dinosaurs, the evidence of extinction. A fallen building of charred timbers, rusted boilers and compressors, winches and furnaces. I pictured the scene a century ago, the sky blackened with fires from sawmills and smelters. I thought of Cimarron’s great-grandfather and the other drillers and muckers, a mountainside crawling with grim-faced, wiry men whose hands would never scrub clean.
The entrance to the tunnel was framed by three wooden timbers, two vertical, and one horizontal connecting at the top. Rusty nails held a metal sign to the horizontal timber. Silver Queen, Tunnel No. 3, 1888.
I expected to see the tracks of a woman’s stylish high-heeled boots in the snow, but the imprints were of wide, plebeian work boots. The tracks went from Jo Jo Baroso’s pickup straight into the tunnel. Okay, she had changed shoes. Always prepared, that Jo Jo. It wouldn’t surprise me if she had a hard hat, a flashlight, and a pickax, too.
I headed into the mine. Bare electric light bulbs were strung along the rocky ceiling, laced to old timbers. Canvas air chutes ran along the walls. The bulbs were lighted, and even after the tunnel took a gentle, rounded turn to the right, cutting off light from the entrance, visibility was fine. It was warmer inside, probably in the fifties, but dank. Water dripped down walls of rock stained purple and yellow from whatever minerals had been locked inside by volcanic explosions a thousand millennia ago.
I had walked maybe half a mile when the tunnel opened into a cavern, a ballroom-sized chamber with fifty- foot ceilings. Inside, where I imagined a thick, rich vein of silver was found, now were only empty ore carts and wooden crates that may have once held dynamite or tools. On the ground, a broken bottle of thick, brown glass, the remnants of a miner’s beer break. I took off my topcoat and tossed it into one of the ore carts and kept going. At one end of the chamber, there was a ladder of steps cut into the mountain itself. It only went one way, down.
I started the descent, slowly at first, the way lit by the overhead bulbs. Timbers stained black from thousands of hands provided a railing. Perhaps fifty feet below, another horizontal tunnel connected with the downward shaft. I kept going. Another tunnel connection, then another. Deeper still, I paused and listened. The steady thumpeta- thumpeta of machinery, a pump maybe. It came from below. I descended farther, counting eleven tunnels at different intervals before running out of ladder in a narrow, darkened tunnel. I paused on the last step. No lights here, but the sound of the machinery was louder. A steady whirring and a combustion induced chugging, joined the thumpeta-thumpeta machine.
I took the last step and splashed into a puddle of icy, black water. At least I thought it was a puddle. I slogged two steps into the darkness. Then two steps more. It wasn’t a puddle. More like a river. The floor of the tunnel was covered by a foot of water. I was sweating, but my feet were freezing.
I had no idea how far I had descended. Five hundred feet, a thousand? I waited a moment for my eyes to get adjusted to the light. They didn’t, because there wasn’t any.
I started my way along the wall in the direction of the sound. I was moving away from the mountain and back toward the town. If I walked far enough, I’d probably be right under the courthouse.
Ouch! My forehead cracked hard into an overhead timber. I’ll bet miners a century ago weren’t six feet two.
Now, I hunched forward and scuttled along, my hand trailing over the ragged walls. Ahead of me, a sound of rushing water, like the rapids on a shallow, rocky stream. I kept wondering where the sound was coming from until my foot stepped into space and I fell forward into the torrent. The drop-off was only two feet or so, but the landing was hard, facedown. I tumbled ahead, water pouring over me from the ledge I just stepped off. Soaking and freezing, I got up, spitting out cold, filthy water, feeling for sensation in my right shoulder. It still had a stainless steel pin inside, and it didn’t take kindly to surprises.
I kept going, splashing along until I saw the light, a yellow glow from an opening at the side of the tunnel. I cautiously inched ahead. Suddenly, a blinding flash turned the black water a bright orange, illuminating stalactites overhead-or stalagmites-who the hell can remember the difference? The flash was followed by a dull thudding explosion, and a wave of dust rolled down the tunnel from the direction of the light. Overhead, timbers creaked and groaned.
With the explosion still bonging in my ears, I hurried my pace. If I couldn’t hear my splashing, I figured no one else could, either. In twenty seconds, I was at the opening. It was a rough rectangle in the limestone walls, perhaps four by six feet, beginning a few feet off the floor of the tunnel. Three steps were cut into the rock wall and ended in a ledge, which led directly through the opening and into another cavern, higher and drier than the tunnel. From inside, voices echoed off the walls. I crept closer.
As dust rolled out of the opening, I heard a man cough. “ Jesus Cristo! Too much dynamite. We’ll be buried here along with this silver-dollar puta.”
Blinky’s voice, no mistaking it.
“ How else do you propose we get it out?” Jo Jo Baroso asked.
“ The same way they got the bitch in if we could find the old shaft.”
I lay flat on the ledge and peered through the opening, trying to keep out of view. Inside, a gasoline generator chugged away, powering spotlights mounted on two aluminum poles. One of the lights shone directly in my eyes, and I couldn’t make out my favorite team of siblings.
“ There isn’t time.” She sounded exasperated. “There wasn’t before, and there surely isn’t now. I’ll be lucky if I’m not charged with perjury. If you’re found, you’ll be charged with murder.”
The sound of a shovel scraping against rock, then gravel clattering against metal.
“ Like I told you before,” Blinky said, from somewhere behind the glare, “Jake bluffed you, and you fell for it. The prints will never match up, ‘cause I never touched the barrel. All they can prove is that I was in the barn, but that’s no case for murder. And when’s the last time anybody got prosecuted for perjury. I’m sorry you got embarrassed, Josie, me da mucha pena, pero, I’m glad Jake’s gonna be okay. He never fucked with me, and I didn’t want to sandbag him this way.”
“ Thanks for the testimonial, Blinky.” Shielding my eyes from the glare of the spotlights, I slid off the ledge and into the cavern, my wet shoes squishing on the hard rock. Blinky wore a red plaid shirt under coveralls and a hard hat and was tossing a shovel full of rocks into an ore cart. Next to him was Jo Jo Baroso with rubberized boots sticking out incongruously from her long, fur-trimmed coat. “What are you doing, kids, building a clubhouse?”
“ Jake, mi amigo, I’ve missed you so much.” Blinky leaned on the shovel and smiled at me. He seemed genuinely, weirdly, happy to see me. “You got no idea what it’s like to go underground. Hey, that’s a pun, isn’t it?” He allowed himself a short chuckle. “You give up all your friends, you gotta move around. Hell, I even gave some blood, which you found in the Range Rover. What a pain in the ass. Never again.”
“ Blinky, you’ll forgive me if I don’t throw my arms around you, but I’m-”
“ Don’t say it, Jake. We did you wrong. We never should have set you up. I said to Josie, let’s cut Jake in for a full share, let him figure out a way to just steal the maldita compania from Cimarron, but she said, no, you’d never go along with it. She was right. I knew that as soon as you raised a stink when we left a few things out of the prospectus. You just didn’t want to play the game.”
“ Not your game, Blinky. Not the con.”
“ Yeah, well this wasn’t a con. For once it was real. Really real and really big. That’s why we had to get Rocky Mountain Treasures back from Cimarron. Why give seventy percent to that condenado? Was that fair? Hell, if I hadn’t raised the money, he never could have found her. I asked him to renegotiate, but he said no and called me a door-to-door salesman in patent leather loafers. Hey, Jake, I never sold door to door, and you know it. This was his life, he said, everything he’d worked for, and a deal’s a deal, so I was stuck. So the little sister and me, we decided to get the company back, but that cowboy was smarter than-”
“ Shut up, Luis!” Jo Jo was glaring at him.
“ Hermanita, I’m gonna do the talking for once. Jeez, she even bosses me around down here. I learned this shit from Cimarron. How to drill the holes in a round pattern, put different length fuses on the dynamite so it explodes just right and the rock falls the way you want it. There’s a science to it, if you want to knock a hole in the rock without blowing yourself up. Jake, you wouldn’t believe it, but I like this shit. I really found myself down here.”
“ I’m not surprised. You’ve got a great future breaking rocks.”
“ C’mon, Jake, don’t be pissed. It’s time to make amends.”
Next to him was a wooden crate with sticks of dynamite poking out of the top. A fuse was attached to each stick.
“ Okay, Blinky, so now you’ve gone straight. You’re a miner, right?”
