by Mason Cross
“Dom was a sucker for places like this,” Carol said. For the first time since he had met her, she sounded unguarded. A note of sadness had crept into her voice. A second later she remembered why they were here and turned her face away. When she spoke again her voice was back to normal.
“There are towns like this all over the state,” she said. “Boomtowns. They appeared out of nowhere when a mine was sunk, blew up like crazy over a few decades, and now they’re left here to rot.”
Gage reached into his pockets and produced the twin keys, showing them to Carol in the palm of his hand. She regarded them for the second time, showing no sign that they meant anything to her. She looked up from the keys and met his gaze, waiting for him to say something. Had this all been a waste of time? A wild goose chase?
“These unlock a safe. It’s here, isn’t it?” The sudden impatience in his own voice surprised him. “Where?”
Carol glanced from side to side, examining the patch of street lit by their headlights, and shook her head. “I don’t know.”
“Bullshit. You know, all right.”
“It was daylight when we were here, it looks different. Maybe we can find it.”
Gage held her gaze for a long moment. She stared back, unblinking. Gage reached into his pocket and withdrew the key for the handcuffs. He leaned over and hesitated for a second.
“If you try to run ...”
“You’ll shoot me. I’m very clear about that, you don’t have to keep saying it. Besides ...” she looked from side to side at the empty town and the black desert night beyond. “Where would I run?”
A good point. Gage relented and put the key in the cuffs. He unlocked them and Carol sighed, letting her left hand drop into her lap and massaging her wrist with her other hand.
“Get out, we don’t have all night.” Gage heard the undercurrent of anger in his voice and knew it was displacement. He wasn’t angry at her; he was angry because he would have to kill her soon.
They got out of the Chrysler and Carol stood by the driver’s door as Gage circled around and opened the trunk. He took out a powerful flashlight and clicked it on, bathing the immediate surroundings in a white light. Immediately, he saw fresh tire tracks, underneath the wheels of their own vehicle. Not a big car; probably a sedan. Somebody else had been here recently.
He played the beam over the nearest buildings, and then farther down the main street, before looking at Carol expectantly.
“We just looked around for a while,” she said, then pointed at a large building fifty yards away. It was bigger than the other structures. “We went inside that one, I think. There’s no door.”
Gage directed the beam on the ground ahead of them, creating a path of light, and gestured for Carol to take the lead.
As they approached the building, Gage could see it must have been the hub of the community: a town hall. As Carol had said, there was no door. The space in the wall was big enough for two entrance doors, but all that remained was the hinges on either side.
Gage stopped. Carol took three steps before she realized he wasn’t following and turned around.
“What’s in there?”
“Nothing much.”
Gage handed her the flashlight. She hesitated, then took it. He raised his gun and pointed it at the doorway, indicating that she should lead the way.
“No surprises in there, are there?”
She shook her head. Nothing to hide. But Gage remembered the trick with the phone, and the look on her face when the police car rolled into the gas station. He kept a couple of paces behind her as she walked into the darkness.
Carol was standing in the middle of an open space. She played the beam of the flashlight around, catching the remains of the old building in the light. A stage, some broken chairs lying around.
“We had a picnic in here,” she said. “Dom and his friend went to look around. I went outside to sketch the building, and when I came back, they were coming down from up there.”
She moved the beam of the flashlight upwards to take in a metal spiral staircase leading to a platform halfway up the wall. There was a door at the far end of the platform.
Gage said nothing, regarding the platform and the closed door. It seemed like more details were coming back to Carol, just as her recollection of the town’s location had as they got closer. She hadn’t said any of this back in Quarter. Which meant something was up there, all right.
Carol took a step toward the spiral staircase. “If you want, I could go up there and check ...”
“Not so fast.”
Gage closed the distance between them and took the flashlight from her. He held it loosely in his left hand while keeping the gun on her. “We’ll both go. You can lead the way.”
Carol turned and walked unhurriedly to the foot of the staircase. Gage followed, pausing to shine the flashlight around again. He was uneasy about this. They were in the middle of nowhere, he had a gun, she was unarmed. So why did it feel like he wasn’t fully in control of the situation?
Carol took the first three stairs, and then Gage noticed she stepped over the fourth. He paused as she continued to climb and then stepped onto the third step. Briefly, he moved the beam of the flashlight down to see that the join between the fourth step and the central column was almost rusted through. Keeping all his weight on his left foot, he pushed his right foot down firmly on the fourth step. It buckled and sagged downward with a creak.
At once, he heard Carol’s footsteps quicken above him. He looked up as he hopped up to the fifth step to see Carol racing to the top of the spiral and stepping onto the platform. He closed the distance quickly, gaining the platform just as Carol reached the door.
He took careful aim and put a bullet in the wall a couple of inches from where her hand was reaching for the handle. She cried out and flinched back from the door. Gage closed the distance between them and grabbed her roughly by the wrist.
She started to protest. “I was just trying to—”
“Enough bullshit.”
She shut up and stared back at him. It wasn’t just defiance he saw in her eyes now. It wasn’t fear, either. She was pissed off; as though he was inconveniencing her, not just threatening her life.
Gage jerked his head back at the staircase. “You knew that was rusted through. That means you’ve been up here before.”
She said nothing.
Gage pushed her back against the guard rail of the platform, hard. Her eyes widened in surprise and for an instant, he wondered if the rail might be rusted through too. But she slammed against it and it held her weight.
There was an old rusted padlock on the door. Gage examined it, took a step back and trained the Ruger on it. He watched Carol as he pulled the trigger. She flinched, and he heard the remains of the padlock smash to the floor. He pushed the door open and it creaked open. Gage grabbed Carol’s arm again and yanked her around, pushing her toward the door while jamming the gun into the small of her back. A voice at the back of his head told him to squeeze the trigger and be done with it. He could search the place himself. It was starting to feel like killing Carol would be safer.
He calmed the urge. He was in control, no one else.
Carol stood in the doorway. It was pitch-black inside, not even lit by moonlight through a window. He directed the flashlight beam past her and it lit up what looked like an office. A heavy wooden desk, some shelves, a pile of cardboard boxes. A doorway on the far wall, bricked up. If he had the correct sense of the building’s dimensions, this was an exterior wall, so it had probably been a fire exit.
Gage nudged Carol to step inside with the barrel of the gun and then swung the beam around to see if he had missed anything. On the right-hand side of the room, the wall was damaged. There was a gaping hole in the brickwork. Peering through, he could dimly make out that the void behind dropped all the way down to ground level. Perhaps this had been Carol’s plan, to escape that way. A few feet to the right of the hole there was a wall safe, the door slightly open. T
he plaster around it had been chipped away and some bricks had been removed. It looked as though the owners had tried to rip it out when they abandoned the building, or some optimistic looter had tried to take it at some point over the past few decades. Either way, whoever had made the attempt had given up.
But this wasn’t the safe he was looking for. This one had a combination lock, no keyholes. It had been here decades before the safe the shiny new keys in his pocket fit would have been constructed. Aside from the heavy desk and the shelves and the safe, the room was empty.
Gage looked at Carol.
“Open it.”
She walked over and gripped the edge of the safe door with both hands, pulling toward herself. It resisted for a second, and then creaked the rest of the way open. Gage stepped forward and directed the flashlight beam inside.
It was empty.
“Maybe they hid the case somewhere else,” Carol said quickly.
“There never was any case, was there?”
Carol looked at him, then at the gun.
Gage raised the gun again. “Not that it matters, but I’m sorry about this.”
His finger was already tightening on the trigger when she spoke.
“Stop.”
She didn’t shout the word. It wasn’t a plea. Just a calm instruction. Gage relaxed his finger just for a second, feeling the trigger slide back into place.
Carol raised her hands and took a step back, toward the bricked-up doorway.
Gage didn’t move. “Show me. Slowly.”
Carol reached a hand out slowly and touched her fingertips to the bricks. Gage stepped forward and directed the beam of the flashlight on the doorway. Up close, he could see that something looked out of place. This was recent work. Old bricks, new mortar. An effort had been made to dirty up the mortar between the bricks, but it was obvious when you looked close.
Carol looked at the pile of boxes next to the desk, saying nothing. Gage stepped back and lifted a couple of the boxes. On the floor underneath them was a sledgehammer, also new.
“I’ll let you do the honors,” Carol said.
Gage hesitated, then handed her the flashlight.
“You didn’t come up here, huh? I have to admit you were convincing.”
He holstered his gun and picked up the sledgehammer. He looked from the head of the hammer to Carol, and decided he didn’t need to say anything. She stepped back from the wall and gave him room. Gage gripped the shaft with both hands, weighed it in his hands and swung. The bricks at the impact point smashed and gave way easily. Although the work was new, the bricks themselves weren’t. They were as old as the building. It only took him four swings to demolish the makeshift wall.
Gage wiped sweat from his brow and tossed the sledgehammer back in the corner. He took the flashlight from Carol and shone it through the newly opened doorway. There was a small chamber that led to a fire door with a pushbar. On the floor, coated with dust and brick fragments, was a small, new-looking black safe with two keyholes.
He took the keys from his pocket and handed them to her. “Open it.”
For once, she didn’t hesitate, and even before he saw the contents of the safe, he understood that it was because there were no calculations left for her to make, no cards left to play.
She climbed over the remaining bricks at the bottom of the doorway and crouched down at the safe. She fit each key into its respective lock. She turned the one on the right first, and then the one on the left. A catch popped and the door swung smoothly open on its hinges.
Gage stepped forward and directed the beam inside. There was a canvas backpack inside. Carol pulled it out and unzipped it. She took out a small black case, just as she had described. It was a few inches thick, height and width about the size of a magazine.
She flicked back two catches and opened it on its hinges and there it was: shining and sparkling and refracting the light from the flashlight into a thousand tiny reflections on the walls. The biggest pile of diamonds Gage had ever seen.
42
A couple of minutes before I reached the edge of Corinth, I cut the headlights. There was still a little light in the sky, so I could see well enough to make it the rest of the way. I slowed right down as I made it to the edge of town. If Carol had brought Gage here, I had a pretty good idea of where they would be going. I thought whatever this was about was behind that locked door in the town hall.
A second later, I came in view of the bend in the main street. There was a car parked right outside the old town hall building; a gray Chrysler.
I pulled to the side of the road and cut the engine, hoping that I was far enough away that the sound of my approach had gone unnoticed.
I reached beneath my jacket and drew the Beretta free from its holster. I advanced toward the town hall, keeping as close to the buildings on the north side of the street as their most recent coat of paint. We had been right: Corinth was important. The only question was, would Gage have any use for Carol after she had brought him here? I held my breath as I got closer to the Chrysler, bracing myself for what I might see inside. Unwanted images flashed before me like premonitions. Carol’s head resting on the dashboard, her blood coating the inside of the windshield.
The car was empty. No body, no blood. I stopped and listened. I heard nothing but the desert wind whispering between the abandoned buildings.
I climbed the stone steps outside the town hall and edged close to the bare doorway. I looked into the main hall. It was almost full dark outside. Inside, it was already as black as a cave.
But on the other side of the main hall, twenty feet above the ground, I saw an illuminated rectangle. The sealed door on the platform was open. And there was someone up there.
43
“Is that what I think it is?” Gage heard the unguarded excitement in his own voice and grimaced as the hint of a smirk on Carol’s lips told him she had heard it too.
“Unless you think it’s bubble wrap, then yes.”
It wasn’t bubble wrap. Gage was no expert, but the diamonds looked very real to him. Loose white diamonds, cut and polished. There had to be fifty or sixty of them, each one worth tens of thousands of dollars. No wonder the men in Vegas had been keen to talk to Freel.
“This is why they wanted him,” he said, almost to himself.
“So they really didn’t tell you. Dangerous to give the help too much information, huh?”
Gage looked back at her, too caught up in the revelation of the diamonds to issue a rebuke. It took him a couple of seconds to put it together. McKinney and Freel had been doing time for armed robbery. Robbery and diamonds and Las Vegas and the timeframe added up to only one thing.
“This is from the Ellison heist, isn’t it? Freel and McKinney. They were the ones who got away.”
She opened her mouth to say something, and then they heard it.
The wings of the birds out in the main hall beating as something, or someone, disturbed them.
Gage turned back to the door and stepped out on the platform, just in time to see the silhouette of a man in the dim twilight cast through the open door, before he vanished into the shadows. He tracked the movement and fired three times into the shadows by the door.
Gage ducked back into the room and turned his head to tell Carol not to move an inch.
Something hard slammed into the side of his head as he turned, a blinding flash of light exploded behind his eyes. He fell to the floor, barely keeping hold of the gun as the flashlight dropped from his fingers and bounced across the floor.
He started to get up and immediately was felled by another blow to the head, this one from the toe of Carol’s boot. He jammed his eyes shut to blink away the star burst and slurred a curse as he felt Carol’s hand dig into his pocket and come out with the keys to the Chrysler. He felt her hand close around his on top of the gun and managed to tighten his grip. She struggled for a second and then let it go.
He urged his muscles to start working and move him off the floor. He could hear fo
otsteps, both up here and downstairs. He heard a creak, became conscious of the room lightening slightly as Carol used the pushbar to open the exterior door beyond the vestibule with the safe. As the door slammed shut again, he heard footsteps on the metal spiral staircase out in the hall and willed himself to move from the ground. He got to one knee, shaking the stars out of his vision and saw what Carol had hit him with. She had struck him with enough force to break the old brick in two. The age and condition of the brick was probably the only reason he was still conscious. He was just glad he hadn’t left the sledgehammer too close by.
There was no time to dwell on that. His ears ringing, he got to his feet as he heard the sound of footsteps outside on the platform. He moved toward the exterior door and pushed at the bar. It didn’t budge. She had jammed it with something. He forgot about it and moved back to the interior door.
He swung around the doorframe and fired, just as the man on the platform fired back at him.
44
As soon as I saw movement, I fired. Gage’s shot went wide, mine punched into the wood of the doorframe. I stopped midway along the platform, hugging the wall to make the angle from the doorway impossible. But that cut both ways, of course.
I listened. I could hear breathing.
“Carol?” I yelled. “Carol, it’s me, are you there?”
There was no answer for a moment, and then the voice I didn’t want to hear.
“You’re a little late. I just killed the bitch.”
A tightness seized my chest. But something in Gage’s tone gave me hope. There was a pure, insulted rage beneath the words. As though he desperately wanted this to be the truth, but it wasn’t.
“Carol, are you in there?”
A pause, and then I heard movement. I tensed for another round of gunfire from the door and then realized he was moving away from me. Quickly, I walked the length of the platform, keeping my gun on the doorway. I reached the doorframe, took a breath, and pivoted around. The room was empty. On the other side I saw an old fire door with a pushbar, closed tight. For an instant I guessed Gage had made his escape, before I realized there would have been no way to get the door open and closed in the time it had taken me to get to the door.