by David Wood
“That leads to the sterncastle and the officers’ quarters.”
“Let’s check it out,” Bones said. He took a step and the wood beneath his feet let out a dull crack. He froze. “You go first. I’ve already fallen through the deck of one rotten ship. It’s your turn.”
Maddock chuckled. That particular ship had been half-buried in a swamp. He had a feeling the dry desert climate would be a bit more forgiving on the decking.
“Here goes nothing.” He stepped out and gradually put his weight on his front foot. The floor complained loudly but supported him. He took another step, then another. “It seems to be holding it up.”
“If I fall through, I blame you.”
As they gingerly moved forward, step by cautious step, their eyes probed the dim light, searching for any signs of artifacts or treasure. Nothing. The brief glimpses of the decks below weren’t promising either.
“I wonder if the crew cleared out the holds at the time they ran aground,” Maddock said as he made his way across the creaking, cracking deck.
“Where would they take it all?” Bones asked. “I think they’d scout around first, figure out where they were, locate sources of food and water; look for signs of civilization. Know where you’re going before you start hauling cargo in 120-degree heat.”
Maddock nodded. “And out here in this desert, if they went scouting, who knows if they ever made it back to the ship?”
They had reached the door. He took a breath, held it, and pushed it open. To his surprise, it swung smoothly and silently on its hinges. The room beyond lay in darkness. Their Maglites had been stolen with their backpacks, so they took out their phones, turned on the flashlights, and shone them inside.
“Holy freaking crap!” Bones said. “What is this?”
“It’s not the captains’ quarters, that’s for sure,” Maddock said.
The room was empty, save for a single chest shoved into one corner. An open doorway in the aft bulkhead revealed a ladder leading down into the cargo hold. Only a few broken rungs were visible. But that wasn’t what captured Maddock’s attention.
Sets of Medieval style iron shackles hung from the aft bulkhead.
“That’s weird,” Bones said. “This would be an unusual place to put the brig.”
Maddock inspected one of the shackles. The chain and cuff were free of rust, unsurprising in the dry desert climate. Still, something about them didn’t look quite right. He let his light follow the length of the chain up to the top of the bulkhead where an iron bracket secured it in place. Four words were stamped on the bracket.
“Property of Paramount Studios,” he read aloud.
“Movie props,” Bones said.
“We aren’t the first to discover the ship.” Maddock shone his light down to the floor. A dark stain marred the space beneath the shackles. “I think Kirk Striker found this place and he brought victims here so he could torture and kill them at his leisure.”
“You’re quite astute, Mister Maddock,” a voice said from behind them. They turned to see Shipman standing in the doorway. He held a flashlight and a pistol, the one taken from Maddock. Bones’ pistol was tucked into Shipman’s belt. “I never dreamed anyone else would find this place. Hopefully you’ll be the last.”
Chapter 29
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“Just keep your hands where I can see them,” Shipman said. His voice was surprisingly calm, his hand steady. “In fact, why don’t the two of you have a seat?”
Maddock and Bones reluctantly sat down.
“I don’t know what you’re worried about,” Bones said. “You’ve got our weapons.”
“I want to make certain you didn’t hurt anybody. Namely me.”
“That’s ironic,” Bones said.
Shipman frowned. “What do you mean?”
“Was that you shooting at us?” Maddock said.
“Of course not. I don’t want to hurt anyone.” Shipman’s shoulders slumped.
“That’s why the two of you are still alive. I’ve been following you, trying to summon up the courage to kill you, but I couldn’t do it.” Shipman unslung their backpacks which he’d been carrying over his shoulder and tossed them to the seated men. “You’ll probably be wanting your water.”
Maddock had no idea what the man’s game was. Still, he was beyond parched. He took out one of his bottles of water and took slow, measured sips. Bones did the same.
“If you’re not the one doing the shooting,” Maddock finally asked, “who is?”
“Human traffickers. They’ve been around for a year or more. They’ve set up a way station in a section of the system of caverns I so stupidly led you to. I shouldn’t have been so paranoid about the race. No one was going to find that place by accident.”
“So, the human traffickers are the guys in suits?” Bones asked.
“Capitalizing on local legend. Someone goes to the police to report they’ve been accosted out in the desert by a man in black, the police aren’t going to put too much stock in that. It’s not the worst idea. Before I bought the ranch, the UFO crowd used to camp out here, trying to commune with Striker’s aliens. You can imagine the stories of men in black that sprang out of those.”
“You’re aware of human traffickers on your land?” Maddock couldn’t believe it.
“Have you reported it to the police?”
Shipman shook his head. “Our little police force would be powerless to stop them, and I’d pay the price for opening my mouth.”
“But the state and the Feds,” Bones began.
“You don’t understand how things work. Their sort of operation can’t function without the aid and financing of a network of important connections. Buy off or blackmail the right people and you can get away with all sorts. Even if I did report them, the best-case scenario is one of their moles would tip them off and they’d be gone long before the authorities arrived. Hell, they could move deeper into the caverns and probably go undetected. You can’t imagine just how expansive they are. Then, when it’s all finally blown over, they’d come after me.” Shipman sighed.
“Also, they pay me.”
“That’s disgusting,” Maddock said.
“I’m keeping my mouth shut either way. Might as well profit from my silence. I just want to be left alone.”
“I imagine the women who were killed here felt the same way,” Maddock said.
“Have you been continuing your father’s work?”
Shipman flinched. “What are you talking about?”
“You might be surprised at just how much we’ve learned,” Bones said. “And before you think about killing us to hide your secret, you should know that several of our friends are fully in the loop and are at this very minute digging into your history, and Striker’s. You’re a dead man walking.”
“And speaking of Striker, we’ve seen the shrine to Megan Keane in your upstairs room,” Maddock said. “Was she your first victim? Was that a special memory for you, you sick son of a bitch?”
Shipman shook his head. “No. It’s not like that.”
“Come on,” Bones scoffed. “You’re obsessed with Striker. You live on his ranch, drive his car. You’re fascinated with him and with serial killers. I take it you inherited the Critzer family madness?”
Shipman tensed for a moment, then seemed to deflate. He sank to the deck, his back resting against the bulkhead. Maddock and Bones were both looking for an opening, but he still held the pistol at the ready, finger on the trigger.
“You two don’t understand anything.” His voice faded to scarcely more than a whisper. “I never wanted to be like my father.”
“Why don’t you explain it to us?” Maddock asked.
“Growing up, I knew almost nothing about who my father was. My mother would only tell me he was a bad person and that we were better off without him.
He tried to connect with me a few times over the years, but Mother wouldn’t allow it. I think she accepted money from him one time so she could m
ove us to a better neighborhood. It wasn’t until I came of age that I even learned his name, much less that there was an inheritance waiting for me. He left me everything.” He sighed. “I asked her to come and live with me, but Mother wanted no part of anything that had been Striker’s.”
“What happened between them?” Maddock asked.
“He tried to kill her,” Shipman said. “She met him in Hollywood. He was charming, handsome, seemed to be well-connected. She thought he was a good guy who really wanted to help her career along. According to her, things were going great, and then one night he tried to strangle her. But Mother was no hot- house flower. She was a strong girl, raised on a farm. Grew up working side by side with her brothers, and brawling with them from time to time. She managed to fight Striker off and get away from him.”
“Did she report it to the police?” Bones asked.
Shipman chuckled. “It was a different world back then. An unmarried woman in the 1940s was not going to call the police to report rough sex with the man she was fornicating with.”
“But he was a serial killer,” Bones said.
“She didn’t know that. She had no idea who and what he was. She was just a young woman trying to survive all alone. She did the best she could.”
Maddock could understand that. “When did you find out the truth?” he asked.
“The full picture came together over time. I pieced together clues, learned everything I could about him and the Critzer family. That’s why I seemed obsessed with Striker and with serial killers. I was convinced that Striker had indeed inherited his father’s madness and I was terrified that the same would happen to me. The last thing I wanted was to be anything at all like him. Yet here I was, drawn to writ- ing and treasure hunting. And if he and I shared those traits...”
“So, what about the treasure?” Bones asked.
“My father was interested in lost treasure of all sorts, but the story that captured his imagination was the lost ship of the desert. It was a hobby of sorts. But when he finally found it, he found very little in the way of coins or artifacts. The ship had been almost stripped bare. But he could find no historical accounts of anyone claiming to have recovered its cargo. And it wasn’t only valuables that were missing. Commonplace items were also taken. The galley, the captain’s quarters, all cleared out.”
“Not the sort of stuff you’d bother carrying across the desert,” Bones said.
“Exactly. My father was convinced that the crew must have settled somewhere nearby and had taken everything with them. Finding that place became his obsession. This ship he put to other uses.”
“I take it he wasn’t searching for the Arch Gold Mine?” Bones asked.
“Not around here, I don’t think. He put out lots of cover stories and allowed people to believe he was off his rocker.” Shipman grimaced. “Off his rocker as far as treasure hunting is concerned, I mean. But some of his stories drew the wrong sort of attention. Men in black started showing up, following him. Real ones.”
“Wait a minute,” Maddock said. “The men in black stories were real?”
“According to him they were. Some were interested in his UFO tales. Low-level government types. It was the others who really concerned him.”
“Who would those others be?”
Shipman’s brow furrowed. “He had put out a story about finding the remnants of an ancient civilization. He claimed to have found powerful crystals and advanced weaponry. That apparently got the attention of some quasi-religious group.
He tried to tell them he’d made it all up, but that only made them doubt him. You know how these true believers are. They dogged him all of his life.”
“Do you happen to know the name of this group?” Maddock asked.
“Something stupid. Domination, I think?”
“The Dominion?” Bones asked.
Shipman’s eyebrows shot up. “That’s it. You’ve heard of them?”
“Have we ever,” Maddock said. “Have you ever had an encounter with them?”
“No. I think they poked around and eventually satisfied themselves that Striker really was crazy, and the ancient world legend was nonsense.”
“I take it Striker’s search eventually led to the caverns?” Maddock asked.
Shipman nodded. “It was late in his life when he discovered them, so I don’t know how thoroughly he managed to investigate them. He kept a journal full of weird codes and drawings.” Bones covered a low cough at the mention of the purloined book, but Shipman didn’t notice. “I haven’t managed to decipher more than a few lines. I suspect it’s mostly gibberish. Another smokescreen.”
“So, you’ve spent your life following in your father’s footsteps,” Bones said.
“Only in terms of treasure hunting. But yes, I write for a living, search for treasure in my spare time. As far as I know I was the only person alive who knew about the caverns until the traffickers discovered a back entrance. I still don’t think they have any notion of the full extent of it. They don’t seem to venture far from their headquarters.”
“What’s it like down there?” Maddock asked. “We’ve only seen a little of it.”
Shipman didn’t catch the subtext of Maddock’s question. “You can’t imagine the sheer size and complexity. How deep it goes. And the passageways are deceptive. They’ll taper off into nothing and just as you’re about to give up it opens into a magnificent chamber. And all of it is pitch black save for the light you carry with you. The going is slow. There’s water down there, too. I nearly drowned once. Water was dripping down from above. Like an idiot I poked at it with my knife and the ceiling collapsed.”
“Tell us about the iron door and the dungeon,” Maddock said.
“We can thank the Critzer family for that, too. Frank Critzer had a brother, a prospector, who made his home in these hills. He had a son who was crazy even by the standards of the family. He was little more than an animal, really. Eventually he grew too strong to be controlled, and he ended up killing someone. His father built that dungeon to keep him from hurting anyone else. It worked for a while. But one night he overpowered his father and escaped. Depending on which legend you believe, he either went on a killing spree that ended with his own death, or he continued to haunt the hills, killing when the demons drove him to violence.”
“Was he the source of the Mojave Monster legend?” Bones asked.
“The very one.”
Maddock realized this was an important moment for Shipman. The man clearly felt the need to unburden himself. Hopefully they could keep him talking.
“Who made the tunnel from the dungeon room to the caverns?”
“My father had heard the story of the caverns from an elderly Native American woman. To her it was a far-fetched legend but my father had a feeling there was something to the story. One of the consistent threads across the various legends he had collected about the dungeon room was that there was a crack in the dungeon wall and through it the young man could hear the whispers and moans of the spirit of the dead. My father investigated and found the caverns. From that moment on he was certain the crew of this ship had hidden her treasure there.”
“What’s the name of this ship?” Bones asked.
“If my father found out, he didn’t write it down. At least, not in a code I can make sense of.”
“It’s probably painted on the stern,” Bones said. “Anybody feel like doing some excavating?”
Shipman didn’t smile, didn’t blink. His expression was unreadable, and that unnerved Maddock.
“I don’t get it,” Maddock said. “If you’re so certain there’s treasure in the caverns, why did you sell that piece of land to Grizzly?”
“I needed the money and Grizzly was the only one who was interested. His assistant, Ms. Rivera, insisted that area be included. She ‘liked the visuals.’ I know other ways into the caverns, and I doubted anyone would find the dungeon room.”
He flashed them a baleful look. “And then, in a fit of paranoia, I inadve
rtently led you there.”
“And when we did find the room, you locked us inside, hoping we’d get lost and die in the caverns?” Maddock asked.
Shipman nodded. “I panicked in the moment. I tend to do that. I couldn’t believe someone had found the room. It wasn’t a premeditated plan, but yes, that was my thinking at the time.”
“And when it didn’t work, you tried to protect your secret by blowing the place up,” Bones said.
“And by rolling boulders down on me,” Maddock added.
Shipman blinked. “I did not blow the place up, although the thought did occur to me. And as for the boulders, I have no idea what you’re talking about.”
“Right,” Maddock scoffed. “I suppose you didn’t kill Megan Keane, either.”
Shipman cocked his head. “Oh, no. I absolutely did kill her.”
Chapter 30
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“I think the yellow bellies have tucked tail and run! That’s what happens when you mess with the USA!” Terry Gold leered at the camera. “And let me tell you some- thing. The sound of gunfire? That’s just the rat-a-tat-tat of the little drummer boy at Lexington and Concord!”
“I think the little drummer boy was a Christmas thing,” Roddy said.
“Brother, there’s a little drummer boy beating in the heart of every true patriot.”
He raised his rifle in the air, lifted his head to the sky, and let out a long, high- pitched howl. He had done it! He always knew he had it in him, but now there was proof. He and his team had driven off the dirt bags, whoever they were, and had suffered no casualties. Each man had acquitted himself admirably. Not a coward among them. Even Roddy had remained calm and fired off a single shot for the benefit of the camera. And to top things off, Gold had wounded one. He had seen the man go down clutching his leg.
