December 5th, 2016
Las Vegas, Nevada
Sarge watched as Pickett was clearly excited to see Cavanaugh again when he met them in the parking lot area of the storage facility at a little after four in the afternoon. His head was bald, his sports coat hung loose on his shoulders, and his face looked thin, maybe a little too thin.
But his broad smile and green eyes made Pickett smile as she gave him a hug. Robin gave him a hug as well and then Pickett introduced him to Sarge.
Cavanaugh’s grip was firm and his smile real. “Heard a lot about you over the years,” Cavanaugh said. “And I’m really impressed you could convince Pickett here to leave her matron ways in the past.”
“I doubt I had anything to do with that,” Sarge said, laughing.
“Matron ways?” Pickett asked, pretending to frown at Cavanaugh.
“Yeah, you know, like your virginity,” Cavanaugh said, “Hard to get rid of but you never miss it once you do.”
Sarge laughed and Robin sounded like she was going to hurt herself she was laughing so hard.
Pickett just laughed and then gave Cavanaugh another hug. “Damn it’s wonderful to see you again. When you officially joining the gang?”
“Six months from now,” Cavanaugh said. “You want to know how many days and minutes exactly? I cross them off my calendar in my office every day.”
Again Sarge just laughed. Cavanaugh seemed like a great guy and clearly Robin and Pickett loved him.
Cavanaugh reached into his breast pocket and pulled out a folded piece of paper. “We have permission to search, photograph, inventory, and even remove some things.”
“Wow, what did you give the judge for that?” Robin asked.
“Just mentioned this might get some answers on whatever happened to Darling Black and he gave me the whole nine yards,” Cavanaugh said. “I hadn’t thought of that name for decades until you told me what you guys were doing.”
Sarge just shook his head. Had he been the only person in Las Vegas to not know that name?
Cavanaugh and Robin went into the small office and a few minutes later the woman with the tall, beehive hair came out with them. She had a lit cigarette in her hand and walked all four of them down the worn concrete to a second building and pointed to a unit and handed Cavanaugh the key.
It took only a moment for Cavanaugh to get the lock off, but both he and Sarge had to slowly work the rusted old garage door up.
Sarge and Pickett had brought a couple of LED lanterns in hopes they would get the search warrant and also a number of file storage boxes.
About a foot inside the door was a dusty curtain strung from one side of the ten-foot wide unit to the other.
Sarge had the others stay outside and he carefully pulled the curtain aside, sliding it along the cord holding it up, trying not to stir up any more dust than he had to.
Then he stepped back out into the sunlight to let the dust settle that he had disturbed.
With the light of the day shining in, the unit looked like it might have even more than they had hoped. A wooden desk sat against the right wall with a desk lamp in one corner. Some papers were piled to one side and an old computer filled the middle of the desk with a massive printer on the other side.
Everything had a thick layer of dust on it.
“Wow, that setup cost some money in its day,” Cavanaugh said, pointing at the computer and printer.
Sarge had been thinking the same thing. Just the printer alone had to have cost over three grand in 1990 money. No telling how much the computer had cost.
Along the back wall were a row of six four-drawer file cabinets and two lamps on top of the cabinets. Some papers were stacked neatly on top of the cabinets.
In the back left corner was a fairly large combination safe.
“What was she doing in here?” Pickett asked.
“Let me take some pictures before we even look,” Robin said.
Sarge watched as Robin made sure she didn’t miss an angle on any of the stuff in the room.
“You guys don’t mind,” Cavanaugh said, “I’m going to leave the deeper exploring in the dust to you. I got another appointment to make before dinner. Send me the pictures and inventory for my official file. And keep me up on what you find, would you. This is all damn weird.”
Both Pickett and Robin hugged him and thanked him before Cavanaugh nodded to Sarge and headed back for his car.
“Nice guy,” Sarge said.
“One of the best,” Robin said. “His wife Steph was a dream as well, but she lost a long fight with cancer a few years back. He’s going to make a great addition to the gang. Andor said we were going to have a special welcome night for him when he finally retired officially.”
Sarge had a gut sense they were right about Cavanaugh being a good member of the gang. Somehow he had managed to get this search warrant and then felt comfortable leaving it to them.
“So how do we start?” Pickett asked.
“We open every file drawer and I get a picture first,” Robin said. “And then every desk drawer and the same thing. Carefully and by the numbers we all used to follow.”
“Pain-in-the-ass numbers,” Pickett said.
“My suggestion after that,” Sarge said, “is we take fingerprints. We need to know exactly, besides the testimony of the landlord, who was in this place.”
“How many people were in here,” Pickett said, nodding.
They all put on evidence gloves and Sarge was about to open a top drawer on the left near the safe and Pickett was moving to the cabinet on the right when he noticed a small wire leading from the drawer.
“Don’t touch anything!” he shouted. “Back out carefully a safe distance.”
Pickett and Robin did exactly as he told them to do.
He carefully, without touching anything, traced the wire along the top edge of the cabinet and then down the side to where it disappeared behind the cabinet.
The cabinet was either wired to explode if opened wrong or if opened wrong would set off some sort of alarm somewhere. Either way, he wasn’t taking any chances.
He moved along the cabinets slowly, looking at each one. From what he could tell, every file cabinet was wired the same way.
And so was the large desk drawer.
He got down on his knees and visually traced the wire from the desk to a switch hidden on the wall behind the desk.
The wires from the cabinets all seemed to come into that same switch.
And above the switch, secured to the wall, were enough explosives to not only destroy everything in this unit, but the entire row of units.
He could hear his blood pounding in his ears and he didn’t want to dare breathe.
Those were old explosives.
And when explosives got old, they often got touchy. It was lucky the thing hadn’t gone off when he and Cavanaugh had worked that door open.
Sarge slowly climbed to his feet, not touching anything, being very careful to not lose his balance.
His heart was threatening to pound out of his chest by the time he slowly backed out of the storage unit and turned to join Pickett and Robin who were standing in the middle of the drive looking very worried.
“Everything is wired to explode if opened without deactivating a switch under the desk,” he said, indicating that they should all move farther away from the unit. “Enough to level the entire row of units.”
“Oh, shit,” Pickett said.
“Too damned close,” Robin said, shaking her head.
Pickett hugged Sarge as they moved away and he hugged her back.
Robin took a deep breath after they had stood for a moment staring at the open storage unit. “I’ll call Cavanaugh, have him get the bomb squad out here and get back here himself since this is his warrant.”
“I’ll get the lady in the office to shut this place down and open that front gate for trucks,” Pickett said.
“I’ll stay right here and make sure no one gets near any of this,” Sarge said.
As Pickett and Robin moved away, Sarge moved over and leaned against another row of storage units. He just kept staring back into the open mouth of the unit, trying to catch his breath and slow his racing heart.
Over the years he had come close to dying a number of times.
But this one might well have been his closest.
And coming close to dying was not something anyone ever got used to.