by Pete Lister
Excess Baggage
by
Pete Lister
For Dianne
Prologue
The sun beamed down around the occasional wisp of a cloud over Grant Park as a cool breeze off Lake Michigan rippled the top leaves of the elms on the day Shiv Thompson’s empire collapsed. Shiv lay bleeding alongside the Buckingham Fountain, unable to move, as the fountain’s fantasy seahorses spouted, oblivious to the drama unfolding around them. His tailored clothes bloody, his revolver still gripped tightly in his now-useless right hand, Shiv no longer had the strength to raise the pistol, let alone pull the trigger, again. His eyes were fixed on the bastard who had stolen his money and his drugs, the one staring back at him now. Shiv couldn’t shout, couldn’t even speak, couldn’t tell the bus driver what he was going to do to him. He could only fight for breath, just vaguely aware of the wail of the approaching ambulance. Grant Park was full of cops, mopping up what was left of Shiv’s organization. He had fallen for a pigeon drop, a goddam pigeon drop, the oldest scam in the book! The empire that had taken him years to build had come down in an instant. Once set in motion, the whole operation hadn’t taken five minutes, but the denouement had actually begun on a quiet evening under ten rural acres an hour north of Madison, just south of the Ho-Chunk casino...
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1
The hissing in the air vent should have been the first clue. Anyone who’s ever read a paperback or seen a movie would have recognized the danger in the sound emanating from that air vent. If that wasn’t enough, the visible mist flowing into the bunker from the cool of the Wisconsin evening should have set off red flags and alarm bells, but it didn’t. The counters and guards just stared at the vents as if they’d never seen a movie, curiosity writ large on their faces as they collapsed in place.
This was the heart of Chicago drug lord Shiv Thompson’s heroin distribution network. The bunker and its parking lot, a subterranean stronghold of steel-reinforced pumped-concrete and bullet-proof glass, lay concealed beneath the ten-acre pasture, a hundred yards west of U.S. 12 in south-central Wisconsin. The old weathered barn above it leaned some, like so many old barns, and was hidden from the road by a thick stand of pine. The leaning of the barn masked the reinforcement Shiv had added. It still looked like a relic, still leaned, but it was now a secure storage facility that would pass unnoticed in rural Wisconsin.
Normally, any number of locals would have seen the construction, but after an acre of woods had been cut and bulldozed out of the woods, a large fence had discouraged casual observation of the construction site of a new diner, so no one noticed the additional concrete mixers and glass deliveries, far in excess of what was required to open that diner.
Several hundred yards to the north of the old barn, Curtis’ Place was open 24/7, just like the bunker. The silver diner, designed to look like a 1950s-era Pullman dining car, still sported juke boxes in each booth. Sited in the band of trees bracketing Highway 12, the diner and its gravel parking lot almost filled the acre cut out of the trees along the west side of the highway.
Curtis Thibodeaux, the short, bald Cajun who ran the eponymous diner, was no more than 135 pounds soaking wet. Decked out in his uniform of white polo shirt and jeans, Curtis always wore a white, ankle-length apron around his waist. He walked with a limp, the result of a gunshot wound received on the Chicago El when he was eighteen.
Curtis’ Place welcomed cops, whether they stopped mid-shift for a full meal or just dropped in, in the middle of the night, for a slice of apple pie with cheddar cheese, the way they eat apple pie in Wisconsin. The coffee was always on the house for Curtis’ boys in uniform. The diner hosted their birthday parties and promotion parties, and it served the same purpose that ‘cop bars’ served for urban departments. It was a cops’ place, and a cop’s tab was always only a buck, whether for a meal or a mid-shift snack.
Curtis never failed to smile graciously and thank them for their service. He told anyone who would listen that he would never get robbed, because he always had at least one cop there. “An’ it might just be a undercover cop in street clothes eating at a regular table!” he would crow, laughing and shaking his head. In fact, if the over-sized “cops’ booth” couldn’t accommodate all the lawmen that showed up at the same time, he’d been known to bounce a paying customer to seat them.
Curtis welcomed them all, the cops from Lake Delton, Baraboo, Dellwood, and the Dells, the Sauk County deputies, even the Ho-Chunk Tribal Police. The wall behind the register was covered with notes of thanks and letters of appreciation, as well as patches representing the departments whose officers had visited Curtis’ Place. Cops vacationing in the Dells from other areas often stopped in just to leave a department patch, so they could say they’d been to Curtis’ Place, like a Wall Drug for cops. Below the register, Curtis kept a long piece of black fabric, used to drape the badge or plaque of any department that had lost an officer, and he always sent flowers to the funerals.
Curtis had installed the “cops’ booth”, an oversized booth sporting half a dozen electrical outlets with surge protection and secure Internet connection. Police could use this booth with laptops when writing reports ‘in the field’. A sign graced the edge of the table, RESERVED FOR LAW ENFORCEMENT, warning off unwary civilians.
“Evenin’, Curtis.” The deputy sheriff brushed dust off his shirt front as he came through the door.
“Evenin’, James. You look like you could use a cuppa coffee.” Curtis smiled, welcoming the Sauk County deputy like an old friend. Picking up a coffee pot, Curtis followed James to the big ‘cops’ booth’ that looked out over the highway. Cops’ coffee was always free at Curtis’ Place.
“How’s the retirement fund comin’ along?” James asked, glancing upward. The ceiling in Curtis’ Place was almost covered by dollar bills, accentuated by occasional fives and tens - and the C-note above the cash register - each held up by a red push pin, only red, taken from the small glass fish bowl next to the register. Curtis had gotten the idea when a Baraboo cop told him about seeing it done at a place called Buen Tiempo – Good Time – a bar/restaurant he had visited in Ouray, Colorado.
“Any day, now.” Curtis would always tell him.
For the uninitiated, waitresses would demonstrate the art of sticking bills to the ceiling. A push pin was pushed through the center of the bill, which was signed and, of course, provided by the customer. The flat head of the pin was then placed against the end of a roll of coins. The pin was held between the index and middle finger of the launcher’s hand, the thumb supporting the bottom of the roll. With a back-handed flick of the wrist, the fingers were spread and the coins, pin and bill were launched into the ceiling’s acoustic tiles. If the maneuver was done correctly, the bill was held in place by the pin, which was driven into the tile by the weight of the roll of coins. The new girls used rolls of quarters, the veterans used dimes. After the pin penetrated and stuck, securing the bill to the ceiling, the roll of coins dropped away like the space shuttle’s fuel tanks and the waitress would recover it in mid-air with a casual one-handed snatch, slipping it back into an apron pocket with a smug smile. The ability to make the bills stick every time was a prerequisite for waitresses to be hired.
No one knew when or where Curtis slept; no one could remember a time when he hadn’t been there, often joining a customer for a cup of his private stock of strong, black, chicory-laced Café Du Monde coffee (“COFFEE AND CHICORY Distributed by Café Du Monde Coffee Stand at Old Jackson Square, New Orleans, Louisiana 70116”), according to the orange 15-ounce can, which also stated on the back of the can, near the top, inside its own quasi-fancy border: “This is the exclusive Coffee and Chicory blend served at the CAFÉ DU MONDE®, the Original French Market Coffee Stand, serving Café Au
Lait and Hot Beignets (French Doughnuts) 24 hours a day, year round. This popular New Orleans landmark has been located in the French Market since the early 1860s.”). Both the coffee and the habit had come with him from his native "Looziana".
Around back, where the deliveries were made, a dirt road penetrated the woods that surrounded the diner on three sides. It looked disused, but its surface, only where the tires had worn the weeds away, had been treated with DirtGlue. The polymer-water mix, after being carefully applied over the tire tracks, dried hard. It even sealed the ruts in place. In summer, wild grasses grew down the center, highlighting the impression that the road was abandoned.
Ten yards up the dirt road, after a 90° left turn and past a rusty cattle guard, a sagging barbed-wire fence, running along Curtis’ lot line, crossed the road. The lack of a gate in the fence suggested that the road was no longer used. But, a vehicle approaching the fence would trigger an alarm. After the vehicle and driver had been verified, a button would be pushed that laid the fence down so it could be driven over. The wire was actually rubber-coated, molded and colored to look like aged barbed wire. It left no impression on the road, and no tires were injured during the making of this transit.
A hundred yards through the thinning woods, the road broke into a pasture before petering out against a badly weathered cattle-loading ramp. The ramp’s age-silvered lumber had actually been soaked with stabilizer. While it still looked like it was a week from falling down, it would endure many more years, each day looking like tomorrow would be its last. It was obvious from its rickety appearance that the old ramp could no longer handle the weight of cattle, but that didn’t really matter. The few bulls that grazed the property were permanent residents, put there for show, safe from the slaughterhouse.
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2
Nightfall doesn’t offer much change in an urban landscape. The sky turns black, street lights come on, and the casual observer can pretty much see the same things visible during the day.
Rural nightfall, on the other hand, isn’t simply a diminution of daylight. It brings black, a deep bottomless black, ameliorated only by starlight and, occasionally, the moon. You want light, you bring your own.
Just at dusk, a dented, oxidized, mostly red ‘73 C-10 pickup, powered by a big-block Chevy eight-banger, pulled off Highway 12, drove around Curtis’ Place, and proceeded down the old dirt road. The truck’s paint job was a sham, intentionally colored to look weathered, but in reality sealed with a flat, weatherproof finish. The engine was kept perfectly tuned, but the muffler had a small hole welded into it that made it sound like a Harley. The bed of the pickup was packed with hay bales, a set of old tires, and a crate of eggs from a local farm, so it looked like any old Wisconsin farm truck. This truck was one of nineteen similar rigs in Shiv’s fleet. They arrived at the bunker at irregular intervals, around the clock.
The pickup slowed as it approached the old loading ramp, which silently pivoted into the air, its vertical face folding under. The truck disappeared down a well-concealed concrete maw, descending twelve feet and rolling into an underground parking lot. As the truck dropped out of sight, the old cattle ramp dropped smoothly back into position, the opening vanishing. At the bottom of the incline, the truck made a turn, then backed up to the bunker’s small loading dock.
Stopping against the dock, the driver reached under the steering column and pressed a soft spot on the bottom of the padded dash. That spot masked a recessed button that was undetectable to the uninitiated. When the hidden button was pressed, the tonneau cover was unlocked and raised automatically by two hydraulic pistons as the tailgate slowly dropped open.
The truck’s faux load was actually made up of two hay bale cut into halves, horizontally, and an old tire cut into four pieces, fastened to the top of a fiberglass tonneau cover to give the appearance of a tightly-packed load in the back of the truck.
When the loading ramp had pivoted up, exposing the underground parking lot, it triggered a flashing light in the counting room. Guard Tracy Wilson, squat and dour, stepped out onto the loading dock with an industrial material handling cart, while the other counting room guard opened the vault. Wilson unloaded wrapped bundles from the bed of the truck, wheeling them across the dock and into Count, the counting room, under the watchful lenses of various security cameras. The driver always stayed with his truck.
Count was enclosed on two sides by thick, bullet-proof glass walls. The two remaining walls were concrete, a faux cinder block pattern pressed into the outside wall by the mold when the concrete was poured. A 36” x 79” Hamilton vault door in the center of that wall, opened for each delivery, would stay open until the count was completed and verified. The room contained two work stations, with a pair of money counters at each.
After wheeling in the cart, Wilson piled the bundles on one of the tables. The first counter would open each bar-coded bundle, placing a stack of hundred-dollar bills onto a Ribao SBC-100 Suction-Type Banknotes Counting Machine, which counted a hundred bills every four seconds. After counting each bundle, the machine entered the total and the barcode scanned from the bundle wrapper into a server located in Ops. The barcode identified the dealer and the amount reportedly enclosed. The counted bundle was then handed to the second Counter, who placed the bundle into another SBC-100, where the process was repeated. If the two machines reported different totals, or if either machine didn’t match the amount indicated by the barcode, an alarm sounded and work stopped at that table until the error was resolved, under the watchful eyes of the guards. Almost without exception, both machine counts not only matched, but matched the listed count, since counting errors were considered theft. Down-line distributors who still couldn’t count, after one warning, tended to disappear. After the second count, the opened bundles were passed to the second table for another, identical count.
After the count was verified at the second table, the bills were placed in a foot-long stainless steel tray that held twenty-eight hundred bills, two hundred eighty thousand dollars. The tray was then transferred onto a Preferred Pack 5600 high-speed shrink wrapper and wrapped tight in a package, precisely 12” x 61/8” x 25/8”, a foot long and the exact size of American currency.
A guard then carried the shrink-wrapped “sticks” to the 8’ x 8’ foot vault, where they were laid six across on shelves that circled the small room, like laying your hand flat on a table against the wall. With each stick 25/8” thick, the height of a bill, theoretically they could be stacked twenty rows high. The normal load in the vault, when the truck from Chicago picked it up, was between twelve and sixteen million dollars. There are people in society who will tell you crime doesn’t pay, many people in fact. But none of them worked here.
After dropping the cash in Count, Wilson next pushed the cart to the ‘Dispensary’, where 75% pure heroin, uniformly shrink-wrapped in 7½” x 4½” x 1½” bricks, each weighing 1,021 grams, about 36 ounces, were shelved. Taking exactly the number of bricks needed to supply the distributors in the cities served by that particular truck, Wilson pushed the cart back to the dock, where the driver waited. The bricks were loaded, the faux load lowered and locked, and ten minutes after its arrival, the truck was rolling, again.
The heart of the bunker was Ops, the operations center, where a supervisor sat watching a bank of eighteen monitors. The first-shift supervisor, Lawrence John, worked the twelve-hundred post. Carrying two forty on his once-lanky, but still-tall frame, the middle-aged bachelor was slowly going to seed. His hair, receding and fading to dingy gray, added ten years to his appearance, while his high-fat, high-cholesterol, fried-food-and-snack-cake diet added twice that to his heart. The monitors he scanned displayed the scenes covered by eighteen interior and exterior cameras, the outside cameras also equipped for night vision.
Ops – the name for both the work station and the supervisor who worked it - controlled all the entrances and exits as well as the interior doors and was inaccessible from within the complex. Ops communicated with the res
t of the staff through the intercom system. If anyone bent on relieving Shiv of his ‘bricks and sticks’ managed to penetrate the bunker, he could be locked in until help arrived. Ops had its own entrance beside the barn, disguised as an old root cellar door, sporting a rusty padlock secured to a useless, equally-rusty hasp. The weathered wood door was a façade, masking a modern steel one. The door’s heavy-duty steel piano hinge was hidden under the rusty hasp, and the rusty hinges on the other side of the wood door served no useful purpose at all.
The ‘root cellar’ entrance led down to a tunnel, then to the locked Ops door. The floor of Ops was a full yard higher than the floor in the rest of the bunker, so the controller had an unobstructed view of the entire operation. The interior cameras covered every aspect of the enterprise, including the inside of the vault, the Ops control panels and monitors, and even the bathroom, all recorded in the Ops server. This place was nothing if not secure.
There were no keyholes; the doors were locked and unlocked, opened and closed, electrically. There was a backup generator in the barn, insurance against the power failures so common in rural areas during bad weather. Fresh air was provided through a powered vent, located on the roof of the dilapidated barn, out of sight from ground level.
There was only one back-up for gaining entrance to the bunker, and no one but Shiv even knew about it. The contractor who had installed it in the dead of night now rested beneath Lake Geneva, not far from Shiv’s summer place, right on the shoreline of the lake.
In all, there were the four money counters, two guards, a dispensary clerk, and the Ops controller on duty at all times. All employees in the bunker were armed, men and women. Guards and Ops supervisors carried Glock Model 22s, chambered in .40 S&W, while counters and dispensary clerks carried the smaller Model 23. Shiv had designed the bunker to be assault-proof, sealed off from the surface, with access strictly controlled by the Ops supervisor.
