Past Crimes

by Glen Erik Hamilton

  Still stopped. And now the door was opening and the driver was stepping out.

  No reason to freak, I told myself. We hadn’t touched a thing out front. Even if he came around back, our big moving truck would probably look like any other vehicle the warehouse might use. He’d think everything was all cool.

  Unless he saw our ladder.

  Or we’d already triggered an alarm somehow. Maybe the cops were on their way right now.

  Oh, shit.

  The security guard left the door of the car open and walked to the side of the parking lot.

  Where he unzipped his pants.

  Not taking a look. Taking a piss.

  I made myself breathe—again—and by the time I’d stopped huffing like a buffalo, the guard was in the car again and driving out of the lot.

  I walked back to Granddad.

  “We’re clear,” I said, and told him about the security guard.

  Granddad shook his head and sighed. Maybe at me, maybe at fate. He tossed the tarp aside.

  Past the yawning hole was the huge interior of the warehouse. Silent and echoing all at once. The roof beneath my feet suddenly felt fragile, like it might collapse at any moment and send us both tumbling into the pit below.

  Granddad had been unpacking the rest of our gear while I’d been busy with the guard. He picked up a small winch and used a power drill to secure it with bolts near the edge of the hole. He fed the end of the rope through the winch and handed the rope to me. I began tying the rope to a bosun’s chair that Granddad had bought the week before at a marine salvage store. The chair was a simple rig, just thick blue canvas over a base of rigid plastic for the seat, forming a triangle shape with a few straps and D-rings attached.

  It would let me sit in relative comfort while Granddad lowered me into the pit.

  Within five minutes I was strapped into the chair while he cranked up the last foot of slack in the rope.

  “Check the brake,” I said. I’d seen him lock the winch. But I was about to be dangling a long fall away from a concrete floor.

  He twisted the brake an extra millimeter. “It’s set. Don’t forget, now. If we have to meet later—”

  “I know.” If there was trouble, if I screwed it up and set off the alarms, Granddad would be gone. Down the ladders and through the forest, two miles away to where we’d left the rental car. If I couldn’t find my own way out of the warehouse and back to the car, I’d be busted.

  He was a convicted felon. I was a juvenile. No question.

  “Let’s go,” I said. Granddad nodded.

  I took a deep breath and knelt down to grip the edge of the hole with my gloved hands. I stepped backward off the roof into the hole, lowering myself slowly, like I was doing a pull-up in reverse, until the bosun’s chair took my full weight. Its canvas creaked, and the safety straps tightened around my thighs.

  I let go, and the chair swung lazily. My head was level with the cut edge of the plywood sheet. I could smell the singed wood and glue, still hot from the saw blade.

  Only twenty feet from where I hung was the front of the warehouse. To my right I could see the top of the interior office space, and near that was the first gigantic row of storage racks.

  We were here for something specific, but seeing those racks, loaded with huge wooden pallets of everything from food to furniture, made me feel like it was Christmas. I slapped a hand against the side of the chair. Giddyup.

  Granddad passed me the bag of hand tools, and I clipped it to the D-ring at the side of the chair. He gave me the smaller bag, the one with his burglary kit. I cradled it in my arms.

  Granddad tapped the kit. “You remember about the alarm?”

  “The phone line first, then the battery,” I said. I was sure I could get by with just doing the battery, but I’d told Granddad—after we’d argued about it for an hour—that I would take the precaution of bypassing the phone line beforehand.

  He nodded. He reached over to ease off on the winch brake and turn the handle. Smooth as honey, I started sinking.

  The clicks of the winch echoed in the gloom as I ratcheted down. It was like being on a trapeze. Without a net. Cool.

  When I was halfway down, I held my hand up and Granddad stopped cranking. The chair spun, slowly. I had to keep turning my head to see the front of the warehouse.

  On the wall above the office, there was a bank of passive infrared sensors, about twelve feet off the floor. The sensors were angled downward, covering a wide swath of floor near the office and front entrance. I knew the brand. Their effective range was fifty feet.

  Knock the infrareds out and I would have clear passage to the office. And the main alarm box inside it.

  I knew this because Granddad had bought inside knowledge about the warehouse’s security from a guy I’d never met in person. One of Hollis’s many buddies. Granddad must have trusted him, though, or at least believed Hollis when he vouched for the guy’s creds. So far his information about the alarms was spot-on. I wondered if he was an employee of the warehouse. Maybe even the owner.

  I frowned at myself. Better get my head in the game.

  I unzipped the little burglary kit and looped its carrying strap around my neck.

  “Okay,” I said. My voice sounded loud in the big metal cavern.

  Granddad reached down and yanked hard on the taut line. The tug started me swinging in a short arc that got wider as I leaned into it. Five feet. The heavy bag of hand tools bumped against my leg with each swing. Ten feet.

  In one more pass, I was close enough to reach out and grab one of the wooden planks that made a broad reinforcing stripe every few feet on the corrugated metal wall. My weight tried to pull me back, and for a moment I hung by one arm like a gibbon. The corners of the raw wood bit into my palm, even through the glove.

  Granddad gave me slack on the line until I could get a foot on one of the wooden planks and stand. Face-first against the wall, midway between the floor and the ceiling. The bank of infrared sensors was four feet below my shoe.

  From the burglar kit, I took out a multifunction wrench and a set of wire cutters. I looked down at the infrareds and grinned.

  Time for the fun part.

  I took two deep breaths and heaved with my arms and legs to twist myself around until I was almost upside down on the wall. I shoved my sneakered feet into the gap between the wooden planks and the wall, jamming them painfully but immovably.

  The chair tried mightily to pull me back upright. To stay where I was, I had to tense every muscle in my gut, like doing crunches in gym class. But doing them while blood rushed to my head and with my feet feeling like they were trapped in a vise. Then it got a little worse, when one of the straps started putting pressure on my balls.

  I almost laughed. Granddad would have hated this. No wonder he let me take point.

  But the infrareds—those were easy, even hanging head down like a bat. Pop the screws on the housing with the needle-nose pliers of the wrench and cut two wires. Dead meat.

  “All set,” I called to Granddad as I gratefully clambered right side up. He eased off on the brake, and I let go of the wall and swung like Spider-Man—no Spidey-sense necessary, now that the alarm was toast—down to the warehouse floor.

  I unstrapped myself from the chair and let it fall.

  “Take your time,” Granddad said. His voice rebounded off the floor and walls of the huge interior. Time-ime-ime. The echo helping him get a few last reminders in.

  From my new vantage point on the floor, the place was spooky, no question. The racks were like monoliths to some ancient pissed-off god. The warehouse behind them looked like it stretched on next to forever.

  I took out my penlight and walked up the short flight of stairs to the door of the interior office. It was locked. I fished Granddad’s snap gun out of the burglar’s kit and had the lock picked in under a minute.

  The alarm was right on the wall, directly across from the door, a box about the size and shape of a small medicine cabinet. Painted e
gg yellow, with the security company’s logo in police blue. The padlock on the box was so tiny I used the wire cutters to snap it and reach the control panel.

  Three minutes later I had the heavy twenty-four-volt brick battery connected to the alarm’s power lines and I’d greased the phone line around the alarm connection. Just in case I screwed up somehow with the battery and the alarm tried to dial out. I knew it wouldn’t.

  But I still held my breath as I cut the alarm’s power.

  No blinking lights on the panel. No sirens. The alarm fed off the battery and never knew the difference.

  We owned the place, right down to the coffeemakers in the break room.

  I checked my watch—3:34 now. We had less than ninety minutes to take what we wanted and clear out, leaving a safety margin of a full hour between our exit and the first guys on the 6:00 A.M. shift straggling in. One more hour after that, we were scheduled to meet Hollis back in Seattle. We had to be on time. Granddad had been very clear on that point.

  I jogged across the wide stretch of floor to the loading bay. Two Hyster electric forklifts sat against the wall, plugged in to their sockets like chained mastiffs. A rubber-coated button on the side of the door was obvious enough. I pressed it, and the heavy metal door began to rise with a loud hum.

  Granddad was standing on the loading dock outside. Behind him was the dark forest of trees, with no lights in sight, except for stars, and no people for at least half a mile.

  “So?” said Granddad.

  “Cake,” I said. I could see that he’d opened up the back of our moving truck and set the loading-bay ramp in place. It was a big truck, over a thousand cubic feet of capacity.

  Granddad took the duffel bag from me and tapped the burglar’s kit. “I’ll find the goods. You get the forklift ready.”

  He meant disabling the warning light and beeping when the machine was in reverse. It only took a minute, and I was unplugging the forklift from the wall just as he came walking back.

  “I found two,” he said. “Follow me.”

  I pushed the button to start the forklift—the electric engine made a loud stutter—and I got used to the feel of steering it as I trailed Granddad slowly along the rows. We stopped at the end of a long row of large cargo on wooden pallets.

  Granddad slapped the closest pallet with one gloved hand. “These.”

  Pall Mall cigarettes. They didn’t look like I’d imagined. The cases were covered with a big sheet of protective plastic wrap that bound them to the pallet. The whole thing the size of a wide refrigerator.

  The cases had been shipped straight from the manufacturer to the warehouse. Since the thousands of packs inside were intended as export products, they had not been stamped for Washington State taxes.

  Unstamped packs were like gold. Any smuggler could slap on his own fake tax stamps, to match whatever country he wanted, and sell the cartons as if they were legit. The packs could even be sold under the table in the U.S., without any stamps at all. A lot of people were happy as clams to buy their smokes at almost half price.

  Fifty cartons per master case. Forty master cases on each large pallet. Four pallets here in the warehouse, according to Granddad’s source. At thirty bucks per carton retail in the States, that was almost a quarter of a million bucks here, a little less overseas.

  Granddad would clear somewhere around a hundred grand for the four pallets, I guessed. Once I learned how much, I wanted to figure out what it came to per cigarette. Maybe it really was better than gold, if you compared the weight.

  “Load ’em,” Granddad said. “I’ll find the other two.”

  Driving the forklift was a blast. It wasn’t my first time, and I’d handled heavier equipment before, but these little machines hauled ass. After I unloaded the first pallet of master cases onto the truck, I took an extra loop around the rows, just to feel it corner.

  I was dropping the second pallet in the truck when Granddad came out onto the loading dock.

  “We’ve a problem,” he said, turning and walking back inside.

  I stopped the forklift and walked quickly after him. His long legs ate up the ground a lot faster than mine, even though I was only five inches shorter.

  He stopped at a row not far from the warehouse office and pointed up at a higher level. “There they are,” he said.

  The two pallets rested on the third level of racks, maybe eighteen feet above the floor. Someone had cut off the thick plastic wrapping that protected the other pallets, but other than that they looked the same.

  “Okay,” I said. It made some sense that the warehouse might store the cigarettes up high. As cargo weight went, cigarettes were lighter than most things. Easier to put on a top shelf than lumber, at any rate. “I saw a hoist over on the other side. We can get them down.”

  Granddad shook his head. “That’s not it.”

  “We’ve got enough time. Twenty minutes, I’ll have them on the truck.”

  He shook his head again.

  Whenever he went silent like this, I knew he was testing me. It really pissed me off.

  I looked again at the pallets. And finally saw what Granddad saw. Not only was the plastic wrap gone, but the master cases had been moved and then restacked on the pallet. On the untouched pallets I’d loaded into the truck, the Pall Mall logos on every case lined up neatly in the same direction. These cases were jumbled around, some backward, some not. And the only reason I could think of for unwrapping and shuffling forty cases was …

  “They’ve been opened,” I said.

  “And look,” said Granddad.

  He led me over to an area to the far right of the first rack. A large blue machine was bolted to the floor near the wall. A short conveyor belt made the short part of the machine’s L shape, while the long arm looked like some combination of a table saw and a printing press.

  “A stamping machine?” I said.

  “Yep,” said Granddad. He sounded a little amused. “Every case opened and every damn pack inside marked with a Washington tax stamp. We don’t even have to take them down to know that. These cases aren’t going over the border. They’ll be sold around the state.”

  “So why are they here? Why send them to this place if they aren’t being exported?” I caught the whiny tone in my own voice and hated it.

  “Convenience, I suspect. The tobacco company just sends one big shipment. Half for inside the state, half for export.”

  “And your guy didn’t know that? Was the idiot guessing or what?”

  “He knew the cigarettes were coming in. That was all.”

  “Shit. Shit.” I fumed and glared up at the cases, twenty feet off the floor, wishing them with all my might to go back to their original state. “How much can we still get for them?”

  “Twelve to twenty years.”

  “That’s not what I mean.”

  “But that’s what they’re worth, boy. I don’t know if our buyer will want them with the tax stamps. And we sure as sin don’t want to keep eighty cases in our garage, now, do we?”

  “Somebody will buy them.”

  He waved a hand, like brushing away a fly. “Somebody, somewhere, sometime. If you don’t have a buyer you can trust for shit like this, you leave it alone.”

  I fumed. Looked at my watch—3:58. “Okay. No cigarettes. What else do we want? Half the stuff in here is valuable. There’s televisions over there. And appliances.”

  “Same deal. Just stones hanging around your neck.”

  “You must know somebody who’ll take them. Three weeks of work and you’re good with making … what, maybe forty grand out of it?” Granddad could clear that on a decent house job.

  “Some people work a year to make less.”

  “We’ve got a whole empty truck. We’re just going to walk away? Fuck that.”

  Granddad’s face darkened, and he took a step toward me. I flinched.

  He wasn’t a hitter. Not to me anyway. He’d never done more than swat me on the ear when he thought I was being especially dumb.
Then again I’d never argued with his decisions right in the middle of a job before either.

  But he didn’t raise his hand. He took a long breath. Stared at me. I could feel the blood going out of my face. The stare was almost worse than getting hit.

  “All right,” he said. “I told you it was your job. Your call.” He looked around at the warehouse. “So tell me. What’s it to be?”

  I looked around. The warehouse seemed even larger than before. We hadn’t even glanced at ninety percent of the place. Which racks held the best stuff? Was there anything even more valuable than the cigarettes?

  Screw it. There wasn’t time to search every rack hoping for something better. “Maybe those laptops?” I said, pointing to a stack of two dozen slim boxes. Granddad shrugged. “I might be able to sell them. A hundred apiece, maybe.” He sounded bored.

  I scanned the racks nearby frantically. Spotting a familiar logo, I ran over for a closer look.

  “Here!” I said. “Canadian Club. Cases of it!”

  “You’ll hide the bottles in your locker at school, I suppose?”

  “We don’t have to hide them. They can go straight to the back room at the bar, right?”

  Granddad leaned against the forklift and folded his arms. “So let’s say we’re willing to risk losing the bar forever to save Albie spending a few dollars per bottle. The government can seize a business, you know, if they think it’s involved in smuggling. But put that aside. How do we get the cases there?”

  “Well, we’ve got the truck,” I started to say. And then stopped. We had to drop the two pallets of unstamped cigarettes off with Hollis first. That was set for seven o’clock. Then we’d have to take the truck—the stolen truck—through downtown during the morning rush hour and park it right in back of the bar to unload every case—every stolen case, clearly marked NOT FOR RESALE—by hand ourselves. And then we’d still have to get rid of the damn truck.

  “This sucks,” I said.

  “The hard choices usually do,” said Granddad.

  “I can’t believe there’s nothing in this whole fu—stupid place that’s worth the trouble to take.”

  “Don’t think of it like something you’ve lost. It’s a successful job. We’re in the black. Provided”—he nodded toward the open loading bay—“that we get our asses out of here.”