Moonlight Water (29 page)

Red's stomach lurched.

“How much money, grand sum total?”

“At the end, when I've peddled it all, up probably close to two million. That's gross, less expenses, equipment, everything.”

“You ass.” Her voice cut like a knife. “That's the heavy equipment Damon mentioned, backhoes with bulldozer blades. Your partners are tearing the hell out of a major archeological site, destroying all the knowledge in it. A man is dead. Not a good man, but he didn't deserve a shotgun blast in the chest.”

Gianni opened his mouth, but Zahnie blocked it with a hand. “I know, you didn't kill him. And I know you wouldn't have.”

“It's cost us a fortune.”

“Back to the point. You deliberately destroyed a major site, a huge find, for pure greed.”

“Get off your high horse,” said Gianni. “What I do, the artifacts end up out in the world, and the knowledge is available to people. It's not buried under dirt by some ostrich archeologists. Who made you the policeman of what the public gets to see?”

That did it. They flew at each other like fighting cocks. The gist of the argument was 1) Zahnie blasted Gianni for preventing the archeologists from getting lots of information layered in the ground, and 2) Gianni mocked the archeological policy of excavating sites and putting everything back under dirt, out of sight.

Zahnie finished with, “You destroy public sites for money. You're scum!”

Gianni gave a theatrical shrug. “If I am,” he said, “Red is, too.”

Red blurted, “What?”

Gianni smiled with his knowledge. “You're a partner.”

“What?”

“The joint venture I said I'd put you in? Double your money in a short time?”

Lightning bolted in Red's head, and thunder shook his soul.

“We were short of capital right then, and that's where your money went.”

“You son of a bitch!”

Gianni laughed. “Hey, it was a great deal. If nobody had caught wind of it, your investment would have turned a fancy dime.”

Red launched himself at Gianni, a windmill falling on a small human being.

“No, no,” sang Winsonfred.

Gianni got inside Red's big fists, and the punches only thumped his back.

Tony pulled them apart, catching a blow on the back of the head as he shoved Red away.

Gianni was purple-faced and breathing hard.

“Idiot!” Red shouted. “You idiot!”

Now Gianni recovered his slick charm and pulled off a lopsided grin. “One comfort,” he said. “You won't make a dime off of evil. We'll both lose every penny now.”

Red fell to his hands and knees and did dry heaves.
All of it gone. Who was this man he'd trusted with his life?

“You'd
better
not make one stinking cent,” snarled Zahnie.

Red's emotional boat heaved up and down the heavy seas.

Now her voice changed to theatrical sweetness. “Gianni, you've skirted the real issue here. You are very good at creating diversions. Back to the big picture. A man has been murdered. Undoubtedly by your partners. Who are they?”

*   *   *

Gianni showed how a man can squirm without moving. His eyes wandered up and down and left to right. He met Red's gaze, no help, and then looked for a long moment at Winsonfred. Gianni muttered, “The Kravins. The dad, Travis. Wayne. And his brother, Emery.”

“No way!” Zahnie shouted.

Everyone shuddered. She looked sideways at Red. “Wayne, that bastard, he's a political dinosaur. Why the hell did you pick him?”

“We played on the basketball team together. We hung out, the only non-Mormons on the team.” Gianni paused. “The real deal is this. Travis has had a mad-on for fifty years. He figures he got done out of a big mine, the Bounty of the Lord, back during the first uranium boom, about 1955. One hundred fifty million dollars of uranium ore came out of that mine.

“He got done out of it real stinky. That's a school section, where the mine is. A school section, unlike federal land, you have to pay per-acre rent annually to the state. He and a bunch of other local boys, all Mormons but Travis, staked all the law allowed, but agreed not to file the claims with the county, so they wouldn't have to pay the rent. Nobody was to file until they got some big company interested in developing it.

“Somehow, they all got into a pissing contest, I don't know what about. When they found a developer, the nine Mormons went in and made their claims legal and put another claimant in Travis's place. They sold jointly. He was out in the cold, not a thing he could do. Except get bitter and mean. Touchy to get anywhere near that old man, and Wayne is still riding the same mean bull.”

“No shit. Shows how dumb greed will make you.” Zahnie screwed a hard look at Gianni. He gave back a lame smile.

“All right, Gianni, out with it. What are the coordinates for the site? Lucky Dog is miles of sand and slickrock.”

Gianni stared into space, weighing his options.

Ri-i-i-ng!

Tony half-ran to the desk and answered the phone. Then he held the receiver out to Zahnie. “It's Damon.”

She listened. Her face contorted in a terrible way. She hung the phone up. In a strangled voice she said, “The Kravins have got him. If the cops or anyone comes near the site, they'll kill him.”

 

35

NOW WHAT?

Don't talk about snakes. They will come around.

—Navajo saying

 

Red held Zahnie while she sobbed.

After a long time Gianni said, “I know something that may fix this. Part of it.”

Zahnie wrapped herself tighter into Red.

“I know something.”

Red mouthed,
Not yet.

They waited. Finally Zahnie pulled her head a little way up from Red's wet shirt.

“War conference,” said Gianni. “I know something.”

Zahnie shook her head no.

Winsonfred said, “Let this man redeem himself.”

Zahnie looked at her grandfather.

“Let him.”

Gianni said, “I know something important, maybe. Damon said ‘come anywhere near the site,' right?”

Zahnie nodded yes.

“They're faking you out. Old man Kravin called me today and told me they were closed out at the site and had moved everything to the mine.”

Red remembered some lie Gianni had told about the investment being a mine.

“The looted stuff needs good truck access, safe storage, weatherproof, completely secret, to let us take a couple of years to sell it for what it's really worth. The country's full of mine shafts, left over from uranium on the cranium. Kravin's using one.”

Red looked into Gianni's eyes hard.
How can we possibly trust this man?

In a meek voice Zahnie said, “Which mine?”

“He wouldn't say. That way I can't do a thing without him, just like he can't do a thing without my connections. But they're at the mine right now, packing things away very carefully in crates and storing the crates in a shaft, or a couple of shafts.”

Zahnie's shoulders shook with more sobbing. “You have no idea how many mines there are. We'll never find him. Even with an airplane we couldn't find him.”

Gianni said, “They're supposed to come back day after tomorrow and Wayne is gonna take me out there with him, show me the stuff, let me take some artifacts to start peddling. For sure he'll blindfold me, but you could track him somehow.”

Red said, “When they come back, I don't think Damon will be with them.”

Zahnie hurled her face into Red's lap.

Gianni said slowly, “I guess I think the same.”

They froze, Red, Gianni, and Winsonfred gazing at one another, Zahnie crying softly.

“I have an idea,” said Winsonfred. “The sun will be up in two or three hours. Let's get a little sleep and come back at it fresh.”

They did.

*   *   *

Zahnie and Red woke up at the same moment and with the same thought. She looked at him hard and spoke it. “Let's go find Damon.”

In ten minutes they had another war council around the coffee table, Red and Zahnie, Gianni, Tony, Clarita, and Winsonfred. “Okay,” said Zahnie, “here it is. What mine would Travis use to hide the artifacts? In this goddamn big, goddamn wild country? It has to be hard to spot, remote, and secure.”

“Good point,” said Red. He studied Gianni's face, wanting to be sure of him.

“We have to figure this quick and figure it right.” Zahnie's voice was steady, betraying none of a mother's fear.

No one spoke.

Still no one spoke. “Maybe his own mine,” Clarita said evenly.

Several voices said
“What?”
at once.

“His good claim. When Travis got cheated out of the Bounty of the Lord Mine, he located another claim he thought was great. Road to Glory, he called it. Staked it, did discovery work, bragged all over the country, made a deal to have it developed. I'm remembering now, it was in the newspaper—the Road to Glory Mine, and a contract with the Atlas Corporation. He got some advance money, which he used to buy his family a house. Travis was about to be rich.

“That was when, before any more digging got done, the AEC announced the government was over-supplied with uranium and was suspending purchases. Travis went from rich to busted in a sentence from a microphone in Washington, D.C., him and a thousand other local prospectors. But he did a lot of work at the mine first, put in some shafts or drifts.…” Her face showed how far back her mind had gone. “Travis believed in that mine. Got some advance money, but no ore came out, and he lost a lifetime of royalties.”

“Where is it?” This was Zahnie.

“No idea, dear.”

“The county courthouse will have a record!” Tony exclaimed. “The clerk records all claims.”

They grinned at one another.

“It doesn't open until Monday morning,” said Gianni.

Oh, shit.
This was early Saturday morning.

Said Red, “Damon can't wait.”

“Come on, Grandma!” urged Tony. “It's in there.” He tapped her head lightly with his finger. “Bring it out. Shake it loose.” He was her cheerleader. “Jiggle your hair!”

Clarita did.

“Harder. Shake it loose.”

Clarita stared at the ceiling, at the floor, wrung her hands, tapped her head, and did a little finger dance in her hair. She froze. She whispered, “I got something. It's somewhere in Shaughnessy.…”

Red's heart jumped up until he saw Zahnie shaking her head. Everyone waited for her bad news. “It drains into Lake Powell,” Zahnie said, “and it's huge. We'd need a week to search that place.”

They made miserable eyes at one another.

“I have an idea,” said Winsonfred.

Everyone waited.

“I'm going with you,” he warned.

“Whatever!” snapped Zahnie.

He smiled beatifically at her. “I'll ask Ed to find them for us.”

 

36

THE BIRD LEADING THE BLIND

Don't sleep while you're herding sheep. A crow will peck your eyes out.

—Navajo saying

 

They were gone in half an hour.

“This is looney tunes,” said Red. From his tone he could have been excited about this, or scared shitless, or both.

“Looniest we ever sang,” said Gianni.

“Totally insane,” said Zahnie.

“But it's the only song we've got,” said Red.

“We have no choice,” said Zahnie.

Gianni said, “Unless we just want to wring our hands. It's better than giving the Kravins all the time they want to hide the goodies—”

He stopped short. They all knew the rest, and no one wanted it said.
To kill Damon and dump his body down a shaft where not even the buzzards could get to it.

“What's that white-man saying?” asked Winsonfred. “‘Oh, ye of little faith.'”

They laughed like madmen, and no one could think why.

They had camping gear, two coolers full of ice and food, lots of water, pissant weapons, the .45 Red confiscated from Wayne and an aged double-barrel borrowed from Clarita. Red gave a wry grin inside. Was their most powerful weapon the intuition of a cheerful 103-year-old man in the backseat?

Clarita reminded them that the mine would be up toward the canyon rim, not out on the flat. The upshot of this was that they weren't driving into the canyon. They were going to check out the mesas above, as directed by Ed, yes, by Ed, find the road to it, and make a guerilla attack.

Some Scots warriors, according to Grandpa's stories, turned into berserkers. Red quietly decided that, when the time came, he would do exactly that.

Before noon they got within distant sight of what both the map and GPS said was Shaughnessy.
Anonymous Source, let that be the one with the Kravins, the loot, and Damon.

They found a small piece of shade for lunch. No one cared as much about the food as the gallon bottles of water Jolo had provided, still half-frozen.

Zahnie went back to her maps and GPS. Gianni sat off to himself. Winsonfred asked for a hand up a boulder, saying he needed to commune with Ed. He didn't say whether their two-way reception was good. Red paced, kept a wary eye on Gianni, watched the old man, and scanned the skies for buzzards. He saw dozens, but not one made wigwag signals, or whatever passed for language with Ed.

In a few minutes Winsonfred said, “Ed's found them. He's ready to go.” Zahnie took the wheel.

*   *   *

If he was really there, Ed did not flap along in front of the Bronco. Winsonfred kept his eyes mostly closed and paid hot attention to something no one else could see or hear. Red stopped watching the buzzards.
No offense, Ed, but you all look alike to me.

From time to time Winsonfred would say to Zahnie, “Over there,” or, “Toward that knob,” or, “The other side of that wash and follow it.” Once he said, “Ed is really frustrated with us. The ground is such an awkward way to travel.”