TREASURE KILLS (Legends of Tsalagee Book 1)

by Phil Truman

  “No,” Sunny answered.

  “How long did she stay?”

  “Just long enough to get a couple of free meals, and steal fifty bucks and my credit card.”

  “Really?” Goat shook his head.

  “Is that what you’re planning on doing too, Goat? Because if you want some money, just ask and I’ll give you some. No need to steal it.”

  “Aw, Sunny, naw. I don’t aim to steal nothing from you. Honest, I just wanted to see you again. Just wanted to know how you was doin’. There wasn’t a day go by in prison I didn’t wonder how you was doin’.

  “That’s about all that kept me going in that place. I never figured I’d get out alive, but they started running out of room. I figure the Man decided to boot out some of us old timers to make room for the next generation.”

  Sunny’s posture loosened a little, but she still kept her distance. “What are you going to do now?” she asked.

  “I ain’t planned much beyond seeing you this morning,” he said with a grin. “But I’m going to check out the job situation. Prison wasn’t a total waste. I was always a pretty fair mechanic, and they kept me doing a lot of that. I’d say, from the number of cars and trucks on the road these days, there’s bound to be plenty of mechanic jobs.”

  * * *

  It took a three week search before Goat finally found employment. The hiring person at every one of the places he went interviewed him briefly, and told him politely they didn’t currently have any openings, but that they’d keep his application on file.

  “But your ad said you needed three mechanics,” he said at one car dealership he’d gone to at eight on Monday morning.

  “Yes, well, we have several more candidates to interview. We’ll let you know,” the HR guy said. The man stood, stuck his hand out and smiled; indicating to Goat the interview had ended.

  Sunny had relayed Goat’s plight to her co-worker Frankie in a lunch conversation, expressing her doubt anyone would want to hire her dad with his prison record and appearance. Frankie, a computer geek, could empathize, as he possessed some of the same personal styles as Goat both in hairdos and body art. Frankie preferred spiked hair with tips of yellow and red. A black tribal band tattoo weaved around his right forearm, and a small yin yang-ish thing, which seemed to involve fish, floated on his neck. But, unlike Goat, Frankie had the added enhancements of three eyebrow rings, a lip ring, multiple left ear piercings, and a speech impeding stainless steel tongue stud.

  Frankie nodded knowingly. “Yeth.” He said. “Thelf expwethion ith fwond upon by moeth employouth.”

  Sunny nodded. Where they worked, everyone considered Frankie a freak. He kept his job for only two reasons: he was brilliant at what he did, and his aunt sat in an executive office as a vice president and legal counsel.

  “Doth yew dad know anything about motowcykelth?”

  “Motorcycles? I don’t know. I guess so. Why?”

  Frankie pulled out his overstuffed billfold, and started fishing for a card. Through his corrupted speech, Sunny translated him to say, “I don’t think your dad will scare this guy. Maybe he can use some help.”

  The business card he handed Sunny had a stylized chopper for a logo and the name “Red Randy’s Bike Shop” in red letters, and an address.

  The next day, Goat entered the unoccupied front office of a grayish white cinderblock building. A loud bell burred when he opened the door. Presently a short, wiry, grease monkey came through the open door from the shop, and asked Goat, none too cordially, “Whatcha need?”

  “I’d like to speak to the boss man,” Goat said.

  “Hang on,” the guy said, and returned to the shop. “Randy!” he hollered and motioned over his shoulder toward the office.

  The man who ducked coming in through the shop door stood a head above Goat, which would have made him about six foot six or seven. Thick muscles knotted his neck and shoulders. A crooked scar ran from the right side of his forehead diagonally down across the bridge of his nose and left cheek stopping at his jaw line. His large brown head was shaved clean. He wore a gray sleeveless t-shirt with a Harley-Davidson logo across the front under which massive pectoral muscles bulged. Both his arms displayed a gallery of tattoos from wrist to shirt-line. By his features and skin color Goat took the man to be Native American.

  “You wanna see me?” the big man said in a deep, menacing bass. Wiping his hands on a red shop rag, he looked at Goat with suspicion.

  “You Red Randy Brown?” Goat asked.

  “Could be.”

  “Guy sent me out. Told me you might need a mechanic.” Goat said.

  “What guy?”

  “Didn’t really meet him. He works with my daughter. Guy named Frankie.”

  Red Randy didn’t say anything for a while continuing to wipe his hands on the rag and looking at Goat.

  “When did you get out?” Randy asked.

  Goat looked surprised. “You mean it shows that much?”

  Randy nodded. “Only to someone who’s been there,” he said. “They teach you anything about bikes inside?”

  “Some,” Goat said. “I had a Honda 750 before I went up. Worked on it quite a bit.”

  Red Randy didn’t seem impressed. “We do mostly Harley’s here,” he said.

  “I just need work, man,” Goat continued. “If you got it, I’ll do it; if not, I’ll move on.”

  “Okay,” Randy said after more thought. “I’ll give you a shot at it for a week. You work out, I’ll try you for another week. Payday is Saturday, in cash. It’ll be minimum wage. Rules around here are simple. We work Monday through Saturday. We start at eight; we quit when we quit. You get an hour for lunch. You miss a day’s work, I’ll fire you. You steal anything from me, I’ll kill you.” Red Randy looked at Goat and waited.

  “Sounds good to me, Goat said. “When can I start?”

  The man nodded slightly and turned on his heels heading back through the door to the shop. “Follow me,” he said. When they passed the grease monkey then lying on the floor, his head on the underside of a large bike, Randy said, “That’s Threebuck.” As if cued, Threebuck swore loudly at the machinery above him, banging it violently several times with the wrench he held.

  Goat’s new boss stopped at a door to a small utility room at the back of the shop and opened it. He pulled out a broom and some clean shop rags and handed them to Goat. “You’ll start by cleaning this place up. Clean the floors, the racks, the benches, and the tools. Clean the office. Clean the John. Empty the trash, there and there,” he pointed to two overflowing drums on the shop floor. “There’s some plastic trash bags in here,” he indicated the utility closet. “There’s a dumpster out back.” With that Red Randy said no more, and walked back to the chopper he’d been working on.

  At six that evening, Randy told Goat to call it a day. “You going to come back tomorrow?” Randy asked.

  “Yeah, unless you fire me,” Goat answered.

  “I will if you’re late,” Randy said. “How you plan on getting here tomorrow.”

  “I ain’t figured that out yet. I’ll start by asking my daughter if she can bring me.”

  The next morning at seven, when Red Randy swung his big chopper onto the gravel parking lot, Goat sat on the ground next to the office door, his back against the building, waiting.

  Randy parked his bike next to the building and came to unlock the door. Goat stood, but Randy didn’t acknowledge Goat’s presence. The big man pulled a small chain that lead into his jeans pocket extracting a wad of keys at its end. He found the one he wanted, inserted it into the door lock, and opened the door. He walked into the shop and headed toward the back, flipping on lights as he went. Goat followed silently, hesitating uncertainly at a workbench, waiting to see what his boss wanted him to do.

  Randy stopped in front of a bike leaning against the back wall. “C’mere,” he said to Goat without looking at him. Goat walk over and looked at the bike in front of Randy. It was a beat up old mid-nineties model Suzuki 500. />
  “Guy come in here about a year ago,” Randy started, “had this bike he said he needed to sell. It looked like a piece of crap back then, just like now. I told him I’d give him fifty bucks, and he took it. It has sat here against this back wall since then. Don’t know if it even runs. If you can get it going, I’ll let you have it for seventy-five bucks plus any parts you need to use. We’ll figure up the total when you get it running, and I’ll deduct it from your pay. That ought to get you to work. Plus it’ll give me an idea of what kind of mechanic you are.”

  Goat got the Suzuki running by the end of the day. By the end of that week he’d earned two hundred forty-seven dollars. Red Randy held back twenty-five, and put Goat on a pay plan of twenty-five a week, rounding what Goat owed him up to a hundred even for parts and interest. He also reminded Goat of the consequences of skipping out on him.

  Goat didn’t skip out the next four weeks. He stayed on at Red Randy’s, and even managed to work out kind of a peaceful co-existence with Threebuck. But not before coming to blows with him.

  The fight started over an argument on who’d last used a 7/16th socket, which had come up missing. When Threebuck shoved Goat and called him a stupid bastard, Goat returned the shove spewing a profane name back at Threebuck. Randy stopped his work on a big hog, walked over and grabbed both men by the scruff. “Take this crap outside!” he commanded, and then shoved them both tumbling through the bay door before returning to his work.

  The two proceeded with punches and kicks and bites and swearing and name-calling. Red Randy made a mental note to deduct this fight time from each of his employee’s pay. He then noticed the missing socket amongst his own collection of tools. But this thing had been brewing for some time, so he decided to let those two work it out.

  The fight continued for forty minutes, working its way up and down the bulldozed red rock mounds to the sides and back of the shop, and eventually tumbling all the way around the building. Both men became so exhausted they could no longer stand. They lay propped up on the side of the building next to each other, bleeding from various wounds, and breathing so hard they could no longer swear at, or call each other names. Ten minutes into their recovery, Randy came around the corner.

  “If you idiots are through, you need to get your butts back to work. I ain’t paying you for this,” he said, and returned to the shop. Later, without saying a word about it, Randy tossed Threebuck the missing socket. Threebuck examined it, then laid it aside, and wordlessly continued his own work. After that, Threebuck and Goat more or less got along. At least they didn’t come to blows again.

  Goat stayed on, got a room at the Y, and even managed a reconciliation of sorts with Sunny. She would invite him over for dinner at least once a week. She never felt complete trust in her biological father, but as the weeks and months went by, she began to share with Goat about her growing up years with her foster parents—Lorene and Buck Buchanan.

  Sunny still kept in touch with Lorene and Buck, and eventually let them know about Goat, his release from prison and their subsequent reunion. In late February of 2003, Lorene wrote back that she was glad Sunny and her father had made amends, and invited Sunny and her father to come home for a visit that coming Easter. Sunny replied that she didn’t think that was a good idea, but Lorene insisted. So over a home cooked dinner, Goat—tattoos, ponytail and all—met Buck and Lorene Buchanan for the first time.

  Halfway through the meal Lorene asked Goat, for the third time, “What kind of work are you in, Mr. Griggs?”

  “I’m, uh...” Goat looked at Sunny, who shrugged back at him.

  “Lorene, darlin’,” Buck said with a smile. “Mister Griggs already told us he works as a motorcycle mechanic. Remember?” He turned to Goat. “You’ll have to excuse Lorene. She’s kind of forgetful lately.”

  Chapter 2

  Buck Tells a Tale

  As it turned out, Buck had fatal flaws. The things that made him such a well-loved man proved to be his ruin.

  Buck believed everybody had good in them, and he always looked for it. With such a gregarious nature, he found it hard mistrusting or being suspicious of anyone. That even held true for strangers with snake and spider tattoos who had dealt in illegal drugs, and spent almost two decades in prison. “We all make mistakes,” Buck liked to say.

  Buck also liked to talk, and had a hard time keeping secrets. He liked to tell stories, especially stories about his ancestors and the land they’d occupied.

  “Your folks from Oklahoma?” Buck asked Goat. He and Goat had moved from the dining room into the living room after the meal, while the women cleared the table that Easter Sunday in 2003, and Buck wanted to get a conversation going.

  “Naw,” Goat responded. “I grew up in Texas. My old man died when I was about thirteen.”

  “What about your mother? She still with us?”

  “She re-married a couple of years after Dad checked-out. Married a mean sumbitch. I left home when I was sixteen. I ain’t seen my mom since.”

  Buck shook his head, and gave Goat a sad look, “Too bad,” he said.

  “What about your folks?” Goat asked.

  “Me and Lorene have lived here in Tsalagee all our lives. My family goes back several generations in these parts.” Buck got up from his chair and walked over to the fireplace. He grabbed an ornate frame sitting on the mantel which held a yellowed black and white photograph. It showed a fuzzy group of five men of indeterminate age standing and sitting in front of a large iron-wheeled vehicle. The machine had a smoke stack at the nose and a belted iron wheel on the side which had large spokes. Buck handed the frame to Goat.

  “This picher was taken in 1908 not long after Oklahoma statehood. These here men was some of the founders of the town. That fella there,” Buck pointed the stem of his pipe at a man sitting on a small crate, slightly in front and to the right of the rest of the group. “...was my grampa; my mom’s daddy. He was a Cherokee by the name of Ned Starr. He was a nephew to Sam Starr, the man who married a widow by the name of Belle Reed, who became better known as Belle Starr.”

  “You’re related to Belle Starr?” Goat asked. That seemed to impress him.

  “Only by marriage. She wasn’t well regarded in the Starr clan.” Buck paused to fire up his pipe before continuing his history lesson. “This here guy,” Buck pointed to a man leaning on the big rear wheel of the old steam engine, “...was Belle Starr’s son Ed Reed. Him and my granddaddy was said to be real good friends.

  “There was talk back then that Ed’s the one who killed Belle. Shot her in the back down around Eufaula. But they never found out who done it for sure. I guess in her case there was a long list of possible suspects.”

  “But her own kid?” Goat asked still looking at the picture.

  “Aw, old Belle... well, I guess I shouldn’t call her ‘old.’ She wasn’t even forty-one when she died. But in Belle’s line of work, she didn’t make a lot of friends. It’s said she horsewhipped the boy more than a time or two. I guess there wasn’t much love lost between ’em. Course, no one in that crowd back then was what you’d call nice people. The reason Ed shot her, so the story goes, was to get some of her loot. Jim Reed—that was Ed’s daddy—and two other guys came up into the Indian Territory from Texas to rob a rich Choctaw farmer named Watt Grayson. It was said that Grayson had a big stash of gold coins, which apparently he did, as Reed and his gang made away with about $30,000 worth of them.

  “Belle was accused of being a part of that robbery, but couldn’t nobody prove it. Anyways, Belle was said to still have a sizeable part of them gold coins when she was murdered, and that Ed took ’em, along with some of the other booty she had from train robberies and such. Ed lit out from down there, and settled up here. Didn’t seem to be anyone much interested in chasing down Belle Starr’s killer, so no one came after him. Strangely enough, a few years later he hired on as a deputy U.S. marshal, and was shot dead in a barroom brawl up at Wagoner. Don’t think it was long after this picture was took.”

>   “What happened to all the loot” Goat asked.

  “Good question,” Buck said. He whacked out his pipe ashes in a big ashtray on the table by his chair. “Ed is said to have hid it in a cave somewhere around here.”

  “I guess people have looked for it.”

  “They’ve dang sure done that,” Buck said with a wheezing laugh. “People looked for that gold for a lot of years.” He opened his tobacco pouch to refill the pipe. “And that stash kept getting bigger every year. Lotsa gold, lotsa jewelry. A regular pirate’s treasure, if you believed the talk.”

  “You’d think someone would’ve found it by now,” Goat said.

  “Well, I don’t know. Lots of caves between here and Eufaula. Could be anywhere. Over the years, folks just gave up looking or lost interest. Nowadays the story’s mostly forgot about. Don’t hear much talk on it anymore. Outside of a few obscure books, I think I’m the only living soul that knows anything about it.

  “Funny thing, though.” Buck struck his butane lighter and put the flame to the top of the fresh tobacco in the pipe bowl, then sucked, sending out thick blue-white clouds of smoke with every puff. He continued. “A lot of hunters for Belle’s lost treasure came to a disastrous end of one kind or another.”

  “What do you mean?”

  “I mean, they turned up dead. Some at the bottom of a cliff, some drowned in the river. Some just went out looking for that treasure and weren’t never heard from again, just disappeared.

  “All this has led some people to believe the Lost Treasure of Belle Starr is cursed. Some say by the ghost of Ed Reed, some say Belle Starr’s ghost, and still others believe the treasure is protected by the Devil himself. The Cherokees and Choctaws talk about some kind of forest demon, but that legend was around long before Ed hid that treasure. That curse could be another reason folks quit hunting for it.”

  “Have you ever looked for it?” Goat asked.

  “Course I did, when I was younger. But I stopped.” Buck stopped talking and looked out the window.