“My heart is pounding, Chase,” she says, her tone anxious, stressed. “What do I do?”
“It looks like a punji trap,” I say. “It was popular during World War One trench warfare and later, the trenches and jungles of Vietnam. It’s basically a deep hole filled with spikes or spears. You need to trip the false floor and get an idea of how wide it is. Then you can walk around it.”
“How exactly do I trip it?” she asks, her voice cutting in and out.
“Step on it,” I say. “It should disintegrate. But be careful. Or you’ll become a permanent feature of the Cohoes Falls.”
“Funny,” she says.
The camera shakes, and from Sarah’s point of view, I watch her step onto the false floor. The panel immediately disintegrates. Sarah screams. She falls back against the wall. For a split second, I’m convinced she’s going down into the pit. But she doesn’t.
“Oh my God,” she gasps. “Take a look at this, Chase.”
She focuses the camera down at the pit interior to reveal a series of spikes and spears set vertically so that whoever drops into the pit is immediately impaled. There are a couple of skulls and skeletons impaled on the spikes. Nosy people who quite obviously ignored the many skull and cross-bone warnings, climbed the fence, braved the barbed wire, found themselves wandering the cave only to discover not treasure, but instead a slow, painful death.
“Why is Sarah screaming?” Edge says, his head poking through the space between the two bucket seats.
“Dutch Schultz is trying to kill her,” I say, my hand blocking the phone face and speaker.
“Schultz is long dead,” Rob says from behind the Jeep wheel.
“But his booby-traps live on. What’s also obvious is that someone has been maintaining the pit. Fixing the false floor after some unlucky soul steps on it.”
“But who?” Edge asks.
“I have my suspicions,” I inform him.
“Chase, you there?” Sarah, talking through my hand.
I say to Edge and Rob, “I’m going to remove my hand now, so everyone be quiet.”
“Chase,” Sarah says, “I’m going to move on.”
“Tread lightly,” I say. “There’s bound to be other traps.”
I watch her moving around the open pit, her back pressed against the stone wall. The further into the cave she goes, the more the reception cuts out on me. It makes for some difficult viewing. But I need to do my best. Sarah doesn’t know it, but she’s our way to the treasure. If I can manage to successfully navigate the way for her to that wood chest, that means I can successfully navigate my own team.
When she’s effectively made it past the pit, she begins making her way across the widening floor to the box.
“It’s all daylight from here on out,” she says, just as her lower leg catches on a vine.
31
“Sarah, stop!” I bark.
She stops.
“Take a step back,” I instruct.
Slowly, she back steps. But at the same time, an eyelet on her shin-high lace-up boots snags the twine.
“Sarah, duck!” I shout.
She drops to her knees a split second before the fireman’s ax swings down from its ceiling-mounted pivot.
“For the love of God!” she wails. “That thing almost took my head off.”
“That would be the point,” I say. I check my watch. It’s going on six in the evening. The time when, according to Sarah anyway, the dam water is usually released. I suppose I could just allow her to drown after what she’s pulled on us. Her stabbing us in the back. Now that it appears she’s successfully located the treasure, we don’t need her alive anymore. But then, I’m not a killer, and what do the wise guys say in Sicily? Revenge is a dish best served cold. “Sarah, you gotta hustle.”
She looks into the camera. Despite the video and audio cutting in and out, I can clearly make out a wide smile. A smile painted with greed.
“Tell Edge to stop worrying about losing that ear,” she says. “Looks like I’m about to make the find of the century.”
She moves on toward the treasure chest. She’s within spitting distance of it when the cage drops from the cave ceiling.
32
The alarm sounds.
Three short, sharp bursts of an air horn. From where we’re positioned in the Jeep, we can hear the mechanical unlocking of heavy metal. Big metal doors being slid open, and the thunderous noise of millions of gallons of river water rushing toward the falls.
“Holy shit,” Edge says, “here comes the water. It sounds like the end of the freakin’ world.”
“The Sergeys,” Rob says, his right arm outstretched, index finger pointed at the two Russians standing maybe twenty feet from the cave opening.
The roar of the falls grows louder and louder. You can almost feel the earth trembling. The Sergeys begin to run for the cave. But Sergey Junior is too injured. He can’t run. Sergey Senior is yanking on his son’s arm. He’s screaming at him to get up.
The water roars, the earth trembles, the siren wails.
“Chase!” Sarah screams over the phone. “Chase, I’m trapped. You son of a bitch. You did this. I know you did this. Sam, cut Edge. Cut his other goddamned ear off. Cut his nose off. Cut his fucking head off! Cut him—”
The wall of swift moving white water meets the edge of the falls and drops like the wrath of God onto the riverbed below. The explosion of water against rock can be felt all the way up in the Jeep. Even the spray splashes against the Jeep windshield.
“Jesus,” Rob says, his voice full of shock and awe. “Where the hell did the Sergeys go?”
“You gotta ask, Mohawk man?” Edge says. “They’re probably at the bottom of the ocean by now.”
“Chase,” comes the voice over the phone. A water-choking voice. The voice is almost too weak to hear, even with the volume maxed out. “Chase . . . please . . . I’m . . . drowning.”
The picture on the Facetime connection is almost entirely covered in electronic snow and distortion. But that doesn’t mean I can’t make out the rising water. It’s getting so high, it’s nearly up to Sarah’s chin. She’s holding the phone over her head and recording the scene at a downwards angle. Her eyes are wide, the rapidly rising river water entering her mouth causing her to choke, drown, die.
“Help . . . .me!” she whispers, her voice all but gone.
“There will be no blue diamonds for you, doll,” I say to myself, as her phone falls from her hand, drops into the water.
Facetime goes black.
33
“How long do we wait, Baker?” Edge poses.
He’s standing outside the Jeep now, sucking down the very last beer left in the cooler.
“We gotta wait until all the water drains,” I say. “But by the look of it, it’s almost all gone now.”
I turn to Rob and Edge.
“Let’s do this,” I say. “While we have the chance.”
With me taking the lead, we crawl through the hole in the fence and slowly make the climb down the steeply angled, black shale rock face.
“Gonna be a bitch getting that heavy box of treasure back up this riverbank,” Edge grunts.
“But the strain will be soooo worth it, dude,” Rob says.
We make it down the fifty-plus feet of jagged riverbank and come to the now damp, slick river bed. The bed isn’t smooth, but instead a horizontal continuation of the shale riverbank wall. The surface isn’t jagged, however, but instead, smoothed out from the swiftly moving river water’s natural polishing effects.
Rob slips on the slick surface, goes down on his ass.
“That hurts,” he bellows. “No wonder it took the Sergey’s forever to cross this thing.”
Edge is taking it slowly, shuffling his feet over the river bed like he’s walking across an ice rink. I’m more or less doing the same. But I’m also going as fast as possible. For all I know, that alarm is going to sound once again and if it does, we’ll end up at the bottom of the ocean like the Sergey
boys.
Soon the big, black, dripping falls wall looms large and ominous over me. Like a damp, nightmarish dark shadow. When I come to the fissure in the wall, I stop and wait up for the other two. Edge arrives first, but right on his heels is Mohawk Rob. Both men are sweating up a storm, and I suppose I am too. But I keep telling myself it will all be worth it.
Pulling out my phone, I thumb the LED flashlight app. I point the bright white beam at the cave’s interior.
“Stay close behind,” I say. “I’m pretty sure Sarah uncovered all the booby-traps Schultz planted here back in the 1930s, but I could be wrong. There could be something nasty waiting for us we don’t watch our step.”
“Good to know,” Edge says. “This whole thing is beginning to wear on my nerves.”
“Let’s just hurry and get it over with,” Rob says.
I enter the bowels of the Cohoes Falls, my left shoulder rubbing against the tall wall. It’s a tight fit at first, the cave is narrow, but after ten or more feet, it opens up to maybe three feet across. The smell is sickening, like old, rotting fish, and it seems to stick to my tongue and nasal passages like a gas or vapor.
Shining the light out ahead of me, I spot the open pit and the many vertical spikes it contains. Two of the spikes have skulls impaled on them, while another supports an entire set of bones.
Edge says, “Tell me something, Baker. You get the feeling no one has ever come out of this cave alive? Besides Schultz that is.”
“Not just Schultz, Edge,” I say. “Somebody has been maintaining this cave over the years, and I have a sneaking suspicion about who that someone is.”
Up ahead I can make out the fireman’s ax that now hangs upside down from the cave ceiling from a long piece of thick twine. Schultz certainly was the creative type, I’ll give him that. There’s something else up ahead too. A metal cage that’s dropped from the ceiling. Lying on the damp cave floor, inside the metal cage is the body of a woman.
Sarah.
Her mouth is wide open, as are her eyes. Her brown skin has turned blue and sickly looking, her long hair mussed and waterlogged, her hands clenched into fists. Her cell phone rests on the stone floor by her side.
“Her final moments were not good ones,” Edge whispers, his words echoing inside the stone chamber nonetheless.
“I think I’m going to be sick,” Rob says.
“Don’t look at her,” I say. “Just keep your eyes on the prize.”
“Where is the prize?” Edge asks.
“Behind the cage.”
We walk around the cage and, in the round beam of the flashlight app, spot a big wood chest. The Dutch Schultz lost treasure.
“Well, I’ll be damned,” Edge says. “This adventure wasn’t all for nothin’ after all.”
“Are we rich now, Chase?” Rob says in a trembling voice. He’s a far cry from the weeping sack of rags and bones he’d become down inside the basement of The Harmony Hotel.
“Let’s go,” I say. “But continue to tread lightly.”
We make our way to the box, kneel down before it reverently.
“How we gonna get into the thing?” Rob says. “That lock is huge.”
I look around the chamber.
“Somebody find me a rock,” I say.
Both Rob and Edge stand, begin searching the floor.
“Got one,” Rob says, returning to the chest, handing me the baseball-sized rock.
Edge returns also.
“This should do it,” I say.
Raising the rock, I bring it down hard on the old metal lock. It breaks into two separate pieces, the top U-joint and the bottom housing separating from one another.
“Jeeze,” Edge says. “That was a little too easy.”
I say, “This lock has been getting a soaking several times a day, every day, for eighty years. Whaddya expect?”
“So, this is it then?” Mohawk Rob says. “The moment of truth.”
“Hold this on the chest, Edge,” I say, handing him my phone/flashlight. He focuses the beam of light on my hands.
Pulling the metal latch up on the now broken lock, I position both my hands on the chest lid and lift. The hinges are rusted, and it takes a little effort on my part, but the lid slowly opens. That’s when we’re suddenly blinded by blue brilliance.
34
The blue diamonds have been placed inside a sterling silver, gem encrusted goblet which is set on top of too many gold and silver coins to count. There are also more goblets, jewelry, silverware, a few gold bricks, and who the hell knows what else. It’s like a pirate’s treasure.
“I’m fucking shaking,” Edge says.
“I think I’m gonna shit myself,” Rob says.
“I can’t believe it,” I say, feeling all moisture exit my mouth while my heart pounds inside my throat. “This isn’t just wealth, boys. This is wealth beyond your wildest imagination.”
“No wonder Sarah wanted it all for herself,” Rob states.
“No wonder she killed those cops in cold blood for it,” Edge says.
“No wonder you're all going to put your hands up,” says the voice of the man behind me.
35
Turns out they’d been following us on and off since we decided to go after the Dutch Schultz treasure when we were still downstate in Phoenicia. Rather, they had been following the Sergey Boys. The trail only went cold when we ended up at The Harmony Hotel. Now we’re back to standing atop the Cohoes Falls overlook, those numerous skull and cross-bone images staring us down.
“You gonna arrest us?” I say, once more standing between Rob’s Jeep and the chain link fence. “Can’t say we’ve done anything wrong.”
“There’s a dead body down there,” the FBI Agent who introduced himself as Jason Michel as he was escorting us out of the cave at gunpoint. The thirty-something agent is maybe an inch taller than me, and thin, his hair dark and thinning, face scruffy, lips thin, eyes blue. “I’m aware that Sarah Winston walked into that cave of her own recognizance. But that doesn’t excuse you from illegally engaging in the pursuit of a national treasure.”
No mention of the two dead Colonie Police officers whose bodies by now are swimming with the fishes along with the Sergey boys.
“What national treasure?” Edge says. “You mean the loot in the cave? That stuff was stolen in the first place by a gangster.”
“Yeah,” Rob says. “Finders keepers.”
Agent Michel laughs.
“If only that were the case,” he says. “A lot of years have passed since Dutch Schultz walked these streets and he’s now a piece of United States history. So is that treasure.”
“Like Rob said,” Edge says. “Finders keepers. It’s the law.”
“I generally would agree with that,” Agent Michel attests. “But in the case of the Dutch Schultz materials, it was all illegally obtained, which by default makes it Federal property. In theory, all of it — and I mean all of it — is to be returned to the rightful owners or, in this case, heirs of the rightful owners.”
“So, after everything we’ve been through,” Edge says, “we don’t get diddly?”
Michel smiles again, purses his lips.
“If it’s any consolation,” he says, “you did the Government of the United States of America a great service. You solved an age-old mystery.”
“Now the government is richer for it,” Edge smirks, shaking his head. “I need a damn cigarette. And a beer. Two beers. And a shot.”
“Me too,” says Rob.
The agent hands us each one of his cards. He tells us he’ll need to take down our individual statements over the next few days. In the meantime, they are presently hauling the chest up from the cave using ropes, pullies, and a team of men positioned on the riverbed with a second team on the riverbank.
Edge, Rob, and I get back into the Jeep. Rob turns over the transmission.
“Where to?” he says. “It’s not like we have a whole lot of money left to party with.”
“Back to The Harmony
Hotel,” I say. “I need to speak with someone.”
“Uncle Pat,” Edge correctly surmises. “The cops will already be there. You know that right, Baker?”
I nod. “I know,” I say, not without a hefty sigh. “But I still want to go.”
Edge slaps Rob on the arm. “You heard the man,” he says. “Get going why don’t ya.”
36
Rob pulls up as far as he can to The Harmony Hotel. Which isn’t very close considering the three blue and white Cohoes Police cruisers pulled up not against the curb, but up on the sidewalk. There’s also an EMT van backed up to the front door and several on-the-spot breaking news vans representing some of the local news outlets.
A bunch of the permanent residents are standing outside the hotel. I spot the one I’m looking for. Uncle Pat. He’s seated on a picnic bench that’s set beside three other identical picnic benches in the empty lot next door.
“I won’t be long, fellas,” I say. “Wait here for me.”
“Maybe there’s a gin mill close by,” Edge says.
“Just wait,” I say, slipping out of the Jeep. “It’ll do your liver some good.”
I take it double-time past the scattering of cops, past the cop cruisers, tinny voices blasting over their radios and scanners. Past the EMT van, its back doors wide open, the interior presently empty, but that will soon contain the body of Sam the counter man. Whether or not that body is still living, I have no idea. Time will tell.
When I come to the picnic table, I find Uncle Pat seated all by himself.
“Mind if I sit down?” I say. I see the sadness in his eyes. It tells me the police have already informed him about the death of his grandniece.
“Suit yourself,” he says. He pulls his sweater tighter around narrow shoulders. It’s still warm out, but with the sun beginning to set, the cooler weather is settling in.
“Looks like the cops have no idea about what hit Sam,” I say. “Or am I wrong about that?”
Chase Baker and the Dutch Diamonds: A Chase Baker Thriller Book 10 Page 11
