The Broken Universe

by Melko, Paul

  As if knowing what John was thinking, John-7458 said, “You got here as fast as you could.”

  “Yeah.”

  “If you’d taken the bus, you’d be in Toledo still.”

  “Thanks for helping, John,” John said.

  “You know my price,” John-7458 said. “I get to man this outpost of Pinball Wizards, Transdimensional.”

  “You got it.”

  “So, what’s the plan when we get there? Do we even know where he is?”

  “No, but I think I know how to find out.”

  They climbed back into the car as the ferry approached the dock. In the shelter of the island, the waves faded and the bouncing ebbed. They slid into the dock with a grace one wouldn’t expect from a hundred-meter barge.

  John-7458 eased the car off the boat and onto the local road. They neared the first four-way stop.

  “That one,” John said. “That bar.”

  John-7458 pulled the car into the first parking space he could find, right across from the bar that was blasting country and western.

  “The Shaft?” John-7458 asked.

  “We’re looking for locals. That one looks like a local bar. Sounds like one too.”

  “You want me to come in? People might remember us if we look alike.”

  “Doesn’t matter at this point,” John said.

  He pushed the door open and the music blared out. Yeah, it looked like a local crowd. Not the suntanned touristy people he’d expect on the weekends. No, these were the local residents of Kelleys Island letting loose on a weekday.

  John took a spot at the bar next to a whiskered older fellow. John-7458 stood beside him. John was worried that the bartender would card him; he was only twenty. But the man just nodded when he asked for two beers.

  The guy on the stool next to him looked John and John-7458 up and down.

  “You two fellers twins?”

  John was glad he’d had John-7458 come in with him. It made starting a conversation easier.

  “Yeah, we are.”

  “You two should wear the same outfits!” John realized the man was drunk.

  “Yeah, not since we were kids,” John said.

  “Sure, sure.”

  “Listen, we’re looking for people,” John said. “You a local?”

  “Yeah, sixty years a local!” he proclaimed. “I’m a handyman, fix the bed-and-breakfast places all over the island. Also have a water truck that I use to fill up people’s cisterns.”

  “So you know just about everyone on the island?”

  “Just about, unless they have piped water. The only people with piped water is everyone in these couple blocks downtown!”

  “Then you gotta know who I’m looking for,” John said. “Two guys, a little bit yokel—no offense—one is named Russell and the other is named Amos.”

  “Oh, you mean Russ and Amos Smerndon,” the guy said. “They have a house out by the forest preserve. Near the beach and the glacial grooves.”

  “Yeah, over there. They inherited some money, didn’t they?”

  “Money? I don’t think so. They don’t work much of late. Used to do handy work like me, but they don’t bid the jobs against me anymore. I thought they was just lazy.”

  “Where do they live now?”

  “Old white house off Titus Road.”

  “Right up against the forest preserve?”

  “Yeah, that’s the place.”

  “Thanks, man. Let me buy you a beer,” John said.

  “Yeah, Russ and Amos are usually here this time of evening,” the guy said. He turned around on his stool and John panicked, wondering what he would do if the two were there in the Shaft. But the guy just shrugged his shoulder. “Naw, they ain’t here.”

  John paid for their beers and he and John-7458 left the bar.

  “Glad they weren’t there,” John-7458 said.

  “Would have been interesting.”

  Before getting into the car, John found the same telephone booth he had used that day in 7651.

  “It’s 3290 Titus Road,” he said, consulting the phone book.

  They drove slowly toward the forest preserve and past it onto Titus Road.

  “I feel as if I’m about to get in a fight,” John-7458 said.

  John nodded. His stomach was tense too, filled with butterflies, and he felt hyperalert.

  “This might get rough,” John said.

  “For them!”

  John felt a bit of the tension ebb away as he laughed.

  “There it is.”

  John-7458 slowed the car, noting the dark drive that disappeared into the woods.

  “There’s a pull-off up ahead,” John said.

  John-7458 eased the Trans-Am onto the dirt berm. He flipped off the lights and the two looked at each other.

  “Flashlight’s in the trunk,” he said.

  “I have one in my ready bag,” John said.

  They stood by the car for a moment, both of them listening to the crickets and waiting.

  “Ready?” John asked. “You can wait here, you know.”

  “No, I’m going,” he replied. “As if you could stop me.”

  “Yeah. I know how it feels to be in your shoes.”

  “You said it.”

  They trotted up the gravel driveway, eyes open for some sign of human presence. There was nothing, no lights at all. The white of the house loomed ahead of them. No lights shined in the windows. No porch light, not even a mosquito light.

  John paused and John-7458 knelt beside him. Then he motioned him to follow him around the edge of the yard. He remembered another building beyond the house, a barn or shed.

  The ground was lumpy and he almost fell in the darkness. On the other side of the house was a small barn, and a light was on within. The windows were papered over, but the door didn’t fit squarely against the earth, where feet had worn away a path and the light slipped out from under it. As they watched, shadows danced within.

  Someone was in the small barn.

  They continued around the edge of the yard so that if someone emerged from the barn, the two wouldn’t be seen. Now they were close enough to hear voices, someone shouting.

  They crouched and crawled on hands and knees closer.

  “He’s not gonna say anything,” someone said.

  “He’ll talk,” someone else said. “Won’t you, punk?”

  There was an incoherent reply.

  John and John-7458 shared a worried glance.

  “Tell me, punk. Why you digging for our gold?”

  “Piss … off.…” The words weren’t clearly articulated.

  “And where’s your twin brother at?”

  “Was a ghost … dimwit.”

  There was a dull thud, as if someone had been kicked in the stomach.

  John-7458 stood at the same time John did. They shared a glance, then ran.

  John hit the barn door first and it gave. He stumbled and fell, felt John-7458 run past, screaming like a banshee. He tackled one of the two men—Russell.

  John scrambled to his feet and tripped, ran, staggered at Amos.

  If the man hadn’t been staring at the two Johns in horror, John would never have reached him.

  “Ghosts!” Amos screamed.

  John slammed into him and screamed into his face as he pummeled him with his fists. Why hadn’t they brought a gun? John wondered as Amos curled into a ball and screamed. Because they were ghosts.

  John stood and looked down on Amos as he murmured and squealed. Then he spun as he heard Russell curse. He had John-7458 in a headlock, but his doppelganger was striking the back of his head weakly with a fist.

  John saw the two-by-four on the floor. He grabbed it and swung it down at the top of Russell’s head. The man looked up just in time for the wood to slam into his eye socket. He fell to the ground like a crash dummy.

  John-7458 stood up rubbing his neck. They both looked over at John Prime, tied to a post in the middle of the barn. He was bloody, his eyes bruised, his no
se broken, and his lips cracked.

  He smiled.

  “I’m seeing double,” he slurred just before he passed out.

  * * *

  John-7458 trussed the two men with the same rope they had used on John Prime and was none too gentle about it. Amos merely whimpered and remained in his fetal position. Russell was unconscious long enough that John began to worry.

  Prime, however, recovered enough to stand unsteadily.

  “Who’s this?” he asked, pointing at John-7458. “Or rather which universe is he from?”

  “This one,” John said. “I needed to get back fast, and he gave me a ride.”

  “I assumed they’d run across you earlier when that lunkhead kept going on about ghosts,” Prime said, nodding at Amos.

  “Yeah, I had to ditch and come back the long way.”

  “Well, I’m glad you did.” Prime walked over to a pile of old boxes covered in canvas. “And now you’re glad you did.”

  He pulled the canvas away, revealing a steamer trunk filled with gold coins.

  “I found the treasure and didn’t have to dig for it,” Prime said.

  John tried to guess how much there was, but he couldn’t figure the volumes in his head. There had to be thousands of gold coins in each box.

  “My god,” he said. “That’s millions of dollars in gold!”

  “It’s our gold!” Russell spat out.

  “Not anymore,” Prime said and swung a kick into Russell’s exposed stomach. It would have done worse damage if Prime hadn’t wobbled as he’d stepped up to kick. Still Russell woofed and curled up as well as he could in his tied position.

  John put a hand on Prime’s shoulder and pulled him back from a second kick on the helpless Russell.

  “I know you’re pissed right now, but let him be,” John said.

  “Sure, sure,” Prime said, but it didn’t sound like he meant it.

  “Why don’t you bring your car around?” John asked John-7458.

  “Okay.”

  John helped Prime sit down on a hay bale. “You need to relax a bit.”

  “I will, I am.” He sighed. “I hate almost getting killed.”

  John put a hand on his shoulder.

  “We thought this one was going to be a simple dig and run,” John said. “And we promised Casey you’d be back safe and sound.”

  “We always make that promise.” He looked at the boxes of gold. “Well, that’s going to make your life easier, isn’t it?”

  “Yep. Yours too.” He heard the Trans-Am coming up the drive. “Let’s pile this in the car.”

  The car was noticeably lower in the back when they had finished putting the chests into the trunk.

  “Don’t drive over any bumps on the way off the island,” Prime said. “Let’s go.”

  “What about them?” John-7458 said, nodding at Amos and Russell. Russell had rolled over and was glaring at them.

  “Leave them to rot,” Prime said.

  “No.”

  John looked around the barn and found a serrated knife on a hook. He picked it up, and then tossed it into the yard.

  “You can crawl out and find that in the morning,” he said to Russell. “By then we’ll be long gone.”

  “Screw you all,” he said.

  “You tried, you failed,” Prime said.

  “Let’s go.”

  CHAPTER 11

  “Where’d you get this?” the man asked.

  “Why does that matter?” Grace asked. The man frowned and looked at the coin again through his magnifying glass. John and Grace had found Toledo Gold and Coins in the yellow pages, arriving as the owner was opening his storefront. The stockholders’ meeting with their investors was the next day.

  “I don’t deal in stolen goods,” he said.

  “If the police come looking for it, feel free to turn us in,” Grace said. “They won’t.”

  The man took a book off the shelf and flipped through it.

  “I’ll give you a thousand dollars for it,” he said.

  John laughed despite himself. He had expected to be ripped off. When Grace had consulted the yellow pages at the library, John had paged through a numismatics book. The North Carolina gold coins minted by the Bechtler Mint were exceedingly rare.

  “We know how rare it is,” he said.

  “It’s not even in a coin case,” the man said. “And I have no idea what the provenance is. I have risk that you have to pay for.”

  “By a factor of forty? These have gone for forty thousand dollars.”

  “At auction to dedicated coin collectors,” the man said. “You want that kind of money, you need to take it to auction.”

  “We don’t have the time,” Grace said. “We need a better price.”

  The man shrugged.

  “At least we can buy coin cases from him,” John said.

  The man shrugged and laid a single case in front of them.

  “Fifty cents,” he said.

  “No, we’re going to need ten thousand of them,” Grace said.

  The man’s jaw dropped open. “What did you find?”

  Grace shrugged at him.

  “Hold on, hold on,” the man said. “You have ten thousand Bechtler coins from the 1830s?”

  “About that many. We didn’t count.”

  The man typed some numbers into his calculator. “That’s hundreds of millions of dollars you have. Do you realize it?”

  “Yes, we had an inkling. Now we need to sell them for cash,” Grace said. “Can you help us or not?”

  “This might be the greatest coin discovery of the decade!” the man exclaimed. “You can’t just lug the coins into a coin store and sell them!”

  “We need the money now,” John said.

  “You need four hundred million dollars right now?” the man asked. “I don’t think so.”

  “Well, we only need about fifteen million,” Grace said.

  “We don’t have to auction them now to get that money,” he said.

  “We?”

  “Yes, you let me handle the auction at three percent, and I can help you assess the coins at a reasonable value. A bank will loan you cash on that collateral.”

  “That makes a lot of sense.”

  “We just need to establish the provenance,” the man said.

  “How do we do that?”

  “We need to show where you found the gold.”

  “We dug the coins up,” John said.

  “Where? On public land, private land? Do you own the land? Does your grandmother?”

  “It was public land,” John said.

  “Federal, state, or county?” the man asked.

  “State land,” John replied. They had decided to go with the story that they had found the gold coins as if they were lost during the Civil War in the same place on Kelleys Island in this universe as 7458.

  “Did you have a permit?”

  “Nope.”

  The man rubbed his chin.

  “We can get around that. There’s no law that requires you to have a permit on state land, unless it’s posted as you enter the area.”

  “We didn’t see anything.”

  The man had begun to sweat, and his gestures were wild and exaggerated.

  “Uh, I think we’re good,” John said. “Thanks for your time.”

  “I can help,” the man said. “I really can.”

  “No, we’re good.”

  John and Grace left the store, running back to the car.

  “He seemed a little desperate,” John said.

  “But he had a good idea,” Grace said. “We don’t need to sell them. We just need to appraise them. Then any bank can give us a loan with the coins as collateral.”

  “Who’s going to appraise the coins?”

  “I don’t know. Let’s call my guy at Ladora Savings.”

  “Who?” John asked. Ladora was the bank that Grace had set up all their business accounts through.

  “Clay Burgess,” she said. “He’s kept us going with l
ines of credit during the bad times. Maybe he’ll know what to do.”

  “Um, maybe we should cover our tracks, too,” John added. “Get Henry to buy a plot of land on Kelleys Island near the forest preserve.”

  “I see what you mean,” Grace said.

  They stopped at a pay phone and Grace called Henry.

  “He’ll call a Realtor,” Grace said. “But if anyone looks closely at the timeline…”

  “Why should it matter? We have the coins and no one can ever claim they had them first,” John said. “They never existed on that island in this universe.”

  “True, but when we’re talking about a half billion dollars, people do stupid stuff,” Grace said.

  “Wait, turn here,” John said. “There. Coin shop. It was second on the list. Let’s buy the coin holders.”

  “You mean, let’s look like we know what we’re doing?”

  “Yes.”

  Ten thousand coin holders wiped the shop owner out. He also sold them small cartons that held a hundred coin holders each. It made carrying the coins easier than lugging them around in a cardboard box. They spent two hours sliding the coins into coin holders and then the coin holders into the boxes. John’s fingers began to hurt, and he accidently dropped one of the coins into the space between his seat and the center console of his car.

  “Careful,” Grace said. “That’s forty grand down there with the bubble gum wrappers and old French fries.”

  John extended his sore fingers and managed to grab the coin.

  “Got it,” he said.

  Clay Burgess was a young man, too young it seemed to be a business banker, but he greeted Grace with a hug.

  “I still haven’t heard anything from Mr. Gilbert in Investments about the funding,” he began, but Grace shook her head.

  “We’re here on something else,” she said. “We’ve stumbled upon some coins, and want to see if we can use them as collateral for a loan.”

  “Coins?”

  “Civil War–era coins,” Grace said.

  “But you were looking for an investment of twenty to twenty-five million, weren’t you?”

  “It’s a lot of coins.”

  “That’s not my area of expertise, Grace,” Clay said. “I’ll need to talk with someone else.”

  “Of course, but as you know, we’re in a bit of a hurry. Our corporate meeting is tomorrow.”