Caroline doubled up one rope, put a loop in the middle, and slipped it over the timber. While she held the coil of rope, and while I tried not to look down, we set the timber across the center of the abyss. Then Caroline searched the tunnel walls near the shaft, located a crack in the solid rock, and wedged in a wired nut. She attached a sling to the nut with a carabiner.
“We’ll hook you up to this,” she said to me.
“What for?” Archuleta asked.
“It will help him belay me as I go down.”
“You’re not going down the shaft,” Archuleta said and shone his light in my face. “Lomax is.”
“But he doesn’t know anything about climbing,” Caroline protested.
“He’s going down and that’s it.”
“But I’m more qualified to—”
“Shut up!” Archuleta was edgy enough to shoot. “Lomax goes down and you stay up here with me.”
“It’s all right,” I told Caroline.
“But, Jake—”
“Show me what to do.”
We put on our harnesses—little more than leg and waist straps—and Caroline hooked me to the belaying rope. She attached a figure-eight descender to my harness, then pushed the climbing rope through the descender and lowered it into the dark guts of the mountain, down to where Mr. Bones was patiently waiting.
“Your left hand holds the rope in front like this,” she said, “but it’s just for balance. It’s your right hand that prevents you from falling and holds the rope down and behind you like this. Don’t let it go.”
“Wouldn’t dream of it.”
“I’ll keep the slack up on the belaying rope, so even if you slip, you won’t fall more than a few feet. Okay?”
“If you say so,” I said.
She handed me a pair of clamplike ascenders and showed me how to use them to climb up the rope after I’d retrieved the satchel.
“I’ll help you up with the belaying rope,” she said. She hooked a lantern to my belt with a carabiner. “Ready?”
“Unless he’d rather go.”
“Move it,” Archuleta said.
I sat on the tunnel floor and moved forward until my legs hung over the edge of the grave-shaped pit. Then I pulled up the slack on the climbing rope, took a deep breath, and rolled off the edge. My body swung gently beneath the timber, which creaked from the strain. Below me was dead, black air. Archuleta looked on, amused.
“Having fun yet?”
“How does it feel?” Caroline asked.
“Okay, I guess.”
I let the rope slide slowly through the descender and lowered myself into the pit. The pressure on my ears increased as I went lower, or maybe it was my imagination. When I’d gone down about forty feet, Archuleta leaned over the edge, shining his light and pelting me with a shower of tiny rocks.
“Are you almost there?”
“Get back.” Caroline’s voice was angry.
Archuleta moved away, leaving a pale, empty rectangle above me. My lantern swung at my side, lighting only my feet and a small section of the rock wall. Below me was blackness. I sank into it.
Forty feet later, I reached the bottom. My lantern revealed Mr. Bones resting in a tangled mass of rope, the grappling hook still stuck through the top of his chest. His head had broken free and now lay in the corner of the pit—eye sockets and nose holes agape, toothy mouth fixed in a sardonic grin.
“Are you there yet?” Archuleta sounded far away.
“Wait a minute!” I shouted up, my voice deadened by the high, steep walls.
I moved the desiccated corpse aside, then kicked through the loose rocks and boards until I found the solid rock bottom of the shaft. No satchel.
“It’s not here.”
“What?”
I frisked the corpse—a morbid task, but maybe his pockets were stuffed with jewels. All I found were loose coins, a car key, and a leather wallet dried shut with age. There was a dusty Bulova watch on an expansion band around his wrist.
“There’s no satchel and no jewels!” I shouted at the distant rectangle of light above me.
“You’re lying.”
“There’s nothing down here but a dried-up corpse.”
“Listen to me, Lomax!” Archuleta yelled. “Unhook your belaying rope and tie it to the satchel of jewels.”
“I’m telling you there’s no satchel.”
“Do it now!”
“Goddammit, take a look!” I pulled the watch off the corpse’s bony, leathery wrist and held it up. “The only jewels down here are in this guy’s watch. I’ll bring it to you for a keepsake.”
I shoved the watch in my pocket, hooked up the ascenders, and tugged on the rope.
“You’re not coming up until I see the jewels!” Archuleta yelled.
“There are no jewels, you stupid son of a bitch!”
I slid the right-hand ascender up the rope, then stepped into the sling that hung from it, putting my weight on my right foot. Then I raised the left-hand ascender, shifted my weight to my left foot, and began “walking” up the rope.
Suddenly Caroline cried out from above. When I looked up, I could see Archuleta silhouetted against the mouth of the shaft. He was leaning on the timber that held my rope. I took a few more steps upward, when all at once the rope let go and I fell to the bottom of the shaft, landing beside the mummified corpse. Eighty feet of doubled rope piled down on top of me.
“This is your last chance, Lomax!” Archuleta yelled. “Tie the satchel to the belaying rope or I’ll cut it and leave you down there.”
“There’s no satchel, goddammit!”
“You’re lying.”
“Okay, Archuleta, wait a minute.” I fought to keep the panic from my voice. “Look, I know where the jewels are. Just let me come up and I’ll show you.”
“Where are they?”
“I’ll have to show you.”
“Tell me now, Lomax, I mean it.”
“No, I’ll climb up and—”
The other rope came piling down on top of me.
“Wait a minute!” I shouted.
I struggled to untangle myself from the ropes. When I was free, I aimed my light up the sides of the tomb to the top, eighty feet away.
“Archuleta!”
Silence.
“Caroline!”
I was alone.
32
I SWITCHED OFF THE lantern, surrounding myself in thick darkness. When I looked up and tried to make out the mouth of the shaft, everything was uniformly black. Archuleta had gone and taken Caroline with him.
The question was should I sit down and conserve energy for a day or three until a rescue party found me, or should I try to climb out. The answer was simple: Unless Caroline got away from Archuleta, assuming she was still alive, there would be no rescue party.
With the lantern back on, I searched the steep walls of the shaft but saw nothing resembling a toehold. There was plenty of rope down here, and even a grappling hook, but it would be impossible to throw it eighty feet straight up and snag the top edge of the shaft.
And yet there might be a way out.
I removed my harness and hooked the lantern to my belt. Then I leaned against the long side of the shaft and pressed the sole of my boot to the opposite wall. When I pushed, I could exert pressure against my lower back. With shoulders forward, arms down at my sides, and palms flat against the rock, I planted my left foot next to my right. I had climbed completely off the bottom of the shaft. Well, three feet off. Only seventy-seven more to go.
I inched my butt up the shaft, then my right foot, then my left. Nothing to it. Except that after ten minutes and eight feet of climbing, my muscles were starting to ache from maintaining constant pressure. Also, the lantern dangling from my belt was pulling me off balance. I started to unhook it.
Then I slipped and fell.
I went headfirst onto tangles of rope, breaking a few bones in the process. Luckily, they weren’t mine. But if the fall had been eighteen feet instead
of only eight …
I placed the lantern next to the corpse, shining across the ropes to give me a visual reference, then pressed my back and boots against opposite walls and started up the shaft.
After what seemed like an hour, my arms and legs and back were on fire. The bottom of the shaft was visible thirty or forty feet below me. I was barely halfway up and already exhausted. If I continued upward, my muscles might let go before I reached the top—in which case I’d take a neck-snapping plunge to the bottom and join Mr. Bones in a long, cold sleep. But if I climbed safely down now, I’d probably learn what it felt like to die of dehydration.
I struggled upward.
Without looking up or down, I watched my boottops in the near darkness and tried not to think about falling and dying alone in a pit but concentrated on the pain and pushed one foot up and then the other and then my back and hours passed and days and my hands were wet with blood and I almost slipped and then again and I knew I’d never make it and couldn’t go any farther but I did anyway just one more step one more step.
And then my head bumped the timber across the mouth of the shaft.
It surprised me so much I almost let go. I got one arm over the timber and then the other, swung my legs up, and then I was on the tunnel floor, lying flat on my stomach, trembling with fatigue.
After a while I got to my feet, stumbled out of the mine, and hugged the nearest tree. The sun was bright and yellow and the sky was bright and blue and the trees were lush and green. There was fresh air and good, clean rocks and a wind that stung my eyes, making them tear. I’m sure that’s why they teared.
There was no sign of Caroline or Archuleta.
I started down the mountain, a bit shaky at first, letting the slope and gravity do most of the work, but I felt better with every step. An hour later I reached the Olds. Archuleta had turned it around, smashing a taillight into a tree. That was as far as he’d gone before the engine had seized up for want of oil. There were dirty handprints on the trunk where he’d tried to push it, and the keys were still in the ignition. I started down, then stopped. Handprints on the trunk?
When I leaned in to get the keys, I heard Caroline’s muffled voice from behind the backseat. She was curled up in the trunk, trembling and gasping for air. There was a nasty bruise on her head. I helped her out. She clung to me and cried.
“I thought I was going to die there in the dark,” she said.
“Believe me, I know the feeling.”
“He hit me when I tried to stop him from cutting the rope. When I came to, he was dragging me down here. But how …” She held me at arm’s length. “How did you get out of the shaft?”
“Would you believe a mighty leap?”
I told her about it as we hiked down the mountain. Then she told me that Archuleta had said he believed she and Soames and I had lied about the location of the jewels. He’d taken the keys to Myrna Witherspoon’s car and was driving to the city. If Soames didn’t tell him the truth this time, Archuleta had said, he would shoot him and leave Caroline in the trunk to suffocate.
We went straight down the ravine to the big house on the site of the murder shack. The lady of the house, a salt-and-pepper-haired woman with sporty clothes and a midwestern twang, calmed her three Dobermans and let us in. The four of them escorted us to the phone. I called Witherspoon at the Gazette.
“We’ve got big trouble, Harry, and not much time.” I told him where we were. “Can you come get us?”
“I’ll be there in ten minutes.”
“Have you got a gun?” I asked, kicking myself for not remembering to take Willy’s pistol from the glove box of the Olds.
“Hell yes, I’ve got a gun,” he said. “This is America, isn’t it?”
Witherspoon picked us up in his big blue Dodge pickup. There was a Western Field twelve-gauge double-barrel shotgun wedged in the rack behind our heads.
“Will that do?” Witherspoon asked good-naturedly.
“If we hurry, we may not need it,” I said.
We roared down to I-70 and swung east. I told Witherspoon about Rueben Archuleta.
“He thinks Soames can tell him where to find the Lochemont jewels,” I said. “If Soames doesn’t, he’ll kill him.”
“Shouldn’t we call the police?”
We should, but I wanted time alone with Archuleta, time to talk to him at length about Helen Ester and maybe a mine shaft and one or two other things—time with no cops around to interrupt me.
“If you step on it,” I said, “we’ll be there in fifteen minutes. By the time we explained it all to the cops …”
But Witherspoon was already jamming down the highway, passing cars right and left.
Along the way, I felt something jabbing my leg—the Bulova watch in my pocket. When I took it out, Caroline asked me what it was.
“It belonged to our friend at the bottom of the shaft.”
She made a face and turned away. I wiped the crystal and twisted the stem, and the damn thing started ticking. The back was stainless steel, and after I buffed it with my thumb, it shone. There was an inscription. It took me a moment to realize exactly what the words meant. I shoved the watch back in my pocket.
When we got to Caroline’s house, Myrna Witherspoon’s Rambler was parked at the curb, and Willy Two Hawks’ beat-up green Chevy was parked right behind it. We piled out of the truck and I leaned back in for the shotgun. Witherspoon beat me to it.
“You’d better let me,” he said. “The triggers are kind of touchy.”
We hurried up to the house and peeked in the front windows. The living room was deserted, but I could see someone lying in the kitchen. Caroline unlocked the door and we crept through the front room. She gasped when she saw Willy Two Hawks lying on his back near the kitchen sink. His mouth was open, his dark glasses were in place, and his shirt was soaked with blood.
We heard a muffled scream.
“Grandpa!” Caroline said in a loud whisper.
She started toward the basement door, but I pulled her back and went down the stairs with Witherspoon right behind me.
Charles Soames was tied to a kitchen chair under a naked light bulb. His shirt was off and there were burn marks on his gray, wrinkled skin. Rueben Archuleta stood before him. A cigarette dangled from his fingertips.
“We’ve got all day, Pops.”
“No, you don’t,” I said.
Archuleta spun around, his hand on the automatic pistol in his belt, his eyes as wide as if he were staring at a ghost.
“Raise your hands,” Witherspoon said from behind me.
Archuleta looked from me to Witherspoon. Slowly, he seemed to relax. He smiled and shrugged in resignation. I stepped down off the last stair, and suddenly Archuleta dove to his right, went into a tuck and roll, and came up with the Beretta pointed at me. Witherspoon let go with both barrels, the blast nearly rupturing my eardrums. The buckshot caught Archuleta full in the chest, exploding it in shreds of leather and fabric, tissue and blood. He was slammed back into the wall like a rag doll. He slid to the floor, dead.
33
THE BASEMENT WAS FILLED with the smell of gunpowder and death. I untied Soames, while Caroline cried over the old man and rubbed his face. Witherspoon was pale as a fish’s belly. He kept looking over his shoulder at the bloody heap in the corner.
“It’s okay, Grandpa,” Caroline said. “It’s okay.”
Soames nodded but didn’t try to speak.
“Let’s take him upstairs,” I said. My voice sounded odd—my ears were still ringing from the shotgun blast.
Witherspoon and I got Soames to his feet and helped him up the stairs, past the body of Willy Two Hawks on the kitchen floor, and into his bedroom, where we eased him back onto the bed. Witherspoon went quickly into the bathroom and passed Caroline coming out with cotton pads and the tube of ointment. He shut the door, and we heard him throwing up.
Caroline dabbed at her grandfather’s first-degree burns. They looked painful but not serious. Soames’s torme
ntor had touched the glowing tip of his cigarette to the old man’s neck and chest, as he’d done to Lloyd Fontaine a few weeks ago.
“He … he killed Willy.” Soames’s voice was weak, as if he’d just finished a marathon, which in a way he had.
“Don’t try to talk,” Caroline said.
“He heard Willy picking the backdoor lock and … and he went up and shot him.”
“Did he say anything about Helen Ester?” I asked.
“Helen? No. What do you mean?”
I shook my head. “I guess it doesn’t matter. Not now. I only wish I’d’ve had the chance to get him to tell me what he’d done with … to tell me about her.”
“What are you saying, Lomax?”
I felt sick inside and figured I might as well share it with someone. “I’m afraid our friend downstairs killed Helen.”
“What? There’s no way. Helen told me she was leaving town, staying up at her place in the mountains where she’d be safe.”
“I have a bad feeling she came back and ran into him.”
“No.” Soames looked from me to Caroline.
She squeezed his hand. “You’re safe now, Grandpa, and that’s what counts.”
Witherspoon stepped out of the bathroom. Some of the color had returned to his face.
“No.” Soames was shaking his head at us. “No.”
“Just rest now, Grandpa. Everything’s all right.”
“It sure as fuck is not all right,” I said, getting everyone’s attention. “For one thing, we still have the blond man in the Ford to contend with—Villanueva’s partner.”
“Villanueva?” Caroline said. “You mean Archuleta.”
“No, I don’t.”
“Shouldn’t we call the police?” Witherspoon said. He glanced nervously at the door, as if he expected a dead man with no chest to walk in looking for him.
“Who is he, Soames?” I asked. “Who’s the blond guy working with Villanueva?”
“How the hell should I know?”
“There’s plenty you know that you haven’t told us.”
“What the hell’s that supposed to mean?” His anger had revived him and he started to get up, then winced, and Caroline tried to hold him back.
Blood Stone (The Jacob Lomax Mysteries Book 2) Page 19
