“Hell, no,” Chaz said.
“I dream about it,” Jimbo said. “And not the bad parts. I dream about those forests packed with game. No laws. No licenses. No limits. It’s a cleaner world. It’s better than this one.”
“That’s some Comanche bullshit right there, bro,” Chaz chuckled. “You’re forgettin’ those homicidal monkeyfuckers that was tryin’ their damnedest to eat us.”
“Still,” Jimbo said with a bland expression. “There was a lot for me there.”
“Well, you can give up on that wild-ass fantasy because you’re never going back there. The Tube is shut down and off-limits.”
“Dwayne called while you were running.” Jimbo turned to Chaz with a grin.
“Oh shit,” Chaz said.
4
The Fever
According to the Visa statement the Lowes would receive when they returned from their eight-week spiritual tour of Northern India, they had racked up a killer tab at the Morton’s Steak House on Clay Street in Portland, Oregon. Eight hundred bills (not counting tip).
Dwayne pushed himself away from the table as the sommelier poured what Caroline promised would be a surprisingly robust merlot at two hundred bucks a bottle.
“Well, you fed me,” he said as he picked up the elegant fluted glass. “I guess you think I owe it to you to listen to you.”
“Drink up, and we’ll go someplace quieter,” Caroline said and held out her glass to clink crystal with Dwayne and her brother.
They walked through the drizzle for a few blocks and came to Johnny’s Authentic Irish Pub. It was an establishment for serious drinkers, and the music was low, and the early crowd was watching college football on the screen over the bar.
The booths around them were empty, and they ordered pitchers of Harp and gave off an aura of “don’t bother me” to the mini-kilted waitress. She was happy enough to comply and returned to the bar and the regulars.
Caroline slid in beside Dwayne, and Morris sat opposite them.
“We want to go back,” Caroline said without preamble.
“To...?” Dwayne was never sure where or when she meant.
“To the cave,” she said with a smirk. “Present time. We don’t have the capacity to travel in time anymore, remember?”
“Uh-hm,” Dwayne said and shook salt into his beer, a habit he picked up in desert climes.
“Not yet, anyway.” She smiled. Morris rolled his eyes at that.
“Why do you want to go back to the cave?” Dwayne said. “And why are you telling me about it?”
“I would have thought that was obvious. We’ll be close to the Tube facility, and its new management might not like us snooping around in the neighborhood. We’d need you and maybe a couple of the others to watch over us.”
“We’re not looking for trouble, but we’d rather be safe than sorry,” Morris interjected.
“Okay,” Dwayne said. “But why take the risk? What’s the compelling reason for going back there?”
Caroline took Dwayne’s arm in hers and moved closer to him so he could hear her lowered voice. He was a little surprised at the sudden intimacy.
She explained how, when she was captive of the cannibal aborigines, way back in The Then, she was bound hand and foot near some kind of shrine they set up in the back of the cave. Dwayne was too preoccupied with saving all their asses to have noticed it. The shrine was in a natural niche in the rock wall of the cave and dominated by a large fertility totem. At the feet of the totem were offerings in the form of plates, primitive sculptures, rings, necklaces, and bowls.
And all of them hammered from pure gold.
“The fertility statue alone has to weigh a few hundred pounds,” she said. “The rest is maybe a quarter-ton more.”
“I remember that some of them were wearing gold,” Dwayne said, not turning to her but looking at Morris while all the time aware of her face close to his. “The chiefs and the shaman. They had gold pendants or amulets. And gold beads in their hair.”
“Well, that was just their showoff bling,” she said with a chuckle, her warm breath brushing his cheek. “Inside that cave was a prehistoric Fort Knox. I had one of the pieces in the necklace I wore tested. It’s eighty-percent pure. Right out of the ground.”
“There’s no way it would still be there,” he said and turned to Caroline. Their faces were inches apart.
“I’m betting it is.” She looked at him from under her lashes.
“After all this time?” He couldn’t look away. Her eyes were the most amazing cerulean blue with tiny gold flecks at the edges of her pupils.
“Tell him about the skull,” she said with excitement and turned to Morris.
“Well, I excavated some of the cave while you and the others were...gone,” Morris said. “There were skeletal remains there that I can confirm are from the same period in which you traveled there.”
“How can you possibly confirm that?” Dwayne said. “And did you find any gold in your digging?”
“Don’t worry about how he can confirm it,” Caroline insisted. “It would only make your head hurt. And he didn’t find the statue or the rest of the gold because he didn’t dig far enough back. But it’s there. If the remains of their shaman and their witch mother matriarchal leader were still there, it meant that the tribe never went back in the cave again. And the remains weren’t disturbed so that means no one else went into the cave either before either a storm surge or tectonic event buried everything.”
“You and your team most probably made it a bad place for the aborigines,” Morris put in. “There’s every reason to believe they moved away and avoided the place as taboo until they became extinct.”
“So, there’s a fortune waiting there, and all we have to do is go dig it out from under the
