A Visible Darkness - By Jonathon King Page 0,46

head from a Philadelphia case, and I was trying to dig it out of its place in the past. I started a pot of coffee.

“Can you find a Philadelphia Inquirer archive on the box?” I called back to him while the coffee was brewing.

“Sure. What are we looking for?”

“Name of an inmate. A guy we tried to help out after we broke a car theft ring. The bust went bad and a port officer got killed. This guy was a locksmith at the time and he ended up on the rotten end of a murder charge.”

“They would have done a news story at the time?”

“I hope so.”

While Billy clicked at the computers, I sat at the kitchen counter telling him the story, unraveling a day at a Delaware River port warehouse in a time before I was a completely disillusioned police detective.

A handful of us had been assigned to an auto theft task force that was working with Customs on the theft and importation of cars and trucks from the northeast to Haiti and the Caribbean.

The feds had been working the scam up and down the coast. The theft ring was the typical game. At the low end, they hired car thieves to do the heists. The boosters were given special lists of makes and models, actual orders to fill. Most of the cars were high- end SUVs, especially Toyota 4Runners. At the time, the loose pack of military thugs running Haiti had a liking for the all-terrain vehicles. The Toyota emblem on the front of the hood looked distinctly like a bull with horns, and to them the bull image carried an aura of masculine power. The SUVs brought top dollar.

The car thieves were told the less damage the more they would get paid, and they’d boost the cars and park them in a commuter lot at Philly International Airport to be sure they didn’t have anti-theft locators. If the cops traced the electronic beacon, all they’d get was the car abandoned at the airport.

Once the cars cooled, the shippers would then move them inside a warehouse at the port where a guy could cut a key. When they were ready, a tractor-trailer would back up to the warehouse loading dock and the cars would be driven inside. The crew would then pack the rest of the trailer, floor to ceiling, with household goods, boxes of clothes, bags of rice. If an inspector decided to pop the back door, all he could see in the first ten feet were legitimate goods for shipping.

“What do you think? Five years ago?” Billy said from the other room, still clicking.

“No, more like seven.”

Most of the task force work had been with informants, kids picked up on auto theft charges who were looking to deal information for a break. We’d put surveillance on a warehouse and it was primed. I was one of four detectives, a U.S. Customs agent and a handful of port police used to cut off any escape routes. We were in position. It was hot and dusty as we leaned into a corrugated wall around the corner.

“Summertime,” I said to Billy.

“I think I’ve got it,” he said.

We waited in the heat until the tractor-trailer was loaded and started to pull away on its route to the holding area, where the container would be loaded onto an outbound freighter to Haiti. When the trailer cleared the doors we jumped, guns drawn.

“U.S. Customs, hands in the air!” the agent yelled as three of us came through the front and two more took down a door to the back.

The element of surprise. Four men were eating lunch around a wire-spool table, another was in the glass-walled office, sleeping with his feet on the desktop. One was busy near the back of the warehouse, his head down and a pair of safety glasses on his face while he worked over a machine. He was my guy—the key man.

It would have gone down like clockwork but for the idiot in the john. The last one to see us had to be the cowboy.

Everyone in the warehouse had already let the air out of their lungs when the asshole came sprinting out of the cheap wooden door of the bathroom and started firing a second-rate .38, thinking he might get to the loading dock door. He made it twenty feet before he took four rounds and dropped. But one of his random shots also hit a port policeman.

“Harlan P. Moticker,” Billy said from his room.