by Ann Charles
A Browning 9mm lay diagonally in the box, taking up most of the available real estate. Claire glanced up at Jess, glad she wasn’t the kind of kid who got off on playing with guns.
Ruby had made a point of teaching Jess all about firearms long ago. She’d once told Claire that living with Joe Martino made gun familiarity a necessity, since the man had them stashed all around the house. He’d claimed collecting guns had been his hobby—a rather creative way of hiding his true sleazy profession, in Claire’s opinion.
Carefully lifting the handgun from the box, Claire made sure the safety was on and set it down behind her, the barrel pointed toward the outer wall. She turned back to the box. A greeting-card-sized envelope, yellowed in the corners, lay at the bottom of it.
“What do you think?” Jess’s question drew Claire’s gaze. The girl wore a pair of Ruby’s silver, three-inch heels and held a white satin dress under her neck. “Mom wore this when she married Joe.”
“It’s a pretty dress.” Claire picked up the envelope. It was sealed.
“I wonder if Mom still has those diamond earrings Joe bought her the Christmas before his stroke.” Jess brushed past Claire and clomped into the bedroom in Ruby’s heels.
With Jess off digging through Ruby’s jewelry box, Claire picked at the envelope seal. The glue was so old that the flap tore open easily. She pulled out a handful of pictures, squinting at the top one in the dull light.
A quiet gasp slipped from her throat. She gawked down at a naked blonde woman, who could give Dolly Parton a run for her money, posed on all fours on a bed.
But it wasn’t the chesty blonde that had Claire’s jaw hitting the parquet-floor, it was the guy behind her playing Rin-Tin-Tin. Joe Martino had been quite a looker in his youth, prior to eating too many sour-cream-and-onion flavored potato chips. The shock of black hair partially blocking one eye, the square chin, those dark piercing eyes—Joe definitely had the rebel-without-a-cause look down pat.
Claire stood, moving closer to the light bulb. While the blonde seemed lost in Candy Land with her eyes half-closed, Joe stared straight into the camera lens. The cold hardness of his smile held Claire’s gaze for several more seconds.
Shuddering, she tucked that picture behind the others and moved to the next.
She gasped again.
The woman in this picture had curly red hair. The walls were covered with pink, flowery wallpaper, the bedspread matched and hadn’t even been turned down. The woman’s bra hung from her arm—she’d been short on time, apparently. Knocking on the woman’s back door was Joe, grinning around a cigarette, focused on the camera.
Claire’s hands felt dirty as she flipped to the next photo.
The third picture had a short-haired brunette, small chested, caught in mid-scream, her eyes rolled back. Joe was winking at the camera this time.
The fourth picture had another brunette—her hair long and straight. A wire-mesh Tiffany’s table lamp, red poppies decorating the glass, sat next to the bed. A Victorian era, curved head frame provided a romantic backdrop for yet another one of Joe’s campy smiles. He either liked that particular mattress-romping position, or he preferred that camera angle, because the brunette and he were again on their knees.
“Jesus!” Kate said from over Claire’s shoulder. “Where did you find those?”
Claire jumped and almost dropped the bunch of photos. She’d been so lost in Joe’s sordid little world she hadn’t heard Kate walk up behind her.
“Where did she find what?” Jess stood in the closet doorway, trying to peek over Kate’s shoulder.
Claire shoved the pictures back in the envelope. Her face burned as if she’d been busted ogling her aunt’s Playgirl magazines again.
“Did you look in this?” she asked Jess, holding up the envelope.
While it had seemed sealed shut, Claire didn’t put it past Jess to peek and then glue the flap shut again.
“Oh, I forgot about that. I saw it under the gun, but then I saw the receipt and key and came to see you.” Jess pushed past Kate. “Why? What’s in it?”
“Nothing.” Claire shoved the envelope in her back pocket. She wiped her hands on her pants, wondering if bleaching her palms would remove that icky feeling.
“Whose gun?” Kate asked as she stared down at the Browning.
“Joe’s.” Claire squatted and packed it back in the box. Then she lowered the box back in the floor. “You’re supposed to be minding the store, Kate.”
“Manny’s standing guard. I had to use the bathroom.”
“Jess,” Claire said, “will you go take over the register?”
“But Manny is already doing it.”
“It’s not Manny’s job.” The teenager opened her mouth to argue. “Please, Jess.”
“Fine!” Jess kicked off Ruby’s heels and hung up her mom’s wedding dress. She muttered something about “slave labor” and left.
“What are you going to do with those pictures?” Kate asked after Jess was safely out of earshot.
Claire finished rolling the carpet back into place and stood up. “I don’t know. The guy in all of them is Joe.”
“Yuck!” The expression on Kate’s face looked like she’d bitten into a rotten apple filled with worms.
“Tell me about it. That’s almost as bad as finding those pictures of Mom and Dad having sex.” Claire shuddered again and walked into the bedroom.
“Do you think Ruby knows about that box?”
“No. Nothing in it belonged to her. It’s one of Joe’s stashes.”
“So that’s his kilo of gold?”
Claire grabbed the little black box from Ruby’s dresser and popped the lid off again, frowning down at the slice of gold. “Definitely. Ruby would have cashed this in last spring if she’d known about it.”
“Deutsche Reichsbank,” Kate read aloud the stamped words on the bar. “That’s German, you know.”
“I wasn’t born yesterday, knucklehead. Besides, there’s no missing that Nazi symbol. I remember learning about missing Nazi gold in one of my history classes. It’s kind of trippy to think that we may be holding a bit of that treasure.” Claire ran her finger over the smooth, shiny surface. “I wonder …” Her words trailed off as cylinders in her head clicked.
“What?” Kate leaned against the dresser.
“If this is the treasure Porter was looking for.”
“What’s going on in here, Señoritas?” Manny asked from the doorway, making them both jump. Grinning, he ambled into the room.
Claire thought about closing the lid on the box, but instead, held the gold bar out toward Manny. “What do you make of this?”
Taking the box from her hand, Manny took a long look at the slice of gold, then let out a low whistle. “You got you an expensive piece of history here, mi amor. That’s Hitler’s gold. Reichsbank was the bank of the Third Reich.”
Manny confirmed Claire’s suspicion. She could only imagine how Joe had gotten his hands on this little trinket.
“What are you going to do with this?” Manny handed the box back to Claire.
Sighing, she dropped the item in question on the dresser. “Shit, I don’t know. Hand it over to Ruby, I guess.”
“Oh, speaking of shit,” Manny’s said, “the toilet is overflowing again in the men’s restroom.”
“God damn it!” Growling in her throat, Claire stormed out of the bedroom.
If that toilet clogged one more time, she was going to use a stick of dynamite to clear the sucker once and for all.
* * *
A half-mile back in the Lucky Monk, Mac tipped his canteen and sipped some lukewarm water, washing the coat of mine dust from his throat. Hours had slipped by while he’d been busy spelunking and charting, hours that he’d rather have spent most anywhere, but in the bowels of a mine.
Suddenly, a rumbling sound, born from deeper within the mine, rolled over him.
“Fuck,” he whispered, knowing the sound of a cave-in all too well.
Goosebumps race
d up his arms and across his shoulders, making his hairline tingle. He lowered the canteen, gulping down the last swallow still pooled in his mouth.
Fighting the urge to get the hell out of there, he screwed the lid on his canteen and tucked it away in his pack.
With that cave-in, his plans changed course. Before continuing with his surveying, he wanted to know where the cave-in had occurred and see if any new rooms had been opened or drifts sealed off.
He hoisted his pack onto his back and hiked further into the mine, watching for a cloud of dust, sniffing the stale air, listening for the sound of more rocks crashing to the floor.
Twenty minutes later, at the fourth X he’d sought out yesterday, he hit pay-dirt—the previous cave-in had crumbled further. This time, several feet of rock from the ceiling had given way, most of it appearing to have cascaded down over the pile of rocks already there.
Mac coughed, small particles of dust still flurrying in front of his hard hat light. He squinted up at the now steeply-arched ceiling, searching for further stress fractures or veins of minerals, finding neither. The blasting from Copper Snake was taking a toll on Ruby’s old mines, shaking loose the at-risk sections for better or worse. The ceiling looked as stable now as the rest of the mine, which didn’t say much.
As his light flitted over the rock pile, he caught sight of a small, dark hole between the ceiling and the top of the mound of rocks. Dust drifted through the hole toward him.
He pulled his high-watt flashlight from his pack and shined the beam at the hole. The light pierced it, disappearing into the darkness.
What was on the other side? His instincts told him there were answers there waiting for him, something important. But were they important enough to risk his life to find out?
Rubbing his neck, Mac weighed his odds. He scanned the ceiling, wondering how long it would hold before giving way again. He lowered his pack to the floor, the voice of reason in his head trying to talk him out of doing something foolish. He was too old to flirt with death, had too much to lose for it to be appealing. But what if …
He squelched the thought, cursing its source—Claire. Without a doubt, he knew that if she were here, she’d already be up there trying to wiggle through the hole.
But he wasn’t Claire.
He walked away from the cave-in, telling himself there was nothing wrong with using some common sense. Fifty feet or so later he stopped and cursed at the ceiling.
Turning back, he returned to the rock pile and carefully climbed it, his breath shallow and fast. At the top, the hole was just big enough to squeeze through if he felt ballsy enough to try it. He settled for just peeking through with his flashlight.
The first thing his light bounced off was a boarded up wall, not thirty feet from the other side of the rock pile. He frowned, his flashlight lowering slightly as he wondered what someone had wanted to keep out … or in.
Something shiny reflected the light, catching his eye. He shifted his beam to the floor several feet in front of the wall and almost lost his grip on the flashlight.
Leaning against the rock wall, covered in a layer of dust and rags, sat a dead man.
* * *
“Make a right,” Kate told her sister as they pulled up to the stop sign at the only intersection in Jackrabbit Junction. The two overhead streetlights cast an orange glow on the night.
Kate resisted the urge to glance over at The Shaft as the old Ford rumbled onto the main highway. A lukewarm breeze fresh with the smell of damp earth puffed through the passenger window as Claire accelerated.
To the northeast, lightning flashed behind the thick bank of clouds that had dumped dime-sized drops on the valley around sunset, an hour earlier.
Kate clasped her hands together to keep them from shaking. This whole sneaking-around-looking-for-clues routine made her armpits clammy.
“Quit driving like a grandma. I’d like to make it there before sunrise.”
Claire turned down the radio, muting Jeannie C. Riley singing about telling off the Harper Valley PTA. “Exactly where am I taking you?” She sounded annoyed.
Kate ignored her sister’s glare. “I’ll tell you when we get there. You’ll need to make a turn at Gila Monster Road.”
She’d memorized the route this afternoon, not wanting to carry a map or written address around in case Claire figured out what she was up to before they reached the destination. “It should be right up here … there it is. The dirt road on the left.”
Muttering under her breath, Claire slowed the pickup and made the turn, then pulled to the side of the road and shifted into park. “You haven’t answered my question. In fact, you’ve been dancing around it since we left the R.V. park.”
“I don’t know what you’re talking about.” Kate glanced over her shoulder as an eighteen-wheeler whooshed past on the main highway. “Come on, let’s get moving. We’re almost there.”
Claire turned off the engine. “We’re not going anywhere until you tell me where ‘there’ is.”
With a sigh, Kate stared at Claire in the shadows. “You’re acting like Mother.”
“And comments like that make me want to turn this truck around and head back to Ruby’s.”
“Okay, okay. I’ll spill. I arranged a meeting with Porter tonight,” Kate lied.
“In the middle of the desert at night … alone? That’s real smart, Kate. And I suppose you brought Joe’s Browning 9mm as a gift for our host. Better yet, Ruby’s big ol’ butcher knife.”
“Jesus, Claire. You need to stop reading Stephen King. Porter is just a writer. All he did was kiss you, not bite your neck and drink your blood.”
“What reason did you give him to meet us?”
Kate gulped. Slipping a lie past Claire meant giving an Oscar-winning performance.
“To apologize in person for you sucker-punching him last night after he kissed you.”
“What? I’m not apologizing for that. He went too far too fast.”
Kate ignored her. “And I’m coming along because you’re too nervous to face him on your own.” Proud of her stellar fib, Kate smiled.
“Why would you tell him that?”
“To get him to invite us to his place so you could see for yourself there’s no reason to suspect him.”
“It’s not that simple, you know.”
“Sure, whatever.” But Kate could hear the interest in Claire’s voice. She reached over and turned the key. The engine sputtered to life. “Can we go now? We’re already late because you kept dinking around back at Ruby’s.”
After another dirty look at Kate, Claire shifted into gear. “I wasn’t dinking around. I was scrubbing the smell of that freaking clogged toilet off my skin.”
They rode in silence for a couple of minutes. Kate’s heart beat harder and louder with each passing mesquite tree. After winding up a short canyon, they came to a fork in the road.
“Take the left one.” Kate checked her side mirror for any followers. The night cloaked them in darkness, the radio and the Ford’s headlights the only illumination in the shadows.
“How much further is it from here?” Claire asked.
“Another mile.” That was her guess, anyway. Kate sat forward and watched for a driveway. The road turned to washboard for a quarter mile, making her teeth rattle … at least she told herself it was the road.
Claire swerved to miss a scraggly looking coyote, and Kate’s stomach roller-coastered. She needed a stiff drink, one that would burn all the way into the pit of her stomach. She didn’t know how Claire pulled off this Inspector Gadget routine without popping antacids like Tic Tacs.
Up ahead, Kate saw a drive and a mailbox. “There it is.”
The numbers on the box matched those she’d memorized.
Claire turned the steering wheel and cruised up the smooth, paved drive. “Are you sure this is it?” They ascended a small hill. “The place looks dark.”
Pitch black was more like it. With the moon recently set, the stars too far away to help, and n
o outside nightlight, they could be driving off the rim of the Grand Canyon for all Kate could see.
“Hit the brights. I can’t see anything.”
They crested the hill and Kate gasped.
Claire hit the brakes and skidded to a stop. “Holy shit.”
Kate shoved open her door and stepped outside so she could get a better look without trying to peer through the bug guts splattered on the Ford’s windshield.
Standing there, under the milky spill of stars, she crossed her arms and let out a very definitive, “Humph!”
How in the hell could the owner of a two-bit bar in a spitwad of a town afford something like this?
In front of her sat a huge, Pueblo-style house. Two stories high, headlights reflecting in all umpteen windows that stretched from floor to ceiling on both floors, the place looked like a five-star resort. Homes like this went for a million-plus in Tucson, according to the real estate channel Deborah tuned to day after day since arriving in Jackrabbit Junction.
After killing the engine but leaving the headlights on, Claire joined Kate under the Big Dipper. “We’re too late, huh?”
“We’re not late.”
“You just said back there—”
“I lied. We’re not meeting Porter here. We’re not meeting him at all.”
“Damn it, Kate!” Claire pinched Kate’s arm hard. “What in the hell are we doing here then?”
“Ow!” She rubbed her bruised flesh, glaring at Claire. “We’re here to find proof.”
From her back pocket, Kate pulled out a pair of cotton gloves she’d found in Ruby’s tool shed and slipped them on.
“Shit,” Claire said, watching Kate slip on the gloves. “Please tell me this isn’t Butch’s house.”
“Okay. It’s not Butch’s house.” Kate climbed the steps leading to a pergola-covered patio. Lights in the walls lining the steps kicked on, illuminating the stairs in a soft glow. Kate smirked. Motion sensor lights, those couldn’t be cheap. “It’s Butch’s desert palace.”
A string of curses flew from Claire’s lips.
“Your mother would be so proud,” Kate told her potty-mouthed sister.
On the top stair, Kate pulled a penlight from her shirt pocket. More motion-sensor lights flickered to life, revealing an immense patio covered with a jungle’s worth of potted plants and patio tiles made of travertine limestone—the kind imported only from Spain or Portugal.