by Black Alley
“Remember when he ambushed that patrol? He made them think he had a full company behind him.”
“We were all young then. That was war.”
“So is this, Pat, and it’s not over yet.”
Pat nodded sagely and said, “I’m restricted to the city, Mike, but you’re mobile. Someplace in your head you’ve schemed something up. You have plans and you are about to start working them out. Am I right?”
“You’re close.”
“Do I come into this or not?”
“Do you want to?”
“No, not really, but I know I will, so clue me in.”
I leaned forward and looked at him. I wasn’t about to string him along and jeopardize his job and he knew it. We were back on hostile ground facing an armed enemy who had more troops than we did and who could disappear into the civilized bushes of a city without a trace.
I said, “Stick by your phone, Pat. I’ll call at the right time.”
New York had turned gray again. There was a chill to the wind that blew from the Hudson River and dust devils rose from the sidewalks and blew in your face so you could actually taste what the city was like. It was nasty and indigestible. There was nothing in common with the smell that loped around the soft rises of the mountains. There, you could smell the trees and the green things and windows didn’t vibrate from the street noises and exhaust emissions followed the thruway and didn’t intrude on the countryside. Acid rain touched the pines on the mountain peaks, but that was a disorder born in industrial cities far from the mellow foliage of the real New York, the part they call the North Country now.
Leaving the city without a tail was no trouble. Just to be sure, I doubled my little tricks and got on the New York Thruway with nobody in sight. At the restaurant area by the Middletown cutoff we pulled into the parking lot and sat there, surveying the traffic. Only two cars stopped, each one with big families. One had Pennsylvania plates and the other Ontario.
So far it had been a clean run. We locked the car, throwing an old khaki jacket over the two cellular phones on the seat. There was no more demand for CB radios. Personal telephones were the big deal for vandals. Then we went inside and got a booth where we had a clear vision of traffic on Route 87.
Over a bowl of hot oatmeal Velda said, “When do you tell me what’s going on?”
“We’re going to find the money, doll.”
“And what are you going to do with it?”
“Nothing. I’m just going to find it.”
“Do you know where it is?”
I grinned at her. “I think so.” Her eyes narrowed and she waited for me to tell her. I shook my head. “You wouldn’t want to know, honey.”
“Why not?”
“Too many bats.”
Her mouth twitched and she said sharply, “Stop it, Mike.” Then her eyes grew grimmer for an instant. “You are going back to Harris’ cave again, aren’t you?”
“Dooley wasn’t fooling about those numbers, kitten. He knew what he was doing.”
“That cave was saturated with experts and they didn’t find a thing!”
“They weren’t the right kind of experts,” I told her. “They only thought they were doing a clever search job.”
“What did they miss?”
“Latitude and longitude gives you an exact location. Out on the ocean you can locate the exact spot within a couple of feet with regular loran equipment. You can give me a number and I can run right to the spot . . . if I know how to use the equipment.”
“But you gave them the numbers you found on Dooley’s boat.”
“I didn’t tell them what Dooley had told me, though. He had changed the signs so the arrows pointed in the wrong direction. Those loran numbers crossed in the middle of the big cave. Nothing was there at all. In fact, the spot wasn’t even in the middle of the cave, but down toward one end.”
“How did you find that out? You didn’t have any equipment with you.”
“An offhand remark one of the feds made who did have the equipment. He thought the whole business was a red herring dreamed up by a loony who had a big gripe against the government.”
“But you don’t think so, do you, Mike?”
“I believe Dooley, kid.”
“Then let’s do it.”
We made two stops in the Albany area before I drove to a farm equipment place outside of town. I told the manager I wanted to rent a small backhoe and a pick and shovel combo to do some digging on property I just bought. I told him it was a simple job I could handle myself if he showed me how to run the backhoe. It wasn’t too far off what I had used a few times in the army, so the lessons were quick and I signed the papers for the stuff. He hooked a trailer hitch to the rear of my car, loaded the backhoe on a trailer and slid the trailer hitch on the ball then waved me off.
Velda was giving me another of those “who are you” looks again. She said, “Mike, I don’t believe you. Where did you learn about this machinery?”
“I didn’t know you were such a nurse, either,” I said.
“We’ve been out in the field together before.”
“Not like this. And we were younger then.”
“Are we smarter?” she asked me.
“If we’re not, we’re in trouble.”
Getting to Harris’ property now was no problem. All the recent traffic had widened the opening of the driveway, crushing down the weeds that almost obscured it earlier. I swung wide, turned up the road, dropped the transmission into low range. Those many cars had made the road smoother, so hauling the backhoe wasn’t much trouble at all. I crept by the see-through slash in the trees, passed the old wrecked Mack truck and came out on the plateau of the property.
The residue from a couple of hundred official visitors was plain. Cigarette wrappers were all over the place, with soda cans and quick food bags making it look like a sloppy camper’s picnic area.
I drove up to the semi-hidden opening to the cave, lowered the wheel ramps on the trailer, started up the backhoe and drove it off. While I flipped on the lights and went into the cave, Velda drove the car into the nearest grove of trees and joined me in that vast empty dome that was a bootlegger’s perfect warehouse.
She hopped up beside me and clung to my neck as I drove across the dirt floor. Too many feet had softened the crust and the dust hung thick in the air. I had thought this could happen, so brought a couple of plastic filters that we slipped over our heads. Breathing became a little better then.
I started where the numbers intersected, fifty feet back from the rear of the wall. The pile of rubble Slateman said had come from the roof lay straight ahead, looking for all the world like it had been pushed there to get it out of the way of the trucks.
But Slateman was wrong. None of that rubble had come down from the ceiling. The scarring above was minimal compared to the pile below. I touched the controls and dropped the scoop, and while Velda stepped down to watch the operation, I started digging into the seemingly immovable heap of stone.
Only at first was it difficult, most of it due to my inefficiency with the scoop, but once I had the routine down it became faster. In thirty minutes the rubble had been parted and the scoop was digging in loose, pebbly material and I knew I was almost there. I lifted the scoop and left the engine running with the lights blazing and took the pickax and began hacking at the indentation.
Velda said, “You’re through, Mike. There’s nothing back there.”
“Oh, there’s something back there, all right,” I told her through labored breaths. I used the shovel, scraping the dirt away until the hole was wide enough for the two of us to walk through without scraping.
You could hear them now. They made funny noises at being disturbed, tiny sounds and noise like the beating of wings. Velda looked at me, her eyes wide, holding back from entering the hole in the wall.
“They’re bats, kitten. Millions of bats. They’re bottled up in here guarding eighty-nine billion dollars.”
“How do they get out?�
� There was a shudder in her voice.
“Someplace there’s an opening. It’s probably well concealed and you’d only spot it when the bats exit the area. But we know it’s there and we know how to get back in here again.” I took her arm and gave her a tug. She didn’t move. I pushed a little harder and she took a reluctant step.
“Mike . . .”
“What?”
“They don’t really get caught in your hair, do they?”
“You should know better,” I reminded her. “They have the best radar system in the world. They won’t even touch you.”
Velda nodded. She believed me. She knew it was the truth, but her steps were still forced.
The fierce light from the backhoe’s floods made it seem like the opening of an ancient tomb. There was a smell of age, and the magnificence of the gigantic casket that rose six cartons high and fifty feet wide, diminishing into the darkness of the hole beyond it, made us feel tiny in comparison.
I took out my pocket knife and went to the nearest carton and slit an opening in its side, finally making a door that revealed the packets of green inside. I pulled out a dozen wrapped bundles of hundreds, counted out a certain amount and put the remainder back in the carton.
Velda watched carefully and said, “What’s that for?”
“Office expenses. This was a job, remember? Okay, I’m paying us.”
“How much?”
“Enough to pay for your ring, our salaries and Uncle Sam his taxes.”
“How are you going to declare it?”
“As a cash deal. No explanations. Our client was anonymous. We’ve had plenty of clients like that.”
“Aren’t you going to look in the other cartons?”
“Nope. We know what’s there. Eighty-nine billion dollars less our share. Someplace in there is a pile of gold, industrial securities . . . all that good stuff, but who needs to count? We’ll never get to use it, but we know where it is and we’ll never tell. But there are those who will know we found it. They can’t do anything about it without leaving themselves open to the law. They’ll figure we arranged for that to happen.”
She was beginning to smile now. It was like that old song, “I’ve Got Plenty of Nothing.”
I said, “Don’t laugh, kitten. Do you know what we’ll really have for sure?”
“No, tell me.”
“The greatest credit rating in the world. We could go to Vegas and have a ball in the casinos and they’d give us anything we wanted.”
“Can’t we just stay at home and work the way we used to?”
This time I laughed. “Absolutely, kitten. I was only kidding.”
Covering up the entrance wasn’t going to be as easy as opening it. Dooley had done a capable job, but he had more time to do it. There was no telling who would come in here now and spot what I had done. I looked over the area carefully, noting the shape of the ledge that was like a lintel over the hole I had dug. There was enough loosely packed rock there to solve the whole situation if it could be brought down.
Velda came up beside me. The thought of the bats inside kept her right by my side. “What’s the problem?”
“I need a demolition man,” I said. “That would solve this one.”
Her mind started doing some mental gymnastics. “Mike . . . under the seat in your car . . .”
I exploded with a “Damn!” and ran across the cave to the entrance. I saw where she had parked the Ford and yanked the door open. It took a minute to pull out that packet of explosive that was supposed to blow us to jelly. When I got back to the backhoe Velda was standing between the headlights, flattened against the radiator.
To the wires on the charge I added another thirty feet from a roll in the tool box on the backhoe. I placed that little oblong package of destruction against the opening, protected ourselves behind the backhoe’s battery and the blast banged against our eardrums.
But it did the job. The opening was sealed. It took another hour to get the exterior rubble back in place and to drive over the area enough to pack it down. When I let the lights run over it, the place looked pretty much like it did before.
It took another hour to get the backhoe on the trailer and hooked up, then we started back down the mountain again.
And then that rain with the frosty breath behind it started misting up the windshield. I turned on the wipers and flipped on the lights. The dark was coming in fast and the visibility was getting sour. I touched the brakes, but the ground that had been packed so tight had gotten slippery with the rain and the backhoe trailer didn’t have a brake hookup and was a deadly crusher in back of us.
I angled the car to the right, getting off the downhill slope and came to a stop. Velda shot me a concerned glance and said, “What do we do now?”
I opened the door and slipped out. “We leave that piece of equipment right here. No way I could make it down to the highway with that thing. We can bring it back another day.”
“Need a hand?”
“No. Just sit tight.”
Getting the trailer unhitched was easy enough. Getting down the hill was another story. The wind had picked up and blew the foliage with it, making it brush against the car, distorting our visibility. The ground wasn’t soaking up the water at all, letting it flow down the tire tracks, eliminating the car’s traction.
Beside me, Velda said nothing and breathed heavily.
Twice I hit the brakes, the wheels locked, but we didn’t stop. Luckily we hit a patch of gravel that gave the tires a bite and we slowed down. I dumped the transmission into low and let the engine brake as well as the wheels. I could feel the car still picking up speed, little by little. If it got out of hand I’d be driving a couple of tons of momentum right down a black alley.
And there it was back again, the BLACK ALLEY. Before it was just me. Now Velda was riding into it too.
There was a harsh crunching sound and branches slashed against the window and the car jerked and slowed. The wind-driven brush had gotten caught under the wheels and the drag was another braking effect.
“How far are we from the road, Mike?”
“A half mile, maybe.”
“Would it be better to walk?”
“Let’s push it as far as we can. At least we’re dry. If a tree comes down there’s a roof over us.” I touched the gas pedal and we rocked over the blown underbrush, seemed to stall out at the top, then went over the peak and gained forward momentum. The low gear was holding us in the tire ruts, but the minute the speed picked up, the car started fishtailing toward the trees on either side. It seemed like almost a sure thing that we were going to get wrapped around the trunk of a pine, then the roadbed firmed out and the tire treads bit in again and we had traction enough to move and steer.
Both of us heard the sound of heavy truck traffic and knew we were near the paved county road. The tension left us like the sudden unwinding of a spring. Then the road was clear and before I pulled out on the pavement Velda looked at me, and I said, “And you wanted to walk.”
“Why do you make everything seem so easy?” she chided me.
I grinned at her, then sat there until another set of headlights swept past us. The rain was heavier now, angling down with a determined viciousness. There was a glow down the road and I waited for that to turn to headlights and when the red taillights went by I steered onto the asphalt.
Two cars passed on the other side of the road followed by a logging truck. A pickup passed us with a patched-top convertible right behind it. Velda wanted to know where all the traffic was coming from on a backwoods road and all I could think of was a possible traffic tie-up on the major highway. I turned on the radio, found the local channel, but there were no accident reports going out. I did pick up a weather station that said an unusual frontal system was bringing in heavy rains and winds and that driving was going to be hazardous.
Great.
I slowed down, squinting through the windshield. Both wipers were going at full speed but the road ahead was a dark, wet bl
ur. The lights from three cars crept up on me until I was the leader in the parade and when the closest one leaned on his horn to get me to speed it up I shook my head at his idiocy and stayed at my own speed. The driver gave in to his impatience, passed me in a shower of spray, almost lost it when he straightened out and kept on going until he was lost in the darkness. The other two cars behind me got the message and stayed right where they were.
Up ahead the lights from a small city put a muted glow in the sky and when we got to a road sign that indicated a motel not far ahead, I turned at the intersection, drove to the tight little cluster of old-fashioned cabins and stopped at the office.
An old man was watching TV and looked up, surprised, when I opened the door. I said, “You have any vacancies?”
It was as if I told him a joke. “That’s all I have, mister. The summer season’s over and until the snows hit, nobody is going to be here at all.”
“How come you’re minding the store?”
“If you knew my wife you wouldn’t ask that. At least here I have my own TV. Want a cabin?”
“I’m not going any further in this weather.”
“Take number four. That one don’t leak and it’s right beside the hot water tank.” He looked out the window at my car. “Just you and your wife. No pets.”
I said, “No pets.” There wasn’t much sense telling him we weren’t married yet. I wanted to stay close to Velda. Too much was happening to take any chances of her getting ambushed. The possibility of Ugo getting a lead on us was remote at this point and I wanted to keep it that way.
I took the key, went back to the car and drove up to the fourth cabin, got the bags out of the backseat and ran for the porch. When we got inside and I turned the lights on I felt like a homesteader. We were back a couple of centuries into log cabin living with modern conveniences, a fireplace with cut oak ready to burn, two lounge chairs facing it and, like a lovely invitation, a pair of double beds with golden maple frames.