Jackrabbit Junction Jitters (35 page)

A quiet gasp slipped from her throat. She gawked down at a
naked blonde woman, who could give Dolly Parton a run for her money, posed on
all fours on a bed.

But it wasn’t the chesty blonde that had Claire’s jaw
hitting the parquet-floor, it was the guy behind her playing Rin-Tin-Tin. Joe
Martino had been quite a looker in his youth, prior to eating too many sour-cream-and-onion
flavored potato chips. The shock of black hair partially blocking one eye, the
square chin, those dark piercing eyes—Joe definitely had the
rebel-without-a-cause look down pat.

Claire stood, moving closer to the light bulb. While the
blonde seemed lost in Candy Land with her eyes half-closed, Joe stared straight
into the camera lens. The cold hardness of his smile held Claire’s gaze for
several more seconds.

Shuddering, she tucked that picture behind the others and
moved to the next.

She gasped again.

The woman in this picture had curly red hair. The walls were
covered with pink, flowery wallpaper, the bedspread matched and hadn’t even
been turned down. The woman’s bra hung from her arm—she’d been short on time,
apparently. Knocking on the woman’s back door was Joe, grinning around a
cigarette, focused on the camera.

Claire’s hands felt dirty as she flipped to the next photo.

The third picture had a short-haired brunette, small
chested, caught in mid-scream, her eyes rolled back. Joe was winking at the
camera this time.

The fourth picture had another brunette—her hair long and
straight. A wire-mesh Tiffany’s table lamp, red poppies decorating the glass,
sat next to the bed. A Victorian era, curved head frame provided a romantic
backdrop for yet another one of Joe’s campy smiles. He either liked that
particular mattress-romping position, or he preferred that camera angle,
because the brunette and he were again on their knees.

“Jesus!” Kate said from over Claire’s shoulder. “Where did
you find those?”

Claire jumped and almost dropped the bunch of photos. She’d
been so lost in Joe’s sordid little world she hadn’t heard Kate walk up behind
her.

“Where did she find what?” Jess stood in the closet doorway,
trying to peek over Kate’s shoulder.

Claire shoved the pictures back in the envelope. Her face
burned as if she’d been busted ogling her aunt’s
Playgirl
magazines
again.

“Did you look in this?” she asked Jess, holding up the
envelope.

While it had seemed sealed shut, Claire didn’t put it past
Jess to peek and then glue the flap shut again.

“Oh, I forgot about that. I saw it under the gun, but then I
saw the receipt and key and came to see you.” Jess pushed past Kate. “Why? What’s
in it?”

“Nothing.” Claire shoved the envelope in her back pocket.
She wiped her hands on her pants, wondering if bleaching her palms would remove
that icky feeling.

“Whose gun?” Kate asked as she stared down at the Browning.

“Joe’s.” Claire squatted and packed it back in the box. Then
she lowered the box back in the floor. “You’re supposed to be minding the
store, Kate.”

“Manny’s standing guard. I had to use the bathroom.”

“Jess,” Claire said, “will you go take over the register?”

“But Manny is already doing it.”

“It’s not Manny’s job.” The teenager opened her mouth to
argue. “Please, Jess.”

“Fine!” Jess kicked off Ruby’s heels and hung up her mom’s
wedding dress. She muttered something about “slave labor” and left.

“What are you going to do with those pictures?” Kate asked
after Jess was safely out of earshot.

Claire finished rolling the carpet back into place and stood
up. “I don’t know. The guy in all of them is Joe.”

“Yuck!” The expression on Kate’s face looked like she’d
bitten into a rotten apple filled with worms.

“Tell me about it. That’s almost as bad as finding those
pictures of Mom and Dad having sex.” Claire shuddered again and walked into the
bedroom.

“Do you think Ruby knows about that box?”

“No. Nothing in it belonged to her. It’s one of Joe’s
stashes.”

“So that’s his kilo of gold?”

Claire grabbed the little black box from Ruby’s dresser and
popped the lid off again, frowning down at the slice of gold. “Definitely. Ruby
would have cashed this in last spring if she’d known about it.”

“Deutsche Reichsbank,” Kate read aloud the stamped words on
the bar. “That’s German, you know.”

“I wasn’t born yesterday, knucklehead. Besides, there’s no
missing that Nazi symbol. I remember learning about missing Nazi gold in one of
my history classes. It’s kind of trippy to think that we may be holding a bit
of that treasure.” Claire ran her finger over the smooth, shiny surface. “I
wonder …” Her words trailed off as cylinders in her head clicked.

“What?” Kate leaned against the dresser.

“If this is the treasure Porter was looking for.”

“What’s going on in here,
Señoritas?
” Manny asked
from the doorway, making them both jump. Grinning, he ambled into the room.

Claire thought about closing the lid on the box, but instead,
held the gold bar out toward Manny. “What do you make of this?”

Taking the box from her hand, Manny took a long look at the
slice of gold, then let out a low whistle. “You got you an expensive piece of
history here,
mi amor
. That’s Hitler’s gold. Reichsbank was the bank of
the Third Reich.”

Manny confirmed Claire’s suspicion. She could only imagine
how Joe had gotten his hands on this little trinket.

“What are you going to do with this?” Manny handed the box
back to Claire.

Sighing, she dropped the item in question on the dresser. “Shit,
I don’t know. Hand it over to Ruby, I guess.”

“Oh, speaking of shit,” Manny’s said, “the toilet is
overflowing again in the men’s restroom.”

“God damn it!” Growling in her throat, Claire stormed out of
the bedroom.

If that toilet clogged one more time, she was going to use a
stick of dynamite to clear the sucker once and for all.

* * *

A half-mile back in the Lucky Monk, Mac tipped his canteen
and sipped some lukewarm water, washing the coat of mine dust from his throat.
Hours had slipped by while he’d been busy spelunking and charting, hours that
he’d rather have spent most anywhere, but in the bowels of a mine.

Suddenly, a rumbling sound, born from deeper within the
mine, rolled over him.

“Fuck,” he whispered, knowing the sound of a cave-in all too
well.

Goosebumps raced up his arms and across his shoulders,
making his hairline tingle. He lowered the canteen, gulping down the last
swallow still pooled in his mouth.

Fighting the urge to get the hell out of there, he screwed
the lid on his canteen and tucked it away in his pack.

With that cave-in, his plans changed course. Before
continuing with his surveying, he wanted to know where the cave-in had occurred
and see if any new rooms had been opened or drifts sealed off.

He hoisted his pack onto his back and hiked further into the
mine, watching for a cloud of dust, sniffing the stale air, listening for the
sound of more rocks crashing to the floor.

Twenty minutes later, at the fourth X he’d sought out
yesterday, he hit pay-dirt—the previous cave-in had crumbled further. This
time, several feet of rock from the ceiling had given way, most of it appearing
to have cascaded down over the pile of rocks already there.

Mac coughed, small particles of dust still flurrying in
front of his hard hat light. He squinted up at the now steeply-arched ceiling,
searching for further stress fractures or veins of minerals, finding neither.
The blasting from Copper Snake was taking a toll on Ruby’s old mines, shaking
loose the at-risk sections for better or worse. The ceiling looked as stable
now as the rest of the mine, which didn’t say much.

As his light flitted over the rock pile, he caught sight of
a small, dark hole between the ceiling and the top of the mound of rocks. Dust
drifted through the hole toward him.

He pulled his high-watt flashlight from his pack and shined
the beam at the hole. The light pierced it, disappearing into the darkness.

What was on the other side? His instincts told him there
were answers there waiting for him, something important. But were they
important enough to risk his life to find out?

Rubbing his neck, Mac weighed his odds. He scanned the
ceiling, wondering how long it would hold before giving way again. He lowered
his pack to the floor, the voice of reason in his head trying to talk him out
of doing something foolish. He was too old to flirt with death, had too much to
lose for it to be appealing. But what if …

He squelched the thought, cursing its source—Claire. Without
a doubt, he knew that if she were here, she’d already be up there trying to
wiggle through the hole.

But he wasn’t Claire.

He walked away from the cave-in, telling himself there was
nothing wrong with using some common sense. Fifty feet or so later he stopped
and cursed at the ceiling.

Turning back, he returned to the rock pile and carefully
climbed it, his breath shallow and fast. At the top, the hole was just big
enough to squeeze through if he felt ballsy enough to try it. He settled for
just peeking through with his flashlight.

The first thing his light bounced off was a boarded up wall,
not thirty feet from the other side of the rock pile. He frowned, his
flashlight lowering slightly as he wondered what someone had wanted to keep out
… or in.

Something shiny reflected the light, catching his eye. He
shifted his beam to the floor several feet in front of the wall and almost lost
his grip on the flashlight.

Leaning against the rock wall, covered in a layer of dust
and rags, sat a dead man.

* * *

“Make a right,” Kate told her sister as they pulled up to
the stop sign at the only intersection in Jackrabbit Junction. The two overhead
streetlights cast an orange glow on the night.

Kate resisted the urge to glance over at The Shaft as the
old Ford rumbled onto the main highway. A lukewarm breeze fresh with the smell
of damp earth puffed through the passenger window as Claire accelerated.

To the northeast, lightning flashed behind the thick bank of
clouds that had dumped dime-sized drops on the valley around sunset, an hour
earlier.

Kate clasped her hands together to keep them from shaking.
This whole sneaking-around-looking-for-clues routine made her armpits clammy.

“Quit driving like a grandma. I’d like to make it there
before sunrise.”

Claire turned down the radio, muting Jeannie C. Riley singing
about telling off the Harper Valley PTA. “Exactly where am I taking you?” She sounded
annoyed.

Kate ignored her sister’s glare. “I’ll tell you when we get
there. You’ll need to make a turn at Gila Monster Road.”

She’d memorized the route this afternoon, not wanting to
carry a map or written address around in case Claire figured out what she was
up to before they reached the destination. “It should be right up here … there
it is. The dirt road on the left.”

Muttering under her breath, Claire slowed the pickup and
made the turn, then pulled to the side of the road and shifted into park. “You
haven’t answered my question. In fact, you’ve been dancing around it since we
left the R.V. park.”

“I don’t know what you’re talking about.” Kate glanced over
her shoulder as an eighteen-wheeler whooshed past on the main highway. “Come
on, let’s get moving. We’re almost there.”

Claire turned off the engine. “We’re not going anywhere
until you tell me where ‘there’ is.”

With a sigh, Kate stared at Claire in the shadows. “You’re
acting like Mother.”

“And comments like that make me want to turn this truck
around and head back to Ruby’s.”

“Okay, okay. I’ll spill. I arranged a meeting with Porter
tonight,” Kate lied.

“In the middle of the desert at night … alone? That’s real
smart, Kate. And I suppose you brought Joe’s Browning 9mm as a gift for our
host. Better yet, Ruby’s big ol’ butcher knife.”

“Jesus, Claire. You need to stop reading Stephen King.
Porter is just a writer. All he did was kiss you, not bite your neck and drink
your blood.”

“What reason did you give him to meet us?”

Kate gulped. Slipping a lie past Claire meant giving an
Oscar-winning performance.

“To apologize in person for you sucker-punching him last
night after he kissed you.”

“What? I’m not apologizing for that. He went too far too
fast.”

Kate ignored her. “And I’m coming along because you’re too
nervous to face him on your own.” Proud of her stellar fib, Kate smiled.

“Why would you tell him
that?
”

“To get him to invite us to his place so you could see for
yourself there’s no reason to suspect him.”

“It’s not that simple, you know.”

“Sure, whatever.” But Kate could hear the interest in Claire’s
voice. She reached over and turned the key. The engine sputtered to life. “Can
we go now? We’re already late because you kept dinking around back at Ruby’s.”

After another dirty look at Kate, Claire shifted into gear. “I
wasn’t dinking around. I was scrubbing the smell of that freaking clogged
toilet off my skin.”

They rode in silence for a couple of minutes. Kate’s heart
beat harder and louder with each passing mesquite tree. After winding up a
short canyon, they came to a fork in the road.

“Take the left one.” Kate checked her side mirror for any
followers. The night cloaked them in darkness, the radio and the Ford’s
headlights the only illumination in the shadows.

“How much further is it from here?” Claire asked.

“Another mile.” That was her guess, anyway. Kate sat forward
and watched for a driveway. The road turned to washboard for a quarter mile,
making her teeth rattle … at least she told herself it was the road.