by Cass Tell
Rajiv nodded his head. “They would burn this place down and even hurt my sister and niece.”
“I’m sorry,” Amy said.
They talked some more and then Rajiv left and Amy said, “We need a plan.”
“Like what?” Jack asked.
“I’m not sure. Maybe we shouldn’t get involved in that we’ve had enough of bad people. We should be thinking about starting a new life.”
“But they need help.”
“Honestly, what can we really do?”
“As you said, we need a plan.”
“I don’t have one. Do you?”
“What do you need to make a plan?” Jack asked.
“I’m not sure.”
“Information,” Jack stated.
“What?”
“We need to find out more about the protection-guy and then maybe we can find a way to take him down.”
“So, how do we find out about him?”
“We go into his office on the fourth floor of that building and snoop around.”
“I don’t like that idea,” Amy objected.
“Then give me a better plan.”
Amy thought for a moment and her mind was blank. “I don’t have one.”
“Then let’s go.”
“Now?” She asked.
“What better time?”
“It’s not such a good idea,” she said, knowing the dangers implied in Jack’s scheme.
“You’re a wimp,” he stated.
Chapter 13
From the restaurant, they walked to the four story building with the offices of Universal Equipment Supplies. Rather than take the elevator, they ascended the emergency stairs. While the elevator was quicker to get to the fourth floor, it was limited in terms of escape. At least in the stairwell they could run if they needed to.
Amy felt foolish to go along with Jack’s imperfect strategy. The memory of being inside Carlo Donato’s house and then caught by Nalf stuck in her mind. Wasn’t Jack’s idea just a repeat of that?
Still, if they could get inside the protection-guy’s office, they might find out something and then they could devise a real plan.
When they arrived at the fourth floor, Amy’s heart beat rapidly and she paused a moment to catch her breath. The events of the past days had gotten to her and she was tired. She wished she was back at their small apartment above the restaurant and that she was in bed asleep. Now they were following this hair-brained idea to find information. What information? And, what would they do with it?
The building was dark, except for a night light that gave an eerie glow to the place.
There was only one door on the fourth floor and next to it was a brass plate with the company’s name on it, Universal Equipment. Supplies.
They stood for a minute, listened, and did not hear any noise in the building. Amy tried to turn the door handle, but it was locked.
“So, what now,” she asked.
“Let me try something,”
Jack reached into his pocket, took out his Swiss Army knife and opened a blade. Then he inserted it into the crack between the door and the door jam and began to wiggle the knife against the lock mechanism. He pulled on the door and it opened.
“Where did you learn to do that?” Amy asked in surprise.
“Mildred always locked the door to her pantry. It took some practice but I eventually figured it out.”
“Amazing,” she whispered.
Amy walked into the office first, taking careful steps. She looked around into a large room with several old couches in it. A table was against a wall with a coffee maker on it and some plastic cups.
One door was in the room and Amy opened it. It was to a bathroom, which was dank and dirty. A hallway was on the opposite side of the room and it led to several doors.
“Where do we start?” Jack asked.
“There’s nothing in this room except old couches. Let’s check the rooms down the hall.”
They went to the first room, opened the door and went inside. It was dark so Amy turned on the light. There was a desk and behind it were stacks of boxes.
Amy went behind the desk, opened one of the boxes and it was full of papers that looked like receipts. “It would take us months to go through all of that,” she said.
Jack opened the top drawer of the desk and pulled out a paper. He gazed at it for a moment, handed it to Amy and said, “Look at this,
She took it and saw it was a list of restaurants and shops. Sumita’s Restaurant was on the list. They were listed by day with some names under Monday, some under Tuesday, and so on.
Sumita’s Restaurant was in the Friday group, as well as the two shops in the shopping center.
“Do you think these are the places that are being extorted by the protection racket?” She asked.
“You mean the protection-guy?”
“Yeah. There’s a lot of names on this list, at least fifty.”
“Fold it up and keep it,” Jack said.
Amy nodded and put the paper in her pocket.
“Let’s go to the next room,” He said.
They went out into the hallway when Amy heard a noise at the front door, a key inserted into the lock. Then she heard the click of the lock opening.
“Quick, in there,” she exclaimed.
They dashed into a dark room and shut the door behind them. It took a moment for their eyes to adjust.
This room had two desks and even more stacked boxes than the first one.
Amy heard the voices of men talking.
“Carlo and Frankie were arrested,” said one of the men.
“What happened?”
“We’re not sure, but we think a couple of kids turned them in.”
When she heard that, Amy’s heart beat with fear.
“Oh come on,” a man said. “How could a couple of kids take down Carlo and Frankie.”
“Believe me, these two were a couple of pests. It seems they were after a reward offered by Northern Bank in Charlotte.”
“A reward?”
“Yeah. Nalf and I lifted some expensive goods and the bank posted a reward. It was for two hundred thousand dollars.”
Amy gulped. It was the voice of Larry. She listened intently. What if they knew the real amount paid? It was far more than two hundred thousand.
“So, did they get the reward?”
“It seems so,” Larry answered.
“And this morning we almost got those kids at their motel, but they got away from us.” It was the voice of Nalf.
“So what are we gonna do?” the third man said, who Amy suspected was the protection-guy.
“We can’t go back to Raleigh,” Larry said. “We managed to flee the scene when Carlo and Frankie were arrested. We need to stay away from there.”
“We ain’t got no boss,” the protection-guy said.
“We don’t need one,” Nalf stated.
“What da-ya mean?”
“We can run the protection game without the boss, as well as the other operations,” Larry claimed.
“Yeah, more money for us,” the protection-guy said. “So where do we go from here?”
“Split up the list three ways and then add more businesses. While doing that we can look for other opportunities. Where’s the list?”
“In my office over here,”
The sounds of their feet echoed in the hallway.
“Hey, the lights on,” the protection-guy said. “I thought I turned it off.”
A moment later he said, “Something’s wrong. My list is gone. I thought I put it here. Nalf, go check out those other rooms.”
The pounding footsteps of Nalf filled the hallway and then the sound of a door opening.
“Quick, get behind the desk,” Amy ordered.
They crouched down behind one of the desks and waited. The door shut down the hallway, Nalf plodded toward their room, and the door opened. The light switched on.
Amy trembled. It seemed like an eternity. Then the light went off and the door closed.
In the room across the hallway, she heard Nalf say, “Ain’t nothing in those rooms. Mannie, where’s the list?”
“No idea. I’ll print out another one and tomorrow we can divide up the visits to the shops. Can I buy you guys a drink?”
“Sure,” Nalf answered.
A minute later the front door to the office closed and the men were gone.
Amy and Jack waited a few minutes without saying a word. Then Amy tapped Jack on the shoulder, they quietly left the room and went into the larger room with the couches.
Amy put her ear close to the front door of the office and listened for a minute. Then she slowly opened the door ,they left and headed for the emergency stairs.
With quick and quiet footsteps, they flew down the stairs like hummingbirds.
Chapter 14
Amy’s heart was beating like a flag in a windstorm. They got to the front door of the building , she carefully pushed it open and looked both ways down the street. There was no one on any sidewalk.
“Where are they?” She asked.
“Maybe they went out the back door,” Jack exhaled.
“What back door?”
“There’s a back door facing a parking area on the other side of this building. I saw it when I was looking around today.”
“Then let’s get out of here,” she exclaimed. “And fast.”
Jack put his hand on her arm as he looked down the empty street. “Wait. Why don’t we see where they’re going?”
“Are you serious? That’s Larry and Nalf.”
“Two jerks.”
“Jack, don’t be stupid. Those guys are not as dumb as you think and remember how Nalf grabbed us.”
“But now we’ve got the Taser-sticks.”
“And, where are they?”
“Ah . . . back at our room?”
“That’s right. We’ve got nothing.”
“But we can at least watch them from a distance.”
He had a point. Maybe they could see where they hung out and even where they lived. That might be helpful. “Okay, but we’ll just watch them from a distance.”
They turned back into the building and followed the entrance hallway past the elevator until it angled right and then arrived at the back door. Amy cracked it open and she peered outside.
Beyond a parking area and across the street she saw Larry, Nalf and Mannie the protection-guy walking past some old buildings. They looked abandoned.
“Let’s go,” she said.
Jack led the way as they sneaked like army scouts zigzagging past cars until they reached the street.
“They’re up there,” he said.
She saw the three men about a block and a half ahead of them and then they followed on the opposite side of the street. There were few streetlights but a car passed and its lights showed them as bright as day.
“Darn it,” Amy exclaimed. “We’ve got to be more careful.”
“When cars come we should find dark areas to hide in,” Jack said.
Ahead of them Mannie stopped in front of a building, took out a key from his pocket, unlocked a door and went inside. Larry and Nalf stayed out on the street.
Amy and Jack hid in an alley and watched Larry and Nalf talking with each other.
“What’s going on?” Jack asked.
“No idea. It looks like Mannie is getting something.”
Then Mannie came back outside, shut the door and they continued down the block until they came to a dilapidated old building with a sign in the front that said, “Tavern’. They went inside.
“They said they were going to go get a drink,” Jack whispered.
“We certainly can’t go in there and wouldn’t want to.”
“Let’s go home,” Amy demanded.
“What’s that building that Mannie went into?”
“How would we know?”
“There’s only one way to find out.”
“Oh no,” Amy responded.
Chapter 15
Her brother was becoming more daring all the time and that would get them in trouble. They did not need any more of that.
However, he did have a point. If they were to help Sumita and all the other shop owners extorted by Mannie, then they needed some way to stop him. Now that Larry and Nalf were with him, it would make life even more miserable for Sumita.
Somehow, they needed to find a way to remove Larry and Nalf for good.
“Okay, let’s see what we can find,” Amy stated.
They walked across the dark street and then in the direction of the tavern. The three mobsters would probably be in there for some time.
It was an older neighborhood with derelict buildings, a factory of some kind, and warehouses like in Raleigh. On a closer look, it was a maze of derelict buildings, alleys, rusted equipment and junk piles. Some buildings were half way torn down to prepare for new construction.
When they got to the door of the building Mannie had entered, Amy stood on the street and watched while Jack fiddled with the lock. The minutes ticked away and Amy got nervous.
“Hurry up,” she said.
“It’s not an easy one,” Jack responded.
“Then let’s get out of here.”
“No, I’m almost there.”
There was a click and the door opened.
“You wait here,” he directed.
“I’m going inside.” She figured it would be better if both of them searched for any information.
“We need a watcher.”
“Go see if there’s a back door and I’ll wait here.”
Jack disappeared and a couple of minutes later he came back and said, “There’s a way out, but I don’t know where it goes.”
“Okay.”
She went through the front door, closed it behind her and stepped into a dark room. Her eyes adjusted and she saw that it was a living room cluttered with empty potato chip wrappers and beer cans. A long couch faced a large screen television attached to a wall.
The cluttered kitchen had dirty plates piled high in the sink.
“This place is disgusting,” Jack said.
“I totally agree,” Amy replied. “If they were making money from their protection business, it certainly wasn’t going to Mannie. That’s going to change now that Carlo their boss is out of the picture.”
“We’ve got to stop them,” Jack said.
“But how?”
“You’re the thinker . . . You’ll figure something out,” Jack stated.
Amy appreciated Jack’s confidence in her, although at that moment she did not have faith in herself. Could she find a solution to this? Lately he had been the one with the ideas. “Keep looking,” she said.
There were three bedrooms in the house. Two were empty and Amy figured that Larry and Nalf would move into them.
The third bedroom was just as messy as the living room and kitchen, having an unmade bed and a pile of dirty clothing on the floor. On a table was a stack of papers.
After turning on the light, she saw that the papers were a cluttered mess of bills and bank statements. This was not her area of expertise and she wished her father were here.
Her father was an accountant and he understood bank statements and anything to do with payments. That is the reason he had gotten into trouble. That is the reason Amy and Jack had lost their parents.
Understanding that bank payments could be important, Amy quickly went through the papers and separated out anything to do with Mannie’s bank account. Then she rolled them up and crammed them into her back pocket.
She turned off the light remembering how she had forgotten to do so in the fourth floor office.
Jack walked into the room and asked, “Did you find anything?”
“Just bank statements, but I’m not sure they will do us any good or how we could use them. How about you?”
“Maybe something. Come here.”
She followed him to the end of the hall, he opened the door to a closet, and then she gasped.
He said, “Its
guns. The mean kind. Six big ones.”
“I think they’re called automatics,” Amy said. “Are they legal?”
“We don’t know anything about that stuff,” Jack replied. “But that one probably isn’t. I think it’s called a bazooka. And look, there are hand guns.”
Next to the hand guns on the floor there was a pile of stocking hats. Jack picked up a hat, stretched it out and said, “These are the kind you pull over your face with two holes for eyes and a hole for your mouth. It’s what robbers wear,” He threw it back on the pile. “Maybe they’re bank robbers or something like that.”
“Well, we already know they’re thieves.”
They shut the door to the closet and went back into the living room when suddenly the front door opened and a hand reached in and flipped the light switch.
Mannie stood in the open doorway, looked at them, and said, “What the . . . ?”
Larry and Nalf stood behind them.
Nalf cried out, “Those are the two little rats.”
Nalf pushed pass Mannie and headed toward Amy.
Jack quickly turned toward the hallway and Amy followed. They sprinted toward the back door.
Chapter 16
Jack fumbled with the lock on the back door while they heard Nalf’s big feet clodding down the hallway.
“Hurry,” Amy exhaled as she remembered Nalf’s foul breath and the strength of his hands.
Jack pulled the lock bolt and twisted the door handled and the door opened and they ran into an open area at the back of the house.
There was a small alley so Jack darted down it and Amy followed. It was more like a path with weeds growing on either side.
Nalf was not far behind them and Larry and Mannie were behind him. Amy was glad Nalf was in the lead for he was slow and would impede the speed of the other two men.
She was also glad for the maze of buildings, although they did not know the layout. Out on the main street they would be in the open. Here they might find a place to hide.
Jack tripped on weeds and went down. Amy pulled him up and she felt fingers grab her shirt so she spun and the fingers lost their hold. Then Jack was up and running and she was just behind him.
