by Chuck Dixon
Lee steadied himself and looked over at a slim white body turned away from him and a tangle of bottle bleach hair atop it. She was naked, and so was he. There was a butterfly tattoo on her right shoulder.
His bladder was sending him urgent signals, and he began to ease on out on his side of the double bed. Butterfly made some noises and moved a bit and he gently raised himself to a standing position. Butterfly woke at that and turned over to pull hair from her eyes and look at him with a bleary smile. Not bad, Lee thought. Blue eyes and a pixie nose. She was smiling, so whatever happened last night agreed with her. Damned if he could remember any of it after the first tequila round.
“Bathroom,” he rumbled and snatched up his jeans. She pointed a lazy hand at a door against one wall of the room.
“Don’t take too long,” she said languidly.
He hoped that meant she needed to piss, too. He stumbled into a half bath with a john and a sink and slung his jeans on a towel rack. He leaned hands on the wall over the back of the toilet and let fly with a long, splashing, spine-quivering piss.
Over the gurgle of water, he could hear Butterfly’s voice call out but not to him. She was answering someone. A child’s voice followed hers, and Lee could tell from the timbre and tone that it was a young kid with lots of questions.
“Who’s in the bathroom?”
“Just a friend, honeybunch.”
“Uncle Beau?”
“No, it’s not Uncle Beau.”
“Uncle Fletcher?”
“Not him neither. You don’t know him.”
“Will he be my new uncle?”
“Could be. We’ll see, honeybunch.”
Oh, hell no, Lee thought and pressed his bladder to empty faster.
A third voice joined them through the thin bathroom door.
“If he’s staying for breakfast, I’m making eggs.”
An older female voice. Butterfly lived with her mom.
Oh, fuck no.
Lee was still dripping as he tore his jeans off the towel rack. He shook them and heard the reassuring jingle of his key ring. It was the work of five seconds to shimmy into them and somehow squeeze out through the tiny window of the bathroom to drop into a flowerbed crowded with weeds. Barefoot he made his way around the corner of the house to find his brand-new Raptor parked on the gravel beyond some wash hung on lines.
He heard Butterfly’s voice calling from the house. “But Mama made breakfast, baby!”
That picked up his pace, and he was in the truck and spraying gravel all over the Buzz Lightyear sheets hanging on the line. He left behind a brand-new pair of rattlesnake Larry Mahans, but that was a small price to pay.
Lee stopped at the first Walmart he came to and slipped the greeter a twenty to ignore the “no shirt, no shoes” policy just this once. He bought a new shirt, a bag of socks, a pair of Timberlines, a super-size bottle of Tylenol, a Payday bar, and two Cokes.
He was back in the Raptor finishing the second pop when one of the cells in the center console buzzed. He fumbled through the collection lying in the bin between the seats and came up with one that vibrated in his hand. He flipped it open. The caller on the tiny monitor was TIME2GO.
“You know who you’re talking to,” he said.
“This a secure phone?” Dwayne Roenbach’s voice. “Always.”
“How much do you know about gold?”
11
Salt Lake City
THEY MET AT the bar at the Hilton closest to the airport.
It was midday, and the place was mostly empty. Caroline had a salad, and Dwayne and Lee ordered ten-dollar burgers.
“This gold is from back then?” Lee said when their waitress had dropped off the plates and been shooed away.
“It was in the back of the cave they were holding me in,” Caroline said. “They had a kind of altar in there.”
“You went back there? Way back there?” Lee said. “No damn way. We went back to the site a week ago and it was still there,” Dwayne said. “In the present. The Now.”
Lee set down his beer and looked at the two of them.
“I go to all the trouble to hide your asses from the outfit that bankrolled your little experiment, and you go back to dig around right under their noses? You know better than that, Dwayne.”
“I do know better, Lee.” Dwayne’s voice was level and low. “I was a Ranger too.”
Caroline leaned over her salad to hiss to each of them. “Look, we were there. We got the stuff. No one saw us. Can we stop the pissing contest and get on with it?”
Lee took a sip from his beer. “I need hot sauce.” He got up and walked to the bar.
“Sorry about him,” Dwayne said.
“You’re just as bad. Did you guys fight Al Qaeda or each other in Iraq?” Caroline said.
“Little of both.”
“Is it because there’s a girl here?”
Dwayne grinned at her, and she grinned back. They broke it off when Lee slid back in his seat with a bottle of habanero sauce. He sprinkled it on his burger. Without a word, he offered it to Dwayne, who did the same.
“You can’t sell this stuff legally. But I know some folks,” Lee said around a bite of burger.
“You mean criminals?” Caroline said.
“I prefer to think of them as patriots,” Lee said. Caroline rolled her eyes. Lee laughed.
“You can own gold. You can sell gold. But in any kind of quantity, you have to report to state and federal agencies. They’re going to have questions, and you have no answers,” Lee said.
“That’s why we’re turning to you and your patriotic friends,” Caroline said.
“What kind of quantity are we talking about?”
“We were only able to bathroom scale weigh it, but we think it’s around a ton and a half or two tons, give or take,” Dwayne said.
Lee choked on a bite of burger. He drained his beer ,in two gulps and drew in a breath.
“Well, none of my friends are that patriotic. For that kind of weight, we’re going to have to go to actual criminals,” he said at last.
“They won’t pay the going rate, will they?” Caroline said.
“No, they won’t. The gold is off the books, which makes it hot. We’ll need to come up with some kind of story for them. Any buyers will be outside the law, but they’ll still need to know where it came from. Or at least believe they know. Purity will be an issue, too. This stuff wasn’t refined under any kind of modern conditions.”
“I think we can assume it’s as raw as it gets,” Caroline said.
“Do we move it all at once or in increments?” Dwayne said.
“Every sale is exposure. The more sales, the more times we’re exposed,” Lee said. “That’s more chances the law might become involved. And more importantly, we don’t want to be going back to the same buyer over and over. Too many opportunities for fuckery that way. I say we find one buyer and make one big sale, even if we have to sell at a deep discount.”
“I suppose that makes the most sense,” Caroline said.
“Do you have a sample I can get tested?” Lee said. Caroline took a small padded envelope from a case and slid it over the table. Lee pocketed it.
“So, do I get a piece of this? I got screwed on our last deal,” Lee said. “I’m down nine million from what I was supposed to get to go to the wayback and find the lady here.”
“Nine million, then, if you get us fifty cents on the dollar.” Caroline pushed her plate away, untouched. “And half of any more than fifty percent you can get.”
Dwayne started to object, but Caroline held up a hand.
“This is going to be a big chunk of untaxed cash,” Lee said. “What are you planning on spending it on?”
“Science,” Caroline said. Dwayne grinned.
DWAYNE AND CAROLINE had driven to the Hilton together. They stayed behind to pay the check and let Lee Hammond leave. Caroline suggested they have another round of beers.
“That’s one hell of a commission you’re lett
ing him get away with,” Dwayne said. He sprinkled salt on his beer and the head foamed up.
“Let me try that,” Caroline said, taking the shaker from his hand.
“So, why so generous with Hammond?”
“We’ll need his connections going forward.”
“Going forward?”
“Next time we have him fence for us, it will be straight commission,” Caroline said and hoisted her beer. “Hey, I like it with the salt. All my time in London and I never tried that.”
“Hold on. Next time?” Dwayne said.
12
The Book
“A TREASURE MAP?” Dwayne said.
“It’s a codex from a Greek named Praxus. The original was written two hundred years before Christ,” Caroline said.
They were in Dwayne’s truck. He was driving them on 215 back to the Residence Inn in Cottonwood.
“Codex?”
“Like a Reader’s Digest version of the original text. Praxus’ handwritten manuscript was lost when the library at Alexandria burned in 391 AD. Imagine if we used the tube to go back and visit the library before...”
“Stay on topic, Caroline.”
“Sorry. Beer makes me chatty. Anyway, Praxus was a slave aboard a ship, a Phoenician ship, that turned pirate. They raided shipping in the Aegean Sea. Praxus was sold to a Syrian merchant then eventually freed. He wrote the story of his time as a captive of the pirates.”
“We’re talking buried treasure?” Dwayne said. “Well, hidden anyway. People have tried to find it for years. The codex identifies the island as Nisos Anaxos in the Cyclades chain. According to Praxus, the Phoenicians hid a fortune in coins, gold plate and jewels somewhere on the island. They were heading into Rhodes pretending to be legitimate traders and didn’t want the Greeks finding their hold full of stolen goodies.”
“This treasure is famous?”
“Oh yeah. The locals still talk about it. Treasure hunters show up all the time. The Greek government had to ban digging on their beaches. You can only use a metal detector these days.”
“And no one’s turned anything up in all these years?”
“Nope.” Caroline shook her head.
“How many miles of beach are we talking?” Dwayne liked the way her blonde hair belled out when she shook her head.
“Twenty? Maybe more?”
“So, why would we have any more luck?”
Caroline turned and smiled at him. The galaxy of freckles across her nose wrinkled.
“Because we can go watch the Phoenicians hide it.”
BACK AT THE Inn, Caroline laid out maps on a table and had the text of the codex of Praxus’ odyssey pulled up on a laptop. She was talking a mile a minute. Morris made a pot of strong coffee in the kitchenette. Dwayne popped a fresh beer. He had a feeling he’d need it.
“It’s an Oxford translation, but I’ve compared it to the original Greek and uncovered some useful details I think they missed in their interpretation,” she said as she smoothed the topographic map of the Cyclades on the tabletop.
“You read ancient Greek?” Dwayne said. “Caroline is that species worse than a scholar. She’s a hobbyist,” Morris said.
“So, you can you speak it?” Dwayne said.
“It’s not a phonetic language, silly. But I can probably manage with some practice.” Caroline laughed at that, but Dwayne couldn’t see the joke.
“Okay, I get that this guy was there when they buried the treasure. I get that, theoretically only, we could go back and watch these pirates bury it in The Then and then go dig it up in The Now. But it’s a question of when, right?” Dwayne took a pull on his Coors.
“But we know when.” Caroline accepted a steaming mug of black coffee from her brother. “Or we know damned close when.”
“Was this Prixus’ day planner you found?”
“Praxus, you, big dope. No, they weren’t really into dates back then. Even if he wrote one down, it would be useless to us now. They were centuries away from the Julian calendar. But something Praxus writes about gives us the year and month to a certitude.” That last word came out “sertytood” and she giggled again. Two beers were her limit.
“Halley’s Comet,” Morris inserted, and earned a swat, on the back of the head from his sister.
“Spoiler!” she snarled, then recovered herself. “Praxus writes about what he calls a ‘wild star’ crossing the heavens. His description of its appearance and path confirm it as Halley’s. It, kind of freaked him out, but he says that the sailors with him knew about it from their elders. Phoenicians were amazing astronomers. They had to be. They were practically the only ancient people who dared to sail from the sight of land. They knew their stars.”
“How close could we get?” Dwayne said.
“May, 240 BC. That’s as close as I can pinpoint it. But that’s damned good, right?”
“So, a thirty-day watch at the outside,” Dwayne said.
“A month at the beach!” Caroline said and shrugged grandly.
“Can we stop the blue skying and consider some harder questions? For example, why do we want to do this?” Morris said.
“Buried treasure, big bro!”
“We have a treasure, Carrie.” Morris only called her that when he was annoyed with her.
“You can’t have enough treasure,” she said, peeved.
“I have to side with her,” Dwayne said. “She’s talking bullshit right now but sometimes bullshit covers the truth.”
“Is that some kind of redneck wisdom?” Morris said.
“Well, it’s something my dad used to say a lot, so I guess it is. The truth is, we’re sitting on a crapload of gold and soon a crapload of tax-free cash. If it was all free and clear, we’d be cool. But we have this Sir Neal character on our ass, and I don’t think he’s going to forget about us. Being on the run from the law eats up money. On the run from a guy with enough juice to ignore the law. That gets real expensive real fast.”
“Besides, Mo,” Caroline put in. “I put the idea in your head. I gave you a problem to solve. You’ll never get a good night’s sleep until you’ve nailed that down.”
“I’m going to bed, and I’m going to sleep like a baby,” Morris said.
Caroline made a motorboat sound with her lips.
Morris exited his room the next morning with red-rimmed eyes. Caroline sat at the table with a black coffee and a bottle of aspirin. He sat down across from her and took a long sip from her mug.
“I have a few ideas,” he said.
13
Big Don
SOME DAYS YOU can’t give gold away.
Lee Hammond sat in the paneled office turning the pages of a golf magazine and pretending to read it. Who’d waste a good day playing a game that 99.999% of the players sucked at? And who’d want to read a magazine about it?
The receptionist spoke to him through a speaker from behind the glass of her little cubby.
“I’ll buzz you in,” she drawled. A harsh buzzer sounded, and Lee trotted to the door set next to the secretarium and yanked it open. The buzzing stopped abruptly, and Lee entered the frigid air of a large office room packed with ranks of empty desks. Big Don Brinkley maneuvered through the desks with a big grin on his face and eyes invisible behind tinted glasses.
“What can I do you for, Lee?” Big Don thought that brand of white-shoes-salesman shit was charming.
“This needs to be between you and me,” Lee said. “Oh. Hush-hush. Always-Secretive Lee.
Follow me to my bear-cave, okay?” Don led Lee toward the back wall through the maze of desks.
“Everyone at lunch?”
“Huh?” Big Don said. “Oh, the fucking economy. Had to let some people go. You know how it is.”
Lee did not know how it was. Big Don was into Florida real estate, car dealerships, highway contracting, and cruise ships, and all those businesses covered Don’s real enterprise, money laundering. The economy may have sent his office people home on unemployment, but Don always had plenty of gr
een around somewhere.
They settled into Big Don’s office. It was a modest little room with one wall lined with padlocked filing cabinets, a big old steel desk, and a minifridge. The only attempt at decoration was a signed poster of Warren Sapp framed on one wall. Lee knew from past association that there was a minimum of six loaded handguns within Big Don’s reach from the seat behind that desk.
Without asking, Big Don pulled a cold Bud from the fridge and tossed it to Lee, who caught it with the practiced ease of a man who fully expected the gesture.
They settled in and shot the shit for a while about “back in the day” which was six years ago when Lee worked security for Big Don on one of the cruise-ships he had an interest in. The line was being sued by a passenger claiming she was raped by one of the waiters. The DNA from the rape kit taken in Barbados was a match for a staff member, and that was enough proof for Big Don. He paid Lee a wad of under-the-table to make the little greaseball the latest mysterious victim of the Bermuda Triangle. Big Don settled out of court with the woman, and the whole thing just went away.
“So, what is it you can’t talk on the phone about?” Big Don said and tossed a second Bud his way.
Lee took the padded envelope from his jacket pocket and slid it to Big Don, who dumped a dull metal lump from it to the desktop. He weighed it in his hand.
“Heavy.”
“Gold usually is.”
“It’s more yellow than gold.”
“It’s raw, Don.”
“My less-than-educated guess is that this is like ten karats goods.”
Don held it between his fingers and squinted at it like he knew what he was looking at.
“I know better than to ask where it came from. Can I keep this a while? I need to have it looked at.”
“It’s yours to keep. Test it. Grade it. Tell me what it’s worth, troy ounce.”
