Abandon

They collapsed onto the rock, their black parkas blanched with snow.

“This it, Larry?”

“This is the place I wanted to check out, yeah.”

“Don’t look like much to me. You ain’t fucking around again—”

“How about that? Does that look like something?”

Isaiah aimed his headlamp at the back wall, the corners of his mouth lifting, his bright, perfect teeth shining their malevolent smile. “Now, that does look like some shit.”

Isaiah got up, walked over to the opening in the rock. He squatted down, peered inside.

“How far’s it go back?” Jerrod asked.

“About four feet.”

“Can you see anything?”

“Nah, this tunnel slants down and to the left.” He put his light on Lawrence. “You been in here before, Lar?”

“No. I’d planned to come up here on some downtime during our three days in Abandon.”

Isaiah pushed back his hood and pulled off his face mask. From underneath the overhang, the wind sounded like a fleet of jet engines as it tore across the pass. “See, part of me’s thinking that you might be a conniving motherfucker. You feel me?”

“No, I don’t feel you.”

“You’re telling me that’s an old claim hole?”

“Far as I know.”

“Well, I’m all for sending your ass in first, but what if it’s in fact a cave? And you just disappear once you get inside? Only one of us can fit through that tunnel at a time.”

“Look, I have no idea what’s in there,” Lawrence said. “I hope for our sake it’s a shitload of gold. Based on my research, everything I know about Oatha and Billy, I have a feeling that’s exactly what we’re going to find. But I’m not leaving Abigail, so you don’t have to—”

“All right, tell you what. We’ll send Abigail in. Jerrod, undo Larry’s end of the rope and whip up one of your fancy knots for the lady.”

It took Jerrod less than a minute to untie Lawrence and prepare a harness for Abigail.

“Second time you’ve done this,” she said as he ran the rope around her thighs. “Remember yesterday?” He’d taken off his mask, and when he looked up, her headlamp shone on the crescent moon scars that ruined his face. In spite of everything, she found it impossible not to feel a flicker of compassion for what he’d endured in Iraq.

“She’s ready,” he said.

Abigail approached the opening and shone her headlamp inside.

“What’s the story on there being bad air in there?” she asked.

“Guess you’ll let us know, huh?”

She climbed in and wormed her way through the tunnel, arriving after ten seconds in a small chamber roughly the size of her studio, but with a much lower ceiling—just barely over six feet. Isaiah crawled through the passage now, and she moved away from the opening as he stepped down into the chamber. “Get your ass in here, Larry!”

They shone their headlamps over the bare rocky floor, across the walls, the low, jagged ceiling. Isaiah walked the circumference of the room, returning to the opening of the tunnel just as Lawrence emerged. He grabbed the professor by the scruff of his yellow parka and dragged him out into the chamber.

“Fuck,” Lawrence said.

“Fuck is right. What the fuck, Larry?”

Lawrence struggled to his feet. He walked to the farthest corner and squatted down, carefully lifting the only man-made object in the chamber.

“What you got?”

Lawrence held up the scraps of an old burlap sack. “This is what the gold was carried in. Probably used a team of burros to bring it to the pass.”

“So what’s the good news? There a secret passage? I push one of these rocks and the treasure room opens up? Larry? I know you got some silver lining for me.”

As Lawrence stood up and looked over at Isaiah, Abigail saw something in her father’s eyes she’d not seen until now: fear, bewilderment, a hint of real desperation. “This is where they brought the gold. I’m sure of it. It was stored right here on Christmas Day in 1893. Now it’s gone. So they must have come back and taken off with it after they’d murdered most of the townspeople. I feel more strongly than ever that it was Oatha and Billy who somehow wiped out Abandon in an unprecedented act of mass—”

“See, I don’t give a fuck about all that.”

“What else do you want from me? At this point, I’ve done everything I can.” Isaiah closed the distance between himself and Lawrence. “I’m not jerking you off here, Isaiah. I could lead you on some wild-goose chase all night long. ‘Oh, I think it’s here. Well, maybe they hid it there. Okay, one more place to look.’ I’m not doing that. This is the honest, stone-cold truth. Now that I know it’s not here, I don’t have the first fucking clue where the gold is. May not even be in the San Juans.”