Big Maria (15 page)

“I
think I got something.” Harry stood up and stretched his back. The muted cracking sounded like a string of firecrackers immersed in jelly. He didn’t appear excited, but it could have been exhaustion.

It was almost dawn. Harry had worked for hours without a break. Frank and Ricky had grabbed some shut-eye in shifts on Harry’s torture device of a couch. Between the sofa springs that attacked the kidneys like prison shivs and the events of the day, neither of them could remember if they had dreamed. But if they had dreamed, they were sure they had dreamed about gold.

Harry spread a map across the dining room table. He had drawn some lines in pen and circled a few areas. Frank wiped sleep from his eyes and joined him. Ricky poured fresh coffee.

“The man kept decent records. He wasn’t worried about anyone seeing this. Wasn’t in code, pretty straightforward. He had to be able to return to the mine, so he needed a visual map, as well as a regular map. Some of the landmarks will be gone or changed, but between the map and his notes, I think I’ve got a toehold into finding the Big Maria Mine.”

“Show us,” Frank said.

“I’ve still got a ton of papers to go through, so I’m a ways from the exact location. I’ve definitely narrowed it down to this area of the Chocolate Mountains.” Harry drew a circle with his finger over an area of mountainous terrain in Arizona to the east of the Colorado River.

“I thought the Chocolate Mountains were a gunnery range,” Ricky said, vaguely remembering when they had first searched online. A million years ago when he had a life and a family.

“You’re the one that told me there’s two Chocolate Mountains. The California Chocolates are a gunnery range. There’s gold and mines there, too.” Harry pointed to a spot on the map far to the west near the Salton Sea. “The Big Maria Mine is in the Arizona Chocolates.” He pointed back to the circle he had drawn on the map.

“That’s a lot of chocolate. Almost the length of the Cal/Arizona border,” Frank said.

Ricky laughed. “But at least it’s not in the middle of an artillery range.”

“Yeah, that’s the bad news,” Harry said.

“What now?” Frank asked.

“The Arizona Chocolates are a gunnery range, too. Or to be more precise, gunnery
ranges
.” Harry reached for another map and spread it out on top. “From here to here. And here to here. That whole area is US Army land. That’s the Yuma Proving Ground.”

“Proving Ground? What are they trying to prove?” Ricky said.

“That they can blow shit up.”

H
arry dug through a stack of library books. He was back to drinking beer, having knocked back three in fifteen minutes. “The reason nobody has found that mine is because it’s in the middle of a war zone. It sounds like I’m making this up, but I’m underselling the place. You name it, this is where the Army shoots it, explodes it, or throws it out of a helicopter.”

Harry pulled out a book and flipped through the pages rapidly.

Frank said, “Okay. They train out there, but not all the time and not in every place.”

Harry held up his hand, having found what he was looking for. He read out loud, adding a few of his own personal footnotes. “The Yuma Proving Ground in the Sonoran Desert of Arizona, established in 1943 by the US Army, is one of the largest military installations in the world. In the whole world. At thirteen hundred square miles, it is roughly the size of Rhode Island—of course it is—with multiple variations in terrain. Blah, blah, blah. More history. General whoever. Important training facility. Where is it? This book is a little old and the numbers’ll be off, but...Here it is. Get prepared to softly say, ‘Holy mother of God,’ to yourself.

“With a number of active ranges, over four hundred thousand artillery rounds are fired in any given year. Four hundred thousand. That’s more than a thousand a day. An average of one hundred parachute drops a day. I’ll repeat, a day. In one day! Thousands of air sorties. I don’t even know what a sortie is. Blah, blah, blah. We are screwed.

“Read it yourself. It’s like an arsenal for a 1980s action movie. They have minefields, tank courses, artillery ranges, mortar ranges, missile ranges. Missiles. A helicopter range for the choppers to shoot at stuff, including something called the Brimstone missile, which you know kills the hell out of a thing, and I’m thinking with fire. They have a road course running through the mountains for all sorts of badass military vehicles. Do you know what a howitzer is? They’re like huge cannons. They got a bunch of those.”

Frank tried to bring the tone back toward optimism. “They’ve got to take time off. Might not be nowhere near the mine.”

“Do you read the newspaper? In the last twenty years, we seem to only be fighting in countries that have a lot of desert and
mountains and deserty mountains. It’s a popular place. And not just for the Army. For the whole world. Sure, the Army’s there—but get this—other countries train there as well. Japs, Germans, Canadians, even the Swedes. And who the holy hell are the Swedes fighting?

“For all my faults, I’ve never been a man that swore.” Harry’s voice rose. “But our motherfucking gold mine is smack-fucking-dab in the middle of the biggest fucking military jumble-fuck that the fucking free world has ever fucking seen. And also, motherfucker.”

Harry got up and paced.

“We get it. What does that mean?” Ricky said.

Frank smiled. “It means we’re probably going to die trying to get that gold.”

Harry turned to him. “You heard what I said, yeah? And you still want to go?”

“So it’s garbage news. A little piss in the picnic basket. But we’re here. We got this far. We’ve held gold in our hands. We can’t turn back. We’re in this. Why pretend? It might take a day or a week or goddamn months, but we’re going to eventually decide to find that mine. Even if it kills us.”

“Easy for you to say, Frank,” Harry said. “You’re dying already. No offense.”

Frank gave Harry a hard stare. “Give me a straight answer. You going to forget the gold and go back to your life? Go back to working your shit job at the prison? Are you, Shitburger?”

Harry looked at the trailer around him, walked to the fridge, and took out another beer.

“I hate that name,” Harry said, “But that’s who I am if I settle for this life. Let’s find that mine or die trying. I’m all in.”

Frank turned. “Ricky?”

Ricky nodded. “Crazy old man. You go through the trouble to save me from killing myself just to find a whole new way for me to kill myself.”

“Things happen whatever way they want to,” Frank said.

“They happen for a reason,” Ricky said. “Of course I’m in.” Reaching for his cup of dirty water to raise for a toast, Ricky knocked over the cup full of teeth. They spilled over the table and around the gold ingot. They didn’t make a pattern and it didn’t seem like an omen, but they all stared at the teeth before lifting their drinks.

Frank made the toast. “To Abraham Constance. He may have been a murderous son of a bitch, probably rotting in hell, but without him we’d never have gotten this far.”

They touched glasses and drank.

Ricky said, “Don’t forget to bury his head.”

I
f Harry was going to do something stupid, he was damn sure going to be smart about it.

That’s why he was sitting in a booth across from Cooker Hobson at a Denny’s in Winterhaven, California. As his name would suggest, Cooker cooked. He possessed fairly well-regarded recipes for both baby back ribs and snickerdoodles. His Triple-Layer Carrot-Rhubarb Pie had won first prize at the Carrot Festival in Holtville. Cooker could cook just about anything. But mostly, he cooked methamphetamine.

Harry had met Cooker at Chuckawalla when Harry was a guard and Cooker an inmate. Their mutual hatred for another guard, “Kirch” Kirchenbauer, gave them a jumping-off point to at least a conversational acquaintanceship. Sometimes all it took was a real douche bag to create peace between two less vehement enemies.

Cooker had been clean—or at least uncaught—for a couple of years. He worked short order at the Denny’s. In the last year, Harry and Cooker had bumped into each other a few times. Never more than a nod of recognition, but Harry felt okay approaching him. As guards went, he was well liked at Chuckawalla, generous with his porn stash, and always willing to look the other way for a reasonable price.

“Why am I sitting here?” Cooker asked. He hadn’t bothered to take off the hairnet that held his ponytailed, graying hair. His handlebar mustache dripped with coffee. It made him look like a walrus coming out of brown water. The world’s smallest
walrus. Cooker wasn’t an inch over five feet, and aside from a volleyball-shaped potbelly, he was skin and bones.

“I need some information.”

Cooker gave a look over his shoulder. The restaurant was close to empty.

“You starting a lab? It’s a solid investment, Shits. I can help you there, but I got to earn. Mind you, I can’t help in person, and you’ll want to be careful. I got a book I self-published. It’s available on Amazon, both in paperback and Kindle. Everything you need, all the tricks of the trade. Safety tips. Equipment checklists. It’s organized good as shit.”

“I’m not starting a damn meth lab, Cooker,” Harry said, too loud.

Cooker looked slightly offended. “Easy, Shits. Ain’t got to act all surprised. That’s what I do.”

“I’m not starting a meth lab,” Harry repeated evenly.

“Then why the fuck we talking? Lunch crowd’ll be here soon. You best hurry this reunion along.”

“You were in the Army, right? I remember you talking about it.”

“I served.”

“You were stationed in Yuma?”

“Few months. Not long. Trained there before Iraq. The first Iraq. The righteous one. Desert Storm, motherfucker.”

“I need to know about the Proving Ground. Mostly the terrain. As much as you can remember.”

“Why you want to know?”

Harry ignored the question. “First, I need to know where the best trails are to reach—”

Cooker interrupted, leaning over the table between them. “I didn’t ask
what
you want to know. Only one kind of fucker wants to know what the inside of a military installation looks like. That’s a terrorist fucker, motherfucker.”

Harry started to laugh and then realized that Cooker was serious. “No, no, no. Back it up.”

“You see this?” Cooker said, rolling up the sleeve of his shirt. His skin was blue with tattoos, overlapping three deep in places. But one tattoo stayed pristine on the meat of his forearm. It was a shield or coat of arms with a cannon and a horse on it, a faded yellowish orange. “Second Cavalry. Wolfpack.”

Harry didn’t know what to say, so he nodded.

“I may be the fuck-up of all fuck-ups. Cooked fatch. Sold it. Been busted. Shit, maybe even killed a couple fuckers. Not much of a crime if they ain’t missed. But I’m a goddamn American. And if you’re planning any un-American horseshit, any squirrelly Ay-rab horseshit, then you’re fingering the wrong hole.”

Harry sat back in the booth holding up his hands. “I’m not a terrorist. It’s nothing like that. I love my country. I have a good reason. Just can’t tell you.”

“You can’t tell me? Then I can’t tell you jack shit. Maybe I’ll even call Homeland, see what they think about your unpatriotical Commie questions.”

“What could a terrorist do in the middle of them mountains anyway?” Harry realized he was raising his voice. He brought it back down. “The Proving Ground ain’t nothing but a place the Army uses to blow stuff up. What am I going to do? Explode something that’s already exploded? Or explode it before it explodes?”

“That shit don’t explode on its own. You could steal something. They got missiles, bombs, all sorts of death out there.”

“That’s ridiculous.”

“You don’t tell it straight, I’m making some government calls. I’m on parole. I need to be talking to a dumbfuck terrorist like I need a second asshole.”

“Bird-watching,” Harry said.

“What?”

“
Colaptes chrysoides
. The gilded flicker.”

“Speak fucking English. You talk more of that foreign shit, I’m going to think you’re talking terrorist.”

“It’s a bird. The gilded flicker is a bird, and the only place that that bird lives is in the Chocolate Mountains. Not near the river. Deep in the mountains.”

“And you want to the jump the fence into the Proving Ground to...?”

“To watch it. To see it. To take pictures of it.”

Cooker scooted to the edge of the booth. “You are full of some serious shit.”

“I’ll give you a hundred dollars,” Harry said, reaching for his wallet.

Cooker stopped, turning back to Harry. “A fucking bird?”

“It’s the truth.”

“You know there are minefields and artillery, on top of the heat and the mountains and the rattlers, right? You want to go through all that shit to take a picture of a bird?”

“Not any bird. The gilded flicker.”

“Whatever the fuck.”

“It’s what any dedicated bird-watcher would do. I can’t explain, but I need to see it before I die.”

“You sneak into the Proving Ground, probably get your wish.”

“Not if you tell me what you know.” Harry pulled out his map and spread it over the table. “What’s the safest way to get to here? That’s the best spot for the flicker. Their nesting canyon.”

“And you’re sure you’re not a terrorist? I ain’t going to give you directions, then in a couple of months, I turn on the TV and there’s a picture of a smoking building and your ugly puss.”

“I love birds.”

Cooker thought about it for a while. “Fuck that. There’s another angle.”

They sat in silence for a full minute, Cooker waiting Harry out. Harry finally broke the silence. “Nobody has taken a picture of it in thirty-two years.”

Cooker smiled, finally satisfied. “There it is. And you’re going to be the guy to get the—what-do-you-call-it—the exclusive. Someone’s paying for the bird picture, right? Paying real money.
National Geographic
–type shit?”

“Let’s just say my bird hobby is about to pay off.”

“How much? Must be a lot.”

“Enough.”