Charlie cleared his throat. “It’s possible he got into the shaft from the house. From what I heard, the old man who built the house cut a trap door into the mine from one of the closets. And that basement’s probably got another door into it.”
Blanchard scraped the ash off his cigarette and studied the coffee table for a minute. “Were those two from the Loomis Company suspicious about the skeletons?”
“They were pretty sure they belonged to Hitchings and Thomas. The artificial leg made that simple enough to figure out.”
“Do they have any idea that cave-in was caused deliberately?”
Tolivar shrugged. “They didn’t say anything about it. But if the coroner comes up here, there’ll be some experts coming along with him to have a look at things. It won’t be hard for them to figure out what caused the cave-in.”
Blanchard sighed heavily. “As I said twenty-seven years ago, Tolivar, it was not very smart of you to leave those skeletons lying in that shaft. It would have been a simple matter to bury them somewhere in there. Or throw them in one of the lakes.”
Tolivar glanced irritably at him but said nothing. He had heard all this a dozen times before. It was easy for Blanchard to play Sunday-morning quarterback. Blanchard hadn’t seen that thing thrashing around in the mine shaft, and he hadn’t been knocked on his ass by that tentacle. When Tolivar and Lucas went back to blow up the shaft, they had stopped twenty feet short of the skeletons and placed the charges as fast as possible.
“Have you called the coroner yet?” Blanchard asked.
“No,” Tolivar said. He had no intention of doing it until he was forced to.
“Well, it’s too late now,” Blanchard said. “My housekeeper tells me the phones all went dead an hour ago.”
“Lines must be down again,” Tolivar said.
Blanchard snubbed out his cigarette. He lifted each of his shriveled legs and pulled his feet closer together. The effort seemed to give him a lot of pain.
Toliver never had fully understood what had happened to Blanchard’s legs. Some time in 1956, he had been exploring in his own lead mine and apparently gotten caught in a small cave-in. He was in there for nine hours before anybody heard him shouting for help. After they got him out, they took him down to Denver, where he spent three months in the hospital. What Tolivar didn’t understand was why Blanchard had been exploring in the mine, at night all by himself, and why it had taken so long for anybody to find him. Blanchard’s mines weren’t that deep or complex, from what Tolivar had heard. And there were miners working in there every day. Tolivar sometimes wondered if Blanchard had been in some secret shaft, digging out his own private supply of gold from that quartz deposit. But nobody who worked for Blanchard would talk about it or even seemed to know exactly what had happened.
“It’s unfortunate,” Blanchard said now, “that those people were able to dig through that cave-in. And now that they’re through, there’s a very good chance they’re going to find the place where the gold was. I really don’t think we can afford for that to happen, Tolivar.”
Tolivar snorted. “How do you figure we can stop it?”
Blanchard smiled and fitted another cigarette into his holder. “I was hoping you might have some idea. It seems to me that the mine is a very dangerous place. There have been a number of cave-ins in it already. It wouldn’t be too unusual to have another one.”
Tolivar stared coldly at him. “If you mean murder, Mr. Blanchard, I don’t think I’m quite ready to go that far.”
“Are you ready to go to jail?”
Tolivar looked at his drink and took a long sip. They seemed to have outlined the problem fairly well, and this looked like as good a time as any to get down to business. Tolivar placed his drink on the table and stretched an arm along the back of the couch. “That brings up a point, Mr. Blanchard,” he said. “If anybody goes to jail, it’s going to be Lucas and me. The worst you can get hooked for is probably some kind of civil judgment asking you to pay for the gold you took from the Hatcher mine. But they won’t know how much you took, and you probably won’t be hit too hard. So the heavy end of the stick goes to Lucas and me.”
Blanchard frowned and studied the end of his cigarette. “Not necessarily.”
“Not necessarily, but probably. And because of that, Mr. Blanchard, I want some money. I want some of the money you’ve been skimming off the pot for the past twenty-seven years.”
Blanchard smiled faintly and nodded. “I think you will agree, Tolivar, that if I had given you any more money, it would all be gone by now, most of it on the crap tables in Las Vegas. So in a sense you might say I have been saving it for you.”
“Bullshit,” Tolivar snorted.
Blanchard chuckled and took a long puff on his cigarette. “Just how much money did you have in mind?”
“Two hundred thousand dollars,” Tolivar said. “For each of us.”
Charlie Lucas’ eyes widened and he glanced uneasily at Blanchard. Blanchard didn’t appear shocked by the figure. “That’s a great deal of money,” he said. “Particularly for someone who isn’t ‘quite ready to go that far’ to protect all of us.”
“The money is for past services, Mr. Blanchard.”
“Ahhh, I see. Then we might call it a form of blackmail.”
“I don’t care what you call it. As far as Charlie and I are concerned, it’s a payment on a legitimate debt.”
“Legitimate? That’s a curious adjective, Tolivar.” Blanchard smiled at Charlie. “Do you agree with Tolivar’s demands, Charlie?”
Charlie looked at Tolivar, then at the coffee table. He clenched his fingers together and shifted forward. “Well, it seems to me that . . .”
“It’s all right, Charlie,” Blanchard said. “I think you are perfectly justified in asking for a bonus.” He smiled at Tolivar. “And I am not demanding any additional service for it, Sheriff. I was merely curious about how far you would go to protect yourself. As to the people from the Loomis Company, don’t even bother thinking about them. I’m sure Victor and I can arrange things amicably with them. As to the bonus, I think you’re a bit high, Tolivar. A reasonable figure, I believe, would be in the neighborhood of a hundred thousand for each of you.”
Tolivar shook his head. “That’s a lousy neighborhood. A hundred and fifty thousand, Mr. Blanchard. Each. That’s the bottom figure. If you won’t do it, I don’t even want to discuss it any more. I’ll just do my talking to the coroner and the detectives who come up here to check it all out.”
Blanchard nodded and studied the coffee table for some time. He finally shrugged. “Very well. You understand, of course, that it will take some time to raise that much cash.”
Tolivar nodded. “Fifty thousand each by noon today. The rest in one week.”
Blanchard chuckled. “You’re a very hard bargainer, Tolivar. Will you give me until four o’clock this afternoon? The telephones are out, and the money will have to be collected from several different banks.”
“Okay,” Tolivar said. “Four o’clock.”
Blanchard smiled warmly—the graceful loser. “You know, I think this is going to make me feel better about our partnership. As a matter of fact, my superintendent informed me last night that they’ve just found a new vein of quartz very close to the original one. I rather think we’re going to have some large dividend payments in the near future. Much larger than you’ve been accustomed to.”
Charlie Lucas smiled and glanced at Tolivar.
“Well, let’s hope it works out,” Blanchard said. He backed his wheelchair away from the table. “And now, I think we all could use some sleep. Good morning, gentlemen.”
Victor magically appeared at the doors as Blanchard wheeled himself through. He let Tolivar and Lucas out the front door and closed it without a word.
“Jesus,” Charlie said as they went down the steps. “I’d never have believed it.”
“Don’t believe it until you see it,” Tolivar said.
Tolivar drove the patrol car do
wn the curved driveway and swung through the gate, wondering what Blanchard meant when he said Victor could arrange things amicably with the people from the Loomis Company. Was he figuring to pay them off?
10
Brian Lockett became aware of the pillow beneath his cheek, then the gloomy morning light filtering through the window, and finally the small travel-alarm clock ticking softly on the table next to the bed. Seven-thirty. Then he remembered where he was and what had happened last night. He smiled and quickly rolled over. There was nothing but rumpled blankets and sheets.
“Good morning, Mr. Lockett.”
She was smiling at him from the bathroom door, brushing her hair, wearing nothing but a pair of scanty white bikinis. Brian stared at her, marveling once again at her incredible figure. “Good morning.”
She moved across and sat on the edge of the bed, giving him a soft kiss. “You were sleeping so nicely, I couldn’t bear to wake you up. Did you know you smile when you sleep?”
Brian grinned. “After last night, I’m not surprised.”
“I’ve been up for forty-five minutes,” she said. “I got some clean clothes from my room, had a nice bath and ordered breakfast from room service.”
“Are you going to answer the door dressed like that?”
She shrugged. “I don’t know. It depends on who brings the breakfast.”
Brian laughed and pulled himself up, giving her another kiss. “Would you consider moving to Denver?”
“Maybe,” she said, “if the price is right.”
“Room and board and a thousand old mine shafts within a day’s drive.”
“Sounds interesting. Any fringe benefits?”
Brian shrugged. “We could throw in a thirty-one-year-old mining engineer to keep your bed warm.”
“That sounds better yet. To hell with the room and board and mine shafts.”
Brian kissed her more passionately, easing her down on the bed. When he finally lifted his head, he took a deep breath in an effort to control himself. “I suppose we should think about going to work.”
She sighed. “I suppose. But why don’t we knock off a little early this afternoon?”
Brian grinned. “Your language is shocking, Miss Hurley. But I admire your intent.” He sat up again. “How’s the weather outside?”
She rose and started dressing. “Drizzly and dismal,” she said. “Lots of thunder and lightning up in the high mountains.”
“Wonderful.”
Brian filled the ancient bathtub and climbed in. After two or three minutes of relaxed euphoria, he found himself thinking about those two skeletons again.
The whole thing was very strange. They must have been put there by someone. And that same someone must have deliberately blown up the shaft and caused the cave-in. Why? To hide the bodies? That didn’t make much sense. It would have been a lot easier to bury the bodies somewhere. Hidden in some small side shaft, or even thrown into a lake inside the mine, the bodies never would have been found. And why was one man’s chest crushed and the other one’s hand missing?
Brian finally shook his head and climbed out of the tub. He was not a detective, and figuring out all the answers would be somebody else’s job. It was pretty obvious that some strange things had happened in the Hatcher mine twenty-seven years ago.
Breakfast was waiting when he came out of the bathroom. Chris was halfway through hers and was reading a day-old copy of the Denver Post. “Storms in the Rocky Mountains expected to continue for two more days,” she read aloud. “And then gradual clearing. Snow above ten thousand feet.” She glanced up. “By the way, the phone lines are out.”
“Oh? I wonder if Sheriff Tolivar got in touch with the coroner last night.”
“I’ll bet he didn’t. I don’t think he was in any hurry to get any investigations started.”
“That might be better for us. If he hasn’t reported the discovery of the bodies, he can’t get a court order to keep us out of the mine.”
Chris nodded. “Do you happen to have a geiger counter with you?”
“There’s a small one in the car, but I don’t know how good it is. Why?”
“I’d like to take it with us today and go back to that stope with the lake. All those strange animals . . . I can’t help wondering if there might be some radioactivity down there. It’s the only thing I can imagine that could produce such weird creatures.”
Brian smiled. “Maybe some mad scientist has a laboratory down there.”
Chris laughed and glanced at her watch. “We’d better get going. We’re supposed to pick up Tim at nine o’clock. I hate to think of him standing out in that rain waiting for us.”
When they had dropped him off the previous night, Tim Lucas had pointed to a big pine tree and said he would wait for them there in the morning. They arrived at two minutes to nine, and Tim was sitting under the tree, his rain slicker pulled over his head again. He quickly jumped up, ran to the car and slid into the back seat.
Brian laughed and started the Bronco moving again. “I feel like a secret agent making a rendezvous. Anybody catch you sneaking into town last night, Tim?”
Tim grinned, apparently enjoying his clandestine activities. “Nope. I snuck around and came walkin’ in from the other side.”
Chris turned sideways and rested her arm on the back of the seat. “Tim, does your father own the general store in town?”
Tim smiled sheepishly. “Uh huh,” he admitted.
“Then he’s been there for some time.”
“Yeah. Almost forty years, I guess.”
“Did he ever mention anything about those two kids who were working the Hatcher mine back in fifty-four? The ones whose skeletons we found?”
Tim thought about it and shrugged. “I don’t think so. I don’t remember anything.”
“What does he say about the Hatcher mine?”
“Oh, not much. Just when I was a kid, he always said to keep away from it. That it was real dangerous. I guess that’s why all us kids thought it was really somethin’ to go in there. It showed you had guts if you did it.”
Chris smiled. “You mean it showed you weren’t afraid of the Boogens?”
“Yeah. ’Course when we got older we really didn’t believe there were any kinds of ghosts or monsters in there. Just that it was dangerous because of the cave-ins and everything. Like the timbers were rotten and shaky.”
“How about the other abandoned mine shafts around here, Tim?” Brian asked. “There must be dozens of them. Did your dad ever warn you about staying away from them?”
“Well, yeah. But everybody always said the Hatcher mine is the worst. They say a lot of miners have been killed in there. Some people say there’s some kind of gas or poison in it.”
“But nobody ever mentioned Boogens being in the other mines?”
“No,” Tim said and grinned. “The Boogens are all in the Hatcher mine.”
When they reached the mine entrance, there were no new signs posted by Sheriff Tolivar. It was drizzling steadily, but the thunder and lightning was still in the higher mountains to the west. Brian dug out the old geiger counter for Chris, and they found their other tools still safely stashed inside the entrance.
When they reached the smaller shaft leading to the lower stope, Chris took the geiger counter and one of the big flashlights and agreed to be back within two hours. Brian and Tim continued on to the cave-in and worked their way through the crawl hole. The empty-eyed skeletons were still there, still in the same positions, as if prepared to wait another twenty-seven years to be found.
“Creepy,” Tim said, staring at them. “Do you think somebody murdered them, Mr. Lockett?”
Brian shook his head and moved on, wondering the same thing himself, and if Tim’s dad might have had something to do with it. If Hitchings and Thomas were murdered, there must have been a motive for it. Aside from the usual reasons why people murdered each other, when there was a mine involved the question of gold or silver or some other precious metal always arose. If
that were the case, though, why was the shaft sealed off?
None of it made any sense, and the more he thought about it, the more confusing it became. He glanced at the place where the amber goo had run down the wall, but he kept going.
“Tim, when you were wandering around the other parts of the mine, did you see any of that amber-colored stuff?”
“There was some of it down by that lake where Miss Hurley found the backpack. But that was about the only place. What do you think it is?”
“I don’t have any idea. Maybe some mineral or resinous type of substance that turns to liquid when it gets wet.”
They walked in silence for ten minutes, with Brian occasionally stopping to give the support beams a closer inspection. They all seemed to be in surprisingly good shape for a shaft this old. He wondered why the mine had a reputation for so many cave-ins. The only cave-in they had seen was the one that looked like it had been deliberately caused.
Brian had no sooner begun to reflect on the question when the shaft came to an abrupt end, obviously due to a cave-in. He knew that normally a shaft ended with a hard vertical surface where the miners had quit digging, and that there were no more support timbers shoring up the last ten or fifteen feet. Here there was a solid mass of rubble, most of it heavy boulders the size of watermelons. Some of the timbering was still visible above it.
“Well, I guess that’s that,” Brian said.
“You think we could dig through?” Tim asked.
“I doubt it. These rocks look a lot less stable than the formations at that other cave-in.”
Tim squatted down and held a light close to one of the rocks. “It’s funny,” he said. “They don’t look anything like the rock on the side walls.”
Brian turned his light on the walls and then back to the loose rocks. They were different. The walls looked like sandstone, but the rocks had the lead-gray color of galena. It was curious. It was possible, of course, that the shaft had broken into an entirely new type of strata, and that had caused the cave-in. But experienced miners generally watched out for that sort of thing.
The Boogens Page 11
