Blood Stone (The Jacob Lomax Mysteries Book 2)

by Michael Allegretto

  “Take it easy, missy,” Willy said, his voice as smooth as a snake’s belly. “Tom, you do like she says.”

  “But, Pop—”

  “Do it, goddammit!”

  Tom let go. I stood up, rubbing feeling back into my wrists, then held out my hand. Willy gave me his gun. Helen released Mathew, and he began taking deep breaths, nearly collapsing from relief.

  “Party’s over, guys,” I said. “I’ll send you a bill for the door.”

  The three men solemnly retreated—braves defeated by a woman. Willy gave me a whiskery smile.

  “See you again real soon,” he said. “You, too, missy.”

  He kicked a piece of splintered doorframe from his path and walked out.

  “Oh, Jacob, I—”

  “Wait.”

  I made sure Willy and his sons walked all the way down the hall, then I watched from the window as they drove off in Willy’s battered green Chevy. There was a cab parked at the curb, lights on, motor idling. Helen huddled against me.

  “I’ve never been so frightened in my life,” she said.

  I put down Willy’s gun and held her in my arms.

  “I thought you did fine.”

  “It was all an act, Jacob. Inside I was scared to death.”

  “Maybe so, but your timing was outstanding.”

  “Thank God,” she said. “I’d heard a terrible crash, and then when we were disconnected and I was unable to get through, I knew something was terribly wrong. I took a taxi right over.”

  “Lucky for me. Let me see your gun.”

  It was a small-caliber piece, stainless steel with fancy engraving and worn rosewood grips. I handed it back and she put it in her purse.

  “When did you start carrying that?”

  “I bought it yesterday after Archuleta attacked us. The man at the gun store called it a ‘purse gun,’ and I thought I’d feel safer with it, but I don’t, not really. I suppose it was foolish of me.”

  “It is loaded, isn’t it?”

  She smiled. “God, I think so. The man at the store showed me how to use it and said it was ready to go.” She reached in her purse, I thought for the weapon. Instead, she pulled out a cigarette and a lighter. Her hands were shaking.

  I sat her down, then got out the Jack Daniel’s and a couple of glasses and poured us each three fingers. Helen sipped it like she would a liqueur.

  “You said on the phone you were leaving town.”

  She nodded. “I’m not safe here, Jacob. Archuleta called me last night.”

  “What?”

  “Actually, it was three in the morning. He warned me again to stay away from Charles. I’m getting out, Jacob. I’m scared to death of that man.”

  “Where will you go?”

  “I have a place in the mountains,” she said, blowing smoke at the ceiling. “It belonged to my late husband, and we stayed there occasionally.”

  “It’s essential that you be with me in court on Thursday.”

  “Please don’t worry. I fully intend to be there. But I can’t stay in Denver, not with Archuleta around.”

  “Have you told Soames you’re leaving?”

  “Yes, and he agrees it’s probably best, at least for now. I gave him the rural route number, should he feel the urge to write.”

  “That seems a bit cold.”

  She stubbed out her cigarette in the ashtray.

  “There’s no phone. Besides, even before Archuleta showed up, it was becoming difficult for me to be around Charles.”

  “Why?”

  “Because of Caroline. She hates me, and she makes no secret about it. She thinks I have ulterior motives for wanting to be near her grandfather.”

  “She’s just a kid,” I said, as if that mattered.

  Helen shook her head sadly. “If it wasn’t for your hearing coming up, I might leave for good, go back to San Francisco.”

  “You still love him, don’t you.”

  “I … I’m fond of him, Jacob. It’s you I …” She stood up abruptly. “I should go. In fact, I was packing when you phoned.”

  “You’re leaving Denver now?”

  She nodded gravely, then gave me a brief smile.

  “I’ll be back Thursday.”

  “Call me Thursday morning,” I said. “If you can’t reach me, meet me at the City and County Building before one o’clock.”

  She hugged me, her head against my chest.

  “I’ll be glad when this is all over,” she said. Her voice was so soft and sweet that I had trouble picturing her holding a gun to the throat of Mathew Two Hawks.

  27

  ON MONDAY MORNING CAROLINE Lochemont answered her door wearing an oversized flannel shirt, hiking boots, and shorts. Her legs were tan and smoothly muscled. When she saw Willy Two Hawks’ pistol stuck in my belt, she told me to get rid of it.

  “We may need it,” I said.

  “No guns.”

  I looked at Soames for help, but he merely shrugged.

  “This may seem like a romp in the woods to you,” I said to Caroline, “but if Rueben Archuleta shows up, things could get ugly.”

  Caroline finally agreed, reluctantly, and since she and Soames had already loaded up her Toyota Land Cruiser, the three of us set out at once—Caroline driving, Soames beside her, and me in the back with the gear. The sun was bright, the fall air was clean and crisp, and the traffic was light. We rode in silence, the car filled with a sense of quiet apprehension. As we climbed I-70 into the mountains, I found myself looking over the seat, checking the scattering of cars behind us. Twice I thought I saw a familiar tan Ford, but I couldn’t be sure.

  When we got to Idaho Springs, Caroline took the second turnoff and headed away from the town, south toward Mount Evans. The two-lane blacktop twisted up the narrow canyon cut by West Chicago Creek, which flowed cheerfully by on our left. The slopes were steep and rocky and heavily wooded. They were cut by smaller canyons and draws. The floor of the main canyon widened in places, and there were houses—some old, some new. After a few miles Caroline slowed down as if to turn onto a dirt road that climbed up a side canyon to the right.

  “Go to the shack first, honey. I want Lomax to get into the spirit of things.” Soames’s tone was sardonic.

  Caroline stayed on the asphalt road for several more miles, then pulled into the weeds and stopped before a dilapidated one-room building featuring gray weathered wood, boarded windows, and a swaybacked roof.

  “Kinda cozy, ain’t it, Lomax?” Soames said. “Ed Teague had a lot of fun in there a few decades ago. Back over here and up that ravine was where I ran for my life, a few million dollars in gems in my hands and the Angel of Death at my heels, blasting merrily away with a twelve-gauge shotgun.” He shook his head and scratched his gray chin. “It don’t look quite like I remember it, but things change after twenty years.”

  There was something about seeing the murder shack that bothered me, something I couldn’t quite put my finger on.

  Caroline made a U-turn and took us back to the dirt road. It was steep and rough, but passable even in two-wheel-drive. Barely passable. After half an hour of teeth-jarring and kidney-shaking, Caroline stopped on a level area and shut off the engine. Soames and I hustled out and stood for a few thankful minutes behind our respective trees. By the time we returned to the Land Cruiser, Caroline already had the gear out—two backpacks, canteens, a shovel, and a brush hook. She unfolded a U.S.G.S. quad map. It showed densely placed brown contour lines on a green background.

  “Here we are,” she said.

  Her finger tapped the intersection of a twisting pair of dashed lines, supposedly a road, and a contour line marked “9000.” The few square miles around us on the map were peppered with tiny Y’s and half-blackened squares—mine tunnels and shafts, according to Caroline.

  “Down that ravine a couple miles is the shack.” Soames was pointing to our left. “There’s a half-dozen mines between here and there that we’ve already checked. Now we go upslope.”

 
; “How far?”

  “All through here,” Caroline said, drawing her finger across four or five miles on the map.

  “Great. That doesn’t look like more than fifty or sixty mines.”

  “What’d you want me to do, Lomax, paint a sign on it?”

  “Great.”

  “Let’s get going,” Caroline said and picked up the larger of the two packs.

  “I’ll take that one,” I said, big, gallant guy that I was.

  “Whatever.” She loosened the shoulder straps and helped put it on my back. It was heavier than it looked.

  “What’ve you got in here?”

  “Climbing equipment, lanterns, a first-aid kit, and so on. I’ll carry it if you like.”

  “Hey, gimme a break.”

  Caroline took the map, a canteen, and the other pack and led the way uphill. I followed Soames and carried a one-gallon canteen, the brush hook, and the shovel. We started off in chilly mountain shadows but soon walked into sunlight. Caroline moved easily ahead of me and Soames, sometimes out of sight. She would frequently come back to see how we were doing, then move out again, not even breathing hard. I guess her twisted ankle was all better now.

  It wasn’t long before the altitude started getting to me. I was huffing for air and sweating freely. The straps on the pack dug into my armpits. My heels were moving around in my hiking boots, and even though I wore two pairs of socks, I knew blisters were growing. And if fighting the steepness of the slope and the weight of the backpack weren’t enough, I was constantly helping Soames over every little bump in the ground. After a while, though, I was glad he was there to slow things down. Caroline let us rest now and then and fed us water and trail mix.

  At ten o’clock we found our first mine. The entrance was almost overgrown with brush, but it was plainly marked by tailings and timbers.

  Caroline pointed it out on the map, then drew a small circle around it. It was one in a group of seven tunnels in the immediate vicinity—the vicinity being acres of hillside.

  Caroline began clearing the entrance to the mine with the brush hook, swinging the long-handled blade in big lazy arcs, slashing through the overgrowth. By the time I’d gotten my pack off, she was nearly finished. I dragged her cuttings out of the way, and when I moved a rotted six-by-six timber that lay diagonally across the entrance, dirt and small rocks sprinkled down.

  “Now what?” I asked.

  “We go in.”

  “I was afraid you’d say that.”

  We carried lanterns and proceeded single-file into the dark wound in the mountainside, with Caroline leading the way.

  The tunnel was about four feet on a side, which meant we had to stoop over, then bend lower still to get under some of the overhead timbers. It was cool and damp inside. Water ran in tiny rivulets at our feet, and I could hear it dripping from deep within the mountain. I began to feel a tightness in my chest—partly from walking stooped over, but mostly because I felt the weight of the mountain on my back. I fought the urge to run outside.

  Soames stopped, and I nearly bumped into him.

  “This is far enough, don’t you think, honey?” he said. “We should have come to it by now.”

  “Come to what?”

  “The shaft, Lomax, the shaft.”

  “Stay there,” Caroline said. “I’ll check ahead a little more.”

  “Be careful.”

  We watched her silhouette move down the tunnel.

  “If she collapses,” Soames said, “take a deep breath and go get her and drag her out fast. And don’t breathe in between.”

  “What the hell are you talking about?”

  “Mine gas, bad air, whatever you want to call it.”

  I sniffed.

  “You can’t smell it,” Soames said. “It just lacks oxygen. That’s why miners in the old days used to bring in canaries in cages. When the birds dropped dead, the miners ran out.”

  “Terrific.”

  Caroline was outlined by her lamp fifty feet away. I took a few deep breaths and wondered if I could get to her and drag her to the entrance without breathing. Then her light hit us in the face as she started back toward us.

  Outside, I filled my lungs with sweet mountain air, raised my face to the sun, and tried not to think that this was only our first mine.

  Half an hour later, we entered our second. This mine, unlike the previous one, was as dry as dust. We found no shaft. Once outside, Caroline opened her backpack on a large, flat rock and we ate lunch in a small circle, cross-legged like movie Indians.

  “What will you do with the reward money?” I asked Caroline between bites of bologna. Christ, is that all these two ate? Maybe that’s all they could afford.

  “Reward …”

  “The insurance reward,” Soames said, patting Caroline on the knee. “Remember, Lomax has to turn in the jewels for us, since the insurance company wouldn’t give me or you a cent.”

  “Oh.”

  “Well?”

  “Oh, well, we’ll go … we’ll probably move out of Denver, someplace where it’s warm most of the time.”

  “And where there’s plenty of beach,” Soames said. “Salt air’s the thing.” He crumpled up his sandwich wrapper and tossed it aside. Caroline picked it up and put it in her pack.

  “What about you, Lomax?” Soames said. “You should come away with about fifty grand. Maybe you could buy a new car.”

  “I like the old one.”

  “Or hell,” he said, “an upright citizen like you, you could always give your share to charity.”

  “We’ve got to find the jewels first.”

  “Oh, we’ll find them,” Soames said.

  But we didn’t, not after searching five more tunnels. Each one had its own design, its own personality, dug by miners of varying degrees of expertise who followed elusive veins of ore. Some mines were simple straight bores into the mountain, while others had side tunnels or shafts. But they all had one thing in common: Each and every one scared the hell out of me. I kept waiting for the mountain to wince and close its open sore with me inside.

  By now Soames was exhausted, and I wasn’t far behind. We made our way down to the dirt road as the sky went from blue to purple and the air turned cold. The Toyota Land Cruiser was exactly where we’d left it. But parked behind it was the ubiquitous beat-up green Chevy of Willy Two Hawks.

  28

  MATHEW TWO HAWKS WAS leaning against the side of the Chevy, a .30-30 Winchester lever-action rifle cradled in his arms. He looked like he was watering his pony and keeping an eye out for soldiers. When he saw us, he leaned toward the side window.

  “Here they come, Pop.”

  Willy and big Tom climbed out of the car. Willy finished his Bud and tossed the can in the dirt with a half-dozen other empties.

  “Hiya, Charley,” Willy said. “Find anything interesting up there?”

  “Lots of rocks and trees.”

  “Let’s have a look in that pack.”

  “We ate all the sandwiches,” I said.

  “Tom.”

  Tom obeyed his father and stepped up to me, ready to rip the pack off my back and maybe an arm with it. I unshouldered it, and he took it from me.

  “You’ve got no right, you goddamn ape,” Caroline said angrily.

  “Oh, let him be, hon,” Soames said.

  “Your kid’s got spunk,” Willy said.

  “She’s not my kid, Willy. She’s my grandkid.”

  “Same difference.”

  Soames shook his head in resignation. You got any more beer?”

  “Hell yeah. And you, Lomax, I want my gun back.”

  “I sold it.”

  “Then you owe me a hundred bucks.”

  The two ex-cons climbed in the Chevy. Meanwhile, Tom had jammed the zipper and couldn’t get the pack open.

  “At least let me—”

  Before Caroline could finish, Tom whipped out a hunting knife from his belt and slashed open the pack.

  “Goddamn you.” Caroline s
tarted forward, and I grabbed her arm.

  “Don’t worry about it.”

  “You’re going to let these jerks do whatever they want?”

  “We’ll get you a new pack,” I said.

  Tom dumped everything out of the pack and pawed through it on the ground. “Nothing,” he said, then yelled to the car, “There’s nothing, Pop!”

  He straightened up and held the knife loosely at his side.

  “Now let’s see your pack, babe.”

  “Fuck off, asshole.”

  Tom threw back his head and whooped.

  “Hear that, Mathew? This squaw has got spit.” He came forward, and I stepped in front of Caroline. Tom raised the knife to waist level. The blade glinted in the dying light. “You could die right here,” he said. He meant it.

  With some effort I turned my back to him.

  “Give me your pack,” I said to Caroline.

  “Goddammit, Jake, why do—”

  “Just give it to me.”

  She glared at me for a moment, then stepped around me, pulling off her pack. She unzipped it and dumped the contents on big Tom’s boots. Then she threw the empty pack at his face. He caught it easily and whooped again. He was good at it.

  “Maybe I should search you, babe,” he said. “Right down to the short hairs.”

  She moved behind me.

  “That’s enough,” I said.

  Tom went into a semicrouch and flipped his knife from hand to hand. “Maybe you think you could stop me.” His voice was a low rumble.

  “Hey, Tom, lay off,” Mathew said. Good old Mathew. “You know what Pop said.”

  Tom’s eyes never left mine.

  “When this is over,” he said, “I’m going to skin you like a rabbit.”

  “Then can we be friends?”

  Tom gave me his fiercest warrior look, spit in the dirt, and went back to the car.

  “You’d better not poke him too hard,” Mathew said.

  “I figured you’d stop him,” I said. “Isn’t that what the rifle’s for?”

  Soames got out of the Chevy and came over to Caroline.

  “I’m going to ride back to town with Willy.”

  “No,” she said. “You come with us.”

  “Don’t worry about it. I want to talk a few things over with him.”