Abandon (15 page)

It felt good to get off her feet, but her thermal underwear had soaked through with freezing sweat. She unzipped her purple Moonstone parka and her pink fleece jacket.

“I have water in my pack,” she said. “May I take it out?”

“Stu, ya’ll searched their packs back in Abandon?”

Stu and the other masked man had sat down near the hearth, their machine pistols trained on the captives.

“Yeah. Their packs are fine.”

Lawrence stepped through an open doorway beside the entrance to Packer’s room.

“What’s in there?” Isaiah asked.

“This was Bart’s closet.”

“Motherfucker was livin the good life.” They disappeared into the walk-in closet. Abigail couldn’t see her father, but she could hear him knocking on the walls.

Lawrence spoke: “If we were to break through this one, we’d be in Bart’s office.”

“Well, hell, let’s be sure.”

“I’ve measured. There’s nothing strange about the rooms on this side of the hallway. They match up perfectly with the original architectural plans. Now follow me.” Lawrence and Isaiah emerged from the closet and walked back into the hallway. After a moment, Abigail heard Lawrence’s voice again, indistinct and followed by more wall knocking.

She worked her arms out of the day pack’s straps, reached in, and pulled out a Nalgene bottle, the water pumped and purified from the safe part of the stream that Scott had fly-fished the previous evening. The image of him dying in that hotel lobby felt like a stray ember behind her eyes.

The water tasted cold and faintly sweet, so unlike the lead-tainted piss that ran out of her tap in New York. As she drank, she tried to ignore the red dots that traipsed across her chest.

Lawrence and Isaiah returned to Packer’s bedroom.

“This past summer, I made a thorough search of that guest room and found nothing,” Lawrence said. “But I knew there was space between that room and Packer’s room that was unaccounted for. I was getting ready to investigate Packer’s room, when the Forest Service showed up. I didn’t have a permit to be here, and the fine would’ve been huge. I had to sneak out of the lodge.” He approached the enormous wardrobe to the right of the doorway, grabbed
the side of it, tried to slide it out from the wall. “It’s bolted down or something.”

“We’ve got grenades.”

“Wanna bring the whole wing down?”

He pulled open the doors, climbed inside, Abigail listening as he banged around. After a moment, she heard “Aha.”

Isaiah smiled. “What I like to hear. What you got, baby?”

Lawrence’s voice came back muffled. “Entire back panel”—he struggled with something—“slides out.” A panel of wood flew out of the wardrobe and crashed onto the floor.

Isaiah was peering in now. “Would you look at that,” he said. “You’re a genius, Larry.” Isaiah pointed at Abigail. “Come here. We may need you. It’s a tight fit.”

Abigail got up, crossed the floor. She stood beside Isaiah and looked into the wardrobe. With the panel removed, a black steel-hinged door was visible, three feet by two feet.

“Looks like some serious shit,” Isaiah said. “Hope for your sake you can open it.”

“Well, the bad news is this locking mechanism. Dates back to the 1860s. There are four locks, requiring three different keys.” He touched the various keyholes. “Here’s the pin tumbler lock. Here’s the barrel lock. These two are bit styles.”

“Ah fuck. We are gonna have to toss a couple grenades in here.”

“Won’t do anything. If this is the kind of door I suspect it is”—he rapped his knuckles on it—“it’s made of ten layered one-eighth-inch steel sheets. But there’s some good news, too.”

“Pins and needles, Lar.”

“See here? Three of the locks are already open. Only thing standing in our way is this bit lock, which has a turned bolt sealing the door.”

“So what do we do?”

Lawrence faced Isaiah. “I’ll be needing a guarantee.”

“A guarantee.”

“I spent the last ten years trying to find what’s in here. Now, I’m willing to let it go—”

“That’s a relief.”

“—if I have your assurance none of us will be harmed. Give me that, I’ll get you inside.”

“That’ll put your little heart at ease?”

“It will.”

“Yeah, all right, Larry. You get me in there, you’ll all walk out of these mountains.”

“That’s the truth?”

“You questioning the word of a marine?”

Lawrence let his pack drop to the floor. He unzipped the outer pocket, scrounged inside. After a moment, he withdrew something, held it up in the light of his headlamp.

Isaiah grinned through his mask at the long, toothed key. “Where’d you get that?”

“Found it in a safe in Bart’s office last summer. I don’t know for certain that this will open that bit lock, but it is the right type of key for it.”

“And what do we think is in there?” Abigail asked.

“Summer of 1871, Bart Packer was broke and prospecting alone in the Sangre de Cristo Mountains. One afternoon, he got stuck above timberline in a thunderstorm. Found an overhang high on the mountain, took shelter there. He was waiting for the storm to pass when he felt an icy draft coming from behind. He turned around, noticed an opening in the rock, and crawled through it. When he got his candle lit, he found himself in a large chamber, and not ten feet away sat a headless skeleton clad in Spanish armor. Bart correctly deduced that he was looking at a conquistador, who’d most likely been in that cave since the 1500s. What lay beside the bones of this ancient conqueror was a pyramid of gold bars, ninety-one in all, twenty-two pounds apiece. That’s about a ton of pure gold.

“When Abandon was in its heyday, it would’ve been worth six-hundred and sixty thousand dollars. Today, with gold trading at eight hundred and two dollars an ounce, Bart’s ninety-one bars are worth over twenty-five million. Now, there may not be ninety-one bars in here. But even if he spent half of that, twelve and a half mil’s a good payday.”

“And you were just using this expedition as an excuse to find this gold?” Abigail said. “What were you planning to do? Sneak off with it without telling anyone?”

“No, of course not. Scott and I—”

“Scott knew?” Suddenly, that look between Scott and her father at the trailhead made perfect sense.

“—couldn’t haul it all out ourselves. That’s seventeen miles, and even if everyone carried as much weight as they possibly could, it’d take at least two or three trips. Besides, it’s not just about the dollar value. Abigail, this was going to be a huge historical—”

“You son of a bitch. You selfish son—”

“Time to open that motherfucker, Lar.”

Lawrence sighed, turned away from his daughter.

He took his time, delicately working the key into the lock.

The key turned and the mechanism clicked.

“It worked,” Lawrence whispered. He grabbed the handle, and when he’d heaved open the steel door, Isaiah shoved him aside and climbed into the wardrobe, his headlamp shining into a secret room the size of Packer’s walk-in closet—walls, floor, and ceiling made of stone.

“You’re fuckin kidding me.”

“I don’t understand. They should be in there.”

Isaiah shoved Lawrence out of the wardrobe. “Sit down!” he yelled at Abigail. “Not you, Larry.” Isaiah backed Lawrence up against one of the giant windows.

“I’m telling you. They should be there. Maybe someone else—”

“You holding out on me?” Isaiah unsnapped the ankle sheath under his trousers.

“I swear,” Lawrence said. “They should’ve been in there. I don’t know—”

“Maybe that’s the case,” Isaiah said, then suddenly pressed the sharp, thin bone of his forearm into Lawrence’s neck. “But how do I know?
Really. Know.
You aren’t lying?”

“I swear to you I’m not. Please—”

“Words don’t convince me, Larry, but you know what does? Pain. For instance.” Isaiah gently removed Lawrence’s glasses, dropped them on the floor, crushed them under his boot heel. “I’m gonna cut out your right eye—”

Abigail’s stomach turned.
Not happening.

“No, please—”

Isaiah leaned harder into Lawrence’s windpipe, briefly cutting off his air supply.

“—and give you thirty seconds to rethink your answer. If you’re still maintaining you don’t know where they are, I may be more inclined to believe you. Know why?” Lawrence shook his head, eyes bulging. “Because right now you don’t understand what real pain is. You think you do. You don’t. But when I’m holding your warm eyeball in the palm of my hand, you’re gonna have a much better idea. You’ll know that I’m willing and fully capable of
taking you apart piece by piece. This is not about torture. It’s about me knowing in my heart that you’re telling the truth.”

“Isaiah, just listen. I need a minute to—”

“Sorry, Larry. This is the only way.”

“Stop it, please,” Abigail begged. “He’s my father. He doesn’t know.”

“Yeah, well, we’re about to find that out for certain.”

Isaiah set the point of the dagger under the lower lid of Lawrence’s right eye.

Lawrence struggled to cover his face.

“Hold still, goddamn it! Want me to accidentally push this into your brain?”

Abigail jumped up and lunged for Isaiah, but someone tackled her from behind.

She tried to fight him off, but he had her by the wrists in no time, his weight pinning her to the floor.

She stared up into that masked face, inches from her own, didn’t smell vodka, reasoned it couldn’t be Stu. What she could see of his eyes seemed strangely comforting, something familiar about them, so deep, burdened.
Because you recognize them.

Abigail whispered, “You weren’t killed. That was an act, for our benefit.”

She jerked a wrist free and ripped off the man’s mask, saw the scarred, bearded face of their guide, Jerrod Spicer.

“The fuck, Jerrod?” Isaiah said.

“
You’re with them?
” Lawrence said, incredulous.

“She recognized my eyes.” Jerrod got up, screamed, “Fuck!
How do we walk away now?
”

“You knew it might come to this,” Isaiah said. “That was always a poss—”

“It’s already come to a whole helluva lot more than you said it would. Why don’t you take off your—”

Isaiah stepped back from Lawrence, ripped off his mask. “Happy?” Abigail’s headlamp illuminated the face of a thirty-something black man she would’ve thought exceptionally handsome under different circumstances, his smooth-shaven features in perfect proportion—pronounced cheekbones, intense mud-colored eyes, dimples that caved when he let loose his broad and malignant smile.

Jerrod lifted off Stu’s face mask, and the first thing Abigail noticed were the ringlets of Stu’s curly black hair, then the week’s worth of stubble, thin lips, sunken, red-rimmed eyes, saddest she’d ever seen. He’d been handsome once, but whatever monster was eating him inside had also sucked the life from his face, drawing it into an ax-thin blade of emaciation.

Jerrod took Isaiah over to the window. Stu got up and joined them. They whispered. Abigail looked at her father. He still stood against the window,
knees shaking, crying, the floor wet under his hiking boots and a dark stream sliding down his cheek and into his beard, as if he wept blood. It took him a moment to muster his voice.

“There’s one more place to look,” Lawrence finally said.

They stopped talking. Isaiah walked over, crowded him up against the glass again.

“Larry, I sincerely pray for your sake you aren’t fucking with me.”

“What’s up here?” Isaiah asked as they ascended the second flight of steps.

“Servants’ quarters.” They reached the third floor, this level more devastated by the elements than the first or second. Up ahead, in the west wing, the gabled roof had caved, their headlamps showing snow falling through the ceiling. “We need to go up one more,” Lawrence said.

They climbed, wood creaking, bowing where they stepped.

Abigail was the third to emerge into the cupola. She shone her light on walls lined with empty shelves, the books having long since disappeared, taken by vandals or reduced by time and moisture to wads of leather, paper, glue. Two chairs and a sofa had disintegrated on the floor. Half the stones had fallen out of the two hearths. Abigail edged toward an opening in the middle of the floor, peered down, her light beam shining to the ground level.

“All right, Lar. Where is it?”

Lawrence carefully moved over to one of the bookshelves and knelt down, the floor cracking. When he stood again, he held an eight-foot brass pole, severely tarnished, with a hooked end. He looked up. They all looked up, lights converging on a square door in the ceiling. Lawrence reached up, unlatched the rusted lock, pushed open the hatch. Snow fell through the hole into the library.