The Revenge of John W: Desert Intrigue, Daring Prison Escape: Thrilling Action (Unlimited exclusive, Joe Corso Book 1)

by Joe Corso

  “The shack is in pretty good shape, and you’re lucky, because when I inspected the place, I checked the roof and it doesn’t leak. The inside was dry, which is always a good sign. Here’s the key to the front door. After you begin to make money, you can convert that shack into a right decent house. It’ll take a lot of weekends of hard work, but it can be done. If you decide to go all out, you could even bring water from the well into the house and put in a proper bathroom. The outhouse is in decent shape, but it could use a new door. You can use it until you build a cesspool and install modern plumbing in the house. Any questions? No? Okay, John, I’ll see you in the morning.” He smiled, feeling better now than he had for quite a while.

  He took Mrs. Hardin by the hand and said, “Mrs. Hardin, I wish you all the luck in the world with your new home, such as it is. If you need anything, anything at all, you just call me and if I can help you, I will. You can’t imagine how glad I am that it worked out like it did. After seeing you lose your home and property, I was concerned that I would be at a loss to help you.”

  Mrs. Hardin looked up at him with fire in her eyes, and steel in her bones, and she meant with all of her heart every word she said to him. “Don’t you worry none about us, Mr. Hayes. I had the same depressing concerns you did when I first walked into this office. But now that you found a way to give us the property, and a roof over our heads, and you gave John a job, we have a new lease on life. And it’s all due to you. God bless you, Mr. Hayes.”

  CHAPTER ONE

  John W. Hardin Jr. never worked at any other job, except for using his strong back to help his father toil their land. These thoughts were on his mind as he walked tentatively into the Hayes Real Estate Office at 9 a.m. sharp, wearing his father’s cowboy hat, which his mother gave him when his father passed away. John hoped he would like this job, because now that his father was no longer here, he hated the thought of working like a mule again. But if this job didn’t work out, he’d have to go back to toiling the land, because that was all he knew. He was a very bright lad, but he had no schooling, so what else could he do, but toil the land if he and his mother were to survive? But that was yesterday. Today he was going to a different type of job, and if he was diligent and tried hard, he just might have a future. So, he wore his father’s shirt and bolo tie under his clean dark brown leather vest, which he loved and was the better of the two that he owned. When he put the shirt on, he pictured his father wearing it at Sunday church services.

  Mr. Hayes knew John had to be nervous, so when he arrived at work, Hayes shook John’s hand. In an attempt to make him feel comfortable, he said, “Welcome to your new job, John.” Hayes flashed John W a sincere smile. “You’re on time and I like that. I take notice of things like that.” Hayes studied John for a moment, and then said to him, “Before you start your new job, do you know Harvey’s Men’s Store on Main Street?”

  “Yes, sir. I passed it on my way here. Why?”

  “Before you get start work, I want you to go to Harvey’s and buy yourself a nice sport jacket that’s suitable for office work. You need something to wear over your shirt other than that nice vest you’re wearing. Then get yourself two other shirts and a good pair of comfortable walking shoes. Oh, and get three pairs of socks to wear with your new shoes.”

  John was crestfallen. He looked down at his boots, then at Mr. Hayes. He said, in a soft voice, “I don’t have any money to buy clothes with, Mr. Hayes.”

  “I know that, boy. Here, take my business card and hand it to Harvey. Tell him to call me after you buy your clothes and don’t worry about paying for them. I’ll take care of it. Consider it a ‘starting to work bonus.’”

  An hour later, John returned to the real estate office, beaming and looking real spiffy.

  “Now that’s more like it,” Mr. Hayes said, grinning. “It’s not that you didn’t look nice before, John, because you surely did. It’s just that it wasn’t the right look for our office. A jacket signifies professionalism. When you’re showing properties way out in the desert and it’s real hot, then of course you can take off your jacket and show the property in your shirt. Remember, first impressions are the most important ones, and to someone coming into this office and seeing two men wearing nice jackets, and nice shirts - well, it puts them at ease. They know that they’ve come to a reputable place. It’s ‘thought transference,’ John. They associate the package - us - with the product - the property they are looking to buy. It’s like buying cereal. If the box is really attractive, they assume the product will be the same, when in fact it may be terribly inferior. It’s perception, John. If the customer perceives us favorably, then they’ll perceive our business in the same light.

  “Consider this. Let’s assume that we have the exact property the customer is looking for, but we are dressed slovenly. That will give the customer the wrong impression of our business and us. It wouldn’t sit right with the customer and it wouldn’t be fair to us because we are offering the customer a superior product. That’s why at work we have to dress professionally. We must give a good impression at all times. Understand?”

  John thought about what Mr. Hayes had just told him. When he put himself in his customer’s shoes, it made complete sense to him. “Yes, sir. I understand. And thank you for the swell jacket and clothes. I never had clothes as nice as these.”

  That pleased Hayes. He noticed the cut of the jacket. It fit his new employee nicely. “It’s a good choice and it gives you a professional appearance, John. The western cut gives you a cowboy look that fits in with the western land that we’re offering our customers.” Mr. Hayes pointed to one of the three empty desks in his office. “John, I think that desk would be perfect for you because it faces the door and it’s closest to my desk. But you’re free to choose any one of the three desks you think you’d feel comfortable in.”

  “No, Mr. Hayes, I’ll use this desk. It’s perfect.”

  John was a natural salesman, but didn’t realize it. Within six months, the real estate sales at Hayes’s office doubled, and a year and a half later, sales doubled again. The additional business necessitated expansion, so Mr. Hayes contacted the owners of the strip mall and told them that he wanted to rent the empty store adjacent to his office but with a small modification. The proviso was that the wall between the two stores be removed to allow Mr. Hayes to expand his office space to accommodate the sales people he needed in order to handle the business John W. Hardin was bringing in.

  The owners of the stores in the strip mall where Hayes had his office, as well as some other businesses in the town, used Jake, a local handy man. The moment Hayes signed the lease for the new store, Jake removed the wall separating the two stores, doubling the office space. Within two weeks, the renovation was completed and the Hayes Real Estate Company had a new grander, more professional look. The small faded store sign was replaced with a larger hand-painted sign that lit up at night. Jake constructed a stone fascia that made the store look like an adobe building, which fit in with the Wikieup area western look. Hayes’s real estate business had grown and it was no longer a small hometown enterprise. His new office was designed to keep pace with the growing needs of people looking to migrate from the frigid winds and heavy snows of the northern states and relocate to the warmth of the Arizona sun. The Hayes Real Estate Company was prepared to meet their needs. Hayes had expanded with three offices spread out strategically in prime areas of Mohave County.

  John W supervised the sales team at the two branch offices. When they became stand-alone offices, Hayes and John investigated expanding into other counties. They performed a market survey that indicated where the growing migratory trends in the real estate market would likely be. Their research indicated Flagstaff in the Coconino County area was where serious growth was projected to occur. Since Flagstaff was the targeted growth area, Hayes decided to open a branch office there before his competitors got wind of what he was doing. Now that he had a working office set up in Coconino County, he needed a man to supervise that
office. So he advertised for a man with the right qualifications in the local Flagstaff papers.

  During the two years John worked for Hayes, he had become a substitute for the son Hayes never had. Conversely, John found in Hayes the father he lost when his dad passed away. The years changed John. He was no longer the insecure seventeen-year-old boy who walked into Hayes Real Estate office with his mother two years ago. He had grown into a tall, dark-haired, handsome muscular young man who for two years had been a steady visitor to the Hayes household, and had fallen in love with Hayes’s daughter Victoria - and she with him.

  CHAPTER TWO

  McCormack Mining Company Headquarters in Phoenix

  “Are you sure about this?”

  “Yes, sir,” Josh Peterson said. “After we purchased the ‘Good Hope’ mine, we did as you requested. We retained the mines still producing gold and silver and we sold all of the mines that were draining our resources. Some of the mines we sold still had gold or silver in them, but it cost too much to get the ore out, so those mines were closed and the property sold. But now, with the price of gold and silver skyrocketing, it would be profitable to re-open some of those old mines.”

  McCormack interrupted. “What are you doing about getting those old mines back, Peterson?”

  “Well, we’ve contacted everyone whose properties would, at present, be profitable and they’ve all agreed to sell their property back to us except one - the most important one. It belongs to a Mrs. Abigail Hardin. She acquired the property two years ago from a Mr. William Hayes and she and her son have been living in the mining shack on the property since they took possession of the property. We contacted her and told her we were interested in buying her property at substantially more than she paid for it.”

  “And?” McCormack asked.

  “She said she was happy living there and she wasn’t interested in selling.”

  McCormack sat there, scratching his chin. “And she has no idea what she’s sitting on?”

  “No, sir. She has no idea that the played out old mine on her property is hiding the mother lode the original miners searched for, but never found.”

  McCormack shook his head. “This doesn’t make sense to me. The mine is played out. I’m holding the report in my hand. What makes you think there’s still gold in that old mine?”

  Peterson had expected that question. He reached over and picked up a large poster-sized board leaning against the side of his chair. It showed a pencil sketch of a mountain on it. “Look here, sir,” he said, pointing to a spot on the side of the mountain. “This is where the ‘Lucky Ben’ mine is located.” He took his fountain pen and pointed to Hardin’s mine. “It’s directly opposite from our mine. Our geologists have performed an analysis on the Lucky Ben mine and according to their analysis, they’re fairly certain that a huge vein of gold - the ‘mother lode,’ if you will - still exists in the old mine on Hardin’s property. It appears that the original owners of the mine took enough trace gold out of that old mine to make them rich. Our thinking is that if they would have continued digging into the mountain another twenty or thirty feet, they would have struck gold worth billions today.”

  “You’re sure about this?”

  “Yes, sir. I have the reports confirming it here in this file. I’ll leave the file in the folder for you to read.”

  Being the shrewd, calculating man that he was, McCormack asked Peterson, “Why not continue digging further into the mountain from our mine? Wouldn’t we meet up with the Hardin’s mine if we did that?”

  Peterson shook his head. “Do you have any idea how large that mountain is? It would take years and cost you a fortune to get to the gold in the Hardin mine. It’s more cost efficient to buy the Hardin property and dig 20 or 30 feet to get to the gold than spend a fortune trying to get to it from the other side of the mountain. It’s all here in my report,” he said, placing the folder on McCormack’s desk.

  “Good, Peterson. That will be all for now. Good job.”

  After Peterson left the room, McCormack turned to the other man in the room. The man sat quietly in the corner and listened with interest to everything that was said, but never uttered a word. Rutgar Kleinst was a German mercenary who McCormack hired when he first took control of the mining conglomerate. Kleinst took care of some very troublesome people problems for him. Rutgar was very effective in eliminating those problems. Through the years, Rutgar had become useful to McCormack. He recognized a golden calf when he saw one and he made it his business to become indispensable to McCormack. Soon, he got what he wanted and he became Jack McCormack’s right hand man, the man in whom McCormack confided, and on whom he depended to take care of his difficult problems.

  Rutgar sat and listened, and he hadn’t said a word during the entire dialogue that took place between the two men. He was a quiet man who religiously followed a workout regimen to keep himself in top condition. At 5’11”, he wasn’t a tall man, but he was all muscle with a blonde military buzz cut, set atop a square face that never smiled. He appeared out of place in McCormack’s corporate world. But he listened carefully to every word exchanged between the two men.

  “So, Rutgar,” McCormack asked. “Give me your thoughts on this bit of unfinished business?”

  Rutgar who spoke perfect English with a slight but still noticeable German accent, smiled, flashing a perfect set of white teeth. “I’ll need a few days to assess the situation and I’ll give you my opinion on Monday.”

  “Good. Do that. But, Rutgar, don’t take too long. I want this last piece of property and I’m an impatient man.”

  McCormack’s threats never bothered the dangerous Kleinst. In fact, it was McCormack who should have been worried, not Kleinst. Rutgar loved physical confrontations. It gave him the opportunity to prove his proficiency with his fists and feet. But he understood McCormack and besides, McCormack paid him handsomely. So, he let it pass and smiled.

  More to placate McCormack than anything else, Rutgar said, “Don’t worry, Jack, this won’t take long. I’ll get right on it.” By the end of the week, Kleinst had enough information to formulate the plan he’d present to McCormack at their scheduled meeting on Monday morning.

  “With that smug look on your face, Rutgar, I assume that you found a solution to the Hardin mine problem.”

  Rutgar wasn’t intimidated by the older man, who assessed him coldly with his dead eyes, as he sat behind his desk, waiting patiently to hear his report. McCormack reminded Rutgar of a little boy waiting for a treat that his mother had promised him. Only McCormack wasn’t anyone’s mother. He was a ruthless tyrant who would destroy anyone who got in his way. McCormack stood 6’2” tall. He was fifty-five years of age with thinning black hair that was showing signs of grey. In a few short years, his thinning hair would lead to male pattern baldness, which at present he tried unsuccessfully to hide by combing his hair to the side. As a young man, McCormack had had a powerful physique. Over the years, good living and an over indulgence in food and drink turned his body to fat. His face had acquired a W.C. Fields Drinker’s Nose. His blotchy complexion gave the impression of standing before Nero or Caligula, the Emperors of Excess.

  “Yes! I did my research and I have the answer to your problem. The woman’s son has been working for the Hayes Real Estate Company for the past two years. In fact, he practically built the company single-handedly into what it is today. They have three offices in Mohave County and they’re planning to open an office in Flagstaff, in Coconino County.”

  “So what does his expansion have to do with my acquiring his property?” McCormack barked impatiently.

  “Relax a minute, Jack. I’ll get to that in a moment.” That mollified McCormack and he sat back in his large comfortable plush leather desk chair, waiting for Rutgar to finish explaining his plan to him. “Hayes is looking for someone to run the Flagstaff office and I have a man, Tom Jenkins, who I worked with a few years ago. He’s a smooth talking con man from Amarillo and he’s between gigs right now. I contacted him and e
xplained what I want him to do and he’s agreed to work with us. He’s already applied for the position of Office Manager. Once he’s hired, he’ll run that office. Then I’ll see to it that he becomes the go-to guy for Old Man Hayes.”

  “What about the kid who’s working there now?” McCormack asked.

  “That’s the best part. We’ll kill two birds with one stone.”

  McCormack reached for a cigar. He always did that when he was nervous or excited and in this instance, he was excited at the prospect of owning another lucrative gold mine. “I don’t understand what you’re getting at. Maybe I’m a little dense, but I don’t get it. I’m a simple man, Rutgar, so explain it to me, but a little slower this time.”

  McCormack was far from being the simple man he liked people to think he was. In fact, he was quite the opposite.

  “It’s quite simple, boss. Are you still friendly with the Governor?”

  “Of course I am. Who do you think put him in the Governor’s seat?”

  Rutgar rubbed his hands happily. “Good, because I intend to frame the kid. Once that’s done, we’ll sabotage the old man’s business and then we’ll take it over. Once the kid is out of the way, it’ll be a simple matter to take the land away from the old lady. The best part is, I’ll make it look as if we’re doing her a favor by taking it from her. We’ll put our man Jenkins in the Flagstaff office as the first step in our obtaining the mine. That’ll be the first thing we do.”