by Blake Crouch
Lawrence and Isaiah returned to Packer’s bedroom.
“This past summer, I made a thorough search of that guest room and found nothing,” Lawrence said. “But I knew there was space between that room and Packer’s room that was unaccounted for. I was getting ready to investigate Packer’s room, when the Forest Service showed up. I didn’t have a permit to be here, and the fine would’ve been huge. I had to sneak out of the lodge.” He approached the enormous wardrobe to the right of the doorway, grabbed the side of it, tried to slide it out from the wall. “It’s bolted down or something.”
“We’ve got grenades.”
“Wanna bring the whole wing down?”
He pulled open the doors, climbed inside, Abigail listening as he banged around. After a moment, she heard “Aha.”
Isaiah smiled. “What I like to hear. What you got, baby?”
Lawrence’s voice came back muffled. “Entire back panel”—he struggled with something—“slides out.” A panel of wood flew out of the wardrobe and crashed onto the floor.
Isaiah was peering in now. “Would you look at that,” he said. “You’re a genius, Larry.” Isaiah pointed at Abigail. “Come here. We may need you. It’s a tight fit.”
Abigail got up, crossed the floor. She stood beside Isaiah and looked into the wardrobe. With the panel removed, a black steel-hinged door was visible, three feet by two feet.
“Looks like some serious shit,” Isaiah said. “Hope for your sake you can open it.”
“Well, the bad news is this locking mechanism. Dates back to the 1860s. There are four locks, requiring three different keys.” He touched the various keyholes. “Here’s the pin tumbler lock. Here’s the barrel lock. These two are bit styles.”
“Ah fuck. We are gonna have to toss a couple grenades in here.”
“Won’t do anything. If this is the kind of door I suspect it is”—he rapped his knuckles on it—“it’s made of ten layered one-eighth-inch steel sheets. But there’s some good news, too.”
“Pins and needles, Lar.”
“See here? Three of the locks are already open. Only thing standing in our way is this bit lock, which has a turned bolt sealing the door.”
“So what do we do?”
Lawrence faced Isaiah. “I’ll be needing a guarantee.”
“A guarantee.”
“I spent the last ten years trying to find what’s in here. Now, I’m willing to let it go—”
“That’s a relief.”
“—if I have your assurance none of us will be harmed. Give me that, I’ll get you inside.”
“That’ll put your little heart at ease?”
“It will.”
“Yeah, all right, Larry. You get me in there, you’ll all walk out of these mountains.”
“That’s the truth?”
“You questioning the word of a marine?”
Lawrence let his pack drop to the floor. He unzipped the outer pocket, scrounged inside. After a moment, he withdrew something, held it up in the light of his headlamp.
Isaiah grinned through his mask at the long, toothed key. “Where’d you get that?”
“Found it in a safe in Bart’s office last summer. I don’t know for certain that this will open that bit lock, but it is the right type of key for it.”
“And what do we think is in there?” Abigail asked.
“Summer of 1871, Bart Packer was broke and prospecting alone in the Sangre de Cristo Mountains. One afternoon, he got stuck above timberline in a thunderstorm. Found an overhang high on the mountain, took shelter there. He was waiting for the storm to pass when he felt an icy draft coming from behind. He turned around, noticed an opening in the rock, and crawled through it. When he got his candle lit, he found himself in a large chamber, and not ten feet away sat a headless skeleton clad in Spanish armor. Bart correctly deduced that he was looking at a conquistador, who’d most likely been in that cave since the 1500s. What lay beside the bones of this ancient conqueror was a pyramid of gold bars, ninety-one in all, twenty-two pounds apiece. That’s about a ton of pure gold.
“When Abandon was in its heyday, it would’ve been worth six-hundred and sixty thousand dollars. Today, with gold trading at eight hundred and two dollars an ounce, Bart’s ninety-one bars are worth over twenty-five million. Now, there may not be ninety-one bars in here. But even if he spent half of that, twelve and a half mil’s a good payday.”
“And you were just using this expedition as an excuse to find this gold?” Abigail said. “What were you planning to do? Sneak off with it without telling anyone?”
“No, of course not. Scott and I—”
“Scott knew?” Suddenly, that look between Scott and her father at the trailhead made perfect sense.
“—couldn’t haul it all out ourselves. That’s seventeen miles, and even if everyone carried as much weight as they possibly could, it’d take at least two or three trips. Besides, it’s not just about the dollar value. Abigail, this was going to be a huge historical—”
“You son of a bitch. You selfish son—”
“Time to open that motherfucker, Lar.”
Lawrence sighed, turned away from his daughter.
He took his time, delicately working the key into the lock.
The key turned and the mechanism clicked.
“It worked,” Lawrence whispered. He grabbed the handle, and when he’d heaved open the steel door, Isaiah shoved him aside and climbed into the wardrobe, his headlamp shining into a secret room the size of Packer’s walk-in closet—walls, floor, and ceiling made of stone.
“You’re fuckin kidding me.”
TWENTY-SIX
L
arry, where are my gold bars?”
“I don’t understand. They should be in there.”
Isaiah shoved Lawrence out of the wardrobe. “Sit down!” he yelled at Abigail. “Not you, Larry.” Isaiah backed Lawrence up against one of the giant windows.
“I’m telling you. They should be there. Maybe someone else—”
“You holding out on me?” Isaiah unsnapped the ankle sheath under his trousers.
“I swear,” Lawrence said. “They should’ve been in there. I don’t know—”
“Maybe that’s the case,” Isaiah said, then suddenly pressed the sharp, thin bone of his forearm into Lawrence’s neck. “But how do I know? Really. Know. You aren’t lying?”
“I swear to you I’m not. Please—”
“Words don’t convince me, Larry, but you know what does? Pain. For instance.” Isaiah gently removed Lawrence’s glasses, dropped them on the floor, crushed them under his boot heel. “I’m gonna cut out your right eye—”
Abigail’s stomach turned. Not happening.
“No, please—”
Isaiah leaned harder into Lawrence’s windpipe, briefly cutting off his air supply.
“—and give you thirty seconds to rethink your answer. If you’re still maintaining you don’t know where they are, I may be more inclined to believe you. Know why?” Lawrence shook his head, eyes bulging. “Because right now you don’t understand what real pain is. You think you do. You don’t. But when I’m holding your warm eyeball in the palm of my hand, you’re gonna have a much better idea. You’ll know that I’m willing and fully capable of taking you apart piece by piece. This is not about torture. It’s about me knowing in my heart that you’re telling the truth.”
“Isaiah, just listen. I need a minute to—”
“Sorry, Larry. This is the only way.”
“Stop it, please,” Abigail begged. “He’s my father. He doesn’t know.”
“Yeah, well, we’re about to find that out for certain.”
Isaiah set the point of the dagger under the lower lid of Lawrence’s right eye.
Lawrence struggled to cover his face.
“Hold still, goddamn it! Want me to accidentally push this into your brain?”
Abigail jumped up and lunged for Isaiah, but someone tackled her from behind.
She tried to
fight him off, but he had her by the wrists in no time, his weight pinning her to the floor.
She stared up into that masked face, inches from her own, didn’t smell vodka, reasoned it couldn’t be Stu. What she could see of his eyes seemed strangely comforting, something familiar about them, so deep, burdened. Because you recognize them.
Abigail whispered, “You weren’t killed. That was an act, for our benefit.”
She jerked a wrist free and ripped off the man’s mask, saw the scarred, bearded face of their guide, Jerrod Spicer.
“The fuck, Jerrod?” Isaiah said.
“You’re with them?” Lawrence said, incredulous.
“She recognized my eyes.” Jerrod got up, screamed, “Fuck! How do we walk away now?”
“You knew it might come to this,” Isaiah said. “That was always a poss—”
“It’s already come to a whole helluva lot more than you said it would. Why don’t you take off your—”
Isaiah stepped back from Lawrence, ripped off his mask. “Happy?” Abigail’s headlamp illuminated the face of a thirty-something black man she would’ve thought exceptionally handsome under different circumstances, his smooth-shaven features in perfect proportion—pronounced cheekbones, intense mud-colored eyes, dimples that caved when he let loose his broad and malignant smile.
Jerrod lifted off Stu’s face mask, and the first thing Abigail noticed were the ringlets of Stu’s curly black hair, then the week’s worth of stubble, thin lips, sunken, red-rimmed eyes, saddest she’d ever seen. He’d been handsome once, but whatever monster was eating him inside had also sucked the life from his face, drawing it into an ax-thin blade of emaciation.
Jerrod took Isaiah over to the window. Stu got up and joined them. They whispered. Abigail looked at her father. He still stood against the window, knees shaking, crying, the floor wet under his hiking boots and a dark stream sliding down his cheek and into his beard, as if he wept blood. It took him a moment to muster his voice.
“There’s one more place to look,” Lawrence finally said.
They stopped talking. Isaiah walked over, crowded him up against the glass again.
“Larry, I sincerely pray for your sake you aren’t fucking with me.”
TWENTY-SEVEN
T
hey made their way back to the stairwell.
“What’s up here?” Isaiah asked as they ascended the second flight of steps.
“Servants’ quarters.” They reached the third floor, this level more devastated by the elements than the first or second. Up ahead, in the west wing, the gabled roof had caved, their headlamps showing snow falling through the ceiling. “We need to go up one more,” Lawrence said.
They climbed, wood creaking, bowing where they stepped.
Abigail was the third to emerge into the cupola. She shone her light on walls lined with empty shelves, the books having long since disappeared, taken by vandals or reduced by time and moisture to wads of leather, paper, glue. Two chairs and a sofa had disintegrated on the floor. Half the stones had fallen out of the two hearths. Abigail edged toward an opening in the middle of the floor, peered down, her light beam shining to the ground level.
“All right, Lar. Where is it?”
Lawrence carefully moved over to one of the bookshelves and knelt down, the floor cracking. When he stood again, he held an eight-foot brass pole, severely tarnished, with a hooked end. He looked up. They all looked up, lights converging on a square door in the ceiling. Lawrence reached up, unlatched the rusted lock, pushed open the hatch. Snow fell through the hole into the library.
“You been up there before, Lar?”
“No. I always thought it was too dangerous. If the floor were to give way, it’s a fifty-foot fall. But all things considered, I think it’s worth the risk.”
“How the hell we gonna climb up through that hatch?”
Lawrence pointed back to the bookshelf. “With that ladder.”
Jerrod and Stu pulled the ladder out from under the long bookshelf, hoisted it up, and braced it against the opening.
“Doesn’t exactly look like a Craftsman product,” Isaiah said, grazing his gloved hand across a cracked wooden rung.
“I’ll go up first. Test it.”
“No, she will.” He waved Abigail over. “What’s up there, Lar?”
“I don’t know. Maybe nothing.”
“That wouldn’t bode well for you, for any of you.” He looked at Abigail. “Up you go.”
She grasped the sides of the old ladder and began to climb, carefully easing her weight onto each rung. The fourth one snapped, but she caught herself. The tenth rung was missing. As she neared the top, snow collected in her hair. Then she scrambled out of the hatch, stepping onto the roof of Emerald House.
“Stay in one spot!” Lawrence shouted up at her. “I have no idea how stable it is up there!” She backed away from the opening, leaned against the wrought-iron railing that surrounded this small open veranda, snow blowing so hard into her face that she choked on it, had to cover her mouth with her hands.
Lawrence came up, then Isaiah, Emmett, June, and finally Stu and Jerrod.
Abigail rubbed her arms, and as she stood watching her father, it hit her: There was nothing on this veranda but an inch and a half of snow, and he looked nervous in the beam of her headlamp, like he was trying to pass off Monopoly money for true currency.
“Well,” Lawrence said, kneeling down, inspecting a corner of the veranda, brushing the snow off the stone. “I’m just at a total loss, Isaiah.”
Abigail gripped the iron railing. June and Emmett stood beside her, Isaiah with his back to her, near a skylight that had long since been liberated of its glass.
“You’re at a loss,” Isaiah said. The hood of his parka had fallen back, snow collecting in his black hair. “What exactly does that mean, Larry?”
“It means . . . it means I don’t know where the gold is. I thought I did, but I don’t. I’m horribly disappointed, believe me.”
“Sorry to hear that.”
“But it just isn’t here. I don’t know where else to look, and that’s the truth. So here’s what I’m thinking. We don’t know a thing about you, so what if you three just leave us here, disappear into the night. We never see you again. You never see us. And we never say a word. Not even about Scott. We’ll pretend this never happened.”
“He’s right,” June said, staving off tears. “Emmett and I would just be so grateful to be home again. To put all this behind us. I’m sorry you didn’t find the gold you were looking for, but can’t this be over now? You men came wearing masks, which tells me that you didn’t come into these mountains intending violence.”
“We could just leave, Isaiah,” Jerrod said. “Scott and Lawrence know more about me than any of us, but I’d be willing to walk.”
Lawrence said, “Look, we could spend tonight in Packer’s mansion, give you guys a chance to head out. I’m telling you, it’d be like this never happened.”
Isaiah stared at the snow-dusted stone beneath his feet. “Stu,” he said, “you got an opinion about this you’d care to toss into the hat?”
“I’m with you, man. Whatever you wanna do, I’m with you.”
Isaiah nodded. He turned around, looked at Abigail and the Tozers, who were standing together on the east side of the veranda. He approached them, faced Emmett.
“I don’t think I caught your name.”
“Emmett Tozer.”
“Cool if I call you Em?”
“Sure. June calls me that all the time.”
“Well, Em.” He pointed at Lawrence. “For this, you can thank that motherfucker.”
He raised the machine pistol to Emmett’s forehead, a red bead drawn between the man’s widening eyes.
June screamed, “No, it’s not his fault!”
The Glock coughed a burst of fire, and the back of Emmett’s head blew out. He dropped to his knees, fell over sideways. In the low light, the blood looked like steaming oil as it blackened and sp
read through the snow.
June threw herself over her husband’s body, shrieking his name.
Abigail tasted that salt and metal in the back of her throat again. The worst moments of your life you never see coming. She turned and spewed over the railing, knew as the bile burned her throat that she’d spend the rest of whatever life she had left trying to sever herself from this moment.
“You happy, Lar, you greedy motherfucker?” Isaiah said, his voice rising. Abigail sank down into the snow. She could barely hear Isaiah speaking over the wind and June wailing, “Em, come back! Don’t you do this!”
“Know what’s gonna happen next?” Isaiah was in Lawrence’s face now, Lawrence backed up into a corner of the veranda behind the hatch. “I’m gonna make that bitch get down on her knees, and you are gonna watch me put a bullet through her head. Then I’m gonna get—”
Lawrence cried, “No, don’t. I’ll—”
Isaiah grabbed his throat. “Don’t ever fucking interrupt me! Then I’m gonna get this bitch”—he pointed at Abigail—“but I’m not shooting this one. I’m gonna take this knife and slowly cut her throat, let you watch her drain.”
Abigail looked at Jerrod, noticed his legs quaking. Stu had pulled the bottle of vodka out of his backpack and begun to work off the cap.
“And then, if you’re still maintaining you don’t know shit . . .” Abigail made herself stand. She wiped her mouth. “. . . I’m gonna go to work on—”
“Isaiah!” Jerrod yelled.
“What?”
Jerrod started toward him. They met at the skylight, both men covered in snow.
“What the fuck?” He pointed at Emmett’s body. “I did not sign up for this shit.”
“What are you saying? You want out? That it?”
“I don’t—”
“You know, you never had the stones to finish the hard shit, did you?”
“I don’t want out. I just . . . You didn’t say it’d be like this.”
“Well, it is, so stop your fuckin crybabyin.”
Isaiah lifted his machine pistol, started toward June, who still lay sobbing on top of her husband. “You watching, Larry?”