The clerk pointed to a short, weather beaten man with a craggy face and said,
“You don’t need to know his room because he’s right there talking to Albert Johnson and the other man. Shorty’s the little guy.”
They thanked the clerk and walked over to the three men deep in conversation.
“Excuse me, gentlemen,” Lucky said. “Sorry to interrupt your conversation, but I wanted to say hello to Shorty here.” He held out his hand. Shorty shook his hand and asked if they knew each other from somewhere.
“Mr. Harris,” Lucky answered. “My partner and I are speculators. I understand that you’re an experienced hand at finding gold, where others might only ‘hope’ to find it. If this is true, I’d like to know if you’re interested in a business proposition.”
“Son,” he said. “Take a seat. I’m always interested in a business proposition.”
Lucky and Mickey joined Harris and his friends as Harris signaled the waitress to bring over a couple of extra coffee cups.
“Whatta you have in mind?” Shorty asked as he got right to the point.
“Mr. Harris,” Lucky said politely.
Shorty put up his hand and said, “Call me Shorty, son. Shorty. Now what was it you were saying?”
“Well, I don’t know if you need a grubstake, but like I said, we’re a couple of speculators with a little investment capital. If you need or would like to have a stake, we’re here to offer it to you first, but if you’re not interested, I understand and we’ll find someone else.”
A grubstake was any prospector’s dream. That meant that someone was going to put up the money, the prospector would do the work, and all parties would divide the find or the earnings, as agreed upon.
Shorty scratched the stubble on his chin and said, “Well, I have some money, but if I had more I could mount a right sinful operation, and instead of poking here and there, I could mine the gold the way it should be mined. But I’m getting ahead of myself – what kind of money are we talking here? A little or a lot? There’s a big difference between a little and a lot, you know. A little is a little and a lot is well, a lot is a figure that neither you nor I have to describe ‘cause, dammit, it’s just a lot. I know where the gold is all right, but I need a lot of money to get it out.”
“It’s a lot,” Lucky said without flinching.
“Well now, son,” Shorty said. “Now just how do you propose we split the take? Gimme something fair, show me that you really have a lot, and we gotta deal.”
“Fifty/fifty,” Lucky answered. “And don’t worry about it a lot,” he said with emphasis. You tell me what you need, when you need it, and you’ll get it and we’ll both make a lot,” he said as he raised his coffee cup into the air as a sign of mission accomplished. “To our new partnership,” he said.
Mickey and the other men, Johnson and another man called Scotty, joined in and, while the other man said nothing, his mind was spinning, wondering if there was a place for him in all of this. Shorty’s friends, not sure of what they had just witnessed, excused themselves. Lucky, Mickey, and Shorty could now talk more freely.
“I have a lot of my money tied up in diamonds and precious stones,” Lucky said. “Need to unload some of them.”
“Yeah,” Mickey chimed in. “Don’t like to travel with too much cash. Not a good thing. Might cause some problems and then I go and get pretty angry and then somebody always gets hurt,” he said purposefully, sending a message to Shorty. Mickey was street smart. He knew what he was doing. He wanted the word to spread all around town, quickly, that there were two men in town, two men who didn’t take crap from anybody.
Shorty didn’t react. Instead, he said, “Come on. Let’s take a walk just down the street a bit. I know someone who might be interested in your goods, and if he is, he’ll do you right by you.”
They stopped at a tent not far away, a small store called Silverman’s, and Shorty introduced them. Silverman picked up the stones one at a time, carefully examined them, and reexamined them. He recognized and appreciated their quality and purchased a substantial number of them right on the spot. It cleaned him out. With no cash left, he told Lucky to hold onto the remaining stones, as he would happily buy those as well, once he had his cash currency built up again. It seemed that the miners who had struck it rich in town followed a pattern. Many of them were eager to spend part of their newfound fortune on lavish items such as gemstones. Good for Silverman, good for Lucky.
Lucky gave Shorty some starter cash that he needed to move along the mining operation, telling him that if he needed more to let him know. Shorty looked down at the wad of cash in his hand, counted it out, and said, “Don’t worry, son. You gave me more than enough for the moment. This here will go far. You got yourself a partner.” And that was the way it was done – no attorneys, no witnesses—just three men, a handful of cash, a handshake and their honor. Well, hopefully their honor.
Mickey and Lucky scouted around the small town until they found a spot to set up their own tent next to the assayer’s office. An assayer, at that time, was a man who weighed the ores and determined their composition and value. There they set up a tent with a sign above it in large letters stating “GOLD AND SILVER BOUGHT HERE.” Lucky also hired a guard to watch over things. Each day, when they closed up shop for the day, Mickey took whatever gold was purchased back to the bank to store it in their vault. The gold accumulated more and more each day, so much so that Lucky thought he might have to return to the present to secure more diamonds and other gemstones.
With the money Lucky gave him, Shorty bought the equipment and tools he needed mine the gold. Shorty had already registered his claim long before meeting Lucky and now that he had some financial backing, the mine took off, producing gold in large, staggering quantities, all of it split evenly. Even Shorty knew when to hold them and when to fold them, so when a few months later, a wealthy industrialist by the name of Charles Schwab offered them a million dollars for the mine, Shorty said, “Let’s take it,” and Lucky agreed. Lucky then decided that he had accomplished what he had set out to and hired a wagon with two horses, went to the bank, withdrew all of his gold, and headed out of the city Rhyolite. It took Mickey and Lucky ten trips into the desert. With each trip, they buried the gold at the base of a mountain, the same mountain, near three trees. The mountain had a unique shape, making their landmark all the more recognizable. The gold would remain there, Lucky said, until he and Mickey returned to the present. Using their modern day phone camera, they took photo after photo, marking its location carefully and even drew up a map on a strip of dry lambskin. After they finished, they returned the horses and wagon and looked for Shorty to say goodbye. They found him at the nearby hotel where he sat, surrounded by gawkers, as he was now a celebrity. He was the guy who struck it rich. He became the example to all the others because he proved that there was gold and silver in the mountains surrounding Rhyolite.
Seated next to Shorty was the man nicknamed Scotty, the guy that had been sitting with him in the lobby of the hotel the day Lucky and Mickey first met him. Scotty began to brag about how well he had done mining gold as well, and proclaimed that he was happily retiring after building his castle in the desert. It was speculated about town that Scotty, now known for saving a steel magnate’s life, had received a stake in the gold mine in return for his good deed. Other rumors abounded as well, including those swirling around that Lucky and Mickey had brought in money from wagon heists and used that to help Scotty dig his mine. Scotty did indeed build his castle on the desert sands of Death Valley, earning him the nickname of Death Valley Scotty, but died right before his swimming pool was completed.
Back through the portals, the longtime friends vanished and traveled until they returned home to the safehouse in Astoria, Queens. Bobby Boots readied the plane and immediately flew Lucky and Mickey to Las Vegas where they rented a large, four-wheel drive flatbed truck, making sure it could handle their large haul of gold. The boys left Bobby back at the hotel as they took o
ff for a present day visit into the past, a journey of a different kind this time. The drive from Vegas to the ghost town of Rhyolite was about an hour away heading north from “Sin City.”
When the two men arrived at Rhyolite, there wasn’t much to see. They walked the deserted streets of the old ghost town to where the Southern Hotel had once stood and headed over to where Silverman’s tent used to be. It was sad. Mickey and Lucky had seen it in its thriving days and now, it was nothing more than a few abandoned buildings. Nothing interesting remained except the bottle house made from thousands of bottles caps stuck into its adobe sides. It appeared to be the one big draw in the area. The men drove the flatbed truck towards the mountain. Lucky was relieved to see that although the terrain had changed a good bit, the landmarks were still recognizable. The three trees were still there, but much larger in size. Just like in an old western, they counted off twenty paces and began to dig. Right at four feet, Mickey’s shovel hit a metal chest. Ten chests of gold were right where they should be, side by side. They used the truck’s winch (or cable cord) to lift the chests out of the ground. When it was all loaded on the truck, they were exhausted and thirsty. On the drive back, Mickey stopped by a convenience store on the outskirts of Vegas, bought a six-pack of beer, and sat for a moment, inside the truck as he downed one of them in about three gulps.
Lucky began to have some doubts about loading all the gold onto a plane and, instead of driving to the Phoenix airport, he pulled out his cell phone and called his pilot, Bobby Boots.
“Bobby, Lucky here. Look, I’ve decided to drive the truck back east. I have a lot of gold here and even though I know the jet can probably handle this payload of about twenty thousand pounds worth, I’d prefer not to take any chances. So just take the jet back to Long Island and we’ll drive the truck all the way back to New York. I think that’s our best option.”
Mickey took I15 through Nevada, into Utah, picked up Interstate 80 East, and wound his way around Wisconsin, the Great Lakes, and Detroit, until they once again picked up I80, taking them all the way to New York. They made the long, tiring, two thousand eight hundred sixty-five mile drive in two and a half days driving continuously, with one sleeping while the other one drove, switching off frequently and only stopping to eat, refuel, or use the restroom. When they were about three hours shy of New York, Lucky called Nicky, Dukie, Sal, and Casey and told them all to meet them at Morris’s Jewelry store and to bring another portable winch to help them haul the gold off of the truck. Each eighteen-inch square block of gold weighed one ton, or two thousand pounds, and they had ten of them.
Mickey and Lucky drove directly to Morris, their jeweler friend of many years. Morris explained that gold is weighed in troy ounces with one troy pound equaling twelve ounces, not sixteen, therefore, one ton of gold = 24,000 ounces, not 32,000. Morris weighed the gold and told them that they had ten tons of pure gold. With a ton of gold weighing in at twenty-four thousand ounces and with gold selling for fifteen hundred dollars an ounce, the grand total was thirty-six million dollars per ton times ten for a whopping total of three hundred sixty million dollars worth of gold. Morris told Lucky that he would take all of the gold netting Lucky twelve hundred an ounce, which in turn meant two hundred eighty-eight million dollars in Lucky’s pocket. It took Lucky about five seconds to agree, but it took Morris about two weeks to move it all, which was quite remarkable. But when all was complete, a wire transfer was deposited into Lucky’s Swiss bank account. Lucky then wrote a check to Mickey for five million and gave all of the other friends who met him at the airport a check each for one hundred thousand dollars. Any guy who took a risk like that, working for Lucky, deserved it. It was their loyalty that Lucky cherished and he rewarded their loyalty.
Chapter Eighteen
Lucky asked Nicky and Dukie if they wanted to work for him a while, stating that the work might be for a few weeks or the next few months – no way of knowing yet. The boys never said no to Lucky. He had been good to them. Dukie came immediately, but Nicky had some loose ends to clear up, as he always did, and told Lucky that he would make it there in the next couple of days. Dukie was always at the ready with a packed traveling bag nearby. In fact, there was a joke about that bag as it forever sat, right by the front door, just waiting for the next invitation out of town. It was a habit from his fighting days, as every other week, he was traveling somewhere for a boxing match. In this case, all he needed to do was throw his suitcase into his car and drive to the safehouse, which was about twenty minutes away, depending on traffic.
Dukie needed this job, not for the money, but to get his mind off of things. His personal life had recently left him emotionally in shambles and Lucky’s timing could not be better. Dukie had gone and married a society girl from Boston. They were a handsome couple, but after a “quick” marriage, there was “quick” romance, meaning it sizzled shortly after the “I do’s.” It struck them that in their haste to wed the couple really hadn’t known much about each other and, in essence, had little in common. She was from a fine, societal family and Dukie, well, he was the rough and tumble street brawler type; very appealing at first to any woman intrigued with the bad boy “rugged” type, but a turnoff later when she realized that he was a borderline redneck. As for Dukie, he didn’t care much for high society, getting dressed up a lot, and appearing at all those functions for nothing more than what amounted to a photo op, in his opinion. Fortunately, there were no children involved, so the only tough decision to make was who got the dog. Marriage wasn’t all it was cracked up to be, Dukie thought.
Dukie looked forward to working with Lucky and the gang. The timing was perfect. When Lucky called, it was shortly after his wife had left and Dukie was wallowing in pity, blaming himself for not doing the marriage thing better and feeling a little despondent.
At the door of the safehouse, Mickey greeted Dukie with a big slap on the shoulder and Charlie gave him a big hello, as did Sam. Anastasia smiled as she nodded hello. Not long after Mickey’s arrival, the telephone lying on the coffee table in the corner of the living room rang. Mickey nodded to Dukie that it was okay to answer. It was Morris, the jeweler, saying that a package had been delivered to his store, in care of Lucky, and asked if there was anyone there who could come pick it up. Dukie agreed to make the trip. Nicky, by now at the safehouse, agreed to stay to look out for things. The professor asked if he could be dropped off at the library until Dukie finished his business at the jeweler’s. Anastasia jumped in and asked him if she could tag along and Charlie stated that he wanted to do more sightseeing. So it was Sam, Anastasia, the professor, and Charlie who took the ride into the city that morning with Dukie.
The drive into the city was pleasant. The gang really liked each other and got along well. On the way, they traded adventure stories and there was lots of laughter. Sam told the story, for the twentieth time, of how she had met Lucky and the Dukie told stories of their childhood and the trouble that would find them occasionally. The time passed quickly and, before long, they were right in front of the grand library in the heart of the city. The professor and Anastasia jumped out and headed inside.
“Let me stop first and get this package, if you guys don’t mind,” Dukie said to Charlie and Sam. “And then I might join you as you tour around the city. We could stop for lunch or something later.”
Sam and Charlie both chimed in about how they would like that.
Dukie attempted to pull the car up to Morris’s jewelry store, but the area was blocked by an ambulance parked outside in front of the building, so he drove around the block until he found a space much farther away. Dukie told Charlie and Sam to lock the car doors and just stay inside until he returned. Dukie walked to the door outside and pressed the button. He heard Morris answer through the intercom.
“It’s Dukie, Morris, open up.”
Morris’s jewelry business was on the fourth floor and it took up the front half of the floor. Being a jeweler, especially a jeweler whose business relied on precious stones, Morr
is always used his surveillance camera before buzzing anyone in. There was a hum, then Dukie tugged at the door and walked in. Morris greeted him and offered him a seat while he went to retrieve the box. Moments later, the jeweler returned.
“There’s no return address. I called as soon as I received it, not knowing if it’s important or not,” Morris said.
Dukie picked up the box. It was light. He shook it. Nothing moved around or made any noise. He thanked Morris and left. The heavy steel door closed automatically behind him. Once it was shut completely, Dukie felt a damp cloth pressed against his face, covering his mouth and filling his nose with a sweet chemical smell. Blackness overcame him. As he lay completely unconscious, Dukie was placed onto a gurney and wheeled downstairs to the waiting ambulance.
Chapter Nineteen
When Lucky first phoned Morris about the gold supply that he was about to bring in, Morris ordered his staff to make space in the large vault situated in a room behind a locked gate in the back of his office. But there was simply not enough room for all of the gold, so Morris offered other jewelers the opportunity to purchase the gold below market prices in exchange for storing part of it for him. They were all savvy businessmen, never refusing an opportunity to buy at the right price. The jewelers who couldn’t use the gold or didn’t have the money to purchase it would store it as a favor. Morris would have Brink’s take the gold from his vault under armed guard to his bank the following day. Morris would call a few of his regular customers and inform them of the gold’s below wholesale market price.
Lucky arrived at Morris’s jewelry emporium with the gold. Morris had four armed security guards vigilantly watching for anything suspicious as the gold was transferred onto pallets. After each pallet was fully loaded, it was taken under the watchful eyes of two of the guards, to the freight elevator for delivery to Morris’s office on the fourth floor. The other two guards remained behind to guard the other gold as it was being placed onto the pallets. Morris supervised the entire procedure by first storing what gold would fit into his vault, and then dispersing the remaining gold to the various jewelry companies in his building who had agreed to help. Jewelers were sort of like family, always helping each other. Morris would return the favor one day.
The Time Portal 2: Escape in Time Page 13