“Hundreds? Surface?”
“Okay, imagine a tube that starts way down beneath the mantle. You know what that is?”
“Yeah, the crust thingy.”
“No, the mantle’s beneath the crust. The crust floats on it. It’s all magma. Anyway, sometimes it’ll throw up these fissures through the crust like a pipe and when the magma cools it becomes rock. Sometimes the conditions are just so and you get rhyolite deposits which sometimes means you get diamonds. I found rhyolite and kept going. Further into this cavern I found there was another rhyolite pipe and it was capped with diamonds like this one, all fused together. I’ve never seen, or even read about anything like this.”
Erica brought her mug up to her lips. Her hand was shaking and she forgot to drink. “How much do you think is down there?”
Amy leaned forward. The muscles in her shoulders made her tattoos swell and roll. “If it’s just the cap, we’re talking hundreds of millions, maybe into the billions with almost no removal cost. Shit, I used some rope and a goddamn hammer to get that one.”
“If it’s not just the cap?”
Amy sat back now; she had her. “If that deposit actually reaches down into the pipe, or other formations exist under the mine, there could be tens of billions. It could easily be the richest diamond deposit in the world.” She sipped her coffee for effect. “It’s all in the mine.”
“What are you going to do?”
“Not me, we.”
“What do you need me for?”
Amy took a breath. Saying it out loud was another thing all together. “I need you to help me steal it. All of it.”
“What?”
“I want to own the mining rights for Shard. That’s the only way to get at the heart of that mine’s potential, but I can’t legally file a claim because I’m under contract to Blackstone. You could, though.”
“I can’t see how that would work, Amy. My firm’s under contractual obligation to Blackstone Mineral. I’m here for my firm.”
“No you’re not.” Amy cut her off. “You’re here on vacation. You said so yourself at dinner. They didn’t send you here. You came on your own time to make points so you could further your career working for a bunch of fat, old white guys.”
“So, you’re thinking that technically I could make this discovery and lay a claim. You’d be what, a shadow partner?”
“Yes,” She didn’t wait for Erica to question further. “Here’s how’d we do it: I file false reports to Blackstone. The mine’s played out. What’s left is small potatoes and slag. Not worth the money, time and manpower to strip out. The fire makes the whole thing just too complicated.”
“They’ll buy that?”
“Sure. Most geological investigations come up bust. That’s why they send in the experts first,” she thumbed her chest, “to make sure they’re not just pissing up a tree. Blackstone doesn’t actually own this mine yet, they’ve just filed a ‘claim of interest’ at this point, but they’ll yank that as soon as they read my report. It costs money just to have one of those temporary claims.”
Erica sat forward a little on her chair. “So then what?”
“Right, so I file the report. They tell me to pull stakes and send me on another assignment. But on the way, I disappear. I’ll pull onto some country road somewhere, torch the rig and walk away. Young women go missing every day in this country and since I’m not a six year-old blonde girl, I probably won’t even make the news.”
“Meanwhile,” Erica jumped in. “I just happen to stumble upon this huge discovery and discreetly file a claim. We pull out the stuff on the cap?” Amy nodded. “And use the money from that to finance the rest of the operation. Once things get big enough to bring in outsiders, you go back into the shadows.” Erica stopped and put her hand on her chest.
“You okay?”
She smiled and fluttered her hand a little. “Yeah, I’m just breathing really fast.” Erica reached for the stone again. She held it close, almost cradling it. A million dollars right there in her hands and billions under her feet. She could not only retire, she could become one of the most influential people on the planet with that kind of money. She could work as little or as much as she liked. She could have a family of her own. She could continue to practice law pro-bono back in the old neighborhood. With that kind of money, she could do anything she wanted. She had no illusions about what money could and couldn’t buy. Love, no. Time and freedom, yes. The stone weighed against her lap and began to take heat from her body. Erica realized with a little embarrassment that she was becoming flushed, as her mother called it, down there.
She looked at Amy. “Let’s do it.”
Chapter 24
Will pressed play on the old CD player boom box he kept in the office. Johnny Cash wafted over his desk and down the hall, between the bars of George Rhodes’s (former) Weekend Retreat, filling every nook and cranny with a balance of grit and remorse. Will opened an old standing closet but instead of clothes he found heavy wire mesh locking away a rack of high-powered rifles. There was a single twelve-gauge pump shotgun and below that, an insectile M16. Will grabbed a little cleaning kit and the M16.
He lay the rifle out on his desk and just looked at it a minute. It was a simple design, rugged and vastly improved upon since the days in Vietnam when it made its debut. Back then, this kind of rifle was as likely to jam in a firefight as shoot, but Tommy Ward had bequeathed this one to Will just last year with the promise that it was “fresh out the fac-tree”. Four things to remember: 1. Slap in a clip. 2. Pull the bolt. 3. Click off the safety. 4. Pull the trigger. If the selector switch was in single fire, it meant one bullet for each trigger pull. If it was in auto-fire mode, you just held that sucker down and rocked out at about 13 rounds per second. The rounds themselves were a measly .223 caliber—not much more than a pellet gun—but there was a good two inches of powder behind each slug, so it packed a serious wallop. The barrel didn’t come with the usual rifling, so when the slug left the gun it tumbled. When a tumbling slug hits a body it has a tendency to boogey around inside awhile before coming to a halt. Get shot with an M16 in the shoulder, there’s a chance it’ll blow your foot off and make wet confetti out of everything in between.
And he was going to give it to the town drunk.
Will sat down with a squeak and rubbed his face with his hands. He really didn’t have much of a choice here. George needed to be armed. Something was coming. Shit, something was already here. Just because Will hadn’t seen anything first hand, didn’t mean it wasn’t so. Cyrus had gone nuts, old Missus Najarian was missing and his truck was parked out back of her place, and everyone up by the Owens’s place was gone, too. All that aside, he just wanted someone next to him that he could trust, someone with a big old fucking gun. Will reached forward and started to disassemble the rifle.
His thoughts roamed the situation as his hands roamed over metal. He checked the weapon, it was clear and unloaded. The simplest weapon to use would have been Smaug, but George wasn’t strong enough for the recoil. The first time Will had fired it, the big pistol had exploded like a bomb and kicked back so hard he smacked himself in the head with it. He’d had a long, straight line of purple skin on his forehead for a week after that. (George had called him “Chief Stripy Head”.) Will pulled the pins holding the M16’s upper and lower receiver, yanked the charging handle and set it aside. While he wiped the receiver with an old rag, he considered the shotgun for George. He had experience with that type of gun, hunting with his mama when he was a kid, but it had been years and you had to work the pump, racking in a new shell every time you wanted to fire. It looked all easy in movies, but it wasn’t fast enough for Will’s taste. The M16 really was the best option. Will reached into the trigger mechanism with a cotton swab and smirked—besides, George would have more fun with the machine gun. Who wouldn’t?
* * *
The slag heap was like the surface of an alien planet: a small maze of moraines made up of solidified coal slurry and trash r
ock at the base of the mountain on the other side of town. Of the few residents left to Shard, almost no one ever came here. Not even the weeds had much chance of taking hold in the ruined ground. What wasn’t destroyed over top was burning underneath. The fire had split the skin of the earth in a hundred crazy cracks, steam seeped skyward. The entire place was a good ten degrees warmer than the surrounding area. Still Will caught George shivering every now and again.
It had been a good three days since George quite cold turkey and he looked much better. The color had begun to flush his cheeks and his face was starting to fill out again. Will knew enough about addiction not to expect it to be a lasting phenomenon, but hoped. George hefted the M16 like he was going to shoot pool with it. “Now, it’s the little end that I point toward the bad people, right?”
“Shut up, George. I’m uncomfortable enough even showing this weapon to you, let alone teaching you how to use it.”
George blew a kiss at his friend, but got his attitude on straight. He was just a little cranky and even when he was in the best of moods it was always fun to yank Will’s chain. “Sorry, Constable. Okay, what do I do?”
Will took a breath. “Right. So, first pick your target. Start with something easy.” He scanned the rock pile walling them in to the north. “See that reddish rock yonder? One looks like a triangle?”
“Come with me under the shadow of that red rock,” George muttered.
“What?”
“Nothing, you just reminded me of what we’re doing is all,” George said. “I see the one you mean, go ‘head.”
“Line the rear site up with the front site and flick off the safety, but don’t look at the rifle while you’re doing it. I want to make sure you can hit that switch and the fire selector without needing to look.”
“I do know how to aim a rifle, Two-Bears.”
Will held up his hands. “All right, all right. You go ahead and take a shot then.”
George found his target, hunted around with his index finger a few seconds and flicked off the safety. He took a deep breath and held it. TA-TOK! TA-TOK! TA-TOK! The M16 came to life in George’s hands like an angry animal, spitting and smashing into his shoulder. It tried to squirm out of his grip with every ejected shell casing. A trail of little impact craters and dust puffed up and to the right from the rock he was supposed to hit. He let go of the trigger a second after pulling it, but already half the clip was spent. For a moment, he just stood in the ringing quiet, the echoes of gunfire crashing off the hills and silencing the birds.
“You doing all right there, Rambo?”
“You could have warned me.”
“Oh, I’m sorry,” said Will. “I thought you said you knew how to handle a rifle.”
“Maybe not quite so much.”
“Maybe not. Now, you wanna few pointers?”
“That would be nice, thank you, Sheriff.”
They spent the rest of the morning and well into the afternoon blowing the slag pile to hell and scaring away even the mosquitoes. When they were through, George had learned to pluck the corners off his targets at a hundred feet and score direct hits at a hundred yards lying on his belly. He’d got the knack of countering the kickback and the M16’s tendency to want to spin around and take his face off. Most of a crate of ammunition was empty and he had the distinct impression that by this time tomorrow his shoulder would be a gorgeous mosaic of color. But he was decent with the machine gun.
George took one last shot at piece of mica that had eluded him all day and finally sent that little fucker to hell. He made the gun safe and popped the clip. It was empty anyway. Will was packing up their lunch cooler and collecting shell casings. “Will?”
Will kept his eyes on the ground. You got a discount on ammunition when you returned enough of the things. “Uh-huh?”
“You feel like you can trust me with this thing?”
“You did great, Georgie. I wouldn’t say you’re ready for SWAT or anything, but you handle that sucker pretty good.”
“I mean, you think I could take this home with me?” George was thinking of Erica’s story about Cyrus and of that face in the kitchen window.
“That was always the point, man.”
George didn’t say anything for a while as Will scouted around for any missed casings. “Will?”
Now, he looked up. “Yeah?”
“I’m not sure I could kill a person.”
Will laughed. George wasn’t sure he liked the sound of it—too much pressure behind that valve. “Oh, I’m pretty sure you’re not going to have to kill any people, Georgie.”
“Really?”
“Yeah, really.” Because I don’t think we’re going up against humans.
Will straightened up and grabbed a handle of the cooler. George grabbed the other side and they walked back toward the Will’s Jeep. A crow called. Life was already flowing back into the absence created by the thunder of guns.
* * *
When will got back to his office, the message light was flashing on his machine. (Cellular phones were little more than bulky pocket clocks back in the hollows of eastern Kentucky. The mountains just inhaled the signal and never gave it back.) He thumbed the “play” button and got the County Sheriff’s scratchy voice. Tommy Ward always sounded like he was just this side of quitting, but everyone knew he couldn’t leave that job. After all this time, no one else in the county would run against him. “Will, ah, this is Tom Ward. Can you call me when you get this? I need some extra hands.”
Will dialed the county seat. “Hi, Marlene, it’s Will McFarlan down in Shard. Can you find the Sheriff for me? Yeah, I’ll hold her.” A couple of dry minutes passed and a voice came on the line. The quality wasn’t great. Sounded like a patch-through from a car radio. “Will?”
“How do, Tommy?”
“Fine, fine. How’s your little slice of heaven? Your house pitch into a sink hole yet?”
“The house is fine. The jail slid into a pit the other day. I’m actually callin’ you from underground right now.”
“Cute, Will.” He paused a second. “Listen, we got ourselves a situation up in Roanneville’s gonna require some extra hands. Can you tear yourself away?”
Roanneville was at the very northern tip of the county and a good hour and a half through the back country, but it was a respectable town in terms of population. They even had a Wal-Mart. “’Course, Tom. What’s going on?”
“Illegals. We been monitoring a good-size operation for about three months now. The coyote’s a local boy name of Howard Kent. He’s got a contracting business, drywall and such.”
“He ain’t running illegals for that, though.”
“Naw, but it’s my guess he started out that way. Probably, picked up one or two of ‘em every so often on a job and picked up a little Español to boot.”
“Got to talkin’ with his new compadres about how they got to the states and figured he could turn the same trick?”
“Exactly.” Tommy yawned. “Anyways, he’s been stepping up his little operation. We got him going and coming with this big ole’ cargo van he uses at least three times in the last month alone. Now, usually he takes them right to the job site and best we can tell that’s ‘cross state lines into West Virginia.”
“Usually?”
“He’s been holdin’ ‘em in the Super 8 in Roanneville. We got a tip from the Chamber maid that there was, and I quote,” Tommy threw on a crackling hill country drawl that made Will’s eyes want to water, “a room stuffed so full a’ beaners you can smell the cologne and hair grease from the lobby.”
“Nice.” Will shook his head. “Why’s he holding them like that do you think?”
“Probably some kinda contract job in Pike County or even over the line into Beckley if there’s enough of them. Maybe’s he had to get a couple of loads for this one.”
“Tommy,” Will said. “Ain’t this something for the Staties?”
The Sheriff chuckled. Will could imagine him brushing crumbs from his belly ont
o the floor of his prowl car. “Well Constable, it will be something for the State Police to be sure, but not until after we’ve made the bust. They can have the whole mess then when it’s all over but the paper work. You see, it’ll all have happened so fast there just wasn’t time to call them in.”
“You just stumbled upon all this from an anonymous tip.”
“Right.”
“And there hasn’t been any continuous surveillance over the past few months.”
“Exactamundo.”
Will shook his head some more. “Okay, Tom. When do you need me up there?”
“You got anything needs tending to in Shard?”
Will paused. “Nothing immediate.”
“All right, then. We’re set to pop in two hours. That give you enough time to get up to Roannville? I got four other cars all scattered on the back roads around town so we won’t clump up and get seen by no one. So, let’s say you and me’ll get together at the shopping center on Route 40.”
“That works.”
“Hot damn, Will. See you in two.” Tommy hung up.
Will put the phone down and took a deep breath. Welcome to the shit-kicker jamboree. Yee—as they say—haw.
* * *
The big Indian Chief rumbled through the hills toward Roanneville. The air outside of Shard was sweet and cleaned the sulfur out of Will’s sinuses. Every time he left town he marveled at the difference. It was amazing what you could get used to. The road hugged a creek for almost half the trip to Roanneville. Every so often Will took his eyes off the road to take in the sparkles from the water. It was dumb to look at anything but the road in front of you when you were riding a motorcycle—too many deer just wander out, loud pipes or not—but he was hoping he’d catch sight of a great blue heron. Besides, the sun on that laughing water as it rolled over jade-colored rocks was too gorgeous not to look. Oh! And there was his heron—tall as his chest and waiting, a patient, lethal stick until some fish or frog got in range.
He wanted to smile but this job was giving him an ugly feeling. Maybe that was why he wanted to be distracted from the road by the pretty creek. Anything to keep his mind off what he was about to do. It wasn’t busting Howard Kent that bothered him. Coyotes were often as not sub-human trash making their living on the desperation of others. He’d heard stories of rape and murder in the desert. If you didn’t pay the price the Coyote wanted, it was just as easy to take it out of your flesh as it was your life savings. And who the fuck cares about a bunch of wet backs, right?