Click – Brothers At Arms #5

Delaney knocked on the door.

When Desi opened it, she asked them, “What do you want?”

“Well, I’d like to get to know you, we are related after all,” Delaney told her.

Alfredo stepped up and said, “And I would like to get to know you as well. You are my granddaughter, same as Delaney. She’s the only member of what little family I have left that I can stand, well other than you. I’m hoping the three of us can become a family of sorts.”

Desi stepped back and let them in the room. Then she shut the door softly.

Leon sat and watched them. He slowly shook his head. Then he turned to Zeus. “We need to find that bastard and find him soon. This has to end.”

Zeus nodded. “I agree. But before we find him, we have to find the fucking money.”

Click opened his laptop again and began searching the cameras for any heat signatures. When he finally looked at the nearby cameras, he found something. He looked up.

 Zeus had been watching him so he asked, “What did you find?”

“There is someone in the still room. The cameras aren’t working there but there is a heat signature down there.”

Leon called his security men and told them to check the still rooms. The silence was overwhelming while they watched even more heat signatures move into the still room. Then suddenly the heat signatures disappeared. They were just gone.

Click looked up at Zeus and Leon. “I have no idea how they just did that.”

“What does that mean?” Leon wanted to know.

Click shrugged. “It could mean just about anything, could be he left the area or he went underground.”

“Marda Dios,” Leon swore.

Diesel and Memphis were already on their feet and grabbing their weapons as they ran down the hall.

Click was at his laptop, looking for everything or anything to happen but as time passed, he saw nothing new. Then he was flipping through the many camera sites they had been watching and suddenly he found another heat source. He looked up and told Zeus, “Now there’s someone in the tunnel under this room.”

“How can that be?” Zeus growled.

“I have no freaking clue,” Click growled back. “But the heat signature is now in the room below this one.”

Leon frowned.

“Do you suppose these tunnels are somehow linked?” Calderone suggested.

Leon merely shrugged. “That could be, I have no idea.”

Zeus grabbed the tunnel map and began tracing a possible track through the underground. Nothing would surprise him anymore. Old man Raggetti had a slew of secrets all right. He looked up at Leon and asked, “Can you have a couple of your men wait for him where the tunnel comes out? Maybe we can catch him that way.”

Leon studied the map and figured out where that tunnel came out and directed some of his men to go there. He advised them to be careful because Barrett might just be taking a shortcut to get clear of them. Then he ordered another two of his men to follow the still tunnel to see if there was a connecting tunnel.

“You know what this means don’t you?” Leon asked as he stared at Zeus.

Zeus nodded. “Yeah, I know. He fucking found a way inside the compound, which means the money he’s looking for is right here under our noses and only he knows where it is.”

Just then, the door down the hall opened up and Alfredo came back down the hall. When he arrived, he looked at Leon’s face then at Zeus.’ He then used his cane to come over to where they stood. “What’s wrong now?”

“We’ve found that the underground tunnels might all be connected,” Leon stated in disgust. “Then we found out Barrett might have gotten inside the compound and he might be here to recover the money before we can catch him.”

“Dannazione,” Alfredo swore. “My father was a madman wasn’t he?” He shook his head and looked at the table. The map Zeus got when they bought this place was sitting there all spread out. Alfredo paused then pulled it close to him. Then he began studying it. He frowned as if trying to remember something from the time he was a child. He looked up at Leon and said, “It’s not here.”

“What’s not here?” Leon asked.

“I remember when I was a kid. We’d come down here to spend the summer and one summer when I think I was about nine or ten maybe.” Shaking his head he said, “That doesn’t matter, anyway we were here for the summer and of course, there were men here working, digging and stuff and I got curious so I was following the men around and they were digging something. I asked one of them what they were doing and he told me they were digging a new well. I asked what happened to the old well and he said they had to cement it shut as the water went dry. I asked where the old well was and he told me to go away. He didn’t have time to answer a bunch of stupid questions. So I went exploring. My dad had gone to town for something or another and I just wanted to look around. I didn’t figure on bothering anyone and they were busy anyway, so I was looking for the old well.”

“Old man, what does that have to do with anything?” Captain asked.

“Well sonny, I’ll tell you in a minute if you’ll let me.” Alfredo growled, then looked at Leon and continued, “I stumbled across the old well and peered down into a deep hole in the ground. I saw an old liner that came up to the surface and they filled part of the hole with cement to make sure it was topped off and no water would leak through the opening. But the hole wasn’t closed up yet and being the curious little shit that I was, I leaned over too far and slid into the old well. I got scraped up a bit but for the most part, I was okay. I screamed and screamed and no one came around to find me.” He shrugged. “Everyone was busy I suppose, but the longer I was in that hole in the ground the more afraid I became. No one came looking for me, not even my father. Soon, it got cold out and I looked up and found it was dark outside and still no one came looking for me. I spent the entire night and most of the next day inside that hole before my dad even noticed I was gone. By the time he found me, I had no voice left from screaming my heart out to let someone know where I was. I was terrified, hungry, and thirstier than hell and I had cuts and scrapes all over my body. Then on top of all of that my dad got mad at me and gave me a beating besides.” Alfredo shook his head. “I was grounded in the house all summer.”

“What a guy,” Zeus quipped.

“Yeah, my dad was a peach all right.” Alfredo shook his head with a look of disgust on his face.

“So, what’s that got to do with any of this?” Captain asked.

Alfredo tapped the map. “The old well isn’t on this map. The hole was cement lined and had cement plugging the tube the water would have come up through the ground in. If Barrett knew about the well, he could have tossed the money bag in there and then not worry that anyone would think to look for it there.”

Leon groaned and closing his eyes, he tipped his head back. “Of course. That makes sense doesn’t it?”

Calderone leaned forward and asked Alfredo, “Do you remember where the old well was on this map?”

Alfredo shook his head. “So much of the landscape has changed around this house I just can’t remember that shit anymore. All this happened sixty years ago.”

Click frowned then began typing on his laptop. He hacked into the vital records department of the county and began looking up wells on its website. He entered their address and paused when the information popped up.

Zeus gazed over at his IT and asked, “What the hell are you doing?”

“Looking up well placements on the property.”

“There’s an actual place for that?” Captain asked.

Click snorted. “If you know where to look, you can find just about anything on the net.”

Leon asked. “Anything we can use to find the old well?”

“Maybe,” Click told them. Then he looked at Alfredo. “Your father was an idiot, you know that right?”

“Why do you say that?” Leon asked.

“Because the man didn’t do his homework and he had to pay twice for something he should have known about all along,” Click informed him.

“Speak English, brother,” Zeus told him.

Click looked up at his boss and sighed heavily. “Ok sorry, when the old well went dry, Alfonzo brought in a water man. He found another water table and told Alfonzo where it was located but apparently, Alfonzo didn’t like that spot and he told the guy to find another one. The water man told him there was only one table that had good clean water. But he also found a shallower pool of water in another area and Alfonzo decided to go with the second area. It was more out of the way and it could be gotten to easier. The water guy recorded that this pool of water might not be as clean or last as long as the first one but Alfonzo went with that one instead. They drilled the new well and got it going. They capped off the original well and cemented it shut. The next year when Alfonzo came down for the summer, he ran out of water. He filed a complaint against the drilling company. It’s noted that the fault for this screw up was on the homeowner and not on the county. So he had to pay someone to come in and drill a new well in the spot the other guys claimed was the right area in the first place. According to the notes, Alfonzo was not a happy camper. At all.”

Alfredo shook his head. “He should have listened in the first place. But then my father thought he knew everything anyway, so his stubbornness doesn’t surprise me too much.”

“Is there any kind of map with the drilling places listed on it?” Zeus asked.

Click went to the next page of the report and nodded. “Yep, they drew us a map.” He hit a few keys and soon he could hear the printer in his office as it spewed out a few pages. He got up and walked to the office and found Desi and Delaney there.

Desi was holding the map in her hands, staring at it.

He cleared his throat.

Looking up at him, she asked, “What is this?”

He stared at her in confusion. “It’s a map of the wells on the property, why?”

“Because I’ve seen this map before,” she told him.

Click frowned. “You’ve seen this map before? Where? How?”

Desi shook her head. “It was in my mom’s to go bag. I have no clue why she had it or what it even was.”

“That just makes no sense at all.” Click grabbed her arm and swiftly escorted her out to the main room.

“What the hell are you doing?” Desi pulled her arm from his grasp.

Click nodded his head at her and announced to the men, “She’s seen this well map before. She told me it was in her mom’s to go bag. How could that be if Barrett killed her mom four years before he robbed that bank?”

“That is a very good question, isn’t it?” Leon quipped as he turned his head to stare at Desi. “What other secrets are you hiding, young lady?”

Desi took a step or two back and shook her head. “I didn’t keep this as a secret. I don’t even know what the hell this is all about! I swear I don’t know why or how my mom got her hands on that map. Hell, I didn’t even know what it was until Click just told me.” She turned her head to glare at Click. “And I don’t appreciate being manhandled or accused of something!” She poked a finger to his chest. “And here I thought you weren’t like the rest of these guys. Tutti maleducati e fottutamente ringhianti. All rude and fucking growling. Lei, signor, è uno stronzo! You, Mr. Click, are an asshole.” Turning, she stomped out of the room, heading back down the hallway.

Click stared at her receding form until they all heard a door slam and he winced when it did.

“Wow.” Captain chuckled as he shook his head.

Alfredo looked over at Click. “Oh, my. She does have that Italian temper. But I agree with her, you should not have handled this the way you did. I suggest that you apologize to her, Mr. Click.” He then looked over at Leon and Calderone. “As to this map and the well, I have thought of one possibility.”

“And just what would that be?” Calderone asked.

“Well, it is possible that Barrett has been using the old well as a storage until of sorts and he’s hidden more than just the bank robbery money here,’ Alfredo summed it up for them. ‘He could have been using it all along to store his ill gotten gains for years and no one knew about it. Because we now can see that he has had access to the property all along.”