Casey's Slip

by Richard L. Wren

  “I’m telling you the truth.” I still said it pretty loudly, trying to make it sound like I was really scared by this guy. Which was easy because I was. “You don’t need to use your gun on me. I’m telling you the truth, honest.”

  “I think you’re lying, but I ain’t taking any chances. I’m gonna let go of your hair and you’re gonna march ahead of me into the kitchen. We’ll see if you’re telling the truth or not. Don’t forget – I’ve got the gun aimed at your back and I ain’t afraid to use it.” He didn’t need to remind me.

  With that he pushed me back into the hall and toward the swinging door into the kitchen. He kept one hand on my shoulder, making me walk slowly, while he tiptoed quietly behind me. I could feel the gun barrel on my back. When I got to the door I hesitated but he signaled that I should push it open.

  Standing in the doorway, I couldn’t see anyone at all in the kitchen. He pushed me a little way in, then cautiously came in behind me. I still couldn’t see anyone and was wondering where they’d gone when all hell broke loose.

  With a loud yell, Dave came out of nowhere and crashed down on my captor. Evidently he’d managed to wedge himself above the door and dropped down from there.

  He knocked the gunman down, the gun went off and I was hit.

  CHAPTER 22

  All in all, I’d have to say this whole plan was not going particularly well. Particularly for me. I didn’t feel anything. I was just, all of a sudden, down on the floor. I had no memory of how I got there. No pain. My biggest concern at that moment was how Dave was doing. He and the gunman were wrestling for the gun and Dave was having a hard time of it.

  My next biggest concern was that, as they fought for the gun, it seemed to mostly be pointed at me. I still hadn’t realized that I’d already been shot. Another shot rang out, but at that moment the cavalry arrived. Our other two guys jumped into the fray and in a moment had the gun in their hands and the gunman pinned down on the floor.

  Smitty looked around.

  “Where’d that blood come from?” he wanted to know. Sure enough, there was a big smear of blood on the floor next to me.

  “You been shot?

  Weird. As soon as he asked me that, it began to hurt. Actually it more burned than hurt. I rolled over on my side. Les got down and took a look, then reported that I appeared to have a flesh wound in my right buttock. He said it was pretty long and was really bleeding.

  “It’s pretty deep but it looks like the bullet just gouged out a groove and passed on out.”

  I think in an effort to take my mind off the problem, he resorted to a statement calculated to make me laugh, but it didn’t.

  “It almost ripped you a new asshole.”

  “Thanks a lot.”

  “Find something and stop the bleeding,” Smitty ordered. Then tie this son of a bitch up real good and put him out on the porch with the rest of the trash.”

  Les took me over to the kitchen sink, pulled my pants down and washed the wound with soap and alcohol. That’s when it started to hurt, really hurt. He got the bleeding stopped and covered the wound with a huge home made bandage.

  “Jesus Casey, couldn’t you get hit someplace that’s easier to bandage than your ass? I don’t think I can get your pants back up over all this.”

  We finally got my pants back on, but the pants put pressure on the wound and the bandage, it stung like hell. Les found some Advil and gave me four of them.

  Back in the kitchen, Smitty regrouped.

  “Shit,” he started out. “This ain’t going the way we planned. Casey, you okay?”

  I gritted my teeth and said, “Yeah.”

  “Okay, problem. Now that they’ve seen our faces we’re gonna have to take these guys with us when we leave.” For the first time I realized that my bandana had been pulled off my face by the gunman and that Dave’s had fallen off during the fight.

  “No use trying to clean up after ourselves anyway. With his staff gone missing, Carpenter’ll know damn well that somebody’s been here. We need to start searching ASAP.”

  Smitty made a quick tour of the house, then started assigning rooms for each of us to search. I got the library. It was on the other side of the dining room and looked promising to me.

  “The most important thing we’re looking for is the little black book from the boat,” he reminded us.

  “It’s got to be real important to Carpenter, important enough to kill for. If we can find it, I bet we’ll find the reason for the killing. But keep an eye out for any papers at all. If we don’t find the little book let’s not overlook anything else. Take your time. We’ve got all night. We can afford to be thorough.”

  I limped off for the library. The first thing I did was rather painfully sit down at the desk and take a good look around the room. It was a large room, with bookshelves on all four walls. One of the walls had a large fireplace with logs arranged in it, ready for a fire. Two windows, one on either side of the fireplace, tightly shut. A pair of leather easy chairs flanking the fireplace. A small coffee table between them. Dominating the center of the room was a huge desk. The floor was covered with several large oriental rugs.

  If there was a small book hidden anywhere in there, it would probably be either in the desk or somewhere on the book shelves.

  Where do I start? The logical first place to search was the desk. Okay, the desk. It looked easy, unless the drawers were locked. It certainly looked easier than searching the thousands of books on the walls.

  I started on the center drawer, and of course it had to be locked. So much for easy.

  There was a heavy letter opener in one of the side drawers, just right for forcing the lock on the center drawer. Inside I found letters, bills, an address book – wrong size – and some personal medical records. No diary or anything even remotely like one.

  The other drawers were full of all kinds of things. Dictionary, phone book, check book, plus a bunch of odds and ends of no particular interest.

  It looked like I was gonna have to look at every book in the room in case something had been hidden there. It would be slow but I had to be methodical. Start in one corner and make my way around the room. The shelves were floor to ceiling with a ladder that was used to reach the upper shelves. I was going to have to climb that damn latter with a burning butt.

  I started at the top shelf. Removing a couple of books at a time, I looked behind them and between them and inside them, with no luck. I took out a couple more books. And a couple more.

  I was stirring up a lot of dusk and started sneezing. About halfway down the first bookcase, it finally dawned on me. All of the books were really dusty. They hadn’t been moved in a long time. I didn’t have to look at every book. I only had to see if any booksweren’t dusty.

  With that I started moving from bookcase to bookcase rather quickly. Most of them I was able to skip over almost at a glance. The few that were even a little questionable, I looked at carefully. When I got to the other side of the room, near the window wall, I ran into something strange.

  Several of the books looked newer than the others and were at lot less dusty than their shelf mates. When I climbed up the ladder to check them out, I couldn’t pull them out. I tried book after book and was unable to move any of them. They were fastened securely to the back of the shelves. How very odd!

  I think the four Advil addled my thinking. Nothing popped into my mind for a minute or two.

  Finally it dawned. It meant that the bookshelf in question was not really a bookshelf. But if it wasn’t a bookshelf, what was it? The only thing I could think of was a door. ‘A secret door. ‘But to where, and how to open it?

  My only experience with secret doors was in movies. There was always a switch somewhere that opened the door. ‘Usually embedded in the floor under the desk or concealed somewhere in the desk itself. The other classic place was either in or on the fireplace. I chose to look at the fireplace first.

  I pushed and pulled every brick, felt around the mantle, checked the firewood
(real) and couldn’t find anything that moved. Moving on to the desk, I started under the center drawer first. Removing the drawer I ran my fingers all over and found nothing. Next I did the same thing with the other top drawers and again found nothing.

  The only place left was the floor. I crawled on my hands and knees looking for a bump that might have been a switch. Nothing there.

  Frustrated, I gave the desk a huge shove. It tilted and toppled over, exposing a thin wire hanging under it. I had uncovered a wire and then broken it, all in one swell foop, as my Dad says. Good going, Casey. Well, what did they expect from an amateur?

  Nothing to do but tell Smitty and get some help.

  The possibility of a secret door got Smitty all excited. When I told him about the broken wire he said, “Not to worry. That’s what Nips is for. Let’s go.”

  Smitty yelled for Nips, then he and I went to the library. I suggested trying to open it by ourselves. There was another, much larger letter opener in the desk and, grabbing it, I tried to force the door open, but no luck there. Upon closer inspection we found small cracks around that whole section of the bookcase, and realized we didn’t have a clue which way it might open, we didn’t even know which side to try to jimmy.

  About that time Nips showed up and told us to get the hell away from the door before we made it impossible for him to open.

  He walked up to the bookshelf, stopped a couple of steps away and stared at it. Then he stepped up to it and ran his hands all around the cracks we’d found. After a minute he said, “I think I’ve got it.”

  Smitty: “Can you open it?”

  “Yep, it should be easy. You’d never be able to pry it open. Actually you have to push on it to open it. It’s got a spring-loaded lock. All you gotta do is push on the left side and it will spring it open. ‘Watch!”

  He was right. He casually pushed against the left side of the bookcase, there was an audible click and the door immediately opened toward us. Pulling it open all the way, we saw a fairly large, sparsely furnished second office. It had a desk, some filing cabinets lining the walls, and no book shelves. This was a working office and a working office only.

  Nip said, “I think the wire you broke was used to lock and unlock the spring loaded device on the door. Otherwise anyone leaning on the case would open it. You broke it and unlocked it.”

  Crossing over to the filing cabinets, Smitty pulled open the top drawer of one, glanced inside, then turned back to me.

  “Looks like you’ve got your work cut out for you, Casey,” he said. “Go through all these drawers. Pull out anything that looks remotely interesting. And don’t worry about keeping too much. We’re taking as much as we need. Plus we’ve got the three prisoners. I’ve made arrangements to get us all outta here around dawn. That means we’ve got several hours to go through this place, so get to work. Grab every piece of paper you find that looks useful. Stuff it all in paper bags. You’ve got till about four-thirty in the morning.”

  I found a bunch of paper bags in the kitchen and got to work.

  CHAPTER 23

  There wasn’t much in the desk. A few pens and pencils, a dead cell phone, a telephone book, a package of Kleenex and that was it. But when I started on the files, I hit the jackpot. It was immediately obvious what these files were all about. Each one had someone’s name on it, or the name of a company. They were neatly arranged in alphabetical order.

  I pulled out the first one, labeled Ackerman. Ackerman, it turned out, was Harold J. Ackerman, the vice mayor of a small town near Bakersfield. Two letters in his file accused Harold J. of stealing trust fund money. ‘Times, places, amounts. Pretty damning stuff.

  Stapled to one of the letters was a copy of a newspaper article about a surprise turnaround by Ackerman on a water bond vote. Written on the article with a marking pen was “$2,000.00.” It looked to me like Carpenter had used the letters to blackmail Ackerman into voting a certain way and had been paid $2,000 to do it.

  Putting that file back, I started looking at one or two files at random in each section of the alphabet. There were literally hundreds of them. It was mesmerizing.

  I looked through dozens of the files. Almost all of them contained records of something shameful in someone’s past. Most of them were pretty trivial. Some of them weren’t. There was only one inescapable conclusion. This was a treasure trove of blackmail files, pure and simple.

  Glancing at my watch, I was surprised to see that almost two hours had gone by. The reading, like I said, was hypnotic. It was like reading a sleazy novel. However, I knew I had to stop reading and start packing. But how much?

  I decided I’d better check with Smitty, tell him what I’d found and see if he agreed with me that we should take it all and sift through it back at the warehouse. I told him that it included a lot of odd-ball things, like medical reports and X-rays.

  He said, “Just bring business papers and records, stuff that might incriminate him. We’ll take it to the research lab.”

  We have a research lab?

  “But before you start,” he said, “take a look at the guys on the porch. Make sure they’re still secure.”

  As I approached the door, I could hear scrabbling sounds. A lot of scuffling. Easing the door open, the first thing I saw was the gunman, on his feet next to the porch window. Smitty was right, they needed checking on.

  The gunman had rammed his shoulder through the window and was using a piece of the broken glass to saw through the rope around his wrists. He had his hands over a piece still stuck in the window trim and was sawing back and forth. He was maybe halfway through. There was quite a bit of blood on his hands, and on the window sill.

  I rushed over, pulled him away from the window and threw him to the floor. At the same time I yelled to Smitty that I needed help. Smitty appeared and in a few seconds we had him retied, this time to a pipe. He wasn’t going anywhere.

  His cuts were pretty superficial. A wet paper towel and a couple of band-aids for him. No aspirin for this asshole.

  Smitty said it was time to start packing up.

  “Bring whatever you find to the side door and don’t worry about how much you bring, we’ll have plenty of room, even for our prisoners.”

  I couldn’t figure that out. He had a truck coming?

  “Oh,” he added. “We found a hydroponic marijuana farm in the basement, complete with plenty of indoor lighting. I found a camera and took lots of pictures. Dave and Les wanted to take it all, but I nixed that idea. Better he’s found with it than us.”

  It took a lot of time to pack all the files into grocery bags. I wanted to keep them in order. I ended up with over a dozen bags stuffed full, then had to lug them across the house to the side door next to the driveway.

  I was the last one bringing stuff to be taken away and I was surprised by the size of the pile already there. Including the three prisoners, it was a whole lot more than one or even two cars could carry away. I asked Smitty what his plan was. He sent me to the front room and told me to keep an eye on the street. He had a smirk on his face. I had a hunch that I was in for a surprise. I pulled a curtain aside and looked out.

  Nothing. A garbage truck was making its slow way up the street from house to house. It looked like it was delivering new cans to the houses in the block below us. I wondered if it was gonna spoil Smitty’s plan by getting here just as his ride arrived. I kept watching.

  The truck kept coming up the street, dropping garbage cans occasionally as it came. I kept hoping they would hurry up and get out of the way. It was still fairly dark but that wouldn’t last long. We needed to get things going, and this damned garbage truck wasn’t helping.

  The truck finally got to us, but it didn’t drive by. Instead it backed into Carpenter’s driveway. Maybe the guy was turning around? Jeez, now what? If he went only a short distance he’d see the pile of papers and stuff we were stealing from Carpenter’s house. He might even think it was garbage!

  I yelled for Smitty as I followed the guy’s progres
s down the driveway all the way to the back of the house. Running out the side door, I almost crashed into Smitty, who was standing on the step, arms folded, the picture of calm. Nodding his head, he kept waving the driver further back in the driveway. The driver leaned out his window and in a loud whisper asked, “We okay on time?”

  Smitty whispered back. “Perfect. Now get the hell over here and help us get this junk out of the house as fast as we can. Don’t want the neighbors to get suspicious!”

  That’s when it hit me; something hadn’t happened that should have. That garbage truck hadn’t beeped once while it backed all that distance.

  CHAPTER 24

  Two guys jumped out of the cab, ran around to the rear and opened it. The mechanism that usually picked up the cans and dumped them inside the truck was nowhere to be seen. The inside of the truck was empty and clean as a whistle.

  With the driver and his helper helping the five of us, the loot and our captives were inside the truck in a short time. The driver and his helper jumped back in the cab and closed the rear opening, ready to go.

  “Good going, guys,” Smitty said. “About as much time as it would have taken you to sneak a cigarette. Now, get going. We’ll meet you at the body shop.”

  They took off and I was left wondering what the body shop was and how in hell Smitty’d been able to arrange for the garbage company to help us.

  Looking around at the general mess we’d left in our wake, Smitty announced that it was time to leave, the same way we got here. “Grab your golf bags and let’s get back to the golf course before any golfers show up.”

  “We don’t clean up anything?” I asked. “Not even my blood on the kitchen floor?” I had visions of crime scene technicians taking samples, slides, microscopes, databases. I was a regular blood donor. They’d know it was mine in twenty minutes.

  “Relax, Casey. Carpenter won’t be calling the cops,” Smitty said. “He’ll be down there on his hands and knees cleaning it up himself. This guy’s in so deep, last thing he’d ever want is cops. He won’t even be able to call in Merry Maids.”