent, we now have a time of day and day of week or day of month if they maintain any consistency.’
‘Hey, Brooklyn Boy, radar will penetrate the snow.’
‘Great idea, Hairy, except I don’t happen to have a radar unit.’
‘I do.’
‘You do?’ they all blurted simultaneously.
‘Sure. Have you forgotten about boat radar? I put them on, repair them and carry spare parts. I even have some used. Why not take one of the used boat radars and set it up on the shore of The Thoroughfare with a lead to the house. You can see them coming a couple of miles away. Let me borrow those fancy night glasses of yours and I’ll get a positive ID when they get close to the warehouse. Can I take a picture through those glasses?’
‘Sure can. Don’t you watch TV? On the evening news you see night vision stills and even video through them.’
Dana pipes up, ‘Gee, Hairy, you’re not as dumb as you look.’
‘Josh, can’t you clean her up? We’ve done all we can.’
‘I try. Lord knows, I try, but it is a Herculean task.’
‘Does that mean big?’
‘The biggest and most intractable of my career.’
‘There they go with the polysyllabics again. What are country folk to do?’
* * * * * * *
When they guessed it was about time for another visit by the mystery boat, Josh and Dana did their cat burglar thing again, but with the Rube Goldberg radar rig and with Hairy stationed at a close approach to the warehouse to get a photo through Josh’s night vision scope. Sure enough, a powerful fast boat – no work boat this – slipped down the passage between the offshore islands right on cue…this time not unobserved. Dana called Hairy’s cell phone to alert him and a photo was taken. The pieces were falling into place.
With the DEA, FBI and Coast Guard now alerted, the quiet surveillance intensified. Josh reported what he had found through the clearing center at the Portland FBI and DEA offices and suggested that the outbound trucks be tailed into Brooklyn or wherever they were using as their distribution point in NY. All agreed that they would not take down the operation until they had a better fix on who might be the kingpin.
* * * * * * *
Josh made a quick trip to Brooklyn. Trusted by both sides, he brokered a meeting between the cops and the crooks. They meet at a familiar local restaurant they had all patronized since they were old enough to go out to eat without their parents. The players were Josh, his cop-pal, Ray, and Eddie, a semi-successful small time gangster who had become a medium level capo, well removed from the ‘dirty work’ of the streets. They have all known each other from stick ball days. Eddie had done time as a lower level hood, but Ray was not involved in the case. They run into one another now and then at neighborhood street fairs, weddings, funerals, first communions and such.
‘Thanks for coming, Eddie. You’re looking good. I see some of our old pals in your business when I come to visit mom. And, I run into Ray on visits. You know I could have gone either way until The Corps put me on another track.’
‘Josh, we all know your story and have no small neighborhood pride in your progress from punk to war hero to big time writer. I’m not ashamed to say, we’re proud of you.’
‘Yeah, big war hero just because I gathered more shrapnel than The Corps allows. I’m just a walking scrap yard.’
‘Eddie and I don’t agree on most things, but that I can get behind. Otherwise, we wouldn’t be sitting here.’
‘Hey, Raymond, you didn’t mind coming to my cousin’s wedding. Didn’t we share a beer and have some civilized chat?’
‘Okay, guys, we’re not here to change each other’s life style, and I have something that we can all probably put our shoulders to. I know you both have kids of a tender age in the local schools. Indiscriminate drug pushing is not good for our families or our ‘hood, right?’
They both nodded.
‘I learned from Ray that we have a street drug problem that is no good for our little corner of Brooklyn heaven. Eddie, I’m led to believe that it doesn’t sit well with you, either. We needn’t go into detail. I’ve reported all I have uncovered to Ray and, with his permission, I’m going to share it with you, too. Are you ready for a briefing?’
Eddie raised his hands. ‘Can we order first? I’m starved.’
The three settled into a more comfortable place of discussing food suggestions and selections and, while the order was being prepared, swapped news and some laughs about mutually known old acquaintances. With food on the table and going into mouths, Josh got back to business.
‘As you know, I moved to Maine over a year ago, more as an escape from my California disasters than anything. I intended to hole up and be a hermit, but I gradually became interested in the history and people of the Maine coast. In my directionless nosing around to better understand the past business cycles of the area, I tripped over something that didn’t seem to jibe. To make a long story less long, I teamed up with a local who brought in some more locals and we’ve been able to confirm that there’s a drug transit operation of pretty good scale right there in a college town on the Maine coast.’
‘It’s not mine.’
‘Relax. We know that, but Ray thinks it may be the pipeline that’s spilling a whole lot of hard drugs onto our neighborhood streets here in Brooklyn. Ray doesn’t want this stuff on our streets, I don’t want our home polluted with this stuff and I’m led to believe that you, Eddie, don’t want this to continue, for whatever your reasons.’
‘I’m not admitting to anything here…’
Ray quickly reassured Eddie. ‘We’re not asking you to. Hear Josh out.’
Josh went on to review step-by-step how they found and confirmed the drug traffic, but more important to the meeting was reaching agreement on how to proceed.
‘So, Eddie, we’re going to find where the trucks go when they leave Maine and travel southward. We’ll also find out where they come from to get to the Maine receiving warehouse. At any time, we could intercept the trucks and bust the Brooklyn redistribution point and raid the Maine warehouse, but we want Mr. Big, the brains behind this caper. For that, we need your help.’
‘If you expect me to turn state’s…’
R
ay again: ‘No, no. That’s not what this is about. What we need to do is not tip them off or scare them off. Here’s what we need. We need your people to play a smart game with the street dealers. Don’t just roll them all up. Just put enough pressure on them -- you know the regular turf push back -- so they’ll think they’re not in serious danger of being shut down. Can you do that?’
‘I think I got it. You want the street soldiers of this operation to get what appears to be nothing more than regular competitive resistance, but not enough to think their whole game is blown.’
‘Right. And, our boys in blue will be playing the same light-touch game. Are we okay with this?’
‘The only thing I’m not OK with is picking up this tab,’ Eddie says as he plops down his AmEx Black Card. ‘You guys eat like we’re still starved punks tryin’ to get under the school uniforms of the girls over at St. Cecilias. We had our heads together then and what good did it do us? Huh?’
* * * * * * *
A little over a week later, Dana came home from a late night at the library to find her apartment completely ransacked. It was trashed as if someone was looking for something, but, as far as she could tell, nothing was taken. This shakes her. She suspects that it was related to her work with Josh. Why else would someone run the risk to invade an upstairs apartment in a neighborhood of unpaid students and underpaid junior faculty? This is not where the money is. Not wishing to stay in the apartment for awhile, she calls Josh and her dad, gathers her essentials and, with Josh’s help, secures the apartment.
They were so intent on straightening up the mess and gathering just enough stuff to allow Dana to continue her work elsewhere that when they finally have all her gear in Josh’s truck, he turns to her and says, ‘Where to?’