He went down heavy, his head cracking against the pavement. She piled on top of him, one hand yanking his hair back and the other hunting his eyes. He screamed and elbowed her hard, shoved her down onto her back.
It was dark, a dim gleam of lights from the warehouse and the port blocks away, and she saw faint shine on a gun’s barrel – he’d had both guns; he must’ve dropped one when she kicked his feet out from him. The shine was a half foot from her hand and she seized the gun, prayed the safety was off, swung it toward his face and fired.
Missed.
He stumbled to his feet, turning and running for the warehouse. ‘Freeze! Ben!’ He didn’t freeze and she fired twice in the dark. She heard the wet-meat sound of a bullet striking him, heard him sprawl along the steps leading to the warehouse.
She ran to where Ben lay. In the thin light from the shuttered windows she saw the wound in the lower part of his back, blood a black spurt. He breathed in sharp hitches, groaning.
‘Holy God,’ Claudia breathed. ‘Holy God.’
Gunshots inside, and she’d just shot a man. Gooch in there, maybe in trouble. She ran back to her truck, fumbled for the cell phone.
Missed, Whit thought in that split second.
The blade missed and Alex would shoot him before he could stab again. But then Alex’s eyes went wide, shocked, his hand went to his throat and the blood fountained. Alex trying to scream and nothing coming but blood.
Alex’s eyes flashed with rage and fear and horror and he brought the gun back up toward Whit but then he dropped it, the other hand going to his throat to stem the flood. He fell to his knees. Whit grabbed the gun, stood there.
‘How does it feel?’ Whit said, his voice breaking. ‘How does it-’
And he saw Alex’s lips forming the word please.
The organic coppery smell of rupture filled the air, overpowered the scent of gunfire.
‘Gooch?’ Claudia’s voice called.
Whit saw her coming through the still-open front door, her service pistol out, in a firing stance. He tried to speak, as silent as Alex.
Claudia ran to him, seeing Alex bleed out his life, toppling to the floor, grabbing at Whit’s shoes. She gasped at the sight of Stoney’s body.
Whit didn’t let go of the saw; its handle felt burned to his hand.
Claudia tore Alex’s shirt off him, pushing the fabric around his throat, trying to stanch the flow of blood, apply useless pressure, telling him help was on the way.
Whit said, without looking at her, ‘Gooch is here. Help him.’
‘Whit…’ Claudia started.
Whit set Alex’s gun on a table. He dropped the saw on the floor.
‘Let him die, Claudia. Just let him die.’
Alex paled, stared up at him, then through him.
‘I’m going to find Gooch.’ Whit’s voice didn’t sound quite right.
‘Jesus, Whit,’ Claudia said. ‘Jesus.’
40
Claudia went with Whit to the Coastal Psychics Network on Sunday afternoon, not having slept that night. He had a spare key Lucy had given him two weeks ago and he opened the doors. The business was closed, the psychics mourning at home.
‘I didn’t think straight. Didn’t think about where she’d hide it,’ he said.
‘We don’t have to do this now, Whit,’ Claudia said.
‘She loved this place. And I don’t want it here,’ Whit said. ‘If I’m right. Her office is this way.’
Jean Laffite’s treasure was finally confirmed to consist of twenty thousand dollars’ worth of gold bars, ten thousand in silver bars, and a cache of rare 1820-minted Monteblanco coins worth, in numismatic and historical value, five million dollars. Scattered among the coins and bars in the crates used by Alex and Stoney were fragments of bone and soil from the Gilbert dig site, including a finger bone. The Corpus Christi police kept the treasure in the warehouse under heavy guard while they processed the shooting scene and called the Texas Historical Commission. But the Devil’s Eye was yet to be found.
In her office, Whit glanced at the small foil mobile, the scattered books on ESP and phone marketing, still with their little neon Post-its as bookmarks, worn from her thumbing. On the mantel above her desk were the crystals, amber and yellow and clear and green and red. Arranged just so for the healing powers they emitted. He didn’t feel healed.
‘There,’ he said.
‘Oh, Whit,’ Claudia said. ‘I don’t think so. These are too small.’
‘No. Look,’ he said. He inspected several, then ran his finger along the largest green one. It was the muddy green of a riverbed. He scraped paint off the stone with a thumbnail and the soft green glow came through, the color of time. The seductive green of envy.
‘Jesus. It’s really sort of ugly.’ He handed it to her. ‘Iris Dominguez can tell us if this is it. Or a gemologist. Right now I don’t know where else to look. Hiding it here is classic Lucy. Plain sight. She-’ He stopped.
‘Whit…’
‘I never want to see it again, okay, Claudia?’
‘Okay,’ she said. ‘Listen. I’m worried about you. We need to talk.’
He stared at her. ‘The way you shot your boyfriend. I meant to say that was well done, what with it being so dark.’
A day later four gemologists said the Devil’s Eye was worthless: the right size, but not the valuable emerald. A nicely done copy, not worth millions, not worth anything at all. At some time – either by a thief in Mexico before Santa Barbara sailed or by Jean Laffite or by Stoney – the Eye was replaced with a worthless hunk of green crystal.
Claudia stopped by his house and told Whit about the report. He was silent. She wondered if he had slept.
‘Whit?’ she said after the silence grew too long.
Finally he said, ‘People will keep looking for it, won’t they?’
‘I suppose they will, after all the news coverage. Dig up Stoney Vaughn’s yard, or the rest of Black Jack Point. David’s mentioned they’ve already chased some folks off Stoney’s land. Thinking he hid some of the treasure there.’
He turned away from her.
‘Whit?’
‘I figured out the person who snooped through my house was Lucy. She knew where my key was, under the fern on the porch. I guess she wanted to know if I had notes on the murders, if there was any way she could be implicated. Or if Stoney was implicated. Whatever might lead back to her.’
‘Maybe Lucy came here, waited for you to come home, wanted to tell you the whole truth. Then she lost her nerve, left.’
‘It’s nice to think that,’ he said, ‘isn’t it?’
When Claudia got home David was waiting there in shorts and a T-shirt. He sat on the stairs leading to her apartment with a cold twelve-pack of Shiner Bock.
‘What’s this?’ she said.
‘I think we should get drunk,’ David said. ‘I’m more likely to apologize when I’m drunk.’
‘That’s a good reason.’
‘Someone finally put you through more hell than I did,’ David said. ‘Jesus, that sucks. I’m sorry, Claudia.’
She let him in and they drank the beer, her sitting on the couch, him on the floor. She drank the first one fast, too fast, and made herself promise to take longer for the second.
‘So Ben was in it with Alex Black from the beginning?’
‘I wasn’t the only seduction in Ben’s life,’ Claudia said.
David raised an eyebrow.
‘Ben got seduced himself. Living with a wealthy brother who was living on the edge of the law in more ways than one and wasn’t paying a price for it. Of course Ben is not talking and he’s using Stoney’s money to hire some fancy defense lawyer from Houston.’ She sipped her beer. ‘I won’t get a chance to say this on the stand at Ben’s trial unless we find evidence, but I think Ben found out about Stoney’s plan to steal treasure from Patch Gilbert’s land and fake an archaeological dig on Lucy’s land. And if he’d gotten to know Alex Black through Stoney, he would have seen that Alex was more interested in the treasure’s financial value than in the fame of discovery. Ben didn’t have Stoney’s blind spot for glory. So he must have cut a separate deal with Alex. They would have grabbed the treasure and then Alex would have eliminated Stoney. But then they didn’t plan on Patch and Thuy Tran showing up and having a double murder complicate their whole deal. And they sure didn’t count on Danny Laffite coming after them with a gang and a vengeance.’