“Boom!” cried Ace Merrill in his best Warner Wolf voice. “Let’s go to the videotape!”
He pulled a pair of faded jeans up over his naked hips and then got into a Harley-Davidson tee-shirt. It’s what all the well-dressed treasure-hunters are wearing this year, he thought, and laughed wildly.
My, that coke was fine!
He was on his way out the door when his eye fell on last night’s take and he remembered that he had meant to call Nat Copeland in Portsmouth. He went back into the bedroom, dug through the clothes which were balled helter-skelter in his top bureau drawer, and finally came up with a battered address book. He went back into the kitchen, sat down, and dialled the number he had. He doubted that he would actually catch Nat in, but it was worth a try.
The coke buzzed and whipsawed in his head, but he could already feel the rush tapering off. A headshot of cocaine made a new man of you. The only trouble was, the first thing the new man wanted was another one, and Ace’s supply was severely depleted.
“Yeah?” a wary voice said in his ear, and Ace realized he had beaten the odds again-his luck was in.
“Nat!” he cried.
“Who the fuck says so?”
“I do, old boss! I do!”
“Ace? That you?”
“None other! How you doin, ole Natty?”
“I’ve been better.” Nat sounded less than overjoyed to hear from his old machine-shop buddy at Shawshank. “What do you want, Ace?”
“Now, is that any way to talk to a pal?” Ace asked reproachfully.
He cocked the phone between his ear and shoulder and pulled a pair of rusty tin cans toward him.
One of them had come out of the ground behind the old Treblehorn place, the other from the cellar-hole of the old Masters farm, which had burned flat when Ace was only ten years old. The first can had contained only four books of S amp; H Green Stamps and several banded packets of Raleigh cigarette coupons. The second had contained a few sheafs of mixed trading stamps and six rolls of pennies. Except they didn’t look like regular pennies.
They were white.
“Maybe I just wanted to touch base,” Ace teased. “You know, check on the state of your piles, see how your supply of K-Y’s holdin out.
Things like that.”
“What do you want, Ace?” Nat Copeland repeated wearily.
Ace plucked one of the penny-rolls out of the old Crisco can.
The paper had faded from its original purple to a dull wash pink.
He shook two of the pennies out into his hand and looked at them curiously. If anyone would know about these things, Nat Copeland was the guy.
He had once owned a shop in ICttery called Copeland’s Coins and Collectibles. He’d also had his own private coin collectionone of the ten best in New England, at least according to Nat himself. Then he too had discovered the wonders of cocaine. In the four or five years following this discovery, he had dismantled his coin collection item by item and put it up his nose. In 1985, police responding to a silent alarm at the Long John Silver coinshop in Portland had found Nat Copeland in the back room, stuffing Lady Liberty silver dollars into a chamois bag. Ace met him not long after.
“Well, I did have a question, now that you mention it.”
“A question? That’s all?”
“That’s absolutely all, good buddy.”
“All right.” Nat’s voice relaxed the smallest bit. “Ask, then. I don’t have all day.”
“Right,” Ace said. “Busy, busy, busy. Places to go and people to eat, am I right, Natty?” He laughed crazily. It wasn’t just the blow; it was the day. He hadn’t gotten in until first light, the coke he had ingested had kept him awake until almost ten this morning in spite of the drawn shades and his physical exertions, and he still felt ready to eat steel bars and spit out tenpenny nails. And why not? Why the fuck not? He was standing on the rim of a fortune.
He knew it, he felt it in every fiber. “Ace, is there really something on that thing you call your mind or did you phone just to rag me?”
“No, I didn’t call to rag you. Give me the straight dope, Natty, and I might give you some straight dope. Very straight.”
“Really?” Nat Copeland’s voice lost its edge at once. It became hushed, almost awed. “Are you shitting me, Ace?”
“The best, primo-est shit I ever had, Natty Bumppo, my lad.”
“Can you cut me in?”
“I wouldn’t doubt it a bit,” Ace said, meaning to do no such thing. He had pried three or four more of the strange pennies out of their old, faded roll. Now he pushed them into a straight line with his finger. “But you’ve got to do me a favor.”
“Name it.”
“What do you know about white pennies?” There was a pause on the other end of the line. Then Nat said cautiously, “White pennies? Do you mean steel pennies?”
“I don’t know what I mean-you’re the coin collector, not me.”
“Look at the dates. See if they’re from the years 1941 to 1945.” Ace turned over the pennies in front of him. One was a 1941; four were 1943s; the last was from 1944. “Yeah. They are. What are they worth, Nat?” He tried to disguise the eagerness in his voice and was not entirely successful. “Not a lot taken one by one,” Nat said, “but a, hell of a lot more than ordinary pennies. Maybe two bucks apiece. Three if they’re U.C.”
“What’s that?”
“Uncirculated. In mint condition. Have you got a lot, Ace?”
“Quite a few,” Ace said, “quite a few, Natty my man.” But he was disappointed. He had six rolls, three hundred pennies, and the ones he was looking at didn’t look in particularly good shape to him. They weren’t exactly beat to shit, but they were a long way from being shiny and new. Six hundred dollars, eight hundred tops.
Not what you’d call a big strike.
“Well, bring them down and let me look,” Nat said. “I can get you top dollar.” He hesitated, then added: “And bring some of that marching powder with you.”
“I’ll think about it,” Ace said. “Hey, Ace! Don’t hang up!”
“Fuck you very much, Natty,” Ace replied, and did just that. He sat where he was for a moment, brooding over the pennies and the two rusty cans. There was something very weird about all of this. Useless trading stamps and six hundred dollars’ worth of steel pennies. What did that add up to? That’s the bitch of it, Ace thought. It doesn’t add up to anything.
Where’s the real stuff? Where’s the goddam LOOT?
He pushed back from the table, went into the bedroom, and snorted the rest of the blow Mr. Gaunt had laid on him. When he came out again, he had the book with the map in it and he was feeling considerably more cheerful. It did add up. It added up just fine.
Now that he had helped his head a little bit, he could see that.
After all, there had been lots of crosses on that map. He had found two caches right where those crosses suggested they would be, each marked with a large, flat stone. Crosses + Flat Stones = Buried Treasure. It did seem that Pop had been a little softer in his old age than people from town had believed, that he’d had a bit of a problem telling the difference between diamonds and dust there at the end, but the big stuff-gold, currency, maybe negotiable securities-had to be out there someplace, under one or more of those flat rocks.
He had proved that. His uncle had buried things of value, not just bunches of moldy old trading stamps. At the old Masters farm he had found six rolls of steel pennies worth at least six hundred dollars. Not much… but an indication.
“It’s out there,” Ace said softly. His eyes sparkled madly.
“It’s all out there in one of those other seven holes. Or two. Or three.”
He knew it.
He took the brown-paper map out of the book and let his finger wander from one cross to the next, wondering if some were more likely than others. Ace’s finger stopped on the old Joe Camber place. It was the only location where there were two crosses close together. His finger began to move slowly back and forth between them.