David Putnam - The Replacements

Clay jumped forward. “You assholes are in enough trouble. You damage or break something, and I’ll have your jobs. You hear me?”

The two SWAT guys and the two windbreakers got on the lever, as the guy in between the safe and the wall pushed at the top of the safe. The safe slowly started to rise. The agent in between the wall and the safe, his face turning red and bloated with exertion, pushed harder. The drywall behind him caved in with a loud crack. The safe’s top started to yield and lean. Dan yelled, “That’s it. That’s it. Push. You got it.”

The safe fell over. The agents jumped clear. The dead weight thudded to the concrete floor. The entire clubhouse gave a little shudder.

Underneath, where the safe had sat, revealed nothing but smooth concrete. No bolts rose out of the concrete floor. No gold doughnut painted gray and inset as a gasket. Drago had been so believable. How had I fallen for his lie? But why had he lied? There could only be one reason. Drago was batshit crazy to make up a juvenile tale of a pirate’s gold with safes and SS. His lack of sanity did not bode well for my family’s future.

Dan rushed over to me, his face right up in mine. “Is this how you return my trust?” He pointed to the overturned safe. “This was a big joke all along, wasn’t it?”

I couldn’t speak, and shook my head “no.”

Dan put a finger up by my eyes. “Now, you are going to rue the day you crossed me. I am going to file every possible charge. You’ll never get out of prison.”

Clay laughed loud and hard, most of it forced to help rub it in.

Dan pointed at me, “Get him out of here.”

The two agents wearing the blue windbreakers moved in. One came away from the corner, away from the damaged drywall, that was now visible. Right above the smooth concrete where the doughnut should have been.

My mind locked on to the obvious solution, I physically struggled. “Wait.”

The agents on each of my arms kept dragging me along.

“Chulack, wait. Wait.”

The two agents hesitated and looked to him for direction.

Dan pointed his finger to the door. “I said, get him out of here.”

The two agents resumed their tug-of-war in earnest. I violently swung my shoulders one way, then the other, and broke free. I ran to the overturned safe, the agents close behind, and picked up the ram on the floor. They were all over me.

Dan was almost to the door and turned toward the disturbance.

Clay’s eyes went wild. “Get that asshole away from there.”

“Wait, look,” I said. “Look at Warfield. He knows I’ve figured out his game.”

Clay yelled, “I’ll sue you assholes, I swear to God, I’ll sue you until you don’t have a penny left to your name.”

Dan took a couple of steps back from the doorway. “Bruno?”

“You asked me to trust you. Now you need to trust me on this.”

Dan nodded. The two agents let me go. I took a deep breath, pivoted my hips, and slammed the ram into the wall. Clay yelled and leaped at me.

“Restrain him,” said Dan.

The two agents jumped Clay with relish and took him to the ground harder than he needed. Dan came over and looked me in the eyes.

In a low tone, I said, “They moved the wall.”

Clay continued to yell.

“Shut him up.”

The two agents sat on him. Clay grunted. Now he could only focus on breathing.

Dan nodded, took hold of the ram with me, and we swung it, throwing our backs into it. We hit a two-by-four stringer supporting the drywall and caved it inward. We swung again and again until we were out of breath and we had a large enough hole. We dropped the ram. Drywall dust hung in the air and stuck to the sweat on our faces. Dan took a small, powerful flashlight from his belt. He carefully stuck in his arm with the flashlight. He looked back at me one last time and then stuck his head in the hole.

He moved his feet and tried to force more of himself inside. I held my breath. From inside came a muffled “Holy shit.”

In the short time I’d known Special Agent Dan Chulack, he’d never used unprofessional language.

He pulled out completely, with a huge smile. “Call for backup. I want every one of those swinging dicks in there booked on RICO, conspiracy to commit murder, robbery, and kidnap.” He pointed to the two SWAT guys. “You two. Take this ram, and I want you to take down this wall right here, but don’t go any farther than right here.” He indicated another place on the wall.

Before the SWAT guys moved, I stepped in close and held out my cuffed hands. Dan smiled and handed me his flashlight. I stuck my arms in the hole and then my head. I couldn’t get in nearly as far with my hands cuffed, but far enough.

Clay had needed a place to run his organization. He knew there would be search warrant after search warrant served on the clubhouse, and he had to have a way to keep evidence out of the hands of law enforcement. He built another wall in his office to partition off a four-foot-wide room. There had to be a secret lever that accessed a hidden door. We didn’t need the lever or the door; we had the ram.

An odor of gun oil and sweat came at me hard. The flashlight lit up the narrow space.

Inside, on one wall hung all the tools of the trade, sawed-off shotguns, machine guns, pistols-including the two H &K P9s with silencers-one of which Clay had used to shoot Drago in the foot. That’s what he’d done when he left us in the living room with Roy Boy, Slim Jim, Sandman, and the other cronies. He’d gone into his office, activated the lever, entered the room, and gotten to the H &Ks. I thought that I had heard the desk being moved when it had been the secret door.

I marveled at all the guns and weapons as the light panned down the length of the wall. At the end, on the floor sat a smaller safe, shorter, the one that would contain the books, the records tracking all the ill-gotten gain for the SS International. I moved the flashlight above the safe. My breath caught. I whispered to no one, “What a damn fool.” On the narrow four-foot-wide wall at the end and above the safe, Clay had thwarted so many search warrants in the past that he’d grown arrogant and invincible, enough to pin up old Polaroid photos and trophies from his past. Dead enemies of the SS. Witnesses, bikers from opposing gangs, and all those who failed to fall into line under their tyranny.

I started to pull back and remembered Drago. I pointed the flashlight straight down. On the floor just on the other side of the new wall, Clay had done a poor job with instant concrete mix. He’d tried to cover the hole where the safe used to sit. The shadow outline of the golden doughnut, still painted lead-gray, rose a quarter inch from the concrete, hardly visible at all unless you knew what to look for, a true Bluebeard’s treasure. The doughnut would not draw any attention from the FBI forensic people coming to document and seize the evidence.

I pulled back out, stunned. Barbara stood close. I handed her the flashlight. She went up on tiptoes to look in the hole.

Dan moved in close and immediately put the key into my handcuffs. “What do you need? You name it. You can have all the manpower you want. I’ll even pull in all the officers from the Joint Terrorist Task Force.”

“I don’t have any time left for that. I find my wife and the kids in the next hour or it’s not going to matter.” I walked out, down the hall, and out to the front yard. The sun colored everything orange and yellow as it went down ending the day. I leaned against the closest Harley and closed my eyes. Now that I had freedom, the pressure of not going to prison, clearing Mack and Drago, I could think straight.

I was barely aware that Barbara stood close by. In my mind, I deliberately went over everything that had happened since Barbara Wicks came back into my life, step-by-step, scene-by-scene, from the time she walked up from the beach. I replayed the dialogue from each conversation.