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was working on the fact that the family had been threatened with
further attempts after Desdemona Bronson had been rescued from
the kidnappers.
Wow! Turn here! Turn here! Get me back to the Clarion office.
I had better file the story before anyone else does.
You had better wipe some of that makeup off your face. You
look like a circus clown right now. And do something about your
eyes, you are going to have some beautiful shiners tomorrow.
To hell with that! I have to get this story in. Can t you go any
faster?
I was already doing eighty in town. It was just as well that all
of the cops seemed to be taking a break, maybe this was between
shifts.
I dropped her in front of the Clarion and she was so eager to
get to her desk that she did not even thank me but ran straight in
before the Jaguar had come to a stop.
I drove serenely back to the Mayoral residence and parked the
Jaguar.
Jeejay was looking haggard when I saw him.
Fred, where have you been? Crawley keeps calling about the
ransom. He doesn t believe that the Mayor is flying back from
Washington. He says that we are stalling him. He says if the money
is not in the numbered account by midnight Mrs Bronson will be
history. We can t reach Mayor Bronson. He is flying in a chartered
plane that does not have telephone facilities. The airport is trying
to contact the pilot of the plane by radio but the weather is giving
them some problems until the airplane is in closer range. What the
hell can we do?
We can raid the buildings on either side of the Java Diner and
see what that turns up. I suggested.
We will never get a search warrant on mere guesswork, Fred.
What if I take a force and raid them? What could I as a private
citizen be charged with?
Breaking and entering and trespass, I guess.
But what if there is a fire in the building can we then enter to
extinguish it?
You might get away with that but then again they might simply
add arson to the list of charges.
Okay then what about getting a warrant to search the Java
Diner? Can you do that?
That I can do: we already have one from the last few times we
tried to catch Crawley. All I need to do is phone the judge and ask
his permission to use it again. He ll re-date the order tomorrow.
Okay, let s do that and bring some heavy equipment we might
have to break down a wall.
We left the house with a team of ten agents all heavily armed and
one technical specialist who claimed he could locate hidden rooms
and passages with his equipment.
The manager of the Java Diner was the cook. He complained
bitterly about the interruption of his business for yet another search.
He whined that Crawley was a regular customer, no more, and he
could not be held responsible for what his customers did when they
were not eating his food.
Jeejay waved the search warrant under his nose and then ignored
him while the FBI team went over the building with a very fine
tooth comb.
The technical specialist was an agent called Wacko. I am sure
that was not his name, just his inclination. He inspected the rear
walls of the building by listening to them with a stethoscope.
I was standing in front of the building watching the FBI team
when I saw the manager whispering to one of the waitresses; the
youngest and most attractive.
Go stand in front of the closet and talk to the FBI guy. See if
you can keep him away from it, understand?
She nodded and moved to the back. I walked into the diner and
found Jeejay. I told him what I had overheard the manager say.
Gee, Fred, you must have exceptional hearing. He commented
but he talked to Wacko who then moved the waitress out of his way
despite her best efforts to distract him and he went to work on the
closet.
It took him two hours to decipher the set-up but he did not give
up until he had it. It was an ingenious plan. The four light switches
for the windowless rear part of the diner were customarily on , with
the switches in this position the walk-in closet light functioned
purely as a light switch. When all four light switches were off the
closet light switch functioned to operate an elevator. The entire
concrete floor of the closet then silently descended twenty feet to an
old unused sewer pipe which ran under the road behind the diner.
A switch at the bottom reversed the elevator so that it returned into
the closet or returned to the sewer pipe. The sewer pipe was fitted
with electric lighting and entered a basement under a building on
the other side of the road.
The basement was set up as a Methamphetamine laboratory and
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