“But we know when.” Caroline accepted a steaming mug of black coffee from her brother. “Or we know damned close when.”
“Was this Prixus’ day planner you found?”
“Praxus, you, big dope. No, they weren’t really into dates back then. Even if he wrote one down, it would be useless to us now. They were centuries away from the Julian calendar. But something Praxus writes about gives us the year and month to a certitude.” That last word came out “sertytood” and she giggled again. Two beers were her limit.
“Halley’s Comet,” Morris inserted, and earned a swat, on the back of the head from his sister.
“Spoiler!” she snarled, then recovered herself. “Praxus writes about what he calls a ‘wild star’ crossing the heavens. His description of its appearance and path confirm that it was Halley’s. It kind of freaked him out, but he says that the sailors with him knew about it from their elders. Phoenicians were amazing astronomers, they had to be. They were practically the only ancient people who dared to sail from the sight of land. They knew their stars.”
“How close could we get?” Dwayne said.
“May, 240 BC. That’s as close as I can pinpoint it. But that’s damned good, right?”
“So, a thirty-day watch at the outside,” Dwayne said.
“A month at the beach!” Caroline said and shrugged grandly.
“Can we stop the blue-skying and consider some harder questions? For example, why do we want to do this?” Morris said.
“Buried treasure, big bro!”
“We have a treasure, Carrie.” Morris only called her that when he was annoyed with her.
“You can’t have enough treasure,” she said, peeved.
“I have to side with her,” Dwayne said. “She’s talking bullshit right now but sometimes bullshit covers the truth.”
“Is that some kind of redneck wisdom?” Morris said.
“Well, it’s something my dad used to say a lot, so I guess it is. The truth is, we’re sitting on a crapload of gold and soon a crapload of tax-free cash. If it was all free and clear, we’d be cool. But we have this Sir Neal character on our ass, and I don’t think he’s going to forget about us. Being on the run from the law eats up money. On the run from a guy with enough juice to ignore the law. That gets real expensive real fast.”
“Besides, Mo,” Caroline put in. “I put the idea in your head. I gave you a problem to solve. You’ll never get a good night’s sleep until you’ve nailed that down.”
“I’m going to bed, and I’m going to sleep like a baby,” Morris said.
Caroline made a motorboat sound with her lips.
Morris exited his room the next morning with red-rimmed eyes. Caroline sat at the table with a black coffee and a bottle of aspirin. He sat down across from her and took a long sip from her mug.
“I have a few ideas,” he said.
13
Big Don
Some days you can’t give gold away.
Lee Hammond sat in the paneled office turning the pages of a golf magazine and pretending to read it. Who’d waste a good day playing a game that 99.999% of the players sucked at? And who’d want to read a magazine about it?
The receptionist spoke to him through a speaker from behind the glass of her little cubby.
“I’ll buzz you in,” she drawled. A harsh buzzer sounded, and Lee trotted to the door set next to the secretarium and yanked it open. The buzzing stopped abruptly, and Lee entered the frigid air of a large office room packed with ranks of empty desks. Big Don Brinkley maneuvered through the desks with a big grin on his face and eyes invisible behind tinted glasses.
“What can I do you for, Lee?” Big Don thought that brand of white-shoes-salesman shit was charming.
“This needs to be between you and me,” Lee said.
“Oh. Hush-hush. Always-Secretive Lee. Follow me to my bear-cave, okay?” Don led Lee toward the back wall through the maze of desks.
“Everyone at lunch?”
“Huh?” Big Don said. “Oh, the fucking economy. Had to let some people go. You know how it is.”
Lee did not know how it was. Big Don was into Florida real estate, car dealerships, highway contracting, and cruise ships, and all those businesses covered Don’s real enterprise, money laundering. The economy may have sent his office people home on unemployment, but Don always had plenty of green around somewhere.
They settled into Big Don’s office. It was a modest little room with one wall lined with padlocked filing cabinets, a big old steel desk, and a minifridge. The only attempt at decoration was a signed poster of Warren Sapp framed on one wall. Lee knew from previous association that there was a minimum of six loaded handguns within Big Don’s reach from the seat behind that desk.
Without asking, Big Don pulled a cold Bud from the fridge and tossed it to Lee, who caught it with the practiced ease of a man who fully expected the gesture.
They settled in and shot the shit for a while about “back in the day” which was six years ago when Lee worked security for Big Don on one of the cruise-ships he had an interest in. The line was being sued by a passenger claiming she was raped by one of the waiters. The DNA from the rape kit taken in Barbados was a match for a staff member, and that was enough proof for Big Don. He paid Lee a wad of under-the-table to make the little greaseball the latest mysterious victim of the Bermuda Triangle. Big Don settled out of court with the woman, and the whole thing just went away.
“So, what is it you can’t talk on the phone about?” Big Don said and tossed a second Bud his way.
Lee took the padded envelope from his jacket pocket and slid it to Big
