Too Much Stuff (28 page)

“Well?”

“Oh, shit.” James looked at me. “We can say goodbye to the engine. No oil. It bound up.”

I motioned to James. Looking down we saw no gun in O’Neill’s hand.

I leaped headfirst into James O’Neill, driving him to the
ground and heard my partner hit Praveen Malhotra as he jumped on him.

I’m not a fighter, but during the last several days I’d punched a couple of people and come out on top. Straddling O’Neill, I hit him with a left, then a right, and he was out cold. At this point, I was with Em. I could have killed him and it wouldn’t have bothered me.

James was struggling with the wiry Malhotra, and the Indian doctor was about to get the upper hand. He rolled James, coming out on top with his hands around my best friend’s throat. I struggled to my feet, grabbed the guy by the neck of his Henley shirt, and hit him once on his chin. His eyes rolled back and he slumped back to the ground. Paybacks were hell.

“So you didn’t need me at all.”

Em stood on the edge of the truck bed, her gun by her side.

“I was hoping I could save you both. Then you’d owe me.”

We met in Mary Trueblood’s suite at one o’clock in the afternoon. I’d never seen her this angry.

“You didn’t have the courtesy to call me, not once, and let me know what was going on? I can’t believe that—”

“Mrs. Trueblood,” I tried to calm her down. “It’s not like ten things weren’t happening at the same time.”

“Damn, boy, you don’t know how worried I’ve been. I hear a gunshot on the phone, you tell me not to worry, and I don’t hear from you until an hour ago.” She was pacing the floor, back and forth. “Damn.”

“Mary,” James said it almost seductively, “we’re sorry. We haven’t had any sleep.”

“I didn’t get any either. Worried about you two and—”

“We’re fine.”

“And Em.”

Worried about her forty-four mill.

“So there is no gold?”

“We don’t know that.” I took the lead. “We opened two cases
and there are three more to go. We’ll open those, but it’s pretty clear that they will contain rocks and rusty iron. Plus, if you want to dig up the others, be our guest. It is our assumption that they are all filled with ballast. This friend of Bernie Blattner’s, Jackie Logan—the one who bought a plantation in South America—we’re pretty sure he went back to where he buried the boxes and stole that gold seventy-five years ago. We believe it is all gone, and we don’t want to risk lifting the remaining crates at Cheeca Lodge.”

“So you will go no further with this investigation?”

“There is nowhere else to go.”

She let out a long sigh, eased herself down on the edge of her bed, and buried her head in her hands.

Finally she looked up.

“The sheriff’s office is done interrogating you?”

I laughed. “We’re ‘on call.’”

“For the moment,” Em said, “they are done with their interrogation.”

“We were so close.”

No one said anything. A minute went by. Another minute. I heard kids down at the pool, laughing, screaming, splashing. Bobbie was probably at the bar, chatting up some couple from North Dakota, talking about how cold it was back home.

“We were,” James said, “so damned close.”

“I think you boys, and you, Em, I think you did a fine job.”

“Thank you.”

“And no one except Maria Sanko knows anything about the gold?”

“What the sheriff’s department knows is that Stiffle was killed by his twin brother because of a feud. No one is quite sure why it happened in our room.”

She let out a long sigh. “It’s not funny, but it is.”

“They do know that Markim tried to kill me in my room with a handgun. He apparently thought that I knew about Weezle killing Stiffle.”

“It just gets stranger, doesn’t it?” Mrs. T. kept shaking her head.

“What sheriff’s department knows,” I continued, “is that O’Neill and Malhotra were smuggling in Cubans with wealthy relatives and being paid a boatload of money in the process. And that wasn’t even on our schedule of events.”

“What they know is that James and I duct taped the PI dudes when they tried to kill us.”

“Weezle and Markim,” she said. “Those two know all about the gold.”

“And those two are going to keep their mouths shut.” I’d thought it through.

“Because no one is certain that there isn’t gold in the other eight boxes.” When they finally talk their way out of the trouble they’re in, if they ever do, they want to be able to come back here and dig up the remaining five crates.”

“There’s no gold left, is there?”

“No.” James and Em said it together.

“And we finally made it clear to the authorities that it was purely by accident that we stumbled on Malhotra and O’Neill’s smuggling operation.”

It was all out in the open. Some of it distorted, massaged, and spun like fine silk, but there was a grain of truth in everything we told the cops. It’s just that we never mentioned the gold. If Mrs. T. wanted to keep looking for her treasure, more power to her. We’d pretty much made up our minds that there was no future in our search for Kriegel’s gold.

“I’m going to write you three a check for three thousand dollars. That should cover things.”

We’d thought the party was over.

“The engine on my truck, that’s going to be right around eleven hundred bucks, rebuilt.”

She sighed. “Okay, James. I’m writing a check for four thousand dollars. Although technically, those two doctors were not my concern. Go buy yourself an engine.”

I looked at Em and James. Three thousand dollars for the gold coins, four thousand dollars from Mrs. T., and a rebuilt engine for James. For James and me, not bad.

“Maria Sanko did do a lot of work.”

Mary Trueblood gave me a dirty look. “Don’t press your luck, boys.”

“One last drink at the bar? Maybe a dip in the pool? This could be our last stay at a resort for a long time.” I hated to think about it.

“You guys go ahead,” James said. “I’m going to walk over to Rumrunners and see if Amy is there. There’s something I needed to know.”

He left and Em and I walked hand in hand to the pool bar.

“So you made some money.”

“We made some money. But I am going to talk James into parting with a couple hundred bucks for Maria.”

“We’ve been through a lot in our young lives,” she said.

“We have.”

“There’s no one else I’d rather go through stuff with.”

I hesitated before I spoke.

“You’re not saying what I think you’re saying?”

She laughed. “Heavens no. I’m just saying that—”

She kissed me.

I don’t know where we’re going, but there’s never a dull moment.

In 2012, Florida, the East Coast, and The United States of America will celebrate the centennial of Henry Flagler’s historic railway. Nineteen twelve was the year that Flagler connected mainland Florida to Key West. The railroad pioneer lived to see the completion of his dream project, then died the same year. In 1935, a hurricane and twenty-foot tidal wave in Islamorada, Florida, destroyed the town and the railroad, killing over five hundred people.

Ninety-five percent of the historic information about Flagler’s railroad and the 1935 hurricane described in
Too Much Stuff
is true. Firsthand accounts of the horrific details are documented in a number of journals, and I was able to talk to several historians who painted a graphic picture of what life was like after the storm. Through a letter and an interview with a fictional hurricane survivor, I believe that I have captured an accurate portrayal of the aftermath of the catastrophic destruction.

By the time this book releases, the value of the lost gold may be even more than the presumed value of forty-some million dollars. That should make it even more attractive for the treasure hunters. Skip, James, and Emily exist only in my mind (don’t tell them that) and I am always flattered by the review from
Booklist
, comparing Skip’s storytelling to the narrative style of Mark Twain’s Huck Finn.

Oh, the 5 percent of the historical information that is fictional? You’ll have to figure that out for yourself.