Too Much Stuff (22 page)

“We’ll observe.” James stepped back.

Plugging in the earpiece, I slowly swept the detector back and forth as I walked on the outside of the cemetery. Occasionally there would be a minor increase in the hum of the machine and I could see the needle move a little on the meter, but there was nothing that got my attention. Of course, I knew absolutely nothing about the subtleties of the JW Fishers Pulse 8K metal detector. Maybe I was passing over silver earrings or gold necklaces. You couldn’t dig every time an increase in the volume occurred.

“Nothing too surprising here.”

“Sweep the cemetery, Skip.” Em was standing with James, the two of them watching my face for a reaction. Well, they couldn’t hear the fire engine siren, so they had to rely on my face.

Slowly, sweeping inside the picket fence now, over caskets and bodies that lay rotting under this gray-white sand. And there was the rise in volume, where the siren sound got louder then dropped back to normal. Not having a clue about corpses, I assumed that a rusty old belt buckle or a pair of wire-frame glasses was giving off a signal. Maybe some brass buttons on a gentlemen’s coat.

“Metal handles on some of those coffins?” I heard Em as she watched my face.

As it got darker, I worked toward the center, sweeping as my compatriots stood on the sideline.

Side to side, front to back I swept the wand. The ebb and the flow in my earpiece kept me focused and several times I thought there might be something. But there had to be a long siren in my ear. The length of a crate of gold. A small coffin of yellow metal. I swept over and over, and the darker it got the more intense I was. I wanted this more than anything. Find one coffin of gold. That’s all I asked for. One sign. Something that told me I was on the right track.

Finding a wooden box in a field of coffins. Hiding in the open.

I was in a zone. Sweep this way, then that. Over a grave and then over empty space. Were there spirits who would speak to me? Maybe spirits were the reason there was a volume increase. The sirens that I heard could certainly be the sound of spirits. Tortured souls who died in a devastating wind storm. Ghosts who were haunted with the pain and the devastation of the hurricane of ’35.

Sweep, sweep and I was on the darker side of the plot when I heard the voice.

“Okay, folks, time to go home.”

I lifted my eyes from the ground and watched Em and James being led away. The security officer stood behind them, prodding them to the lodge. In the dark he hadn’t seen me. I’d totally been ignored.

I stared at them until they disappeared into the night. I didn’t have my cell phone and wondered how I would contact them. Putting that out of my head, I concentrated on the sweeps.

Over and over, back and forth, and only small responses. I stepped out of the fenced-in area. If someone had buried wooden caskets of gold, why would they take a chance that they would accidentally stumble on a real casket with a body inside? Better to bury them on the perimeter.

I swept five feet out around the fenced-in property. Ten feet out. Then fifteen.

I heard the fire engines. My heart started racing as the sirens got louder and louder, louder and louder. Over a foot of high-volume sirens. This was exactly what I was looking for. Then it tapered off.

My hands were shaking. Could be something else. But the size, the intensity of the signal—

I wanted to dig. Right now, but the shovels were in the box truck. I was elated, flushed with success, and scared to death that I’d be found. I was certain I could be arrested for what I was doing, but the idea of finding any part of forty-four million dollars was overwhelming.

What was under the sand?

Studying the ground I’d covered, I noticed there was no headstone. It was definitely outside the fenced section of sand. That didn’t necessarily mean that a body wasn’t buried there. Old tombstones had a way of wearing down, falling down or being stolen. But still, it was one more sign that this could be a crate of gold.

I ran the detector five feet away, then ten. There was nothing.
One crate of gold? It was hard to imagine that they’d only buried one. Maybe one on top of the other.

Out of the corner of my eye I saw someone approaching. Maybe that same guard. I switched off the detector and walked quickly to the building directly in front of the cemetery. Sliding around the corner, I kept walking. No one followed me.

With deliberate strides I reached the gate, hoping I hadn’t been completely deserted. If they wanted a share of the treasure, James and Em had better be waiting for me when I got outside.

The truck was across the street, parked under a scrawny palm tree. I could see them in the soft glow of a streetlight, a worried look on Em’s face.

Walking up to her window, I tapped lightly on the door and she jumped.

“Skip. For God’s sake, you could have given me a heart attack, I mean you should at least—”

“I found something.”

Through the open window, James whispered, “No shit?”

“Whatever it was, it was the perfect length, a little over a foot long and the signal it gave off was really strong.”

“Still,” Em being the voice of reason, “it still could be just a piece of metal.”

“Listen,” I handed them the detector through the open window, “the signal was about fifteen feet outside the cemetery.”

“So hopefully it’s not buried with the bodies.”

“We don’t know. But I feel a little safer.” I was semiconfident that there would be no interference with dead bodies.

“Dude, what do we do now?”

“We had maybe twenty minutes that they left us alone back there. Then you two were unceremoniously escorted off the property, right?”

“About twenty minutes.”

“So from the time we started sweeping the property until you met the guard, twenty minutes passed.”

They both agreed.

“Well, I spent another twenty minutes covering the ground before I saw a guard coming in my direction.”

“So, if these guards have a routine, we should be able to figure out their schedule,” James said.

“Exactly. I’m guessing they cover that area every twenty minutes.”

“So we know how much time we have to work with,” Em jumped in.

“And,” I concluded, “we found out on the vacant property that it isn’t that difficult to dig. It’s sand. I mean, we should be able to determine what is buried there in twenty minutes. Two shovels, two diggers.”

James and Em were quiet. We could hear a night bird somewhere in the distance and the drone of some tree insects. Occasionally there was a car or truck up on the main highway.

“We’re talking about digging in an old cemetery, right?”

I’d been leaning into the open window, so I opened the door and climbed in beside Em.

“Technically outside a cemetery.”

“What if, and I’m just saying, what if we put our shovels through the top of a real rotted wooden casket? And we go right through to a skeleton?”

James, who always talked a good game, was having second thoughts.

“I don’t know. I don’t know how I’d feel, James.”

“And if we don’t, if we don’t do this, then we’ll never know if it’s the gold or not, right?”

“We’ll never know.” I agreed.

“And it’s our job to find out.” James was searching for courage. “We were hired to find this stuff.”

“We were. But part of our job isn’t to break the law.”

Another silence.

Finally Em spoke. “You guys know that I usually try to pull you back. I don’t want either of you getting in over your heads, but you usually manage to do that anyway, right?”

We both nodded.

“But in this case, if you’re careful, I think you’ve got to go for it.”

“Seriously?” I couldn’t believe she was 100 percent on board with this.

“Seriously.”

“We could get in a lot of trouble.”

“Could.”

“Serious trouble.”

“You’re digging in the beach, right?”

“Duh.” James frowned.

“That’s what people do. They dig in the sand. Kids do it. Adults do it. If you’re at a beach, it’s natural to dig in the sand.”

One of the few memories I had of good times with my mother and sister was going to Miami Beach and burying my ten-year-old sister up to her head. She was fine with it and Mom and I dug the hole with our hands. Marie lay in the sand cavern and we covered her up to her neck. Then I drew a butterfly around her head. There must have been ten people who came up and took pictures, and my sister was the hit of the beach. For about ten minutes.

“It’s just a strip of sand. As long as you’re not digging in the graveyard, it’s just the beach. I think we’re okay. Seriously.”

Em was buying in. I was amazed.

“Let’s go back to the Cove. Tomorrow night I think we’ve got some serious digging to do.”

“You know what happened the last time we dug, amigo?”

I did. We’d found a treasure map.

“Our luck is on course,” James said.

“In this case,” Em was smiling, her hand on my knee, “I don’t think it was luck. I think you guys have done some really good investigative work. You’re putting the puzzle together.”

“Yeah.” James had a smug, satisfied look on his face.

“Swing by the vacant property,” I said.

He turned off the highway and went back a block to the fenced-off boat dock.

“What are we looking for?”

I glanced at my watch. Eleven fifteen. Something that the girl at the front desk had said. That guests checked in at the Ocean Air in the very early morning and checked out very late at night.

“I don’t know, just cruise by.”

James slowed down to a crawl and we passed the camouflaged property, then the Ocean Air Suites.

“Whoa. Hold it.”

James braked.

We gazed back into the parking lot, sizing up the big tour bus parked in front. Its parking lights were on and with our windows down we could hear the hum of the big diesel engine.

“They’re just dropping off a late tour group. No big deal.” James shrugged his shoulders.

“Maybe.” Something was nagging at me. Tour buses don’t usually drop people off around midnight.

“Guys, I don’t think we want to sit here and debate what the
bus is doing here. We’ve already been in trouble for hanging around this property.”

James pulled out and drove back to the highway.

“Park it over there, James.” I pointed to a deserted gas station. It was dark and there was no one around.

“Skip—” Em was not happy.

“Five minutes. Just watch the road over there, where traffic comes out from the Ocean Air.”

“Another one of your stakeouts?”

“Five minutes, Em. And the last stakeout turned up someone who looked a lot like Jim Weezle. We did have some success, am I right?”

She had nothing to say.

We waited, our engine running.

“Maybe it’s a good time to give the old girl a drink.”

James turned off the truck, went to the back, and came back empty handed. “No more oil, Skip. Not a good thing.”

“How long can we make it?”

“Won’t be many more miles she’ll be bone dry. It’ll freeze up the engine and we’ll grind to a stop. Not a good thing at all.”

“It’ll be nice when we get a new truck.”

With two million dollars, James could buy as many trucks as he wanted.

“What are we waiting for, Skip?”

And that’s when the big fancy tour bus pulled out, moving onto the highway headed north.

“We were waiting for that,” I said. “James, can you follow the bus?”

He started the truck and drove up behind the bus staying with it for a couple of minutes.

“Still don’t know what the purpose of this trip is.” He kept his eyes on the vehicle in front of us.

“Can you pass him?”

“At this speed, yeah.”

I felt the truck pick up speed. Maybe two or three miles an hour.

“If that bus was going fifteen miles an hour faster, probably not.”

It would be a good thing when James got a new truck.

Flooring the gas pedal, we eased around the lumbering bus.

“Look up at the windows.”

Em and James glanced up at the row of windows.

“What do you see?”

“People. In every seat.” Em nodded.

“So they weren’t checking in.” James was confused.

“No, they were checking out. At eleven thirty p.m. The whole group.” I was confused.

“Something very strange about that operation.”

“They’re smuggling stuff,” James said. “Drugs. Drugs or gold.”

At seven o’clock in the morning the room phone rang. Em never budged, so I reached across her and grabbed the receiver.

“Hello.”

“Skip?”

“What?”

“This is Maria Sanko.”

“Maria, Maria, if we find those coins, I promise you that—”

“Skip, I have a friend who would like to talk with you.”

I was still working the cobwebs out of my head. We’d come back to Pelican Cove and probably drank a little too much red wine and beer. We were pumped up with the prospect of actually having found something. Then we tracked down Mrs. T. who was at Rumrunner’s bar, and when we got her on board with the gold fever, we drank some more. I think she bought the entire bar a round. James’s ex, Amy, was nowhere to be found.

I was a little fuzzy.

“Do you hear me?”

“Why does someone want to talk to me?”

“This gentleman is Bernard Blattner, a gentleman who is almost one hundred years old. He has some information he’d like to share with you.”

I was slowly waking up. I stretched the phone cord as it tightened over Em’s throat. She jerked up, awake and short of breath. Pulling the cord from her neck, she ducked under it and headed for the bathroom.

“Maria, I don’t understand.”

There was a long silence on the other end.

Finally, “Look, you and your partner have used me several times in the last couple of days.”

It was my turn to be silent.

“You’ve played plumbers, historians, and treasure hunters. And I’ve gone along with you, largely because I was sucked in on several of your ruses, but also because I find you both charming con men. I tend to have a soft spot for guys like you.”