by David Haynes
Did he have to shoot them both?
Did he kill Briggs to stop him blabbing?
Was Draper really ripping them off?
Had he lost his mind?
Draper was unable to lower the Beretta by himself. Mercer had to do that for him.
“You had no choice.” He heard the words come from his best friend’s mouth but they had no meaning. Not then, not now.
That was it. He turned his back on everyone, everything. Two years of introspection and trying to answer his own questions, and still none of what happened on that day was any clearer. None of it.
In fact, the repercussions of that cloudless morning at Delta Junction had cast a cloud over everything, particularly his relationship with Meg. His relationship with Meg’s mom, Claire, was dead long before Neil Evans and Tom Briggs had come along, but he had still clung to the memory of his little girl panning for gold with a pan as big as she was. He still wanted her to be that girl and he never stopped loving her. He just knew he couldn’t be anywhere near her. Not if he wanted her to remember him as a father, not some nomadic recluse who found it difficult to say more than two words at a time. A man unable to smile.
She hated him for it. He knew she hated him for what he’d done to those two men, for what that act had done to him. And her.
If he could erase Delta Junction from the story of his life, he would do it in an instant. If he could be the man he was before he shot Tom Briggs, he would gladly trade every single ounce of gold he had ever mined to do it.
Neil Evans had been lowering his weapon. That made everything worse.
14
Mike Vinson had bills to pay. He had loans and debts coming out of his eyeballs. And there were people who weren’t too happy about those debts. Not the bank managers or the car dealers, not the nice, sweet-talking men in suits who had practically thrown dollar bills at him. No, the other guys. The men who told you the interest rate over a stained desk in the darkened corner of a warehouse.
They waited there in the shadows until the friendly bank manager wasn’t quite so welcoming anymore.
Then they came out of the half-light with a smile, a flash of a gold tooth and a wallet full of dollar bills. They offered it to you, just until you got yourself straight; just a bit of interest to make it worth their while. Only they knew you wouldn’t be there if you had any chance of getting yourself straight. No sir, you were there because they were the only people left willing to toss you some change. Then when the big day came, payback time, the smiles had gone and the wallet had changed into a man with brass knuckles on his fist. He smiled sometimes, when the blood splashed his cheeks. That made him smile. They cut people too, cut them in places that made them look like they’d spent half their life riding a horse.
He wouldn’t be in this godforsaken place if it weren’t for them. If it weren’t for the bills, the debts and the loans, he wouldn’t be here. He’d never even been to Alaska before this summer. Not even close but it was far enough away from his problems to give him some time to get the money together to pay them off. That was the idea anyway. To avoid the man with the brass knuckles and the nasty cut-throat razor he twirled around his meaty fists.
“Go up north, Vinson. There’s people up there digging gold out of the ground with spoons.”
He hadn’t met anyone like that yet. He doubted he ever would. But there was money to be made and he wasn’t going anywhere until he had a truck full of it.
He didn’t know much about this Draper guy and the others were pretty tight-lipped about him. Nevertheless he’d learned a couple of things just by watching and listening. Evidently, Draper had shot a couple of miners a few years back, a couple of men who accused him of stealing from them. He didn’t look like a killer, he just looked like a regular guy, but you could never tell for sure. Not until you put them in the right position and gave them the right tools.
He’d watched the way Draper touched that Beretta he kept on his hip. It was as if it were made from a coil of writhing snakes. It seemed like the others respected him though. All except his daughter who clearly couldn’t stand the sight of him. The others though, particularly Mercer, seemed to regard him with a great deal of respect. God knew why, it wasn’t as if he’d found the mother lode for them. They were barely scraping enough to keep the operation running.
He’d had men working for him once. A good honest repair shop just outside of Carlisle, Pennsylvania. Four men to be exact and Claire who did the books and answered the phone. He was never going to get rich on it, but he made enough to live a comfortable life and pay his men well. Did they respect him? He’d never really thought about it. Maybe they did. Maybe they only respected the wages he paid them. Who knew. It didn’t really matter anyway. It was all gone. They were all gone.
Vinson listened to the creaking trees bending in the wind outside his camper. Everyone would be asleep by now. In fact he could hear Flynn snoring like an angry grizzly next door.
It only got truly dark for a few hours every night. No matter how hard he tried, it never felt right and sleep never came easy. The few hours he did manage seemed to be filled with nightmares, vivid scenes of blood, violence and death. The dreams were a patchwork of images from the insidious world he had been living in for the last few years. They had been fused together by his brain to form a bizarre but interesting collage. The reason they were interesting and not frightening was that in the images, he was the one in charge; he was the one using the hammers, drills, guns and knives to intimidate, not the other way around. Nevertheless he felt exhausted almost constantly.
Even back home, before all the money troubles started, sleep had been hit and miss. Back then he would prowl the house, walking from room to room listening to the nothingness that filled the night hours.
Out here it wasn’t nothingness that filled the night, there were noises everywhere. Not the sound of car tires squealing away from an all-night store or of angry men exchanging angry words or even of laughter in a faraway yard. No, these sounds were nothing to do with man or his machines. They were of the natural world. If he thought about them too much, he might never leave the warmth of his bed.
But his feet were hot and the long nerves in his legs flashed electricity in sharp bursts, sending his calves into a ticklish and uncomfortable spasm. He had to get up and walk. Only there were no rooms to prowl, just the grim darkness of Black Pine Creek.
He kicked the sleeping bag off his feet, climbing out of the bed. The mattress was so thin it was almost transparent and he arched his back to put it back into line. He shouldn’t complain too much though, it was lent to him by someone with whom he still had a small amount of stock. He owed them money too but managed to convince them that lending him the camper would allow him to pay them back sooner.
As he opened the camper door, a cool wind blew in, bringing tears to his eyes. Another couple of months of this and he would be a cripple as well everything else. He climbed down, stood beside the truck and listened. He wasn’t armed. He didn’t own a firearm of any kind but he knew how to handle the hunting knife attached to his belt.
A loud click sounded behind him. He turned to see where it had come from. The forest gave him the creeps. It was constantly covered in shadow, even on the brighter days. You could see maybe thirty yards into it, at best. When he was satisfied he wasn’t being stalked, he started walking. He walked toward the creek, toward the wash-plant.
Ray Mercer had told him Draper was the best gold miner in Alaska. Mercer convinced him that if he came along, he would be rich by the time the season ended. Ray Mercer was a fucking liar. How long had they been here? Just over two months now and what had they found? About enough to buy a tank of gas to drive home.
He had bills to pay. He needed to do something about it.
He had done something about it.
The ground was saturated, as it always seemed to be, and every item of clothing he owned was covered in a thick dark mud. Oil was fine, he was used to that but the mud sapped the energ
y from a man. Sucked it out of him with each squelching footstep.
He passed by the saloon. The building was nothing but a bulky shadow. He hadn’t brought a flashlight, he didn’t want anyone seeing where he was going, what he was doing. But without one and without moonlight, it was pitch black. He knew where he was going though. He’d been walking the same route in the daylight for the last two months and almost the same amount of time during the night hours.
Even though Black Pine Creek was in the wilds, miles and miles away from any of the other claims, somehow it still felt claustrophobic. Working with the same people day after day in such close proximity, with only a few hours away from them, was much harder than he thought it would be. Sure, when he’d owned the repair shop he’d worked with the same guys day after day, but it was different. When the day was over they’d all packed up and walked away from each other. They went home to their families, to their kids and the women they loved. They didn’t stay together for all day and all night. It made him feel uncomfortable.
The site itself wasn’t exactly a day at the beach either. The trees blocked out most of what light there was in the day. And even down by the wash-plant where the ground had been cleared, it felt as if the trees were slowly moving back in, trying to crowd them out. Retaking their territory.
He crossed over the creek road and stopped. The creek swirled through the culvert and hissed out the other side. To his left, downstream, something dropped into the water, making a loud splash. He dropped his hand onto the handle of the knife. There was no reason to do that. It was the creatures you didn’t hear, they were the ones to watch out for. The dangerous ones.
He carried on walking until he reached the ugly shadow of the wash-plant. It was like some prehistoric carcass sitting there. Back on Johnson’s claim, where he should have stayed, they found a mammoth tusk. It must have been at least five feet long and perfectly preserved. The guys had gone mad over it. Whooping and hollering and dancing about like idiots. He was impressed by it, no doubt about that, but it wasn’t the size or the age of the thing that excited him. It was the value. It was the debts he could settle. Or at least make a hole in them.
A few drops of rain fell on his unprotected head. How long would it be before it turned to snow? Another six weeks maybe. Two months if they were lucky. Enough time to get his hands on all the gold he needed.
Nobody knew the plant as well as he did, not even Mercer or Draper and they had been mining for most of their lives. This was different though. He’d heard them say that this was like no other plant they had used. It was state of the art and someone had spent a lot of cash bringing it up here. As long as it did what it was supposed to, they weren’t interested in how it worked. Not like him. Ever since he was a kid, he’d wanted to know how things worked exactly and down to the minutest detail.
Draper’s daughter was keen to learn about the plant. She wanted to know how every part of the machine worked and how it flowed. He didn’t understand why she was here. It wasn’t the right place for a woman to work. She was capable all right, more capable than a lot of men he’d worked with, but it didn’t sit right with him. Not that he had anything against women. He’d employed one for ten years. Rather, they were suited to certain types of work. Like Claire, she was suited to answering telephones, booking cars in for repair and doing the accounts. She was no mechanic.
One or two women had come looking for jobs over the years. He’d never taken any of them on though, as good a mechanic as they might be. They were simply too distracting for the men. He’d seen the way Puckett looked at her. He’d seen her blushing at some of the idiotic things he said. He didn’t blame Puckett. She was a nice-looking girl and once or twice he’d had some distracting thoughts about her himself. He shook his head to stop his brain taking that line of thought any further. Neither a workshop or a mine were the right places for a woman to work. It wasn’t natural.
Despite that, he’d shown Meg almost everything there was to know about the plant – almost everything – and it gave him a sense of pride to do so. It made him feel important. There was one process that he omitted to tell her, though. It was a part of the plant that only he knew about.
He looked around, turning his body through a complete circle. Not that he could see anything but it made him feel better to do it, less jumpy.
His heart was hammering in his chest but it wasn’t nerves or anxiety, it was excitement. If they caught him there would be trouble, the type of trouble you didn’t walk away from. But it was worth the risk and if things got rough, well he knew how to deal with that now. The last five years of dealing with bad choices had taught him that.
He took the first steps onto the lower gantry. This was where the final sluicing took place. The rocks, stones and dirt passed through the plant going through a washing and shaking process at every level, until all that was left were the finest particles of sand and gold. The riffles in the sluice box held onto the heavier gold, trapping it and allowing the other material to wash away. It was a simple yet effective process. Once Vinson had mastered it, he could adapt it for his own needs.
It was simple. He installed a nugget trap just before the final sluicing. It was hidden inside the plant but it was there to catch the larger nuggets of gold. It wasn’t perfect of course, hiding the trap inside the plant had presented a number of problems. But he was good at hiding things and after the first couple of weeks, he managed to extract some decent-sized nuggets. A rough calculation told him he had caught around ten thousand dollars worth of gold.
It wasn’t enough, not by a long way but it was a good start. The trap didn’t catch everything, nor did he want it to. He needed some to get through the plant and wind up in the sluice box. If they didn’t find any nuggets down there, it would rouse suspicion and force him to remove his trap.
The rain grew heavier. His steel-gray hair, which had grown long, fell across his forehead and eyes in thick bands. He wiped it away and pushed his hand into the small gap in the steel frame. It was just wide enough for him to get his hand inside but once his fingers were through, the hole widened. Even in broad daylight he couldn’t see inside but his fingers worked through the material until he found what he was looking for. On the first few occasions, he’d withdrawn his hand only to find he was clutching pebbles and gravel, not the gold he expected. He’d spent a lot of time weeding through it to find the gold. Now though, now he knew how it felt and his fingers sensed what he wanted.
He withdrew his hand, gripping the nugget. He could feel the smile spreading to his cheeks even before he opened his fingers.
“There she is,” he whispered.
He brought it closer to his eyes and wiped some of the black sand off its curved edges. Even in the dark it was beautiful; somehow it caught whatever light there was and reflected a warm glow in his eyes. It was a good one. Maybe a couple of hundred dollars worth. He pushed it into his pocket and reached for the gap again. There might be another one in there. Then he would push the dirt out of the trap so it was ready for another day’s processing later this morning.
Just as his fingers touched the cold steel, thunder echoed above him. He looked skyward out of instinct. The rain hadn’t grown any heavier but the noise might wake the others. He stayed still and waited for another clap. Nothing.
He pushed his hand inside and leaned against the frame to lengthen his reach. No, no more nuggets, just sand and...
The whole frame shook, sending a vibrating pulse through his body. The thunder was louder. Right above him. Around him.
But how could it make the wash-plant move? He withdrew his hand slowly and turned. Earthquake? The next crack of thunder didn’t just make the plant vibrate, it actually shifted it. Not much but enough for Vinson to feel it under his feet. The structure groaned and creaked in response.
“What the hell?” Vinson whispered and jumped off the gantry. He walked backward away from it, keeping his eyes fixed on where he had just been, trying to move as quickly as he could.
The air around him changed, or maybe it was his heartbeat going up a notch. Either way, it felt as if everything were closing in around him. The looming shadows of the trees bent toward him, and the creek crashed and smashed over the rocks to his back. Could he hear breathing? Deep, low breaths of an animal. And the smell. The godawful reek was everywhere.
The boom around him made his ears pop. A brief but staggering burst of pain shot through his head followed by the sensation of warm fluid flowing down his neck, mixing with the rain. He cupped his hand around his ear and winced.
There was something near the plant. A shadow so black it seem to suck the darkness toward it. Massive and hideous. A flash of something red. He could feel a scream rising up out of his guts. It climbed into his throat and then he turned and ran. He ran as fast as he could across the creek road toward his camper. He groaned as another thunderous rumble smashed into him. The force of it caused him to stagger and then fall into the mud. His nostrils were filled by an acrid, fetid stench that made his stomach churn.
Vinson sank his fingers into the mud and started to haul himself upright.
The scream he made as his fingers gripped not mud, not gold or rocks but a human skull, was drowned out by another crack of thunder.
He stared into the vacant voids where the eyes had been. Inside was darkness. The same darkness as he had seen down by the plant. Awful and consuming. He wanted to scream again but instead he hurled the skull toward the creek and set off running again. He didn’t look back but he heard something coming in the mud. Something stalking up the hill toward him.
He hurled himself inside his camper, locking the door and slumping with his back against it. His breaths came rapidly, great heaves that made his body shake. He was out of breath, yes, but he was also terrified. But terrified of what? It was just a bear, a big angry grizzly.