“That depends on how high you want us to stack it. If you want easy access to it, we can leave a wide main aisle and work aisles a bit narrower.
“If you want us to cram it full, we can narrow all the aisles. You’ll still be able to get to the stuff, but it’ll require a little more work.
“Your first option, to make pulling it easier, will be ten to fifteen more loads. To cram it full, twenty to twenty five.”
Savage considered his options, then made his choice.
“I don’t care how hard it is to pull stock out of there. I want to cram as much in there as possible in case somebody decides to try to constrict our access to the highway trucks.
“Once it’s full I want you to restock the supermarket’s shelves. Nothing fancy. Just fill up the shelves with a little bit of everything, so the townsfolk can shop. Can you do that for me?”
Luis looked to Jesse. Jesse just shrugged.
“Sure. It’ll cost you two extra ounces of silver.”
“For each of us,” Jesse added hopefully.
It didn’t hurt to negotiate.
But negotiation wasn’t necessary. Savage agreed to their terms without debate.
“There’s one more thing I want you to do for me.”
“What’s that?”
“I want you to take two days off from the market project and ride north on Highway 281 about eleven miles from here, to mile marker 211.”
The brothers looked at one another again and both raised their eyebrows a bit.
This was certainly unexpected.
But they were intrigued. Savage would never ask them to do anything unless there was something in it for him. And if there was something in it for Savage, he was typically willing to make it worth the brothers’ while as well.
“What do you want us to do when we get there?”
“I want you to dig up a cache of silver and gold I buried there a couple of weeks ago.”
“Excuse me?”
“That’s right,” he lied. “I was there a couple of weeks ago. I had a bunch of silver and gold I’d picked up from somebody who owed me a lot of money.
“But I was being followed. It was at night, and I buried it there so I didn’t get robbed.”
“So what happened?”
“I made it back to Blanco without being robbed. I lost the bastards by getting off the highway and cutting through the woods. But the gold and silver is still there. I haven’t been able to go back and get it and might not be able to go myself for awhile. That’s why I want you two to go and get it for me.”
“What’s in it for us?”
“I’ll give you ten percent of the value if you bring it back to me. Trust me, it’ll definitely be worth your time.”
Jesse thought for a moment, then asked a frank question.
“Mr. Savage, now don’t get me wrong. We’re as honest as any other men in the county, except maybe the preachers.
“But why trust us to do this? What if we just take the whole thing and never come back? Just keep on riding?”
“Consider this a test.”
“A test?”
“Yes. You see, I’ve got similar caches hidden all over the place. If you come back with the first one I’ll pay you your ten percent. And after you finish stocking the warehouse and the store for me, I’ll tell you where the next one is. Then the next one and the one after that. Within a few months you’ll both be very rich men.”
The brothers looked at one another once again.
They were thinking the same thing. He’d just given them two different stories about how and why he buried precious metals.
They knew he was holding back… lying to them. But gold and silver were hard to come by, and he was offering to cut them in on a substantial amount of it. Simply for digging it out of the ground and lugging it back to him.
“Of course,” Savage continued, “You have to be careful not to fail the test.”
“What do you mean?”
“I mean I have a very careful and very detailed inventory of every single item in each cache. And I’ll check when you bring it to me to make sure it’s all there. If you rip me off of even one little piece of it, I’ll terminate the deal and find someone else to retrieve it for me.”
The brothers doubted very much Savage would ever find anyone to retrieve the treasure in their place.
But then again, a man with means could always find someone to do his dirty work for him.
“Okay. We’re in. But you’ll have to tell us specifically how to find the stuff.”
“It won’t be hard. But remember, it was night time when I buried it. It’ll be perpendicular to the highway, at the mile marker sign that says 211 on it. That’s all I can tell you.”
“East or west?”
“I honestly don’t know. It was dark.”
“And you don’t know how far from the road?”
“Like I said, it was dark. But don’t worry. All you have to do is walk in each direction until you find a place where the ground’s been disturbed. The ground hasn’t had time to recover. The grass won’t have had a chance to grow back over it yet. It should be easy to spot.”
Luis said, “Okay. We’ll leave at first light.”
“Good. Now then, it’s a day’s ride there and another day back. I still want to be able to finish stocking and open the store within a month’s time. Can we do it?”
“Sure. Piece of cake.”
-27-
Luis and Jesse left the bank to walk to the market’s warehouse a block away.
“I told you we’d get away with it,” Luis told him.
They both shared a belly laugh.
They’d been on their way to pick up the supplies they’d just claimed to have unloaded in the market’s warehouse when they passed by a lake and saw a fish jump out of the water.
Like little boys who decided to play hooky from school to go fishing they abandoned their mission, and spent hours instead reeling in fish after fish and cooking their catch over an open campfire.
What they couldn’t eat they turned into jerky and had two gallon-sized ziplock bags full for their efforts.
Life was good.
They lied to John Savage and still got paid for work they didn’t do. And they had no guilt. It actually felt good, for they hated John Savage as much as anybody else in town.
They sensed that Savage was too scared to go out in public and look in the warehouse to make sure there was more there than the day before.
And they were absolutely right.
They enjoyed getting one over on him.
“So,” Jesse said as they walked, “What about this buried treasure thing? What’s his scam?”
“What makes you think he has one?”
“A man like Savage is always playing some kind of scam.”
“I don’t know. He gave us two different versions of why he buried the loot there.”
“The second version, saying there are more piles out there somewhere, might have been to make sure we didn’t abscond with the first batch.”
“Maybe. That’s what I thought too.”
“So how do you think we should play it?”
“I think we should go out there. It’s no harder than loading that wagon and then unloading it again. And to tell you the truth, the wooden bench on that wagon’s wearing a blister on my butt. It’ll be nice to get off the wagon and on horseback for a couple of days.
“Let’s go out there and find his loot and see what we’re talking about. If it’s worth, say, fifty thousand dollars we’ll take it back to him. We’ll get our cut and go back out the next time he wants us to retrieve another batch. If it’s a million dollars in gold, though, we say to hell with Savage and head to Mexico.”
“I’ve got another idea.”
“Hit me with it.”
“A man like Savage loves money too much to trust his memory on something as important as burying treasure. Especially if he buried it in several different places.”
“Okay. I still don’t follow you.”
“Let’s go get his treasure. Like you said, if it’s a significant amount, we’ll head to Mexico and never see his ugly face again.”
“I just said that.”
“Let me finish, dummy. If it’s not a significant amount, we’ll bring it back to him and take our cut.”
“I just said that too.”
Jesse glared at him.
“Sorry.”
“Interrupt me again I’ll knock you into the dirt and beat your ass, just like I used to do when we were kids.
“Now then, if it’s not a significant amount we’ll bring it back and take our cut.
“Then we’ll go back to stocking his damn warehouse for him again, and earning our little silver bars.
“We’ll assume he was blowing smoke about there being more.
“We’ll assume there was only the one batch, and he sent us after it because he was too scared to go get it himself.
“But, if he says he wants to send us after a second batch, we’ll know we got him.”
“Got him? Got him how?”
“If there really are several more batches, I guarantee he’s got the locations written down somewhere. Like I said, a greedy guy like that wouldn’t trust himself to remember where several batches of gold are buried.
“He’ll have something written down somewhere that will say where each batch is buried.
“And we’ll hold him at gunpoint until he gives it to us.”
“And then…”
“Then we’ll tell him to fill his own damn warehouse. We’ll already be in the bank with him after business hours. We can rob the vault of its gold and have the treasure map to boot.”
“Brother, I never thought I’d say these words, but you’re a genius. Hell, you’re damn near as smart as I am.”
-28-
The following day in the early afternoon a young man named Tad Taylor ignored the “CLOSED” sign on the bank’s doors and knocked anyway.
Savage, rousted from a nap and a tad bit grumpy, grumbled as he peeked through the curtains to see who’d awakened him.
He hurried to the door and opened it, demanding to know what took the man so long.
“I’m sorry,” Tad said. “Mrs. M has a full house today and one of the cooks is sick. They’re running behind.”
“And she doesn’t care one damn bit that I might starve to death over here while she’s taking her sweet time?”
Tad bit his tongue and didn’t mention the obvious: that Savage could stand to miss a few meals and was in no danger of starving.
He had a good arrangement with Savage and didn’t want to jeopardize it.
Tad had once been a teller at the bank. When the local power coop declared the blackout was forever, or at least expected to last a few decades, Savage decided he no longer needed a staff.
But he kept Tad on as a personal flunky and was paying him not in cash or precious metals, but rather in mortgage points.
It was Tad’s idea, but Savage readily agreed to it because it wouldn’t cost him any of his beloved gold.
Tad’s monthly mortgage payment at the time of the blackout had been $820 per month. He offered his services to Savage at $20 per hour, which meant as long as his old boss kept him busy for 41 hours per month Tad would never fall behind on his mortgage.
He was probably the only mortgage holder in the town of Blanco who didn’t have to worry constantly about being foreclosed on and forced into the street.
Tad didn’t mind. The work was easy and he didn’t have much to do anyway.
He and his wife divorced six months prior to the blackout and she moved back to El Paso. They had no children to fight over, so he was all alone with his Irish Setter Susie.
Susie was the best hunting dog he’d ever seen, and he liked her better than his wife anyway.
Most of the work Tad did for Savage was as a runner. Sometimes to deliver messages to Judge Moore for various things or to visit Lester Booker at the library to check out a book or two.
Each morning he visited the bank to get Savage’s meal order, and dutifully delivered it to Mrs. Montgomery at her boarding house.
The breakfast order never varied: three eggs over easy, toast and jam, and either bacon or pork.
He almost always demanded a sandwich and potato chips for lunch and whatever Mrs. M served to her other boarders for dinner.
Occasionally, though, he tired of sandwiches and asked for a homemade pot pie or a steak.
On this particular day he wanted a ham and cheese sandwich, with onions and jalapenos. Barbequed potato chips, “sour cream flavored if she doesn’t have them”, and half a dozen cookies. “Fresh, not packaged. I hate packaged cookies.”
Mrs. M hated catering to such a despicable man. But he held the note on her establishment and had the legal power to close her down on a whim.
So she sucked it up and tried her best to please him.
Savage stepped out of the way and allowed Tad to enter the bank.
Tad followed him back to his desk and took the pack off his back.
He reached inside and withdrew a large resealable plastic container, then handed it to Savage.
“I hope you like onions and jalapenos,” Savage told the young man rather dryly.
“They’re okay,” was the unenthusiastic response.
They followed a strict routine, the two of them. Savage, his paranoia getting worse of late, was convinced everyone in town was out to get him.
Some of them actually were. But Mrs. Montgomery was a genteel woman and a church-goer and certainly wasn’t one of them.
But in Savage’s mangled mind, she was as much as suspect as any of them.
He took the bag of Lay’s Barbeque Potato Chips out of the container first and inspected it closely to make sure it hadn’t been tampered with.
Then he put it aside and took out the sandwich, unwrapped it, and placed it on a paper plate.
He removed a plastic knife from the container and cut the sandwich into four more or less equal squares.
He took one of the squares and handed it to Tad.
Tad wasn’t partial to ham and cheese, and actually hated onions. But it was important to him he do his duty and earn points off his mortgage payment. So he took the offered sandwich and wolfed it down in two bites.
His logic was sound: the less time those nasty onions were in his mouth the better.
Savage gave him a piece of sandwich from a different place each time. In his mind, if he always handed him the upper left piece each and every day, Tad would make note of it.
He’d pass the information on to Mrs. Montgomery, who’d make sure that particular segment was safe to eat. She’d take great pains to make sure the cyanide or arsenic was sprinkled on one of the other parts of the sandwich instead.
Savage knew that Tad was well-liked around town, and reminded Mrs. Montgomery of a son she’d lost years before.
He knew that Mrs. M would never risk Tad’s life to take Savage’s, so he figured he was safe as long as he kept Tad guessing about which piece he’d have to eat.
His job done, Tad sat in one of the easy chairs in front of Savage’s desk and looked around the room while the big man finished his own lunch.
Tad was ready to go.
But he knew Savage wouldn’t get up to let him back out of the bank until he was good and ready himself.
If Tad was lucky, Savage wouldn’t be in a talkative mood on this particular day. He’d had a bad habit of keeping Tad there an hour or more as he railed on and on about how the town didn’t appreciate him.
Tad was indeed lucky on this day. On this day Savage was more tired than talkative. He finished his lunch in a matter of minutes and arose, then walked Tad back to the door.
As Tad stepped through the doorway and onto the walkway outside the bank, a size six boot appeared seemingly from nowhere.
It tromped itself directly into the path of the open door, and would have prevented Savage from slamming i
t shut.
But Savage didn’t try to shut the door.
He was in shock.
He was staring directly into the decidedly unfriendly face of Red Poston.
-29-
Red was aware of Savage’s eating habits. The whole town was. There weren’t a lot of secrets in Blanco.
She’d been cooling her heels on a bench at the courthouse square gazebo, chewing on a blade of grass, when Tad walked up Main Street.
While Tad was waiting for Savage to open the door she watched a rabbit hopping up Texas Avenue headed her way. No doubt to munch on the same knee-high grass Red was chewing.
If she’d had her rifle she might have taken him home for dinner. He was good-sized and would have made a tasty meal for her and her friends.
But as good as she was with a pistol, even Red would have a tough time picking him off at ninety feet.
There was a good chance she’d wound him and he’d hop away to die a painful death.
And that wasn’t Red’s way.
Besides, the gunshot would draw a lot of attention, and that’s the last thing she wanted to do.
There were a couple of townsfolk watching her from their upstairs windows already. She didn’t want to make it any worse.
There’d been a sense in Blanco since the day Red returned that it was almost over. That it was just a matter of days before she and the portly banker finally had it out. After all, an old adage says that the two toughest guys in any crowd with eventually duke it out.
And that’s largely true.
The town hoped it was true in this particular case. They were tired of being bullied by Savage. They knew what he was guilty of, and they were disappointed to hear the Ranger left town without him.
They wanted him gone.
The people who were watching from the anonymity of their curtains and window blinds hoped it was today.
When Tad disappeared into the bank Red lifted herself up from the bench and strolled down the gazebo steps.
She knew Savage would cut the sandwich into quarters and make Tad eat part of it. Tad had explained the process a hundred times around town.
No Help From Austin: Red: Book 5 Page 9