“ Exactly. And something I learned from Luis, the more outlandish the promises, the easier the sale.”
“ I don’t get it.”
“ Either do I, but it’s true. Buried treasure is easier to sell than bushels of apples.”
“ Wait a second,” I said. “Back up. Does Cimarron own these mines or not?”
“ Sure, he’s got mineral rights to thousands of acres. He bought up hundreds of leases over the past fifteen years or so. He tried mining for gold and copper and silver, and he lost his shirt. Not that he couldn’t find the minerals. He could, but the price of excavation and smelting or refining exceeds market price. At the same time, Simmy was always a nut about the old West. He collects the stories-legends really-about the lost gold mines and buried treasures. He can sit around a campfire and tell twenty different stories. There’s the Lost Padre in California, the Lost Dutchman in Arizona, the Lost Pitchblende in Colorado. Everything’s lost, but none of it’s ever found.”
“ Never?”
“ Well, not exactly never. When Simmy was barely out of his teens, he stumbled onto a cache of double eagles. That’s what got him started.”
“ Whoa. Double eagles?”
“ Twenty-dollar gold pieces, San Francisco mint, about three thousand of them, worth about one-point-five million today. And he wasn’t even looking for them. He was camping out on Devil’s Head Mountain in Colorado. He didn’t know it then, but there was a legend about a gang that robbed a government train near there in the 1870s. They were chased by a posse and buried the loot at the foot of a towering spruce tree. They marked the tree by sticking a long knife into it, then took off on horseback. Winter came, and the next spring the gang tried to find the tree, but couldn’t. After all, the forest probably had fifty thousand spruce trees that looked just alike. They kept looking through the summer. Then a thunderstorm started a forest fire and burned most of the trees to the ground.”
“ So what happened to the gold?”
“ A hundred years or so went by, and Simmy was riding the backcountry by himself, hunting and camping out. The way he tells the story, he was pounding some stakes into the ground to pitch a tent when he hit a rotting old saddlebag that had been brought to the surface by erosion. The wonderful thing is that gold doesn’t rot. The eagles polished up just fine, and Simmy had his first nest egg.”
“ No wonder he believes in secret treasures.”
“ The worst thing that ever happened to him. He got a taste of treasure, and he became obsessed. He was always dabbling in mining, but for the next twenty years, it was buried gold, not mined gold, that consumed him.”
“ And you don’t believe treasure exists.”
“ Look, I’ve done some reading. Simmy’s personal library has just about everything ever written about buried treasure in the West. Four hundred years ago, Coronado set out with five hundred conquistadors and a thousand Indians from Mexico looking for the Seven Cities of Cibola. What they found were Zuni Indians growing corn in a dusty village in what is now New Mexico. Then an Indian guide tells Coronado of the fabulous city of Quivera where the streets were paved with gold, and a marble palace was hung with golden bells, and the royal canoes had oarlocks of solid gold.”
“ Gold seems to be the operative word.”
“ Right. It drives men mad. All Coronado had to do was take his men north, the Indian tells him. Of course, the Indian just wanted to get Coronado the hell out of New Mexico where he was taking slaves and doing the traditional macho conquistador stuff. So Coronado falls for it and sets out with his army in plumes and shining armor with a thousand mules to carry back the loot.”
“ That’s optimism.”
“ Verdad, or stupidity. Anyway, they get all the way to Kansas, and all they see are hot, dusty plains. But Coronado believed till the day he died that there were cities of gold out there somewhere.”
“ And Cimarron does, too. Is that what you’re saying?”
“ Who knows? He studies mining claims and trappers’ maps as if they’re holy works. He’s bought diaries from the families of frontiersmen and borrowed family Bibles with crude drawings of mines and graveyards. He’s scoured the files of newspapers from western towns that don’t even exist anymore. He’s spent months in museums, and he’s filled a hundred notebooks with his plans. He’s not willing to admit he’s chasing legends. He figures if one in twenty is legitimate, it’s still worth the search.”
“ So he believes in Rocky Mountain Treasures. To Cimarron, it’s not a scam.”
“ Either way, it’s a good deal for Simmy. He’s got all these leases, and other than the ranch, that’s about all he’s got left. It doesn’t make any sense to dig for gold that costs more to extract than to sell. But they can form a company with suckers’ money, take fees as consultants and managers, and sell Simmy’s maps to the company at a price they set. If they find the Caverna de Oro of Marble Mountain, then everybody’s happy. If not, Blinky and Simmy still make money. Unlike Coronado, it’s a no-lose situation.”
I was dreaming of conquistadors in heavy armor and helmet plumes when I awoke suddenly without knowing why. Next to me, Jo Jo was breathing deeply, a slight whistling sound accompanying each exhalation of warm breath. Outside, crickets made their night music, and overhead, a lone jet made its way toward the airport. I looked at the digital clock and watched 3:13 magically become 3:14.
Before we turned in, I had called Cindy, my loyal secretary, and asked if she would extend her baby-sitting through the night. She whined and said she was meeting Dottie the Disco Queen at a South Beach bar, and I told her to take Kip along but make sure he got home by one a.m., because I promised he could watch Burt Lancaster in The Killers on the all-night classics channel. How’s that for parental guidance?
Now I was awake, and Burt Lancaster had long since been plugged by William Conrad, and I hoped Kip was sleeping soundly and Cindy was sleeping alone.
I lay there a moment, wondering why I had awakened. No indigestion, despite putting away three plates of Jo Jo’s picadillo. Cooking was not a skill passed down from her mother. Jo Jo dried out the ground beef, and the raisins were as moist as BBs. The flan was fine. It came from a local bakery.
And then I remembered why I woke up. The groan of the pine floor planks did all the remembering for me.
Someone was in the house, someone besides the sleeping woman and me.
In the depths of sleep, I had heard a noise, and there it was again. Or was it? Old houses are full of sounds. Pipes clang, walls moan, floors…
Creak.
Again, the sound. It seemed louder, or was it my imagination?
I swung out of bed, my bare feet touching the cool floor. The rest of me was bare, too, and it did not inspire the fighting parts-arms and legs, hands and feet-to know that another part of me was exposed to the air, useless and vulnerable. I tried to take a step without making a sound, but it didn’t work. The floor gave under my feet, too, with what sounded to me like a wail, but was probably no louder than a yawn.
I stopped and listened again.
Silence.
Except for me. My breathing chugged like a locomotive. My heart was running a marathon.
I tiptoed toward the closed bedroom door. No light shone from beneath it. The night had cleared, and moonlight streamed in from outside the window, casting my shadow across the floor and up the door. I took another step toward the door, heard a sound from the other side…
I spun backward.
Not of my own accord. The door had opened with a rush, catching me across the shoulder, surprising me, bouncing me, hop-skip-lurch toward the window. My knee sideswiped the dresser, and when I was off-balance, teetering like a drunk, an anvil caught me on the side of the head, just above the right ear. Okay, so it wasn’t an anvil, but a fist that felt like iron, and it dropped me to the floor.